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“That’s disgusting,” she said.
Blake pushed off the door, ready for Mindy to leave. Erika didn’t need any more ammo when it came to Mindy’s lacking sense of humor or intelligence. He’d pointed out on countless occasions that he wasn’t fucking her because of her brains, but that didn’t stop Erika from doing a dead-on impersonation of the dim-witted woman just to give him a hard time.
“Well, thanks for a great evening, Mindy,” he said, moving her away from his apartment, ready to send her on her merry way.
Mindy turned like she was going to go for one more kiss, but he dodged it, placing his hand on her back to guide her toward the stairs.
“Okay, then,” she grumbled, unhappy at his hasty dismissal. He was going to have to reconsider their standing arrangement and start calling someone else for his post-game celebratory booty calls. Mindy’s goals for their association clearly no longer matched his.
“Bye, Mindy,” Erika said cheerfully.
“Bye, Eileen.”
Blake stifled a groan. Erika had introduced herself several times, but Mindy seemed utterly incapable of remembering her name.
Mindy headed down the stairs as Blake continued toward Erika, who started singing “Come On Eileen,” as she opened her apartment door and walked inside.
“Toora loora toora loo-rye-aye,” Erika belted out.
“Smart-ass,” he muttered, even as the tune starting playing in his head. Great. Nothing like an earworm. He knew what he was going to be singing all day.
Blake followed her, heading straight for her fancy Nespresso machine. Grabbing a cup from the cupboard and a pod from the container on the counter, he fired it up as she toed off her tennis shoes.
“I’m going to have to start a coffee fund if you keep coming over here and helping yourself,” she said, the threat nowhere near new. “Those pods aren’t cheap. It’s why I limit myself to one cup a day.”
“Bill me,” he teased, opening the refrigerator to grab the creamer. “And how many times do I have to tell you? Life is too short to put limits on yourself. You like fancy coffee with the foam on top, so you should just have it. Why mess around with the shit you don’t enjoy as much?”
Erika grabbed a bottle of water from the counter and took a long swig. “You know what your problem is?”
He didn’t bother to prompt her for a response, since past experience told him she was going to tell him anyway.
He and Erika had been neighbors for three years, and during that time, she’d somehow become his best friend, his sometime nemesis, and that nagging voice in the back of his head—some people called it a conscience—all rolled into one.
Erika put the cap back on the water bottle and pointed it at him. “You have no restraint. You see something, you take it.”
He waited for her to get to the problem. When she stopped talking, he snorted. “That’s not a problem. That’s called a happy lifestyle. The opposite would be yours, where you deny yourself pleasure for the sake of self-control. Total waste.”
“Yes, but sometimes you grab things that aren’t exactly good for you.”
“Are you talking about Mindy? Because I can assure you, last night…she was very, very good for me.”
She huffed out a breath. “One of these days, you might want to try to start thinking with the head on your shoulders as opposed to the one in your pants.”
He didn’t bother continuing the argument because at the moment, it didn’t feel like one he could win. “So you really didn’t watch any of the game last night?”
“Didn’t need to,” she said with a mischievous grin. “I watch you score enough here without having to tune in.”
He laughed and debated denying her claim. While he indulged in the occasional celebratory fuck after home games with Mindy and a couple other women, he wouldn’t define himself as an outright playboy. That name more accurately described his best friend and teammate, Zac Phillips, aka Tank. Tank’s bedroom door really should be the revolving type, just to save him time.
Like Tank, Blake wasn’t interested in a committed relationship, but that didn’t mean he was fucking his way through the female population of Baltimore either. Erika wasn’t wrong when she said he scored a lot, but the truth was, he limited his booty calls to the same three or four women.
“I wish you could have come last night. We were on fire.”
“I turned on the TVs in the waiting room and breakroom to the game,” Erika confessed. “I caught snippets during downtimes, but not as much as I would have liked.”
Blake offered Erika free tickets to every home game. Unfortunately, his neighbor was in the last year of her residency at Hopkins, something she took very seriously. She was a workaholic, which probably wasn’t a bad thing, considering her chosen career path, because there wasn’t a more dedicated doctor in the city. And since she was focusing on emergency medicine, her hours weren’t limited to nine to five, like family practice physicians. It wasn’t unusual for her to work the night shift, and depending on the traffic in the emergency room, there were many times when she worked longer than her scheduled hours.
“Next time,” she said, crossing her fingers. “Hopefully.”
