Goal Keeper_A Pearson Players novel

by Sarah Nego

  I pulled my travel calendar out of my bag and hid behind it while the swarm of students filed into the lecture hall. After twelve years of going to school with the same people, I was woefully out of practice at making friends. So far I had Sam and Avery, who were stuck seeing me at practice, and Erin. Though she’d been so busy with the honor’s program intensive that I hadn’t seen a whole lot of her.

  My lips turned up into a slight smile at the memory of our room that morning. I’d gotten up and thrown on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt that read Death Before Decaf. Dressed and done in less than ten minutes. Erin had unloaded practically her whole closet onto her bed, desk, and chair trying to pick out the right look.

  “This is important, Luci,” she’d said, holding a ripped pair of jeans next to an olive-green top with holes where the shoulders should be. “What you wear to the first day of class tells everyone exactly who you are.”

  “I guess mine is going to say that I’m punctual,” I’d told her, grabbing my bag. “Let me know if you figure out an outfit by lunch, and we can eat together.”

  There was no telling if she’d found the perfect look or was still running around the room half naked. I grabbed a pencil and added laundry to the list of tasks for the night.

  “Whatcha doin’?”

  A frayed, canvas messenger bag dropped onto the desk next to me, and Ryan VanKamp sat down, smiling over at me.

  Tingles ran up my arms, and I rubbed my hands over the growing goosebumps there.

  “You’ve got goosebumps,” Ryan said, pointing at me with the eraser end of his pencil.

  “Yeah, I guess they really crank up the AC in these rooms.” Or I was letting the presence of a really hot guy with a dazzling smile and really great hair send me into a school-girl stupor. I’d been right. His hair was long enough to frame his face without looking overgrown. It worked for him and made me want to run my fingers through it.

  I pinched my arm and forced myself to look away.

  “So, what are you working on?” He pointed toward my calendar. “It’s eight in the morning on the first day of class, so there’s no way you have homework already.”

  I closed my calendar and shoved it back into my bag. I didn’t want Ryan to know I was scheduling a laundry session. Better that he think I had big plans for the night so he’d stop smiling at me like that. Or even that I was a neurotic control-freak who had to schedule when she did laundry. “Just checking my class list for the day.”

  “Do you have a lot of classes today?”

  “No,” I said, though at that moment I couldn’t remember what else I had to do. Not with my brain fully focused on the tiny dimple on Ryan’s chin when he smiled.

  “Me either.” He sat back in his seat and pulled out his own copy of Spanish for Beginners, his book looking as beat up as mine.

  “Aren’t you a junior?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them. Why in the world was I continuing a conversation with him when I was supposed to be keeping my distance?

  Ryan turned back to me slowly, and I’d never wished for a teacher to enter a room more than I did in that very minute. The corners of his lips rose in an easy smile, but his eyes held a note of teasing. “Are you stalking me, Luci?”

  “What?” I blurted out, already feeling the back of my neck heat to embarrassment levels usually reserved for split pants or spilling water on a thin white shirt. “No, of course not. God. No. What?” STOP. TALKING. LUCI.

  Ryan laughed in an easy way that did nothing to relieve the heat spreading from my neck to my face. “I’m only giving you a hard time. And yes, I’m a junior.”

  I nodded and turned to the front of the room, determined to end any semblance of conversation before I made a complete fool of myself.

  But Ryan had other ideas. He leaned over the side of his desk so we were even closer. “I guess you’re wondering what a junior is doing in a Spanish class usually filled with freshman. Fair question actually. I hate languages. I’m total bunk at them. And I put off taking this class as long as I could. My advisor told me I had to take it now or I wouldn’t be able to fit it in in time to graduate. So here I am?”

  I kept my eyes glued to the massive chalkboard at the front of the room and nodded, hoping he would take the hint and leave me alone. But I wasn’t known for being a lucky person.

  “What about you? Are you a lover?”

  “What?” I spit out, unable to ignore his comment.

  The smile that was determined to ruin me spread across Ryan’s face again. “A Spanish lover? Do you have a knack for languages?”

  “No,” I said, and tried to slide down in my chair a bit. “Just trying to get it over with.”

  “Good plan. Solid plan,” he said, as if he knew anything about my plans. “So, according to my roommate, Scooter, Professor Ramirez is big on group projects. I’m thinking another good plan would be for the two of us to be partners.”

  “Partners?” I squeaked out, still refusing to face him.

  “Yeah, it makes perfect sense.” He tapped my bag with his foot. “You’ve got a completely full schedule with classes and soccer. So do I.”

  “That makes no sense,” I said, finally turning toward him. “We’re both way too busy to be partners. When would we ever find time to work together?”

  “That’s true, but we also don’t have to keep trying to explain to another partner why we can’t get together after practice because our brains are fried. Or why even though conditioning practice on Saturday is optional, it’s really mandatory.” He bumped my arm with his elbow, and I ignored the way my body heated at the touch of his skin on mine.

  “Of course, that might mean we have to get together during some less conventional times. Like Friday nights. Unless you’ve got plans for lots of hot dates on Friday nights.”

