Ryan Hunter

by Piper Shelly

  “Yes, darling!” she answered over the distance of the hall and kitchen between her and me. “Your dad and I got an invitation to Mary Fisher’s birthday celebration. We won’t be home tonight!”

  “Yesss,” I hissed and punched my fist in the air. Parties were so much better when I had the run of the house. “I’m off to training. See you later, Mom!”

  In our double garage, my Audi A3 was dwarfed by my dad’s Chrysler, but I couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel of my baby painted in shiny, nightfall silver. She had been a present from my parents for my eighteenth birthday, shortly before soccer camp. And with my own savings, I had turned the brand-new car into a real attention-catcher, with twenty-inch tires on specially designed aluminum rims, an epically mean looking front, and the body slammed to the ground. Two-hundred and forty hp let this lady race through the streets like a shark under water.

  When I climbed into the bucket seat and stroked over the curve of the wheel, I inhaled the scent of new leather and smirked. “Miss me, love?”

  The answer came when I pushed the start button and softly tipped on the gas pedal. The Audi gave a roar that would have made her big brothers go pale with envy. Damn, I loved the sound. The wide roll-up door opened at a push of a button on the small remote that was attached to my key ring. Sunlight streamed into the garage and blinded me. I grabbed my sunglasses that lay in the center console, shook them open with one hand, and put them on.

  The music boomed from the speakers on a level meant for going deaf as I left the garage and our drive to head down the road. In no time, the ride was over, because the soccer field was right next to our school, only two miles away from my house. On this Saturday morning, the parking lot was quite busy, which meant that more students had come to the tryouts than expected.

  From the floorboard on the passenger side, I grabbed my backpack and threw it over one shoulder. Locking the car, I headed for the grounds.

  There I spotted Torres, Frederickson, Sebastian Randall, and Alex. I had asked them to come help me sort through the girls today, kick ball with them, and judge their skills. Frederickson was our goalie, so he’d do what he always did. The rest of the crowd on the lawn was female. Since Tony wasn’t here yet, I didn’t even bother to look for Liza, because she wouldn’t come without him. I headed straight to the bench where about a million handbags and backpacks were parked, and one girl. While all the others did some stretching or chatting elsewhere, this one actually read a book.

  She wasn’t in any of my classes, nor had I been out with her, but I knew she had told me her name yesterday at Charlie’s. Damn, what was it again?

  I dumped my stuff next to her and said, “Hi.”

  She looked up from her book and took off her metal-rimmed glasses. “Hey.”

  “Good story?”

  “Fantastic.” Then she blushed an awful red and grimaced, probably because she just caught my subtle taunting. It was weird to go to soccer tryouts and then read a book. “I only have half a chapter left, and I just couldn’t stop.”

  I laughed. She was sweet, this one. “Go finish your chapter. I still need a few minutes to get everything ready, anyway.”

  She seemed totally happy at my words, put her glasses back on and her nose back into the book, which made me shake my head but smile as I fished for the list of names in my backpack. Running my forefinger from top to bottom, I looked for the name that I had jotted down below Elisabeth MacKenzie, because I was pretty sure that this girl had sat right next to her in the café. Yep, there it was. Miller. That was her.

  Sitting down beside her, I traded my shoes for my cleats. An airy thud next to my ear said she had finished her book. “How are you going on about this?”

  Making a knot with the loops of tied laces, I tilted my head and looked up at her. “What you mean?”

  “Well, there are way over fifty girls wanting on your team. How do you select between us?”

  I moved to my other shoe and started lacing it. “Dunno. Let you kick some goals and stuff. Watch you play.”

  “Tough job with so many girls,” she replied and put her book in one of the million backpacks. “Do you have a rating system?”

  No, I hadn’t. Because I thought there would be fifteen to choose between, maybe twenty. I didn’t reckon on half the high school. I quirked my brows at her, chewing on my bottom lip.

  “That means no, right?”

  “No. Right.”

  She laughed at that. “Maybe you should give points for certain tasks and just take those with the highest score?”

