Page 104 of Try Me

“You play ball here?” I already knew the answer. I’d spent last week going through my class rosters and correlating them to the previous year’s class photos.

“Duh.”

“You any good?”

He glanced over his left shoulder, then his right. “Am I any good, he asks?”

More laughter.

“Abraham Lincoln was six foot four, too. He weighed a hundred and twenty pounds, yet earned himself a spot in the Wrestling Hall of Fame. Won 299 out of 300 matches.”

His brows flickered up. “How the hell did he manage that?”

“If you’re asleep, I guess you’ll never know.” I shooed him toward the back. “Go on, Eliot.”

“How—”

I turned away from his confused stare with a smile and returned to the front of the room where I addressed the rest of the class. “Lincoln also created the Secret Service. Now, one of the things I’ve just told you isn’t true. Anyone want to take a stab at which?”

Eliot didn’t fall asleep in class.

No one threw things at my back.

My pants were probably a little too tight. But they’d stretch.

* * *

“You’reall kinds of cheating right now,” I wheezed as Chet sank another basket.

“Street rules,” he panted, and managed to snatch the ball away. His bare torso glistened with exertion, and I admired it even as I chased him down the court, cut in front of him, and stuck my leg out.Street rules. So be it.

I laughed as he stumbled a quarter way across the court before regaining his balance. By then, I was zipping in from the side, the ball back under my control in two shakes. Doubling back the way I’d come, I sank my basket from the three-point line. “We can always play Horse, you know?” I smiled sweetly at him, and he lifted his middle finger, steps keeping pace with mine as I walked backward to the center line.

He aimed the ball at my stomach with force, but I caught it, dribbling a couple of times before faking a shot and pivoting around his left side, heading in close for a basket. Chet was on me in a second, hips bumping into mine. It was a whole different game trying to focus when playing against someone whose clothes I’d rather be peeling off at any given moment. Thrusting my hips back into him, I pivoted around him and took the shot, groaning as it bounced off the backboard.

“Distracted?”

“Nope,” I lied, catching the ball and tossing it to him before following him to the line. “How’s the Marlow case going?”

“Not too shabby. I think we’ll probably win it. Now who’s trying to be distracting?”

I tugged at the tops of my shorts as I crouched low and met Chet’s eyes with a grin, trying to read his intentions. He’d go for the three-pointer, for sure, to try and match me.

The corners of his mouth tipped up, and I knew in an instant I was wrong. He darted around me like a snake through grass, then jumped back a couple of steps as I tried to sneak in from his right. This time, he seemed to anticipate my every move and evaded it easily.

When we got closer to the net, Chet lunged forward, rising up as I stumbled a step backward to keep my balance.

The ball arced cleanly toward the basket and went through, nothing but net.

“God, you’re insufferable,” I groused.

“I didn’t say jack.”

“You don’t have to. It’s all over your face.” But inside I was all lit up. Maybe it was nostalgia for all the hours we’d spent in my driveway when we were kids, before we went to different schools, before everything went down with his dad. Days just like this, hot as the devil’s asshole outside, and no sane person around, and there we’d be out on the concrete, going round after round.

Maybe Chet felt the same, too, because his mouth quirked again and he shook his head as he raked his teeth over his lower lip slyly. A bolt of heat railed through me, something about that expression upending me.

“Go again?”