Page 8 of The Overtime Persuasive

I throw my balled-up tape at him. He ducks, and it bounces off the wall behind his head. Two open spots for alternate, and I’m willing to bet my paycheck that Sawyer Stockton is up for one of them. He’s been playing longer than most of us on the team, and I know he was on the short list for alternate last year.

But it doesn’t matter now. It’s what we do today, tomorrow, and in the coming weeks ahead. It’s a chance to show them I can be more, that I am ready to be more for my team.

Only now Tripp Mercer is standing on the other side of it.

The strength coach appears in the locker room doorway with a stopwatch looped around one hand. Right. The off-ice circuit Campbell warned us about this morning. Coach has divided the roster into green and navy for a conditioning competition, because apparently the Dominion team sometimes operates like we are at a middle-school field day. Only without refreshments and prizes after.

“Green and navy groups in the gym in five,” he calls. “If you forgot your color, enjoy explaining it to Coach.”

Campbell snaps his fingers, tells the green group to get moving, and I reach into my bag for the shirt Eva loaned me this morning.

The plain forest-green one.

One of her “better” pajama tops.

I unfold it, and her scent rises from the clean cotton. It’s faint—her laundry soap mixed with that warm, subtly sweet scent of figs I catch whenever I’m close to her—but I recognize it immediately.

Then, a realization hits harder.

Eva sleeps in this shirt.

My brain takes that information and produces an image of her wearing it, golden blond hair loose and the hem falling over her bare thighs. It’s an image I have no permission to possess at all, mostly for the mere fact that it’s Lucy’s friend, and I have absolutely no business wondering where that hem might fall.

I shake my head, chiding myself. That is inappropriate, unhelpful, and something I will now immediately delete from memory.

Mostly.

I drag the shirt over my head. Eva’s scent settles around me, closer now, caught inside the collar every time I breathe.

Fantastic.

I spend the entire circuit trying not to think about the fact that I’m wearing Eva Barlow’s pajamas in front of my teammates.

By the time I shower and change, most of the team has cleared out. I sling my bag over my shoulder and check my phone as I walk toward the parking lot. Nothing, which is unusual but also welcome. It means I get to do what I want for the rest of the day.

Which apparently is thinking about what I did this morning. Repeatedly. All day.

And against my better judgement.

I’ve replayed it more times than I’d like to admit to anyone currently taking breaths of air. The GPS excuse. Mom’s birthday. Needs a cookbook. I’ve been doing this a long time. Finding reasons to show up, telling myself those reasons, to see Eva, are good.

It would just probably help if I weren’t so bad at trying to hide it.

I toss my bag in my truck and stop beside the door for a quick second, replaying the exact moment she looked up and saw me walking in. I swear I saw a flicker of something else, but then again, I’ve been building myself up with that line since we were teenagers. And now this has turned to parking lot torture, and I’m not a fan.

My phone thankfully buzzes and breaks my thought pattern.

Lucy

We’re still having dinner tomorrow night, right?

Yeah. 7?

Lucy

Make it 7:30.

My place?