Tackled: A Sports Romance

by Sabrina Paige

  Oh God. Did I just say that? It sounds like this apartment is Grand Central Station for dicks.

  Colton gives me a look.

  I clear my throat to cover my embarrassment, but my face must be scarlet. "You know, I … um … have something I need to do?" The statement comes out like a question. “Would you excuse me for just a minute, please?"

  I don't wait for him to answer. Instead, I dash to Sable's room, opening her door without knocking, and slamming it closed behind me.

  Sable is sitting on her bed, her back against the wall and a laptop balanced on her legs. "Colton King is in our apartment," she whispers.

  "Yes, he is," I hiss. "And it's too bad, because he's going to be the only witness to your imminent demise."

  "Oh, don't get mad at me because I let the hottest guy to ever grace the doorway of our apartment inside to see you. He's even hotter than Brad," she says, naming the model she dated for three weeks last October. Brad wasn't really hot, though, just pretty and skinny.

  Not like Colton King. There's nothing small about him, anywhere. And he certainly is hot.

  Focus, Cass.

  "You let a total stranger who tracked down my address into our apartment – and then left me alone with him!” I whisper. "What kind of a roommate are you?"

  "I'm the awesome roommate who's going to get you laid," she says, grinning.

  "Sable Pierce," I say through gritted teeth. "Look at me. Take a good look."

  "You look super cute," she says. "Like you're ready for bed. That's good. Guys like when you look ready for bed. It reminds them that they should take you to bed. You look … easygoing. Not high-maintenance."

  "I look no-maintenance."

  "Eh, details."

  "Remind me why I agreed to live with you again?"

  "Because you're cheap, and when we started rooming together, my mother had cut off my allowance because of my 'grievous error' in choosing to go to grad school in sociology, which left me briefly poor," Sable says. She shudders exaggeratedly. "A dark time in my life that I hate to recall."

  "This is going to be a darker time," I say through gritted teeth.

  "I think you should go out there in what you're wearing now," Sable says.

  "You can see right through my tank top!" I protest.

  "I know," Sable says, grinning. "That's exactly why you should go back out there in what you're wearing. Proudly display your headlights, girl."

  I stomp over to her bureau and open the second drawer, rifling through it until I find a sweatshirt, which is definitely going to be the only item of Sable's clothing that will fit me. I slip it over my head while Sable protests.

  "Seriously, what are you doing?" she asks. "You're covering up the goods."

  "I have no goods, Sable," I say, slamming the drawer shut. "These are the boobs of a girl who wears sweatpants and eats Chinese food while she binge-watches reality TV. These are not the boobs of a girl who proudly displays them to football players."

  She purses her lips as she eyes me. "Fine. But you're never going to lose your virginity with that attitude."

  I pull open the door, turning to hiss at her before I leave. "I'm not going to show some dumb jock my tits or lose my virginity to him."

  I pull the door shut and turn – right into that dumb jock.

  Ooph.

  "How much of that did you hear exactly?" I ask, hoping with every ounce of hope I have inside me that he'll say he's actually hard of hearing. I issue a silent prayer heavenward.

  Please say he didn't hear me say I was a virgin. Or call him a dumb jock.

  "All of it," he says.

  "Well." I move around him and walk down the hallway. I hear his footsteps close behind, and when I reach the living room, I gesture toward the door. "So. I guess you should be leaving now."

  After I pass out and die of embarrassment right here in my apartment.

  "I wasn't eavesdropping," he says, holding up his phone, a sheepish look on his face. "I just got a text from a friend, and I had to go, and you were taking a while, so that's why I was in the hallway and … yeah, I came by to ask if you would reconsider tutoring me."

  "I see." Those are the only words I can get out. I think my heart stopped beating when I ran into him in the hallway — right after I called him a dumb jock and said I was a virgin.

  "I wasn't trying to take your virginity," he says.

  Oh, dear God. Did he just say that?

