Talkin' Trash
Page 8

“I got a weird call from my dad today,” I admitted. “I had no clue what he was talking about, and I just thought it was due to my being oxygen deprived because of how hard I’d been running. He’s probably freaking the fuck out.”
Conleigh bit her lip in frustration—something she’d always done since I’d first met her.
“My mom was the one to call me,” she admitted. “She saw the picture of us on your bike going to that other restaurant. We were laughing in the picture, probably when we saw that guy pumping gas in his underwear. Underneath it, there’s another picture of me in the hospital with Tyson standing in front of me.”
She pulled up the photo on her phone and slid it across the counter to me.
It would’ve dropped to the floor had I not been quick and caught it before it could teeter over the edge.
I stared at the photo with amusement.
“How, exactly, does something like this come up?” I asked with laughter tinging my voice. “Did you just blurt out that you were having my love child?”
I kind of liked that it had happened.
I’d been contacting Conleigh for months, texting, calling, stopping by her old place, and not once had I gotten any sort of reaction out of her. She’d been awesome at hiding behind her walls—and I had a feeling that a lot of that had been because my team was the wildcard in playoffs, and we were in the media’s eye.
She wanted nothing to do with the media at all and hadn’t since it’d nearly ruined her chances at some scholarships that she was going for during her first year in college.
“Well…it started like this…” then she went on to tell me exactly what had happened the previous day at work, and how it’d all been a joke.
Except, her coworkers hadn’t realized that it was a joke, and some of them had spread the rumor far and wide. So far and wide, in fact, that word had traveled to just the right ears, and the lie was now spread to the media—and the rest of the entire goddamn world.
This. Was. Perfect!
“Huh,” I tried to hold in my elation. “That’s unfortunate.”
Conleigh gave me a worried look. “What do we do?”
I tried not to smile, which I just barely accomplished by the skin of my teeth.
It wouldn’t do for her to know that I was actually quite entertained by any of this. She also didn’t need to know that I was enjoying that fact she’d made such a large faux pas.
“I guess now I gotta get in touch with my publicist,” I finally said. “But she’s hours ahead of me since she lives in the UK, so she’s probably sleeping now. That’s why I get the emails instead of the phone calls. I’ll have to email her and wait for her to call back.”
“Why do you have a publicist that lives in the UK?” she asked me what everyone asked me.
I shrugged. “Honestly? Because I started asking around with a few of the guys, and they all recommended somebody completely different from the next person. Rome recommended Elouise’s—that’s her name—husband, Bryant. But Bryant wasn’t taking on any new clients, but he said his wife was. She is British, and little did I know that they were in the process of getting divorced at the time that I needed a publicist…anyway, long story short, she lives in the UK. She’s really good though, so I keep her. If it was something huge that she had to deal with, I have her number and I can call her so we could work it out. But this isn’t that big.”
Conleigh blinked at that lengthy explanation. “That’s quite a story…I assume you must really like her. You’re not the type to do anything all willy-nilly.”
I found myself grinning at that. “Willy-nilly? No, I’m not the type of man to go all willy-nilly and do shit without first thinking it through. You’re right.”
I felt a trickle of sweat start down my temple, and I pushed off the counter. “How about you hang out for a minute and let me go get in the shower. Maybe we can order a pizza?”
Her brows rose. “You eat pizza?”
She looked at my body, letting her eyes skim up and down the length of me, before settling her eyes back on mine.
I snorted. “It’s the offseason, Con. I can do a lot of stuff that I wouldn’t normally do. Such as ride my bike without a helmet.”
She frowned. “Why can’t you do that during the season? Not that I want you to or anything. Do you know how many motorcycles are hit every day? A lot. People just don’t pay enough attention. Anyway, I had a young patient last week, all of eighteen, who got hit by a sedan. He was bruised up pretty bad. Had that sedan been a truck or going just a little faster? He’d have been dead.”
I waited for her rant to be over, and then waited a couple seconds more to make sure she was actually through and then explained.
“I signed a seasonal clause on safety. During the season, from the start of pre-season workouts to post-season, I will not, under any circumstances, participate in any extreme sports. That includes riding a motorcycle without a helmet—though riding a motorcycle was part of the clause that my lawyer got thrown out since I was part of a motorcycle club before I’d even signed my contracts with my old team, a contract which the new team also honored.”
“What else does it include?” she pushed.
I shrugged and turned my back on her to wash my hands in the sink behind me.
I turned my head and explained over my shoulder. “I can’t ride without a helmet. I can’t skydive. Play any pick-up games of football with full contact. I can’t play any sports, really, that require more than light physical activity. I can’t get into any fights. I can’t go to concerts and stand in a large crowd…there’s a bunch of shit.”
She snorted. “Didn’t I see that you went to a Garth Brooks concert in Vegas not too long ago?”
I grinned as I shut the tap off, and then reached for a sheet from the paper towel roll. Once my hands were sufficiently dried, I blew my nose into the towel.
Once it was in the trash, I turned to find her frowning at me.
“What?” I asked.
“You just washed your hands, then blew your nose. You’re not planning to wash your hands again, are you?” She curled her lip up at me.
My lip twitched. “No.”
She made a gagging sound. “That’s gross.”
I shrugged. “It’s my house. I can do what I want.”
She snorted. “I’m sure that you do what you want, when you want, wherever you are.”
That was true.
I started walking out of the room. “Call the pizza place and order us something. I want cheese.”
“What do you mean you only want cheese?” she called. “I thought that you liked pepperoni.”
That was true…at least she thought it was.
It made me sound less manly when I told people I only liked cheese. I’d never really gotten better as I aged. Eating healthy was really hard for me. I loved fruit, but I fuckin’ hated vegetables with a vengeance.
Unfortunately for me, I choked those bitches down because that was how you fueled a body like mine.
But during the offseason? I ate what I fucking wanted, and that was that. Kind of. I ate what I wanted within reason.
I also worked out twice as much because I ate fucking pizza when I should be eating vegetables and white fish.
“I only got pepperoni because you like pepperoni, and I didn’t want you thinking I was a little bitch for only liking cheese,” I shot over my shoulder before closing my bedroom door behind me.
I heard her laughter through the closed door and smiled like a loon all the way to the shower.
I was trying really hard to control my raging hard-on as I stepped into the scalding water—being this close to her reminded me of the past – before I was warned away from her. Glaring at my dick reacting to her laughter, I heard a hesitant knock on my bedroom door.
I ignored it, staring down at my traitorous dick as I willed it to soften.
It didn’t.
Damn, but Conleigh had a way of always making me want her.
All she had to do was curl that lip at me in disgust, and I was hard.
It didn’t matter that it was me that she was disgusted with.