  That sounded like a brilliant idea. “You’re a smart one.” I stood and gave her one of those smiles that I usually saved for asking-a-girl-out moments. It was okay, because those moments had become rare, anyway. The only sheet I had with me, though, was full with names, and there was no room left for taking any sort of notes. “You wouldn’t by any chance have—”

  “A note pad?” she finished for me, giving me the same mocking tone I had used on her before. By her grin, it was apparent she had one, indeed. She handed the pad to me together with a pen.

  Yeah, that was perfect. I placed the book on a small table in front of the tribune and moved a second bench closer so that I could sit down for writing. The girl came over and gave me a hand with the bench. “Thanks,” I told her.

  She nodded and smiled then walked out to the field. It was rare that any girl managed to get into my good-zone so fast, but she was a nice one, smart and helpful. “Hey, Susan!” I shouted after her.

  As she stopped and turned around, there was this quirky look of surprise on her face. “Yes…Ryan?”

  Ah, it was the name then. I chuckled. I certainly wouldn’t forget it again. “Would you care to help me with the notes? I just think I should be more on the field instead of sitting here and writing things down.”

  Susan came back to me and looked me sternly in the eyes with her arms folded angrily over her flat chest. “You want me to be your secretary?”

  “Ugh-ph…” I hadn’t meant to offend her, and to be fair, I had no idea what to reply to that.

  Luckily, her cute face scrunched with a smile then, and she swatted me on the shoulder. “Just kidding, Hunter. Of course, I’ll help you.”

  I laughed and rolled my eyes. Yeah. Definitely liked her.

  We discussed that she’d rasterize the sheet and in the end just add up the scores at the bottom. Her note pad turned out to be a little grab bag, because she ripped two pages with little square stickers on them from the very back and gave them to me. “You write down a number on each and have the girls sticking them on their asses or wherever. It’s easier to work it out this way.”

  She gave me another pencil and, like a real assistant, shooed me off to get started.

  The girls lined up, and one by one they took a sticker with a number from me, while I shouted the matching names over to Susan. Cloey was one of the first, and her friend, Brinna, of course grabbed the number that followed. When I had already given out over thirty stickers, the queue had only halved. It was amazing just how many girls at our school wanted to play soccer, and suddenly I wondered if that had anything to do with us guys. Maybe it wasn’t the sport, after all, that attracted them.

  “Forty-five, Higgins! Forty-six, Stevenson! Forty-seven…” I looked up who was next and found myself face to face with the girl who dominated ninety-nine percent of my thoughts. “Matthews.”

  Chapter 4

  IT WAS NICE to see that Liza mirrored my smile with one of her own. She hadn’t done that before, ever. Not that I had smiled at her a lot so far, or that we’d had any eye-contact other than a passing look in the school corridor. Not wearing a cap seemed to have been a good idea, because her gaze so obviously wandered up to my chaotic hairstyle then snapped back to my face as though she was caught ogling. I didn’t mind. If she liked what she saw, she could happily stare at me all day.

  With a confident feeling in my gut, I decided that things were going to change today. Radically.

/>   “Good luck, Matthews.” I gave her the sticker, which she popped on the upper curve of her left boob and rubbed it smooth.

  Holy penalty kick, she shouldn’t do this to me. My eyes fastened on that same spot while my mouth watered so badly I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to say anything else without drooling all over her.

  Fortunately, she didn’t pay attention to my sudden lack of composure but turned around and headed back to Tony. Pulling myself together fast, I nodded a greeting at my friend then cleared my throat…several times. “Okay, everybody. For a little warm-up, I want you to run three laps around the field then come back here,” I shouted over the murmurs.

  After some protesting moans, the crowd got moving. Susan left her post to join in the warm-up, and I jogged over to run with her. “Thanks for your help,” I told her. “That’s really cool of you.”

  “Yeah, sure. No problem.” She gasped for air as we ran then continued. “As long as that gives me a special status for the tryouts, we’re fine.”

  She made me laugh. In fact, I was thinking about it already. Though I had no idea how she’d handle the ball, I thought it would be fun to have an up-front girl like her on the team. “Don’t you worry about that, Miller. If you can hit a ball with your foot, we’re good.”

