Page 24 of Well Aware

“Worm…”

Please.

I sighed. “Okay.”

His smile nearly brought me to my knees.

There was only so much control I had, and I was barely hanging on as it was.

Sometimes in my head I had to replay “he’s your boss” on an endless loop to keep my hormones under control.

Not for much longer, my mind said for me today.

I had two more months, max.

And the way it was looking, I more likely had a single month.

We technically had two more games left before finals started. But it was highly likely that we wouldn’t be making finals, and I’d be done.

I already had my job at the hospital lined up for this January.

If we won or not, I was done with soccer.

It was a bittersweet feeling, and one I tried not to examine too close just yet.

“How was practice?” he asked, setting his laptop on the table in front of him next to the copious mini-ice cream cone wrappers.

“Good, considering the loss yesterday,” I admitted.

We were in high spirits.

We knew that we’d won, fair and square.

It was a pity that bad calls had lost us the game, but we knew we were the better team.

“I have a meeting with the league head ref on Zoom tomorrow,” he grumbled. “They’re currently ‘reviewing’ the call.”

It’d been a really bad fucking call.

A handball in the box by the other team. Then a red-cardable offense when the other team’s defense had slammed into Nettie like a double-sided battering ram.

It hadn’t been a good call but the ref hadn’t “seen” it.

It’d been the most replayed play over the last fourteen hours in the entire sports world.

“They should be reviewing that ref’s contract,” I grumbled.

“They are,” he promised. “I made sure of that. But it won’t change the outcome of the game, unfortunately.”

I snorted. “No, but a public apology for seeing it and ignoring it would be nice. I mean, it’s not going unnoticed that they needed that win to move to the finals. Without it they’d have been booted out.”

“They’re seeing it. Because I brought it to their attention,” he griped. “It wouldn’t be surprising if the head ref had something to do with it.”

I stiffened at the suggestion.

And, because we were so aware of each other’s presence, including every nuance of our body language, he noticed.

“What?” he asked.