Wrangled

Despite my rejection, the grin doesn’t leave Chad’s bright, blue-eyed, devilish face.

I’m both devastatingly excited and bone-chillingly terrified of what wicked ideas are setting off such sparks behind his eyes.

Everything is so different now that I know his secret.

Everything.

He unbuttons the cuffs of his shirt, then slowly rolls up the sleeves. “Alright, then. I know what to do. I got an idea, you might say. Oh, shoot, this is gonna be fun. Come with me, Goodwin.” He jerks his tie loose, then strolls over to the locker room door and pulls it open.

I’m instantly set off. “Why? What are we doing? Chad?”

He disappears into the locker room.

I huff to myself. Is he serious right now? What in the fuck does he have on his mind?

I glance nervously over at the main doors to the gym, which have large windows built into them showing the dark hallway. I feel like at any second, a pair of faces will appear there, catch us, and we’ll be in trouble.

Then I glance back at the locker room door.

And I think about wrestlers and muscles and sweat.

And Chad Landry.

And that secret I just learned.

What the fuck am I doing still standing here?

10

A Pair of Wrestling Shoes

I march up to the door, yank it open, and slip inside. “Chad?” I call out, but there’s no answer. I search each aisle of lockers, but he’s nowhere to be found. I can’t even hear him.

Is this a game of hide-and-go-seek we’re playing now?

Then I notice a source of light from around the corner of a narrow hall, and the thud of something metal—a locker or a desk drawer, maybe?

With mounting suspicion, I follow the sound.

What I find around the corner—in a tall, wide storage closet—is Chad standing over a bin of laundry.

A pair of wrestling singlets hang from his fist.

He turns to me. “Solution found.”

I stare at those slinky things dangling from his hands. I don’t need any more context clues to understand where his mischievous mind is going. “No.”

“No? You don’t even know what I’m about to suggest yet!”

“We are not putting those on to wrestle each other.”

He blinks. “Oh. So you did know what I was about to suggest. Here, this should fit you.” He throws one of the singlets at me.

I catch the red-and-white thing with my face, grapple with it for five infuriating seconds like it’s alive, then ball it up between my hands and glare at Chad, outraged.

He holds one up to himself, then chuckles. “This should fit me if I’m lookin’ at it right. Extra-large. Yours is a medium. Oh, and yes,” he says to me, answering a question I didn’t ask, “this is the clean laundry. I can see the fear in your eyes. No, I wouldn’t make us wear dirty wrestling singlets.”

“We’re not wearing singlets at all. We’re not doing this.”

“Yeah, we are.”

“Chad …”

He slings his singlet over a shoulder, then proceeds to undo his belt. A second later, he thrusts his pants down to his ankles.

I spin around at once, turning my back to him, wide-eyed.

The image of his bare muscled thighs—with his crotch hidden behind the rest of his dress shirt that was tucked into his now-dropped-to-the-floor pants—is burned into my eyes.

My heart races.

I can’t breathe.

I am not going to be caught dead in this slinky thing.

To my back, Chad chuckles. “You’re so damned skittish! Don’t you watch your models undress and redress all the time in front of you? I mean, they gotta put on your fancy designer clothes, right? I bet they try on a zillion different things in front of you, too.”

“Yes, but …”

“So you should be used to it! C’mon, get changed. We’re gonna have ourselves a little fun while everyone else is boring themselves to death listenin’ to Lyle’s boot-scootin’. You a big fan of country music? Didn’t think so. Why aren’t you changing?”

I stand there stubbornly, hugging the singlet, red-faced.

I hear the clink of a belt buckle scraping the ground. Then I hear him grunt as he squeezes his way out of a shirt (or into the singlet already) and a ruffling of fabric. A shoe flings off and lands somewhere behind me. Another one goes past me into the hall.

“But we got an issue,” he mutters to my back. “Only one pair of wrestling shoes.”

I screw up my forehead, half peering over a shoulder. “Shoes?”

“Of course! You didn’t think we were gonna wrestle in our dress shoes, do you? Hmm.” I hear him turning the shoes over in his hands. “These look more your size. Might be perfect, actually. I’ll have to be in my socks, then, which puts me at a disadvantage …”

“I’m not putting on someone’s dirty wrestling shoes,” I start to say. “I don’t even wear the shoes they provide at bowling alleys.”

“Nah, these don’t appear to be very worn. They’re here in the storage room next to a big box of knee pads. Shoot, I can’t believe this stuff is still stored here, same place it was kept ten years ago.” I hear him shove around a few things on a nearby shelf, causing everything to rattle. “Hmm, what else do they got up here?”