Read Online Winging It by Cate Cameron - Free Book Online Page A

she muttered. There was obviously more to it than I was getting, but it wasn’t like I was dying to go into the details of my own penalty-filled game that night, so it didn’t seem fair to push too hard into whatever her issue was.
    “You want to get out of here?” I asked her.
    And, damn it, she half turned toward Scott, like she was going to check with him first. But she caught herself and turned back to me. “Sounds good,” she said with a firm nod. “See you later, Scott.” So at least I got that much.
    I managed to make it to her equipment bag before she did, and it felt good to heft it up and carry it for her, like I was being chivalrous. I heard her make a weird noise behind me, and then she said, “I can carry my own bag, you know.”
    “Yeah, obviously you can. You got it here, right? But I can carry it, too.”
    “No, it’s mine. I’ll carry it.”
    We were halfway to the end of the rink by then, and I sped up a little. “No, I’ve got it. It’s fine.”
    “Oh my God, Toby, give me the damn bag!” She sounded mad, but this was Nat, and she and I had been play fighting practically our whole lives. I knew how far I could push her before she was actually mad, and we were nowhere close to that.
    “You want it? Come and get it,” I said, and took off running for the doors.
    It was late enough that the rink wasn’t full of little kids for us to knock down, but we still got a few dirty looks as she chased me through the lobby. She almost caught me at the main doors because I had to twist around a bit to get the bag through, but I lifted it up high so she couldn’t get a good grip on the handles and kept going. We tumbled out of the building into the dark parking lot, and she jumped on my back, reaching for the bag. And again there was the serious distraction of her breasts pressing against me, but I managed to keep my focus. Dodge left, trying to shake her off into a snowbank, but she hung on tight, practically choking me with her arm around my throat. Dodge right, hoping to ditch her onto the hood of a parked car, but she kept her grip and gave me a pretty good kick in the thigh for my efforts. A few more desperate steps and I was at the Corolla. I managed to get the bag in the air and drop it on the trunk with a roar of manly triumph, and Nat groaned and dropped off my back.
    “I’m a gentleman ,” I crowed, doing a little victory dance. “I carried that bag. Hell, yeah!”
    “You’re a gear thief,” Nat corrected, and she hip checked me at a crucial step in my dance, just the right time to send me sprawling into the car. “I could have carried it.”
    I bounced back and amped the dance up. “Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” I singsonged. “Point is, you didn’t. I did.” I stopped dancing and gave her a smug smile. “Because I’m a damn gentleman.”
    “Because you’re a damn two-year-old,” she groused, but she was grinning back at me now.
    It’s hard to describe how I felt. I mean, I was playing up the celebration, sure, trying to bug her, but I was pretty much genuine in just how happy I felt right then. It was like Nat and I were back . Like all the whatever-it-was that had gotten between us and made our friendship fade was gone, and it was me and Nat again, hanging out after a hockey game, roughhousing and teasing each other just like always. Sure, maybe I had a bit more interest in certain other Nat-related activities than I’d had when we’d hung out before—maybe I could still practically feel the warmth of her breasts pressed against me when she’d stretched—but that wasn’t the biggest part of it.
    She leaned against the trunk of the car, and I leaned beside her, and we looked out over the parking lot toward the water as I tried to build up the nerve to kiss her.
    Then she sighed and said, “Shit, Toby.” Not quite what I’d been hoping to hear, and from the way her shoulders slumped I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to get better. “This was a stupid idea, and