Chapter Three
Sophia
When Leo joked about wanting to meet up with me again, something in me softened toward the guy.
He was nice. Overly confident, and maybe a little cocky, but he was a remarkable player—from what I’d been told—and he was more attractive than any man I’d ever met, so I guessed he’d kind of earned that confidence.
Still, it was clear he wasn’t mean or callous.
He talked about the other players on his team with grace and didn’t make himself out to sound like the star of the team, even though we both knew he was.
Based on the way he looked at me, I got the impression that he was interested, but I was also willing to bet he looked at every woman he hadn’t already slept with like that.
He kept trying to steer the conversation to questions about me, but I didn’t stand for it.
It was surely some womanizing tactic, and I was too smart to fall for it.
“Can you at least tell me why you’ve chosen to handwrite your notes rather than just record this conversation like a proper product of our generation?” he asked.
I snorted. Okay, that was a good one. Answering one more of his questions won’t count as giving in.
“I like writing by hand because I feel like I remember things better this way. Plus, I can jot down my thoughts in real time instead of trying to recall what I was thinking during our conversation when I play back the recording later.”
“Why not a laptop then?”
“Do you have something against a pen and paper?”
“No, it’s just unusual. But I like the old school approach.”
I shook my head. “I think I got everything I need. Thanks for making the time. I know you’re busy.”
“This was fun, Hawaii,” Leo said as I put my notebook in my bag and pulled out my wallet. He held up a hand. “Seriously, do not leave money. I’m basically the owner; you can’t refuse me.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “The name Leo Harrison is on the deed to this building?”
He frowned. “Well, no.”
“Do you have partial ownership in the company that owns the three establishments?”
“No.”
I dropped my twenty-dollar bill on the table.
He scurried out of the booth as I stood up.
“Will I see you again?” he asked, sounding more anxious than I would expect, given he could literally find a girl to screw tonight on the walk back to campus.
“If I have any follow-up questions, I’ll reach out,” I said.
“Okay, and if you don’t have any other questions?”
I turned back toward him at the inflection in his voice.
“Then I guess you’ll see me around campus. I’ve been there the whole time,” I said with a smile. “You know, you did see me at freshman orientation.”
He blinked slowly and shook his head, mumbling something I couldn’t make out about wasting three years.
I crinkled my nose. What the hell is he talking about?
I said goodbye and walked back to campus to start typing up my article. This reporter shit was not for me. Hopefully my next assignment would at least be something cute like a family of baby bunnies being born in the quad or a puppy rescue feature.
I sat down at my desk in the suite I shared with Jia and Alyssa and started typing.
They were both in class and usually went to dinner after so our suite would be empty for a while.
Our space was made up of three single bedrooms attached to a main living area that included a small kitchenette.
If I finished this article soon, I could probably squeeze in a movie while it was quiet before they came back from dinner.
With our schedules, it was rare to have the place to myself for hours at a time and I usually preferred to use my time alone to watch a weepy chick flick that I could later talk my stepmom, Kennedy, into watching and dissecting with me.
We were excellent plot-hole finders, and I was pretty sure our years of breaking down where the romance went wrong and complaining about the dumb decisions made by the characters, would serve me well in my future romance-writing endeavors.
It was my mission to write self-aware characters who overcame conflicts realistically, without all the bullshit that readers always saw through.
I was halfway through the article when I got a creative idea.
No one said that just because this was an article for the school paper that it had to be sterile and sound like every other column in the sports section.
No way. If I was going to have to do a sports article, I would put my own little spin on it and work in a little bit of what I was good at writing.
That’s what an editor was for anyway. She’d make me rewrite it if she hated it.
I rolled with my idea, read it over a few times, and submitted it to Jana, the editor-in-chief at the school paper.
There was a fifty-fifty chance she sent it back.
But that meant there was an equal chance she enjoyed the departure from the norm and would give me a better story to cover next week as a reward for making hockey interesting.