Page 6 of Faking the Goal

"Why?"

His gaze flicks toward the bathroom one more time, and something in his expression tells me I'm about to regret asking.

"I'll use another one. I'm sure there's at least one bathroom in this house you haven't fucked someone in tonight."

For a second, I genuinely wonder if I heard him correctly.

Then he walks away.

I stand there staring after him with my mouth hanging open, completely flabber-fucking-gasted as his broad back disappears into the crowd downstairs.

Did this motherfucker seriously just say that to me?

All the gratitude I've been carrying around for the past few days evaporates so quickly I can practically hear the fucking hiss. Excuse the hell out of me, Your Royal Goalie-ness. I'm terribly sorry my sex life has offended your delicate sensibilities. Next time I'll make sure the bathroom is scrubbed, sanitized, fumigated, and certified virgin again before His Majesty needs somewhere to take a piss.

And to think I'd been genuinely excited to finally thank him.

I was nice to him. Nice. At two-thirty in the fucking morning, no less, when my social skills should legally be allowed to remain unconscious until sunrise, and he responded by looking at me like I'm personally responsible for the moral decline of Western civilization.

Whatever.

Kentaro Azuma might be unfairly gorgeous, built like a brick shithouse, and capable of making cedarwood smell like it was invented specifically to lure women toward their deaths, but apparently all of that comes packaged with the personality of a judgmental dickwaffle.

Good to know.

Next time I see him, I'll save us both the trouble and skip the fucking thank-you.

CHAPTER 2

TAYLOR

I'm already running late when I yank open my apartment door.

Not technically late yet, but close enough that if I hit every red light between here and campus, I'm fucked. I overslept by almost forty minutes, my first journalism class starts soon, and because the universe apparently hates me, I have back-to-back classes this morning with barely enough time between them to pee.

I'm halfway through mentally calculating whether I can make it to campus without committing several traffic violations when I step into the hallway and nearly crush a bouquet of flowers beneath my sneaker.

"What the hell?"

I jerk my foot back.

A bouquet sits directly in front of my door.

For one stupid second, I just stare at it.

The flowers are dahlias, I think, except I've never seen dahlias this color before. The petals are such a deep maroon they're almost black toward the center, packed tightly together in these perfectly layered circles. They're beautiful, technically. Really fucking beautiful, actually.

So why do they look so... weird?

Maybe it's the color. Maybe it's the fact that somebody left them directly outside my apartment without knocking. Either way, something about them makes the back of my neck prickle.

I crouch and pick up the bouquet, immediately searching between the stems for a card. There is one tucked beneath the wrapping, but when I pull it free, all that's written across the front is my name.

Taylor.

That's it.

No love, no thinking of you, no sorry for being a psycho, no name.