“Goddammit. I’m gonna be good at it one day.”
I shook my head with a smile and tucked a stray hair behind the ear of Kline’s perfect match. “No. You won’t. And that’s a good thing. We are who we are for a reason. You’re the perfect fit for my friend because you are the way you are. I’m pretty sure he’d be pissed if you changed.”
She smiled, and the sincerity of it lit up the room. Yeah, Kline had picked well.
“Why are you the way you are?”
“How exactly am I?”
“Knock, knock,” Wes said from the door, looking from Georgia to me curiously. “I’ve been waiting for you for at least five minutes, dude. I had a suspicion I might find you here, though.”
“Just saying hello,” I dismissed, leaning down to place a friendly kiss on Georgie’s cheek.
“Does Kline know you like to kiss his wife?” Wes teased.
“As a matter of fact, he does, Whitney.” He didn’t fucking like it, but he knew. And it wasn’t like I was giving her open-mouth tongue with a side of tit grab.
Georgia just shook her head and threw up a jaunty wave. “Bye, boys.” Her eyes moved to me, a piercing promise of this-conversation-isn’t-anywhere-near-over rolling tumultuously in their depths.
Wes and I both waved before moving down the hall toward his office.
“What did I interrupt?” Wes asked as we stepped inside and he closed the door behind me.
“Nothing.” I pulled off my suit coat and took a seat in the chair in front of his desk. “We were just talking about Kline’s birthday.”
“It didn’t sound like that.”
“Jesus.” I rubbed at my head. “What are you, the conversation police? It was nothing.”
“So it doesn’t have anything to do with your roommate?” he pushed with a smirk.
Narrowing my eyes, I told him the truth. Well, at least half the truth. “No. It doesn’t.”
He pulled out the chair from behind his desk and moved to sit down.
“And how do you know she’s my roommate? I’m pretty sure you were still out of town when that happened.”
“I was. Kline wasn’t.”
I twisted and lifted my leg so that my right ankle rested comfortably on my left knee and tried to tamp down the nervous swell in my stomach. Talking about everything with Cassie with other people made it real. And being real made me feel like I had everything to lose. My mind had rerouted the end goal, and winning a prank war wasn’t my focus. I wanted to win her.
“He sure has made a flawless transition from Perfect Paul to Gossip Gabe.”
Wes smirked. “He’s just happy he isn’t the center of attention anymore. It was never his thing. But you should feel at home here.”
Both my hands raised to shoulder level in a gesture of what can you do. “I can’t help it if I’m endlessly interesting.”
His body shook with laughter as he reached for the files on the corner of his desk. “So I have a few guys I really want. And I need to find the number that’s going to make that happen comfortably. A couple of them are coming to the end of their contracts with the Seahawks, but one kid is just finishing college.”
“No draft?”
“He tore his ACL pretty early in this last season. And he’d been sitting second-string to that Pulchek kid for most of the first three years of his college career. No one else has even thought about touching him. At least not since his All-American years in high school.”
“So why are you thinking about touching him?”
He raised a brow suggestively, so I flipped him off.
“Because he’s fucking good.”
A shocked laugh burst from my lips. “Well, fuck. I’d say that’s a good reason.” I held out a hand. “Here, let me see his file.”
Wes pulled it from the bottom of the stack and passed it to me, leaning back in his chair and running a rough hand through his hair.
“You know it’s not your job to help me pick people, right? I just need you to make sure I’m paying them the right amount of money.”
“Oh, I know it’s not my job. I do it as a favor out of the goodness of my heart.”
“I don’t really need—”
“To thank me?” I interrupted and pointed at him. He narrowed his eyes. “You’re right. It doesn’t need to be spoken between friends.”
He just shook his head as I opened the folder, and I didn’t bother to hide my smile. He was too easy to play with, and with the way I wasn’t in control of anything else in my life right now, it felt good to be in control of this. It felt normal.
Recognition had me jumping to my feet when I saw the picture on top of the papers inside.
“Holy shit! Sean Phillips?” I’d had a flicker of a memory from Portland when Wes had said ACL, but it was a really fucking common injury and I wasn’t expecting to be this lucky. I figured I’d have to drop hints about Sean to make Wes think it was his idea at some point, but this really saved me the trouble.
Wes’s face scrunched in amused confusion. “Yeah. You know him?”
“Ha!” I shouted, a goofy smile making me feel nearly drugged. “Yeah. I know him.”