Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
EVE
EVE: I saw his thing.
HARLOW: Huh?
EVE: I SAW HIS THING.
HARLOW: Repeating the same thing in all caps clarifies nothing, you know.
HARLOW: Especially at seven a.m.
HARLOW: There’s no need for text yelling this early in the day.
EVE: I walked in on him.
EVE: I’m mortified.
HARLOW: WHO ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT??
EVE: Now who’s text yelling?
EVE: HUNTER.
EVE: Who else could I be talking about?
“ Y ou want coffee?”
The deep rumble of Hunter’s voice distracts me from texting Harlow. I drop my phone guiltily. It bounces off the seat and into the cupholder, almost toppling the water bottle there.
I scramble for it, terrified he’ll be able to read the all-caps messages I just sent Harlow, not relaxing until the screen is black and the device is safely tucked under my thigh.
I clear my throat, attempting some composure. “Yeah. Coffee sounds good.”
“Okay.” He flicks on the blinker for the drive-thru a few buildings down from the motel where we spent the night.
I continue staring straight ahead.
I can’t look at Hunter. I haven’t been able to look at Hunter since I got an eyeful of his giant dick.
I pretended to be asleep when he came back to bed last night, and hid in the bathroom this morning while he packed up his stuff and checked us out. My teeth have never been cleaner.
Have I imagined Hunter naked before? Yes. That night freshman year and nearly every time I’ve seen him since. He’s a tall, strapping hockey player. Proportionally, the size of his penis makes sense.
But picturing him with a huge cock was very different from seeing his huge cock.
And, frankly, the timing couldn’t be worse. Because I’m single. That barrier that’s always been there, blocking me, Hunter, and any sort of reality, is gone. Or, it’s gone on my end. He hasn’t said anything to suggest he’s in a relationship, but he was on a date with Holly Johnson last week.
Even if he’s not dating Holly, she’s his type. I’ve seen the girls who hang around the hockey team. I have big boobs that have always been popular with guys and a great ass in the right pair of jeans, but Hunter could easily pass as a Calvin Klein model. Not only because there’d be a big bulge in the boxers, but because he has abs and that cut V and strong thighs and… fuck , I’m thinking about his dick again.
I bite the inside of my cheek—hard—to distract myself from the flood of inappropriate thoughts.
Because of the other, more pressing reason that Dickgate couldn’t have happened at a more inconvenient time: I’m stuck in a car with Hunter for another two hours and forty-three minutes, according to the GPS.
Stupid flat tire and stupid traffic . We should have pushed through, and then this never would have happened.
I’ll just chug my coffee and then pretend to fall asleep for the rest of the trip, I decide.
My phone keeps buzzing under my thigh, suggesting Harlow finally woke up and figured out what I was trying to tell her. But we’re stopped in the line for the drive-thru now, and I can’t text Harlow about Hunter’s dick while we’re sitting in a car together.
Not while he’s not distracted by driving, at least.
“What are you getting?”
I keep my eyes fixed on the menu. “Not sure. There are so many options.”
There’s a very quiet laugh to my left.
The menu has six choices: coffee, iced coffee, tea, iced tea, water, and soda. Not a vanilla soy latte—my usual order—in sight. I’m not lactose intolerant, but I switched to using alternatives after listening to a podcast about the dairy industry so that I’m not haunted by the cries of calves separated from their mothers.
“I’m, uh, sorry about last night. I was having trouble sleeping, so I?—”
I wave a hand in his general direction, still studiously avoiding eye contact. “Don’t apologize. It’s fine. Totally fine. I’m the one who barged in. I was half asleep and thought the bathroom door was closed because I left it that way after I used it and I—” I swallow. “I didn’t, um, see anything.”
Hunter chuckles at the obvious lie. He was standing—stark naked—about three feet from my face. The motel bathroom wasn’t exactly spacious. Obviously, I saw everything .
“Aren’t artists supposed to appreciate nudity?” he wonders.
“Well, walking in on you in the shower wasn’t exactly the same as admiring David .”
He’s flesh and blood and muscle. Human, not carved marble.
“Ouch.”
“No, I didn’t mean—” My phone is buzzing again, distracting me. Harlow’s definitely decoded Dickgate. “It wasn’t bad , I just meant it wasn’t the same as looking at art.”
“Wasn’t bad,” Hunter muses.
I finally look at him. The longer I don’t, the more obvious it is I’m avoiding eye contact. And not only are we stuck in this car together for the next two hours and forty-one minutes, we’re also spending the next week in close quarters.
He’s grinning. “Thought you didn’t see anything?”
