Three seconds later, my favorite faded gray T-shirt with Hobbes on it is covered in lukewarm milk and the dregs of whipped cream.
“Shoot me now,” she groans as she rests her cheek on the table and mimes pulling a trigger.
“Good thing it’s laundry day,” I say, and I’m thinking there has got to be a storyline somewhere in this where Mister Orgasm saves the day.
She lifts her face. “Are you really sure you want me to go anywhere with you?”
I give an exaggerated nod and a tug at my hot-chocolate-stained T-shirt. “You pretty much just sealed the deal on being my sidekick, Princess Awkward.”
4
Harper swings her right arm behind her, arcs it in front, then launches the nine-pound, flaming-pink neon ball. In a glorious straight line, the ball speeds down the lane, which illuminates with flashing silver lights, and I hold my breath until it smacks three pins.
I hate to do this, but I silently send a prayer that the damage ends there.
Only it doesn’t. Two more pins wobble and then surrender.
I cross my fingers that the others don’t give in.
No such luck. Three more topple then one of those pins clobbers the final pair.
And they all fall down.
Harper thrusts her arms high and punches the air with a fist. Her second strike of the night, along with a spare. Shit, shit, shit. My team is dangerously close to beating Gino’s. I sneak a look at him. His arms are crossed, his lips form a ruler-thin line, and his eyes are nearly slits. Perched on the orange plastic chair by the scoring screen, he glares at me briefly, as if it’s all my fault for letting her nab a strike. Serena appears, and he smiles brightly as she drops a hand to his shoulder and whispers something to him. Probably reminding him to say cheese for the company photographer, since they’re going to post these pics on the Comedy Nation Instagram feed.
I turn my focus back to Harper. Her blue eyes are lit up and sparkling, and she’s on some kind of high. She heads toward me at the ball return. It should not surprise me that she can bowl like a champion. I bet she kicks ass at pool, too. Probably nails the bullseye in darts every time. Hell, she can likely change a tire without any help.
Now, there’s a helluva hot image.
Ah, fuck.
Bad idea to speculate on her auto-repair skills, because as she struts toward me, I’m mentally drawing a picture of Harper as a hot redheaded mechanic wearing Daisy Dukes and a wife-beater tank stretched over her chest, sexy streaks of grease on her legs. I don’t know why, but women are required to wear Daisy Dukes in any chick-auto-mechanic fantasies. It’s part of the guy rule book, and you cannot deviate from it. Not that I’d want to. It exists for a reason—it’s hot as sin.
“Did you see that?” she asks, beaming as she throws her arms around me to celebrate, and I swat away my out-of-nowhere fantasy so that it’s not completely obvious that I’m getting a hard-on for her right now. But really, she’d look so fucking good working on my engine.
The ironic thing is I don’t even have a car.
“You didn’t tell me you bowled a three hundred,” I whisper out of the side of my mouth as I reciprocate, wrapping her in my arms, too. Because . . . well, she started it, and she feels fantastic all snug against me like this.
“Nah, I’m not that good,” she says as we separate, snuffing that short-lived moment.
I give her a side-eye stare as she peers into the machine that chugs and cranks up bowling balls from the lanes. “That was your second strike of the night,” I remind her. “You’re a ringer. You kept that little fact to yourself.”
She shrugs playfully. “A girl’s gotta have some secrets.”
And, hell, do I want to know hers.
“That may be true,” I say, then lower my voice even more, though it would be hard for anyone to hear a word above the Go-Go’s tune that’s blasting on the bowling alley’s sound system. “But if you keep killing it, I might as well be a dead man in negotiations.”
She claps her hand over her mouth. “Oh, shoot,” she whispers through her fingers. “Are we that close to winning? I’ve been so busy being your Velcro I nearly forgot.”
She raises her eyes the slightest bit to a tiny brunette parked next to Gino. Her name is Franci. She works in promotions, and she’s wearing a crotch-length skirt, as she usually does. When I first arrived tonight, she sauntered over to me, then quickly turned the other way when she spotted Harper by my side. Now, she’s making the moves on Gino, which is perfect, since he’ll think he beat me in that regard, too. But little does he know I’m having the last laugh. A few months ago, Franci tried to find me on Tinder. Turns out she found my brother Wyatt instead, since I’m not on Tinder. Wyatt’s a carpenter turned big-time contractor, with a business that’s growing like crazy, and apparently she was quite pleased with his tools. Or so he told me. I told him that was TMI, but TMI pretty much describes my brother.
As the machine spits up the ball, I grab it for Harper, bring it to my chest, and wrap my hands around it. I drop my voice. “I hate to ask, but I need you to throw the next frame.”
Her shoulders sag. “Really?”
“He’s going to go crazy if we crush him. He wants his team to win and raise the most money for charity. He wants his picture to be the one they send to all the trade mags.”
She sighs heavily. “Throw it like the 1919 World Series?”
I nod. “Do it just like the White Sox did.”