Cassie pointed toward me. "So, how is Wes's cock?"
The burn of the hot seat upon me, I forgot all about that lady and her daughter and engaged in cock talk of my own. Though, to be fair, I was using it to say I wouldn't talk about the cock. "I'm not talking about Wes's cock over lunch."
"But you've seen it?" Georgia continued the interrogation.
I just stared back at her as I took a sip of my water.
Cassie's smile nearly consumed her face. "And you've licked it? Sucked it? Fucked it? Rode that-"
"Yeah. Okay," Georgia said with a hand in Cassie's face. "The baby doesn't need to hear these kinds of things."
I blushed. Neither did I.
Cassie slapped her hand away. "But I do. Tell me. Are you having sex with Wes?"
I shrugged and did my best to square my shoulders. "Maybe. A little bit."
"I knew it!" Cassie exclaimed. "I fluffing knew it!"
"Are you guys dating?" Georgia asked.
I shrugged again. "Uhh … well … no. I don't know … We're just sort of … ."
"So, you're fuck buddies," Cassie answered for me. "That's fantastic. Good for you, Win. Good. For. You."
"Do you want to date him?" Georgia questioned. "Like, do you want a relationship with him, or is it just about the sex?"
I honestly didn't know the answer to that.
"What's he think about your downgrade to Jersey?" Dean asked with a raise of his perfectly coiffed brow.
"He doesn't think anything," I countered. "We're not in a relationship."
Eyes turned wild and suspicious all around, and I couldn't really blame them. There was a certain amount of want in my voice despite my efforts to conceal it.
Do I really want a relationship with Wes?
That seemed like a huge risk with a man like him. A man who had a mile-long history of never settling down and always perusing the pussy buffet.
I honestly wasn't sure he was capable of a relationship, especially with a woman who had a child.
But he's different with Lex …
Which was true. But that was right now. What would happen six months down the road? Would he still enjoy being in a relationship with a woman who would always make her daughter top priority?
"Winnie?" Georgia called softly with a gently knowing look in her eyes.
With a quick shake to clear my head, I pointed to Dean and decided the only thing I could at that moment.
"When the waitress comes back to bring you another round, I'm going to need one too."
Another week and a couple of degrees Fahrenheit gone, November was officially in full swing. I glanced at the date on the lock screen of my phone and cringed.
The 20th. Jesus. November is almost over. Where the hell is the time going?
We were headed straight toward the fucking awful part of living in New York with below-zero wind tunnels thanks to tall buildings and physics, and old, garbage-contaminated snow, but, thankfully, other things were heating up.
Our season was on fire with a nine and zero record, and Winnie and I burned even hotter than the team. With sex and banter whenever we could manage, I was the happiest I'd been in … as long as I could remember. And when I thought about all the friction we used to build the flames-against walls, bent over desks, in the fucking locker room showers-the need to complain about winter in New York just up and disappeared.
I glanced up from fiddling on my phone straight into the clear blue eyes of Winnie Winslow herself. With her hair pulled back from her face and a lavender sweater covering some of the sweetest inches of her skin, she looked beautiful. Confident and poised and so goddamn irresistible I had to force my eyes away from her when another person spoke.
"You need to up your social media game, sir," Sean Phillips said with an easy, slightly antagonistic smile. His eyes popped against his darker skin, mischief flickering in the light green depths. It was times like these that I could see his relation to Cassie so clearly it was startling.
"I don't need to have any social media game," I told him, Winnie, and the three other players crowding the not-all-that-small space of the training room with their sheer size and bulk.
Professional football players had a way of looking small on the field, but they dwarfed any normal-sized man. I was comfortable with my height at six foot two, but according to Thatch, being six two in a room full of football players was like being five foot seven on America's Next Top Model-you were the runt of the professional litter.
Plus, I wasn't carrying seventy extra pounds of muscle like these guys.
"He's right," Jeremy Rollins, one of our star wide receivers, agreed. He had a vertical jump fucking cats would envy, but right then, as he agreed with Sean and started an epidemic of pushing me into the social media foray that I knew wouldn't end with him, I considered taking out both of his kneecaps. "I saw the Bruins owner tweeting all kinds of updates and shit. Really got the fans into it."
Winnie's eyes flared with her agreement.
Fuck. Maybe I could make Georgia do it.
Winnie laughed like she knew what I was thinking, and with the amount of time we'd been spending together, she probably did. "Not someone else. You. You should tweet," she asserted.
"I don't tweet," I said with a curl of my lip.
"Not yet, you don't," Quinn Bailey agreed with a wink. "But we're going to teach you."
"No."
"Yes!" Winnie said, excited and nodding.
Fuck.
"Fine."
All of them just stood there and stared. Winnie with happiness, Quinn with way too much knowledge, and the others waiting for Twitter to grow roots and spring from the ground right in front of me, apparently.
"Well?" I prompted. "Do I just email it?"
Earnie Fletcher, one of the best tailbacks in the league and all-around monster runner, choked on a laugh before straightening himself up when my face didn't change. "Oh. You're serious."
My eyes burned with the effort I put into telepathically saying, Fuck all of you.
"Okay, so you're going to need to go to the App Store. Do you know what the App Store is?" Quinn asked with a tremor of humor in his voice, jerking his head to my phone.
I honestly wasn't sure I did, but fuck if I was going to let them know that.
"Yes," I sneered with a tilt of my head. "I know what the App Store is."
Winnie smiled, all the way from her mouth to her eyes, and touched her nose. She knew I was lying.
Holding up her phone from behind the crowd while the guys looked at me, she pointed to a blue button on the screen. I searched for the same icon on my phone and pushed it.
"Now, just search for Twitter," Sean instructed.
I did that and pushed the little box that said "Get." I didn't know anything about this shit, but I also wasn't an idiot.
"Now what?" I asked when it loaded.
It only took them five minutes and a heated discussion over what my "handle" should be to get me in the position to actually tweet something.
It was @NYMavsTopGun, by the way-a cute play on the movie Top Gun and being the guy in charge. I was both disgusted and impressed by the argument those four men had while strategizing my name. It was a lot like any exchange between Kline, Thatch, and me. Apparently, almost all grown men are children.
"All right. What do I say?" I asked testily, growing a little frustrated with the whole thing. I wasn't really great at being the guy who didn't know what was going on.
From a very young age, and likely because of the lack of my mother's influence, my father had raised me to be independent and in charge. Honestly, I think he just needed me to help him raise me by raising myself. He hadn't planned on having to teach me all of life's lessons on his own. But men like him never did. They walked into the hospital with a smile on their face and excitement in their hearts-and they left, brand-new baby bundle in their arms, heartbroken and without a wife.
"Anything you want," Fletcher offered. I had to focus in order to remember what I had even asked.
Winnie's eyes shot to mine, and she almost shouted. "Not anything! Jesus. Don't get him into trouble, guys."
Quinn rolled his eyes with a smile. "It's just Twitter."
Oh, yeah. Twitter.
"And how many followers do you have on Twitter, Quinn?" Winnie fired back pointedly.
God, I loved when she got heated. I had to look down in order to conceal my smile, but I peeked up from underneath my lashes so I could watch Quinn's reaction.
He didn't even have to think about it. I was guessing, by the line of his jaw, Southern charm, and cut body, he had a lot. "Point taken."
"He could just say something about practice," Rollins suggested.
"He should say something funny," Sean insisted as he jumped up onto Winnie's table and leaned back on his elbows, feet dangling.
"How about he doesn't say anything?" I grumbled.
Winnie laughed. "Relax."