  Is it possible to die of mortification? Because I think I might actually be dying. My face is probably the deepest shade of burgundy on earth.

  I try to speak, but no words come out, so now I just look like a fish sucking air. A burgundy-faced virgin fish.

  "It's okay," he says. "I wrote down my number on the card with the flowers. If you still want to tutor a dumb jock, just let me know."

  Colton is near the door when I finally get my voice back. "Colton?"

  "Yep."

  I exhale heavily. I feel awful that he heard me call him a dumb jock. Heaven help me, I can't believe I'm about to say this. "Fine. Can you start this week?"

  6

  Colton

  It's early evening but it's still hot as fuck. The summer air here, even at night, is thick with humidity, and I'm drenched with sweat. We're running seven-on-seven drills, and I couldn't be less focused on what's happening right now if I tried. I've dropped the ball six times, run two routes backwards, and collided mid-field with one of the receivers.

  I'm jacked up nervous. I'm supposed to meet Cassandra for tutoring tomorrow.

  Cassandra.

  Coach Walker told me her name. Maybe she goes by Cassie. I like the name Cassie better. It sounds kind of country, like she belongs in a field picking flowers or something.

  The mental image of her in a yellow sundress picking flowers in a field flashes in my head. Yeah, right. That girl is way too uptight for that.

  I replace that image with one of Cassandra behind a desk in the library, those glasses perched on the tip of her nose, scowling from behind a pile of books. Except she'd be wearing a white button-down shirt with nothing underneath.

  The way she was bare under that tank top in her apartment.

  My cock jumps at that image.

  Focus, Colton. Get your mind off the librarian.

  The virgin librarian.

  Your virgin tutor.

  The one with the full tits, perky underneath the thin cotton top, her hair stuck up in a ponytail on the top of her head, jutting out in every direction like she just stuck her finger in a light socket.

  Shit. That's not helping either.

  It also doesn't help matters that when I walk into the room at the student center where I'm supposed to meet her the next day, she's wearing a white button-down shirt and a skirt, like she just stepped right out of my daydream. When she stands up on the other side of the table, I can see the way the fabric of the skirt skims the curves of her hips, accentuating her body so much that I have a hard time looking anywhere else.

  This time, her hair is pulled up, but neatly. I think I preferred it when it was a mess. I have to resist the urge to reach up there and undo it.

  "Colton," she says, and I blink.

  "What's up?"

  "You're just staring at me."

  Shit. "Oh, yeah."

  There's a table and two chairs facing each other. She's standing on the other side of the table, which means I’m supposed to sit here across from her. And I’m supposed to focus on school bullshit when she sits across from me looking like that.

  "I realized you don't even know my name," she says. "Or you do, because you found my address, so you probably have my name too, I guess."

  "Cassandra," I say, flopping into the seat facing her. "Coach gave me your name."

  Her cheeks turn pink again. God, she blushes easily.

  I wonder what she looks like after sex.

  The image flashes into my head – her hair spilled against a pillow, looking up at me, her lips plump, her cheeks flushed. "C
olton," she'd say, her voice breathy.

  "Colton," she says, and I look up.

  "Right." I shake the image out of my head. Focus.

  "It's Cassie," she says. "No one calls me Cassandra. Except my grandmother, and she's eighty. I'm named after her, though, and everyone calls her Cassandra and not Cassie, so it's Cassie to differentiate between us. Not that it's hard to tell the difference between me and my grandmother, but …"

  She exhales heavily. "I'm babbling."

  "I'm used to it," I say, shrugging. "A lot of women lose their shit around me."

  Cassie rolls her eyes. "They probably lose their lunches."

  "They didn't tell me I would get the funny tutor. Do I pay extra for that?"

  "You get billed extra for the nudity," she says, pulling out her laptop and a notepad.