  I left her side after the first lap and sat on the small table with Alex and Frederickson, watching how some of the girls already fought for air.

  “Tony’s girl is going to collapse before she makes the three rounds,” Frederickson stated, and I automatically scanned the girls for Cloey. But she ran like a pro. Then of course, to everyone else Tony’s girl would still be Liza. I found her more crawling than jogging next to Mitchell, totally red in the face, and panting like a tank engine.

  “Damn. That’s not good,” I mumbled.

  “Why?” Alex wanted to know.

  “Because last night, Tony asked me to take her on the team.” And of course, I would have done so even if I had to give her a piggy ride to master just the warm-up.

  “Well then, I guess you have to be gentle on her.” Alex laughed and pushed away from the table. Something told me that his joke was in fact on me.

  After most of the girls had finished the three laps, I started a goal contest with them. Everybody had to score at least one. Three points if the first kick was a goal. None, if they didn’t manage to get the ball past Frederickson even on the third try. Of course, Frederickson wasn’t giving his best today. It was more like fifteen percent of what he was capable off, but we didn’t want to win a match today, we wanted to restock the team. So, fifteen percent was good.

  I got a little excited as numbers forty to forty-six took their turns. Next would be Liza, and I couldn’t wait to practice goal kicking with her. But when I turned around, she was sitting on the ground and talking to Mitchell who handed her a drink in a paper cup. I had always been cool with him being her companion, best friend, playmate, whatever. It had gotten on my nerves, but I had never said a word. However, since last night—since Tony had told me he was seriously involved with Cloey—I was more jealous than ever. At their tiniest touch, the urge to hit something hard rose within me. This was a serious problem, and I could only hope that Mitchell would come out with the truth fast. She would see him with different eyes then. With eyes that didn’t bear this romantic, dreamy take-me-now look any longer.

  “Matthews! Your turn!” I yelled, suppressing my jealousy, and kicked the ball toward her. She turned around and caught the ball to her chest. Good reflexes. There was definitely some potential in that.

  I waited next to the goal while she placed the ball in the grass then kicked it with mild power toward Frederickson. The tall guy didn’t have to move an inch to stop the ball. In fact, it died on the way toward the goal and looked like it needed reanimation. Damn, kicking wasn’t Liza’s strength.

  “Come on, Matthews!” I shouted as I picked up the ball and jogged over to them. She looked like she was going to capitulate. Sweat coated every inch of her skin and breathing still troubled her after running the three laps. But I couldn’t let her fail in this qualifying, so I tried to tickle out her ambition with a smirk. “I’ve seen you kick Mitchell’s butt harder than that.”

  Since she didn’t back off, I guessed she was up to another try, so I dropped the ball in front of her. Then I placed my hands on her shoulders and moved her several steps back. “Now take a short run and put a little more power in your thrust.”

  This was the first time that I ever touched Liza Matthews. And I thanked God for the invention of tank tops. Her skin was smooth and heated, emitting the warm scent of some flower mix. I didn’t know what she used to rub on her body after a shower, but the smell of it drove me crazy and close to not giving a fuck about who might see it when I was going to kiss that girl in just another moment.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t look very happy about what I did to her. She grabbed the collar of Tony’s jersey and whined, “Ah no, don’t let him make me do that. We both know I will just trip over the damn thing.”

  She looked so hilariously panicky that I couldn’t stop myself from laughing while Tony pried her fingers loose from his collar. “No, you won’t,” he told her in a confident way. Then he shot me a quick glance that looked like he was asking my permission…for whatever. I nodded, because I trusted him fully. Anyway, we both wanted the same today, which was getting Liza on the team. “Tell you what, if you hit Frederickson straight in the chest, I’ll buy you a chocolate decadence ice cream sundae,” he tempted her. “Deal?”

  It wouldn’t be a goal if the ball didn’t make it past Frederickson, but as long as the outcome at the end of the day was the same, I didn’t care.