  My face heated again, and I was almost certain my skin was the shade of a cherry tomato. “No.” I had zero plans for hot dates, but Ryan was making me rethink that decision. And that was bad. Really bad.

  “Then that’s ideal because I happen to be on a dating hiatus myself.” He dropped his pencil to the desk and held out his hand to me. “So what do you say? Partners?”

  I should absolutely say no because I had no business being Spanish partners with anyone on the soccer team. Most especially the ex that sent our captain into her man-hater mode to begin with. But I didn’t want to say no. What he said about finding someone who would understand my schedule made a lot of sense. But the truth was I wanted an excuse to see him again outside of class. And that was maybe the smartest reason of all to tell him no.

  I grasped his hand and gave it a quick shake. “Partners.”

  Sometimes smart people do really stupid things.

  Ten

  Luci

  Friday

  Calculus

  Intro to art

  Speech

  Review history outline

  Make vocab notecards

  “Please, please, please!”

  “Erin, get off me.” I pushed at my roommate, but she’d managed to wrap her arms and legs around me, latching onto my body so we were a four-legged blob on my bed.

  “I’ll get off when you agree to go to this party with me.” She gripped her arms tighter, squeezing my chest in a torturous bear hug. “You never go out with me, and next week your games are going to start. Then you’ll never be here, and I’ll be all alone.”

  She wailed out the last word like a widow crying for her departed love.

  “You said you liked all the time you had to yourself. Last week you called me the best roommate ever.”

  “That’s true,” she said, loosening her grip with her arms but keeping her legs wrapped tight. “Did I tell you that Allie next door said her roommate walks around naked? Like all the time.”

  “Poor Allie,” I grumbled. “What does that have to do with me going to this dumb party?”

  “Everything,” Erin cried out, throwing her arms up in the air. “You’re currently way ahead i
n the roommate Olympics, and going to this party will officially solidify your gold medal.”

  “Are you seriously running a roommate Olympics?” I asked, finally shoving Erin off me. The idea sounded ludicrous, but everything Erin did was ludicrous. Including the three different club meetings she attended in our first week of classes.

  “No.” She let out a dramatic sigh. “But wouldn’t it be cool if I did, and you would absolutely win gold for going to this party with me.”

  I sat up and brushed my hair out of my face. “Why do you care if I go?”

  “Because your color-coded schedule is sucking all the fun out of being at college.”

  I rolled my eyes at her dramatic tone. “That schedule is ensuring I never miss a practice and stay on top of my classes.” So I can keep my scholarships and avoid dropping out as a miserable failure.

  Erin skipped over to the desk and ran a finger down the chart. “According to this, tonight you’re supposed to work on Spanish, but I saw you cramming in extra study time with your libros on Wednesday.”

  “And?”

  She stood up to her full height and punched her fists to her hips. “Tell me the truth. Do you have any actual homework to do tonight?”

  I glanced between my stack of textbooks and Erin. “I was going to review my outline for European history.”

  “No, nope, not a chance.” She grabbed my books and shoved them into my backpack. “I’m not letting you spend your Friday night alone reading a history chapter that hasn’t even been assigned yet. Get dressed, because you’re absolutely going to this party. No buts about it.”

  “But—”

  Erin lifted her hand and gave me a scathing look that would have made my mother proud. “I said no buts. Now get dressed and wear your cute jeans.”

  Two hours later, I was walking down a dark gravel driveway packed with cars. I squinted into the distance, but I couldn’t make out a house or any other people for that matter.

  “Don’t get too close to the grass,” Erin said, pointing at the scraggly weeds and cactus lining the undefined edge of the driveway. “Mark said snakes are pretty common out here.”

  “Where the hell is here? I thought you told me this was a newspaper party.”

  “It is,” Erin said, weaving her arm through mine. “Mark’s grandfather owns a huge lot of property out here butting up to Dove River. I guess it used to be for hunting, and there’s a house cabin that Mark lives in with a couple other guys from the paper. It’s all totally safe.”

  “You realize we look like two dumb chicks from a horror movie, wandering around in the middle of nowhere hoping the killer doesn’t notice us.”

  Erin stopped and pulled her mouth into a frown. “Really? Because I dressed hoping that everyone noticed me.”

  “Goal achieved.” I rolled my eyes and tugged on her arm to keep moving.

  There was no way Erin was blending in that night. Her outfit ensured that every eye in a twelve-mile radius would see her. Her pink miniskirt was covered in sequins that reflected the moonlight in the night’s clear sky, except when she ran her hand down the skirt, the sequins flipped and turned silver. I could only imagine the number of guys who would want to “try out” her skirt tonight.

  I took a deep breath and focused on avoiding any rocks that might trip me up. My outfit for the night was much less attention grabbing. I’d worn my cute jeans, as Erin had insisted, and paired them with a dark-burgundy tank top. Only after Erin vetoed my Straight Outta Yogurt tee.

  The driveway turned, and for the first time, I could finally hear other voices, though I couldn’t see where they were coming from.