  I lean back in the chair. "Well, then. I'm ready whenever you are, Cassie," I say. "Start with the button down shirt. The first two buttons, just to give me a little taste. Then slide that skirt up around your thighs and –"

  She glares at me. Glares. But her cheeks are pink-tinged again and her lips are open, just a little bit. She licks her bottom lip, which tells me she likes it. Miss Goody Two Shoes just might be a dirty little nerd. "I meant the nudity on your part."

  "I thought we were back to the whole stripping thing again."

  "I can find another job, you know," she says, straightening her glasses as they slip to the tip of her nose. She looks over the edge of them at me as she reaches into her bag for a pen.

  Shit. When she looks at me like that – and in that outfit — how the hell am I supposed to focus on anything but running my hands over her curves?

  "No more dirty comments," I say, mock-buttoning my lips. "Promise. I'll be a saint."

  The biggest lie I've ever told.

  She narrows her eyes. "Should we get started?" she asks, straight to business. "Your coach said you're on academic probation and you need to pull at least a 2.0 grade point average to maintain academic eligibility. Did I get that right?"

  "It's bullshit," I say, already irritated even talking about this. Especially with the hot nerd girl who thinks I'm a dumb jock.

  "Okay," she says, ignoring my comment. "I pulled up the syllabi for both of your classes and took a look. Your coach said something about getting you a history tutor specifically if you need one, but really, I'm pretty comfortable with liberal arts courses."

  Another tutor. No way another tutor is going to be as hot as the woman sitting across from me. Her tutoring is going to be much more effective than anyone else's … at getting a rise out of me. Literally. If she keeps wearing outfits like this, I'm going to have more spank bank material than I know what to do with.

  "Nope, I'm good," I say.

  She leans forward, a stack of papers and a pencil in her hand, and I get distracted by her cleavage. I can see just the tops of her breasts. The first button on her shirt is undone, but she really should unbutton one more.

  "Are you trying to look down my shirt?" she asks, looking up at me.

  "What?" I ask, forcing an offended tone. "Of course not. I was looking at the syllabus. I see lots of tits. I don't need to see yours."

  I don't know why I added the last part. Lots of tits? Way to go, Colton, reminding a virgin that you get laid a lot. Real classy.

  "Good." She clears her throat. "So, you're retaking English, right? And it looks like you have a paper due soon. Is this the same thing you did last semester? Can I look at your papers from spring semester?"

  "What class is that?" I ask, then stop. "Never mind. It doesn't really matter. I hardly turned in any papers for anything."

  "You just didn't do them?"

  I sit back in my chair, arms crossed over my chest. "Don't sit there looking at me all judgy," I say, only half-joking because I know that's exactly what she's doing.

  "I wasn't – I mean, why didn't you turn in anything?"

  Irritation swells up inside me at her for her that look she's giving me right now — the one that smart girls give guys like me — and at myself for not giving a shit about any of this stuff. But mostly at her.

  "I didn’t turn in anything because I'm a football god," I say, clasping my arms behind my head and leaning back in the chair. I know I sound like an arrogant fuck, but I keep right on going anyway. "And next year I'll graduate from this place and be making more money than you could ever even dream of."

  The room is so silent you could hear a pin drop. She looks at me coolly, then adjusts her glasses. "Well, football god, what's going to happen when you hire the wrong attorney or wrong financial manager to deal with all your millions of dollars and they bleed you dry, because you didn't have the basic life skills you need to even figure out whether someone's taking you for a ride?"

  I shrug nonchalantly, even though I'm getting more irritated by the second. "That's why you hire good people."

  But she keeps going. "What if you get injured – you blow out your knee or get hit on the head one too many times? What's your fallback plan? You barely pass your classes and graduate with nothing to show for it, and you have nothing to fall back on if things go south. Then you're the guy with the knee injury working as a used car salesman who used to be that guy who was a famous football player once."

