Jock Row (Jock Hard 1)

Little does she fucking know we’re outside because I think she’s pretty and it’s too hard to talk inside with all the noise.

“So you keep saying.” I shoot her a cursory glance, eyes on her mid-length puffy coat. Knit winter hat. Mittens. “No offense—you don’t really look like you came dressed for a party.”

She rips open a pack of fruit snacks, package crinkling, popping a red one in her mouth. “I’m also a realist, Rowdy. I didn’t want to freeze my ass off if the answer was no bueno.”

Silently, we chew in tandem, legs extended in front of us. Her head rests against the house, eyes sliding closed when she swallows her first bite. “I love these stupid things. They’re so bad for you.”

In goes an orange one.

“Never have I ever taken food out of a trash can and eaten it,” I announce, taking a chug out of my water bottle like the total badass I am.

“Stop it right now! You have not!”

“I have,” I boast proudly. “I was starving and I was with a few buddies, and we were walking past a really nice restaurant. Technically we were walking in an alley past their dumpsters…”

“That is so gross—your mouth has been in the trash. What the hell did you eat?”

“Pasta with meatballs from inside a doggy bag.” I chuckle. “We were in the city and it had just been thrown out, so I figured it was clean.”

“Rowdy, that’s disgusting!” When she leans forward and taps me on the leg of my pants, chastising, my entire body goes rigid, calf burning where she poked at it with the tips of her fingers.

“It was still warm! Clearly, I didn’t die from it, so how bad could it have been?” I protest. “Plus, it had just the right amount of parmesan sprinkled on top.”

I pinch my fingers, sprinkling imaginary cheese onto an imaginary platter of spaghetti.

Scarlett plays footsies with me, urging me to quit talking about it. “I’m going to gag. Knock it off.”

Our loud laughter carries into the yard, causing the few people gathered by the road to glance up at the house.

I chomp down the last of the oatmeal bar and rip open the second one. Chew. “Okay brainiac.” Swallow. “Here’s one for you—never have I ever cheated on a test.”

Her pert nose wrinkles. “Why would you assume I’m a brainiac?”

“Uh, cause you’re the girl in class who wants extra credit.”

“You would latch onto that fact—but the truth is, I always needed extra credit because my grades were just okay, not because I loved the extra work. Let’s get real here.”

“Really?”

“Really. And for your information, yes—I’ve cheated on a test.” She takes a drink from her bottle. “It was in high school and it was a take-home algebra exam. We weren’t allowed to use calculators or get help, but during study hall a few of us worked on it together and I got busted.” She pops a fruit snack in her mouth. “God I am so bad at math.”

“I’ve never cheated on a test, unless you count the road test to get my driver’s license.”

“How can you cheat on the road test?”

“By flirting with the examiner?”

Under the dim light, beneath the winter cap, her eyes widen. “Guy or girl?”

“Guy.” I grin shamelessly.

“Was he cute?”

A laugh escapes my lips. “Yeah.”

“Have you ever flirted to get out of a speeding ticket?”

“No.”

Now she’s the one smiling. “I have.” Her grin widens. “I was home one weekend, driving my dad’s car, and got pulled over coming home from a dinner with some friends. I recognized the cop as someone from high school, a guy a few years older who had just become an officer. So”—she shrugs—“I might have unbuttoned my shirt a little while he was running the plates.”

“No fucking way.”

“Way. Two whole buttons.” She laughs. “So much cleavage.”

“Why Scarlett, you little…”

“I really think it’s weird you think I’m some prude just because I got into an argument with your teammates.”

“Honestly, I’m sure it had a lot to do with what you were wearing. They’re morons.”

Her groan is accompanied by a dramatic eye roll. “I’m burning that sweater when I get home.”

“Yeah?”

“Heck no.” She scoffs. “I love that stupid thing.”

THIRD FRIDAY

“The Friday Where I Feed Him…and Give Up Trying to Stay Away from Jock Row.”

Scarlett

“Don’t you freeze your ass off out here?” Tessa’s heels click along the pavement, the strappy, impractical kind she has trouble walking in because they are impractically high.

I personally would never be caught dead in anything other than a wedge, but who am I to judge? I shamelessly wore an ugly sweater to one of the hottest party spots on campus.

It’s only two short blocks from Tessa and Cameron’s apartment complex to Jock Row, but it’s taken us more than twenty minutes because of their ridiculous shoes. At this rate, the party will be over by the time we get there.

Nonetheless, we trudge along.

“Why does he keep making you stay outside?” Cameron wants to know.

“I’m not sure,” I admit. “But then again, I haven’t asked.” Nor do I care.

“Explain again why do you keep going back?”

“Duh—because Rowdy Wade is freaking hot, that’s why. As if she needs any other reason.” Tessa’s ankle twists on a crack in the sidewalk and she slows her pace. “I’d sit outside on the front porch with him too if I had the chance.”

“I would, too, but I guess I just don’t get why the captain of the team is okay sitting outside on the porch.”

“Maybe he wants Scarlett all to himself.”

Tessa’s theory makes me blush, face hot as Hades, cold air notwithstanding.

“I hear he’s single,” Tessa adds. “Like, super single.”

“Has he hit on you?” Cameron wants to know.

“I don’t think so.”

Cameron stops in the middle of the sidewalk, grabbing my upper arm with her hot pink talons. “Well what would you do if he did? Maybe we should role play, just in case.”

“Fantastic idea, Cam,” Tessa enthuses. “Scarlett, pretend I’m Rowdy and I invite you back to my house. What do you say?”

“Uh…I’d ask what we were going to do there?”

She makes a buzzing sound. “Wrong. You never want to be the one doing the walk of shame—make him do it.”

“So I invite him to my place instead?”

“Exactly.”

These two, I swear.

“What do the two of you do on the porch, anyway?” Cam shoots me a sidelong glance, focusing on not stepping on any cracks in the sidewalk.

“I don’t know, a little bit of everything. We play games.”

“What’s he like? Like, what are his hobbies and stuff?” Cameron wants to know.

“Why? Are you collecting data so you can stalk him?” I tease.

“No, but maybe if you got a little more personal you’d—”

Tessa cuts her off. “Cameron, stop. She’ll figure it out on her own.”

But we have been getting personal, the deeper into Never Have I Ever we got. I learned he’s broken his arm twice, and neither time was while playing baseball. He’s never gone skydiving but it’s first on his Fucket List. Once, he dumped a girl he really liked because his friends dared him to, and it was over the phone, then felt so terrible he wrote her a letter.

He’s run red lights, almost been arrested for disorderly conduct, and his parents locked him out of the house once to punish him when he was two hours late for curfew. He sobbed on the steps like a baby for a solid half an hour before they let him in.

He was seventeen.

“So you have a crush on him?” Cameron confirms.

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

“I keep coming back because it’s entertaining. Is that so wrong? I think we’re becoming…friends? Is that weird?”