“Cool down, Hayden. I’m paying you a compliment. You have nice underwear. It wasn’t like I was trying them on or sniffing them or anything creeper’ish like that.”
My face was red, I could feel it, so I kept my back to him. “You just used my underwear in reference to wet dreams. That’s full-on creeper.”
“Full-on creeper would have been jacking myself off with them and then putting them back in your panty drawer. The only full-on I can be accused of is being a splendid roommate for going out of my way to do your laundry.”
“You’re disgusting.” I marched for my “room,” another flush of heat shooting through me when I noticed the folded piles of clean clothes sitting on the plastic rolling drawers I used as a dresser. A stack of folded panties was sitting on top. Crap. That assortment made me look like I was a call girl.
“I probably shouldn’t ask this, but my curiosity will not be silenced”—I was already bracing myself for his question—“but isn’t that uncomfortable? Wearing underwear that rides up your butt crack like that?”
Shoot me. Just shoot me. “What? Like it’s comfortable having your junk stuffed in a plastic triangle?”
Silence. For a second. “So is that your way of saying thongs are or aren’t comfortable?”
“That’s my way of saying I’m not talking about my underwear with you.”
When I started putting my clean clothes away, I realized I was shaking. I wasn’t sure why. Soren was like my brother in a way—what did it matter that he’d seen my underwear and was asking a few dumb questions about them? Soren was not like my brother in one rather large way though—the thoughts and feelings I had for him at times. No sister should be wondering what the rest of her brother looked like beneath that towel. No sister would be feeling tingles, in more than one place, when her brother grazed by her.
Soren may have looked after me like a brother, but the ways I wanted to look after him were not sisterly in the slightest.
I needed space. To clear my head. With a shortage of doors that actually closed in this apartment, the bathroom was my only option since it was “night” according to Soren’s rules. Too late to be out walking the streets by myself.
“I’m taking a shower,” I announced, already heading that direction.
“You might want to wait on that for a while. Unless you feel the need for a cold shower.”
“Why would I feel the need for a cold shower?”
Soren gave me a funny look. Probably because I sounded defensive after he’d mentioned a cold shower. “I’m not saying you need a cold shower. I’m saying if you want a hot one, you’re going to have to wait.”
“Why?” I asked, right before it clicked. “Because you took a thirty-minute shower and used all of the hot water that struggles to make it up to the sixth floor.”
He stepped behind his partition, and the towel flew over the top a moment later. “Sorry. If I’d known you wanted to shower tonight, I could have quickened things up.”
The way he said it, like he had some checklist to go through, made me pause. “Quickened things up?” I waited, but he was quiet. “Why do you take such long showers anyway?”
“I have to shampoo my hair.”
My forehead creased as I stuffed my clean underwear into the back of a drawer. “You have, like, a tenth of the hair I do. You don’t have to shave your legs or armpits or anything else. What could you be doing in there that takes so long . . . oh.” My eyes widened as another thought cross my mind. “OH.”
“Not a lot of privacy out here. The bathroom door is the only one that closes and locks.”
My head dropped against the plastic storage bin as I squeezed my eyes closed. “Great. Now I’m going to have to bleach the thing before I step foot in it each time. And wear flip-flops.” The harder I tried to erase the mental images from my head, the more vivid they became.
“Stop acting so appalled.” Soren’s footsteps moved out from behind his divider. “Where do you do your business?”
“What business?”
“Your self-love business?” he said, padding into the kitchen.
“I don’t masturbate.” My hand moved toward my nose. I was half surprised it wasn’t growing.
“Why not?” The sound of the fridge door whined open. “Yourself doesn’t like yourself enough to let her get close?”
“Or maybe you spend so much time with yourself because you’re the only one who can stand being close to yourself.” I was banging my head against the storage bin now. What kind of conversation was I having?
“Positive endorphins. Just sayin’. Would do you some good.”
Sticking my head out from behind the divider, I aimed a glare in his direction. “Excuse me? Is that your way of saying I’m a bitch?”
“What? Jesus, no.” He was rummaging through the same scant fridge I’d just been searching for something appetizing in. “Get those panties untwisted before you open your mouth to bite my head off next time.” The fridge door slammed shut. “Oh yeah, you can’t untwist them, they’re already riding up your butt.”
“I never knew how much I loved sports until today.” Jane was staring at the diamond with a grin.
Ariel rolled her eyes. “You hate sports.”
“Yeah, but that was before I’d been to this kind of sport, where the guys are hot and wear tight white pants. What’s not to like about that?” Her hand circled the air in the direction of one of the back-up pitchers warming up in front of us. Then she made a squeezing motion.
“I do like to watch them wrap their hands around their big, hard sticks,” Ariel added with a shrug.
Jane nudged her. “And the way they play with their balls.”
The two shared a giggle while I focused on keeping my attention on the game as a whole, instead of the one component I’d been focused on since the three of us arrived at the start of the game. I was in the same boat as Jane—I’d never realized I liked sports until today. It had little to do with the actual game and everything to do with a certain someone with the number twenty-three stamped on the back of his jersey. Watching Soren play baseball . . . did things to my mind and my body I wasn’t eager to acknowledge.
Things were complicated enough between us without adding physical exertion and tight white pants to the mix. He was good. Stand-out good. I didn’t need to know the ins and outs of the sport to recognize that. When he was up at bat, he hit the ball. Far. When he was crouched behind the plate, playing catcher, he caught the ball, tagged incoming runners, and threw the darn thing so hard I could hear the smack it made when it landed in his fellow players’ mitts.