  "Football is my fallback plan." My voice is far too loud for the student center. We're in a private room, but it still echoes off the walls. I hit my palm on the table and Cassie flinches. Shit. For a second I feel badly about yelling, but she's the one who's on my case about my fucking life goals. I don't need a lecture from a girl who's supposed to be getting me to pass my damn classes. "Football is the only plan, all right? I don't need a lecture about valuing education. I need you to do your job and get me to pass my fucking classes so I can play the game."

  I think I might have scared her off by yelling, but she just crosses her arms over her chest and looks at me for a long minute, her expression unreadable.

  Then she leans forward, her hands on the table. "Do that again and you figure out your own damn schoolwork."

  7

  Cassie

  My advisor looks across from his desk at me, his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. "This is … not what I expect from you, Cassie."

  I swallow hard. I'm supposed to be further along on my thesis than this, a fact that Professor Richards keeps reminding me of via email after nagging email. And now I just gave him a lame proposed thesis topic. "I know. It's the topic. I'm not sure –"

  "It's not interesting," he says. "Toss it."

  "Excuse me?"

  "I can tell you're not interested in it." He pulls off his reading glasses and sets them on the desk. "This is my research area, not yours. Give me something better. It's your thesis, Cassie. It's not mine. You're supposed to roll this into your dissertation, so it had better be something you're interested in doing for the next few years."

  "Right," I say absently. Why can’t I get that stupid jock out of my head?

  "Did you hear anything I just said, Cassie?"

  "Yeah," I reply, pausing to look down at my notepad. There's nothing written, no notes detailing what we’ve even been talking about during this meeting. Just a doodle of my initials and a couple of flowers. Like I'm a sixth grader. At least it's not a doodle of Colton's initials. "Totally. That's a good idea."

  "You need a new thesis topic," he insists. "Preferably something you're interested in. And something publishable. At least if you still want to pursue a career in academia."

  "I do," I say firmly.

  "Are you sure everything's okay?" he asks, his expression concerned. Professor Richards is a great advisor. He's basically the professorial version of Santa Claus, kind and good-natured, except in Hawaiian shirts and flip-flops most of the year.

  "Absolutely. I was just distracted by finding a teaching position and… it has a slightly steeper learning curve than I expected."

  "I forgot about that. You're teaching at…"

  "I'm tutoring at
the athletic center," I finish for him. "One of the football players."

  Professor Richards leans back in his chair. "That's interesting. Have you thought about going in that direction?"

  "For my thesis?" I ask.

  "Football teams are an interesting in-group,” he points out. “Or there’s –“

  “Masculine identity in college football players." It pops into my head, just like that, and I blurt it out.

  “You should run with that."

  I shake my head, reconsidering my impulsive idea. “I can’t use anything I learn while tutoring,” I say. “I signed a non-disclosure agreement.”

  “You don’t need specifics,” he assures me. “It’s a proposed study. Propose it and then for your dissertation, you’ll see if you can get permission to run it through the athletic center.”

  Professor Richards is right. I wouldn’t be using anything I learned while tutoring in my thesis, and maybe my sessions Colton King will give me insight I wouldn’t otherwise have.

  Masculine identity in college football players. I wonder if winding up underneath one of them counts as "research".

  * * *

  “So?” Sable yells over the excessively loud music in the bar. We’re at one of the cheapest happy hours in town, which makes it the favorite hangout for poor college students everywhere. Cheap drinks and tacos – the perfect combination.

  Coupled with an interrogation by my roommate.

  “So what?” I ask, scooping up a glob of queso on a tortilla chip. I pop it into my mouth and crunch so that I have an excuse not to answer her questions.

  “You know what I’m asking, so don’t play coy,” Sable yells. “How did it go?”

  “I signed a confidentiality thing, Sable."

  She rolls her eyes dramatically. “Oh, please. I’m not asking for specifics. I don’t give a shit about the academic bullshit. I want to know if Colt –“

  I interrupt her, clearing my throat loudly. “No names,” I say, looking around.

  “A code name, then,” she suggests. “I want to know if Horse –“