The Deal

Pursing my lips, I fish my phone out of my back pocket and pull up my mother’s number. It’s only four o’clock, so I’m hoping she hasn’t left for work yet.

Luckily, she picks up on the first ring. “Hey, sweetie! This is a lovely surprise.”

“Hey. Got a sec?”

“I’ve got five whole minutes actually,” she replies with a laugh. “Your father’s driving me to work tonight, so he has the honor of cleaning all the snow off the car.”

“You guys are already getting that much snow?” I say in horror.

“Of course we are. It’s gl—”

“I swear to God, Mom, if you say global warming, I’m hanging up,” I warn her, because as much as I love my parents, their global warming lectures drive me up the wall. “And why is Dad driving you? What happened to your car?”

“It’s in the shop. The brake pads needed to be replaced.”

“Oh.” I absently open a box of lasagna sheets. “Anyway, I wanted to ask you about Nana’s lasagna recipe. It serves eight, right?”

“Ten,” she corrects.

Frowning, I think about all the food Garrett shoveled into his pie hole when he came to the diner last week, then multiply that by four hockey players and…

“Crap,” I mutter. “I still don’t think that’s enough. If I wanted to serve twenty, do I just double the ingredients, or is there a different way to calculate it?”

Mom pauses. “Why exactly are you cooking lasagna for twenty people?”

“I’m not. But I am feeding four hockey players who I imagine have the appetites of twenty people.”

“I see.” There’s another pause and I can practically hear her smiling over the line. “Is one of these four hockey players someone…special?”

“You can just ask me if he’s my boyfriend, Mom. You don’t have to be cheesy about it.”

“Fine. Is he your boyfriend?”

“Nope. I mean, we’re kinda seeing each other, I guess—” Kinda? He just made you come! “—but we’re friends more than anything.”

Friends who make each other come.

I silence the annoying voice in my voice and swiftly change the subject. “Do you have time to quickly talk me through the recipe?”

“Of course.”

Five minutes later, I hang up the phone and start preparing dinner for the guy who made me come today.





28




Garrett


The house smells like an Italian restaurant when I walk through the door. I turn to Logan, who shoots me a WTF look, and I shrug as if to say fuck if I know, because I honestly don’t know. I bend down to unlace my scuffed black boots, then follow the mouthwatering aroma to the kitchen. When I reach the doorway, I blink like I’ve just stumbled upon a desert mirage.

Hannah’s sexy ass greets my eyes. She’s angled over the oven door, wearing Tuck’s pink oven mitts as she pulls a steaming pan of lasagna off the middle shelf. At the sound of my footsteps, she glances over her shoulder and smiles. “Oh, hey. Perfect timing.”

All I can do is gape at her.

“Garrett? Hello?”

“You made dinner?” I sputter.

Her cheerful expression falters slightly. “Yeah. Is that okay?”

I’m too stunned—and genuinely touched—to answer.

Fortunately, Dean appears in the doorway and answers for me. “Baby doll, that smells fantastic.”

Tucker trails in after Dean. “I’ll set the table,” he pipes up.

My three roommates lumber into the kitchen, Tucker and Dean going to help Hannah, while Logan stands beside me, looking amazed.

“She cooks too?” he sighs.

Something about his tone—well, not something, since it’s the unmistakable note of longing that causes my guard to shoot up ten feet. Fuck. He can’t actually be into her, can he? I figured he just wanted to sleep with her, but the way he’s looking at her right now…

I don’t fucking like it.

“Dude, keep it in your pants,” I mutter, which summons a chuckle from Logan, who obviously knows what I was thinking and my opinion about said thoughts.

“Shit, this looks amazing,” Tucker says as he stands over the lasagna dish with a knife and serving spatula.

The five of us settle at the table, which Hannah actually took the time to not only clean, but cover with a blue-and-white tablecloth. Aside from my mother, no female has ever cooked dinner for me before. I kinda…like it.

“So are you dressing up tomorrow?” Tucker asks Hannah as he heaps a modest-sized square of lasagna onto her plate.

“For what?”

Tuck grins. “Halloween, dumbass.”

Hannah lets out a groan. “Oh crap. That’s tomorrow? I swear, I have no concept of time.”

“My costume suggestion for you?” Dean chimes in. “Sexy nurse. Actually, fuck that, we live in the modern world—sexy doctor. Oooh, or sexy navy pilot.”

“I’m not dressing up as sexy anything, thank you very much. It’s bad enough that I’m stuck passing out drinks at the dorm crawl.”