I feel like I have a fever. Sweat is prickling at the back of my neck and in my armpits. Good thing I applied three coats of deodorant while I was stalling in the bathroom earlier. “Can we please stop discussing this?”
“Yep. Sure.”
He’s still grinning.
I’m still hotter than a furnace.
Finally, it’s our turn to order. It’s a relief when Hunter rolls his window down, letting some cooler air in the car.
Hunter asks for a large coffee, black. I request an iced coffee with soy milk.
Hunter’s drink appears immediately. Mine doesn’t. I’m guessing the ice isn’t the delay.
“What does soy milk taste like?” he asks. “I’ve never tried it.”
“It’s…I don’t know. Bland. I’ve never drunk it plain, I just add it to my coffee. I don’t like the taste of drinking it black.”
“What about regular milk?”
“I feel bad about stealing it from baby cows. I listened to a podcast about the dairy industry and I’m…boycotting, I guess.”
“My dad grew up on a dairy farm,” Hunter tells me.
“Oh. Sorry, I didn’t mean to offend?—”
“You didn’t offend me. I was going to say you’re right—it’s a tough industry. On both sides. My grandparents had to sell the farm while my dad was in college. All the cows went to slaughter and their land is a giant subdivision now.”
“That’s awful. I’m sorry.”
My coffee appears and gets handed to Hunter. He thanks the server, then passes the coffee to me.
We’re back on the highway a few minutes later. The wide-open highway, thankfully.
“You listen to a lot of podcasts,” Hunter remarks between sips of coffee. He must be burning his mouth—there’s steam curling through the tiny opening in the lid—but he appears unbothered by the temperature.
“Yeah, I do.”
He nods to the stereo. “Put one on.”
“What?”
“Put one on. We’ve got almost three hours to kill. You sketching yesterday wasn’t very entertaining for me. I couldn’t even tell what you were drawing.”
Well, thank God for that. I had no idea he was trying to look, and I was drawing him . Thea said I should work on my portrait angles, and he has a really nice profile.
“I was just doodling.” I unwedge my phone, ignoring all the texts from Harlow. Talking to Hunter cleared most of the awkwardness, and reading her responses is going to send me back into a spiral of embarrassment.
“Not the poor baby cows one, please.” His smile is sheepish. “I really love ice cream.”
“I still eat regular ice cream,” I admit. “The dairy-free kind isn’t very good.” I scroll through my saved episodes, trying to judge which show Hunter might enjoy the most. “Do you want to listen to one about sports?”
I tried a football podcast hosted by two brothers last year so I’d have something to contribute when my dad talked about the Cardinals.
I’m expecting an enthusiastic response from Hunter. He plays sports—or, a sport—so he must like sports.
But he surprises me and says, “No. Put on something you really want to listen to.”
“Why do you think I don’t want to listen to sports?”
Hunter huffs a laugh as he switches lanes. “Because you’re not interested in sports.”
“How do you know?”
He chuckles again. “Okay. What sports do you follow?”
I sigh. “None. But I did go to a basketball game last fall. And a hockey game.”
“Because you like basketball and hockey?”
“No,” I admit. “I went to the basketball game because of Clayton Thomas. One of my friends had a crush on him.” Hopefully Mary won’t mind me throwing her under the bus. She’s happily dating David now. “And I went to the hockey game because of y—” I cough, a rush of cold panic constricting my chest. “Because of, you know, the whole Harlow-and-Conor thing.”
“Right.”
Hunter appears oblivious to the fact that I was milliseconds away from blurting you .
Technically, the reason I went to a hockey game this past season was because Harlow was going to see Conor play.
The main reason I wanted to go to a hockey game? To see Hunter play. Because anytime anyone brought up Holt’s hockey team, my first thought was always the eighteen-year-old who told me he was nervous about joining a new team. But if Hunter remembers our conversation freshman year, he’s never suggested it, so I’m following his lead and pretending it never happened. He probably talked to lots of girls that night. I know he’s talked to lots of girls since.
“What about a serial killer in Alaska? He would mail the coordinates of the body to the police station and that was the only way they found his victims.”
C is for Crime is my favorite podcast, but I don’t say so. I know Hunter said to put on what I wanted to listen to, but he’s the one driving and insisting on paying for everything. Well, almost everything. He did grudgingly accept a twenty for my dinner.
There aren’t many people I’d willingly listen to sports with, but Hunter happens to be one of them.
“Uh, sure,” he answers. “Sounds…entertaining.”
I can’t tell if he’s being genuine or simply indulging me, but I start the first episode anyway.
And when he asks me to start the second one an hour later, I find myself wishing the roads today weren’t so wide open.