I don’t respond, but continue to stare at the ceiling from my spot on the bed. Hands behind my head, one ankle crossed over the other.
Mulling about Blue.
The conversation on the plane didn’t sit well with me, and it was because of the palpable derision in her voice when she informed me that she knew exactly the type of man that I was.
Completely condescending and way off base in my opinion, and yet she acted like she had insider information.
“Dude,” Legend says and I roll my head to look at him. I’d been lying here for fifteen minutes as he showered and changed after our long flight from Phoenix to Miami so we can go out to dinner. I’d gotten first crack at the shower and have been patiently waiting for him. “What’s eating at you?”
One eyebrow rises. “What do you mean?”
“You have that look on your face.”
“What look?”
Legend grabs his wallet off the dresser and shoves it into the back pocket of his shorts. We’re eating casual tonight and it’s hot as hell in Miami so we both dressed accordingly. “You know…that look. Perplexed. Confounded. Stumped.”
I roll my body off the bed and snatch my own wallet and phone from the bedside table. “It’s nothing.”
“It’s something,” he presses. Although we’ve known each other barely a month since both being traded to the Vengeance in the expansion draft, we’ve gotten pretty close. We’ve roomed together on all away trips and we tend to hang out with each other in our downtime.
Legend’s a cool dude and fairly laid back. He’s just sort of easy to be around.
“Blue,” I say, needing only one word for him to understand.
All of my teammates have been witness to the extremely cold shoulder I get from Blue, stemming from the very first time we met on the team plane. After her stunning beauty knocked me stupid for a few minutes, I’d recovered and promptly hit on her before any other teammate beat me to the mark.
For some reason, she took great offense and has been nothing but rude to me since then.
At first, I was amused, because I kind of liked getting under her skin. Now I’m just flat out annoyed because while I have my many faults, I don’t think I deserve the type of enmity she’s throwing my way.
And I’m frustrated, because even though she was extremely nasty on the plane, I’m not turned off or rebuffed in the slightest. I still want to get to know her better. It’s like a compulsion and when I want something, I usually get it. I’m not afraid of a challenge and I can be overly stubborn at times. She’s in my sights and I’m not about to give up just because she dislikes me.
“Man, you should just give up on that,” Legend says as if he was just inside my head reading my thoughts.
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
“Why?” he says as we leave the hotel room. I follow him out and pull the door shut behind us. “I mean, yeah…she’s smokin’ hot. Who wouldn’t want to tap that? But there are plenty of super hot chicks around who would give it up a lot easier.”
This I know, but because I’m so focused on Blue, I’d have to reason with myself that I want more than to just “tap that.”
“I can’t explain it,” I tell him as we head to the elevator. “I’m totally intrigued by her, especially after seeing her with her brother.”
Legend wasn’t at the harvest festival with us three days ago, but I’d told him the next day at practice about seeing Blue there with her brother, Billy. Something about watching her dance with him touched me deep inside.
And how something like that made her infinitely more interesting to me. It’s almost as if I’m looking beneath the veneer of beauty to see what makes her tick. It’s not a curiosity I ever remember feeling for another woman, and that in and of itself fuels me.
Nope. Not about to give up now.
The elevator door opens and Legend and I board. He taps the lobby button and when the doors whoosh close, he asks, “So what’s your game plan? Because she won’t give you the time of day on the plane.”
“I haven’t quite figured it out yet but I know what I won’t be doing,” I tell him with a grin.
“What’s that?”
“Flirting,” I say as the elevator car coasts to a stop and the doors open to reveal the blue-veined, marbled floor of the lobby. “She told me to stop it and I told her I would.”
Legend clutches a hand to his chest and makes an exaggerated gasp of disbelief. “You mean the great womanizer Erik Dalhbeck can actually converse with a woman without flirting with her?”
“Shut the fuck up,” I gripe at him as we head across the lobby to the exit doors. We’re headed to a Cuban restaurant a few blocks away where a few of the other guys on the team agreed to meet up for dinner. Our game isn’t until tomorrow afternoon so we have the evening free.