  Liza considered the new task for a second then grinned. “Deal.” Two steps she ran, then she kicked the ball with an amicable thrust. It dropped like a baby in Frederickson’s arms. At least she mastered it this way.

  “Well done!” I told her, wishing I would be the one to buy her ice cream later.

  I returned to the table and to Susan. “Forty-seven gets three points for the goal shooting,” I told her. She’d seen what happened, and of course it earned me a quizzical look from the book lover, but I was the captain of this team, and what I said was law. It took only my arching one brow to make her understand that, and she scribbled a perfect 3 next to Liza’s name. When she grinned up at me in a nice schoolgirl manner, I smiled back. I liked how we communicated without words and understood each other so well.

  I finished the goal contest with the remaining attendees then joined my buddies, Alex and Sasha, who trained running and kicking across the lawn with some of the girls. Tony did the same with Liza, and though she wasn’t a pro, she managed a few very promising passes to Mitchell. I watched them for a while deciding whether to give her the deserved two points in this task or the full five. She was really lame at the next event, which was testing their balance and skills at juggling the ball with one leg, doing kicks without dropping it. I grimaced and dragged my hands down over my face. There was no need to even start counting how many she did.

  I scratched my head. If I gave her a fair rating, she’d never make it on the team. There were at least twenty other girls better than her. On the plus side, she wasn’t the worst, and having her on the team wouldn’t turn out to be a total loss.

  On the way over to Susan, a sneaky attack made me drop on all fours. One of the girls hit me on the backside of my left knee with a really hard kick that Alex failed to stop. Me going down like a shot buffalo caused a round of laughter and some bantering from Alex. It took exactly two seconds, until he was on the ground underneath me, and we wrestled around like a couple of puppies.

  “Hey Sash,” Frederickson yelled above us. “Help me get the kids apart. They’re always so rollicking when they get coffee in the morning.”

  Alex and I grabbed each a leg of Frederickson, which was his downfall.

  “Oh, come on, guys.” I heard Cloey’s annoyed voice. “Can you wait with the man-part until la
ter? Some of us would like to know if we’re on the team.”

  I wrestled myself free from Alex and Frederickson and gave Cloey a wry look. “You got maximum score in every event, Summers. I guess it’s okay to say that you probably made it.”

  She disappeared on a happy skip, and I could finally tell Susan the last few scores to enter into her list. I walked up behind her, braced my palms on the wooden top on either side of her, and leaned over her shoulder. Susan gave a short gasp, probably at the unexpected nearness. If I judged her right, she’d never had a boy touch her, let alone kiss one. Dating might not be spelled in caps in her books. That was a shame. She was cool and she smelled like vanilla milk. She had a pretty face, even with her glasses. The only thing missing on this one was boobs, but she was only sixteen. They might come soon.

  I pointed to the bottom of the list. “Fifty-three and four get three points each for the run and kick, and they did seven and ten at the juggling. There’s no need in writing anything down for numbers fifty-six, seven, and eight. They won’t make it.”

  “Okay, so we have all. Well…all but one.” She tilted her head a little and studied me from the corner of her eye. “You didn’t give me the scores for Liza Matthews.”

  “Didn’t I?” It was a suggestive drawl, and it made Susan chuckle.

  “Let me guess, five points for the run and kick, and at juggling she probably did imaginary…twelve?”

  “Fifteen.”

  She pointed the tip of her pen at me. “Right.” Then she wrote the numbers into the list without further discussion, but she wore a knowing smile all the time.

  I leaned lower to speak into her ear. “You know, as my assistant, you’re bound to secrecy.”

  “Absolutely,” she confirmed with the same sneer that I wore, and for some reason I knew I could trust her with that. When she was done writing, I took her hand and pulled her off the bench. “Okay, it’s your turn now, book lover. Let’s see what you can do with a ball.” As my unofficial secretary, she hadn’t had much time to take part in the tryouts, so I ran her personally through the events. She probably wasn’t going to be a professional soccer player, not now or ever. But she was better than Liza in most things, and even though her scores sucked, I put Susan’s name on the new members list.