AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I take a deep breath, puff out my chest, and do what I obviously should have done a long time ago.
“Olivia, could I take you on a date sometime?”
“No. Bye.”
With that, she spins around and walks away.
My jaw falls when she turns her back to me. As my eyes track her striding through the crowd to the door, an impressed smile slowly tilts my open mouth.
This girl’s already made me sexless, but now she’s rendered me speechless, too. Two things I’m very not used to being.
Olivia Lockley puts me in a lot of states I’m not used to.
When she steps outside and disappears from my sight, she sure as shit doesn’t disappear from my mind. I know for a fact she’s not going to any time soon.
And you know what? As much as she might not want to admit it right now, I don’t think I’m going to disappear from hers, either.
2
OLIVIA
“I’m spending entirely too much time around the hockey team because of you.”
When my best friend Summer doesn’t respond to my complaint, I turn my head to look at her. Her glazed-over eyes make it clear that it went in one ear and out the other.
I guess it’s hard to blame her for being lost in a cloud of puppy love when I follow the direction of her gaze and see her boyfriend, goalie for the Brumehill Black Bears, Hudson Voss, wearing a flannel shirt tucked into a pair of jeans that hug his muscular thighs.
Summer and I just left our Art History class, the one class we’re taking together this semester. We were on our way to Brumehill Brews, the on-campus café, for lunch, but first, she wanted to stop here to check out the hockey team’s photoshoot.
The Black Bears coach volunteered the team to the art department for photography majors to use as practice for advertising-style photos. The photographers are having them dress up in all kinds of outfits and pose in front of various picturesque backdrop screens.
Summer says the guys think their Coach has a thing for one of the photography professors, and this is his way of scoring points with her.
The players don’t seem at all inconvenienced, looking like they’re having the time of their lives posing and soaking up the attention.
I’m far from surprised that a bunch of hockey boys would be total sluts for the camera.
Speaking of total sluts …
One of the players I don’t know steps aside, and suddenly my eyes are pointed at Tuck McCoy.
He’s in the middle of laughing about something. Like he usually is.
His laughter makes the dimples on his cheeks carve even deeper than usual. The angle of his jaw as he laughs accentuates its razor-sharp outline, heightened by the dusting of rough stubble across it, a shade darker than his sandy-blonde hair.
Guess it’s easy to laugh when you’re someone like Tuck. When you’re rich. When you play a sport that your entire college is obsessed with and everyone, faculty included, treats you like a celebrity for it.
I know that’s a petty thought to slink into my head just at the sight of someone laughing. But those thoughts are like antibodies, keeping me from succumbing to his looks, his smooth charm, his honey-sweet southern drawl.
Antibodies I need considering he’s been trying to get with me ever since we met.
But I can read him like a book.
He’s everything I know I need to stay away from. Entitled. Cocky. A guy who grew up rich, privileged, and talented. A guy who internalized the message that everything he could ever want is his for the taking, that all he needs to do is reach out and grab it.
I can read him, because I know the type. I know the type intimately, sad to say.
Tuck McCoy is cut from the same cloth as my ex, Ryan. The guy I wasted too many years and way too many tears on.
