Page 33 of Faking the Goal

I should say no.

A couple of weeks with Taylor Lewis following me around sounds like a fucking nightmare, especially when I've already established that being around her apparently causes my personality to malfunction.

But Coach is right. I can't spend the rest of my career avoiding reporters, and if I'm going to be forced to practice dealing with one, I suppose it might as well be the woman who already knows exactly how unpleasant I can be.

"Fine."

Taylor's entire face lights up. "See? I knew you'd come around."

"Don't make me change my mind."

"Oh, don't worry." She closes her notebook and gives me that sugary smile again. "We're going to have so much fun together, Sunshine."

I already fucking regret this.

CHAPTER 6

KENTARO

By the end of the first week, I've come to the conclusion that agreeing to this Athlete Spotlight was one of the worst decisions I've made since coming to Ridgewater.

Taylor Lewis has become fucking inescapable.

For seven days, she's been trying to get us to agree on an actual schedule, and for seven days, we've discovered that our schedules apparently hate each other almost as much as we do.

She has openings between classes during the day. Unfortunately for her, most of those openings fall right in the middle of everything I can't move. Between classes of my own and afternoons at the rink for practice, conditioning, meetings, or whatever else Coach has planned, there isn't much room to work with. And I made it clear from the beginning that I'm not rearranging team commitments for her article. She's welcome to sit in the stands, observe practice, and take whatever pictures she needs, which she's already been doing for Student Media anyway, but according to her, watching me stop pucks for two hours doesn't tell her anything she doesn't already know.

Apparently, she needs to see me being a person.

Whatever the fuck that means.

I've offered evenings after my group study sessions, but suddenly that's when she's unavailable. She never elaborates beyond telling me she has somewhere to be, and considering what I know about Taylor's social life, I have a fairly good idea what could possibly be so important every night that she can't move it around.

Which annoys me more than it should.

She's the one who needs my cooperation for this feature, yet somehow I'm supposed to carve pieces out of an already packed schedule while she refuses to sacrifice whatever party, club, or other unproductive bullshit she has planned for her evenings.

Although if I'm being fair—and I don't particularly feel like being fair where this assignment is concerned—I'm not exactly bending over backward to accommodate her either.

There are probably places I could fit her in if I tried hard enough.

I haven't tried.

I don't want to do this fucking feature. I never did. Coach talked me into agreeing because apparently letting a journalism student invade my life for a month is supposed to prepare me for dealing with media if I make it to the NHL, but some part of me has been hoping that if I make this difficult enough, Taylor will eventually get tired of chasing me and tell whoever assigned this thing to her that I'm impossible.

So far, that strategy has failed spectacularly.

Because Taylor doesn't get discouraged.

Taylor gets fucking determined.

She has chased me out of two lecture halls. Cornered me outside the student center. Appeared beside me while I was eating lunch and demanded to know when I was going to "stop being a pain in her ass and cooperate." Yesterday, she somehow found me walking between the business building and the library and followed me for almost five minutes while listing every reason I was personally responsible for shortening her lifespan.

She's like a redheaded fucking bounty hunter.

And all of this is because of one goddamn email.

Last Friday, she sent me what she called her preliminary question list. She doesn't want me to answer anything yet. She just wants me to read through the topics she plans to cover during our interviews and tell her if there's anything I absolutely won't discuss so she can plan around it.