  “Down here,” Erin said, pulling me away from the drive and down a narrow gravel walkway that followed the slope of a hill.

  “What the…” I paused in the middle of the path and stared at the scene in front of me. Apparently I hadn’t been able to see the house because the whole thing was tucked up against the side of a hill, with the roof barely even with the ground above it. Multi-colored Christmas lights were wrapped around wooden pillars that supported the roof of the porch. The pillars looked suspiciously like telephone poles.

  People were milling about outside around a fire pit and some were up on the flat roof hanging out at a beat-up picnic table.

  “Erin, you made it.” A guy who looked a bit older than us offered a hand to help us the rest of the way down the sloping path.

  “Wouldn’t miss it.” Erin flashed him a flirty smile. “Mark, this is my roommate Luci. Luci, this is Mark.”

  “Hello there, lovely Luci.” Mark took my hand and kissed the back of it playfully. “Mi casa es su casa. We’ve got beer and cheap liquor in the kitchen. Please help yourself.”

  I tugged on Luci’s arm as we headed toward the alcohol. “I thought we’d only be here for a few hours and then go home. I have things to do tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, yeah, the calendar has you very busy. I promise we won’t stay super late. Until then, can you please relax and try to have a good time?”

  She pushed open the door of the house and pulled me inside.

  My first impression of Mark’s hunting cabin was that no one in their right mind would ever call this a cabin, and the only thing he should’ve been hunting for was a clean surface. The door opened to a kitchen that looked like the opening scene of a bad horror movie. Every surface was covered with bottles, cups, and random bits of things like packs of disposable forks and the little ketchup packets you get from a fast food drive-thru. The whole place smelled like skunked beer and sweat. I couldn’t imagine eating something prepared in there.

  “Do you want a beer or something harder?”

  “Is an Uber an option?”

  Erin shot me a dirty look and picked up a can of beer in one hand and a red plastic cup in the other. “Stop complaining and pick your poison.”

  “Fine, give me the beer.” One beer so I could be completely sober in three hours and drive us home.

  Erin handed me the can and then grabbed one for herself. “Come on, let’s go outside.”

  I followed her out of the cesspool of a kitchen, back outside, and over to the fire pit where a couple dozen people were standing around. I hadn’t realized so many people worked on the newspaper.

  We moved into the firelight, and I opened my beer, taking a second to glance around the circle. I didn’t recognize anyone there, but that wasn’t such a shock. Classes had only been in session for a week, and other than those and soccer practice, I spent all my time with my head in a book.

  Everyone around us was smiling and laughing, letting themselves enjoy the moment. For a second I wondered what that would feel like. To not constantly worry about everything with one eye staring at the future. To enjoy the present moment. But that wasn’t how college was going to be for me. Not unless I was willing to set aside my goals for a few years of fun that I probably wouldn’t remember in another decade.

  “Luci?”

  I gripped my beer can a little tighter. This was a newspaper party, and there was no way the eye candy that voice belonged to was standing behind me. I was positive.

  Turning around, my eyes landed on Ryan VanKamp. I was wrong.

  Eleven

  Ryan

  Friday

  The last person I expected to see at the Dove River party was Luci Ryder, but there she was standing by the fire, gripping her can of beer like it was her last lifeline. I took a second to appreciate her from behind. Her hair was out of its usual ponytail and flowing down her back, but she kept tucking one side behind her ear. My eyes couldn’t help staring at her ass in jeans that seemed to hug every single one of her curves. Curves I hadn’t even realized she had before. Luci had worn baggy jeans to class, and her soccer uniform hid everything. This was a new look I could definitely get behind.

  Not that I needed to be concerned with how Luci looked. Except I was. Every time I talked to her in class, I left wanting to get to know her better. Not to mention she was not at all hard to look at. And she h
ad the added bonus of not being Vanessa.

  Speaking of the raging bitch, she would probably have a cow if she knew Luci and I were at this party together. Well, not together, but that could change. And Vanessa never had to know about it. I closed the distance before I could talk myself out of it.

  “Luci?”

  She turned around and froze like a deer staring into headlights.

  “Ryan,” she squeaked out, her hands about to dent her beer can. “What are you doing here?”

  “The same thing you are.” I lifted my own beer. “Enjoying a drink with my friends before the season kicks off.”

  She shook her head. “No, I mean what are you doing at a party for the newspaper?”

  I took a slow sip of beer and then gave her a smile that I hoped was warm and welcoming. “I let the guys on the paper use my photographs when they need them for story filler.”

  She tilted her head to the side, and her lips moved a fraction of an inch. Like she might smile, but was still thinking about it. “You’re a photographer?”

  “No, not really. It’s just a hobby I like to do when I have a rare free minute.” And it was not an appropriate job for someone who wanted to support a family someday. That was, if you asked Vanessa, which I wouldn’t advise. “So what are you doing here?”

  “My roommate, Erin, is on the paper. She’s…” Her voice trailed off as she scanned the crowd around us. “She was right here.”

  “Are you talking about the blonde with the blindingly bright skirt?”

  Luci nodded, biting at her lip.