Fuck that.
All my friends have gushed over Kennedy Fucking Walsh’s latte-mixing skills. If she likes you, she creates a blend of flavors personally designed to make you cream your pants. If she hates your guts, I guess what you get is on par with fucking cow piss.
Well, two can play at that game. Challenge accepted.
I gulp it down. And take another sip. With each consecutive swallow, her eyebrows draw lower and lower. Until there’s a line in the middle of her forehead and she projects my own scowl back at me.
I toss the empty cup in a nearby trash can. Immediately score. Leaning back in my chair, I ask, “Matcha?”
“And green apple,” she grumbles, fingers striking her keyboard hard enough to shake the table.
“Fucking perfect,” I say under my breath. Louder, I snap, “Ask your questions so I can get out of here. I need to grab some homework from the house.”
“Hope you remembered your keys this time,” Kennedy taunts.
I do breathing exercises again so I don’t childishly respond that I had. The sooner I can get done with this interview, and her, the better.
I hate Leopard Leap. It’s a crock of shit. Just a bunch of dumb questions reporters already asked me during the season. Or a bunch of dumb questions from fans who want to know things they have no fucking business knowing. Morris tells me I should play nice. That I can use this as practice for the draft interview. When Rowe overheard him say that, he’d burst out in laughter and said I need a lot of practice. Dick.
“Were you training again this morning?” Kennedy asks, eyes on her computer screen, fingers flying over the keys. What the hell is she typing? Subject failed to react to poison accordingly—must up dosage next time.
I grunt.
“I’ll assume that’s a yes,” she says. She pauses, counts on her fingers. “That makes Monday, Wednesday, and this morning you went to the gym. Can I also assume you went Tuesday?”
I grunt again, not asking how she knows about yesterday’s session. I’d made a point to tell her how tired I was from it in our shared bio lecture. I’d lied. Mostly because I didn’t want to hear her bitch about standing her up for this interview on Tuesday. Though it actually had a semblance of truth to it by the end of class, since I’d promptly slumped in my chair and fallen asleep the moment the professor started droning on.
“How many days a week do you train?”
“That your first question?” I ask.
“It’s a starting point. To get you warmed up, so you give me something more to work with than a grunt. But it does lead into the first question.”
“Which is?”
“You chose not to enter the draft, even though you’re eligible this year. What makes you so motivated to continue training as vigorously as you would during the season?”
It’s not a bad question.
Unfortunately—for her—meddling with my coffee puts me in a mood less inclined to answer it.
So when this nuclear warhead goes off, and everyone in the fallout shelter tries figuring out who pressed the big red launch button, they can point fingers at her.
“You don’t become a winner sitting on your ass,” I start.
She holds up a hand. “Forewarning, I will be censoring your language in the article.”
“No shit.” When she gestures for me to continue, I do. “I train to stay in shape year-long. A body like mine doesn’t take breaks. I train to maintain peak stamina and endurance, so when I get on that playing field, I give all of me. I go long. I go hard. And I don’t stop until the other team is finished.”
She halts, blinking at her screen. Gives me an odd look before taking a drink from her coffee. “You don’t worry about getting injured? Or exhausting yourself?”
“I don’t tire easily.”
“Okay.” She holds her coffee, typing with one hand. “Second question: in the championship semifinal, you fumbled the ball during a critical tie, costing the team from advancing in the playoffs. How do you deal with that loss?”
I don’t need the reminder. Only weeks ago, and the guilt and fury still boil in me. Morris had given a touching speech after the game, that a player is only as good as his team and we can use this as a lesson to win next year, or some bullshit like that. That night, I’d left our hotel to visit a nearby pub, where I’d gotten smashed. Morris and Hart found me kicking a dumpster in an alley behind the bar, though I don’t remember how I’d arrived there or what the dumpster had done to piss me off in the first place.
“Exercise,” is all I say.
“Exercise?”
“Yep. Vigorous exercise,” I steal her word. “The kind that gets your heart racing. Where you can feel the blood rushing in your fucking veins. Hear it pumping in your head. Your muscles tense, your core’s engaged, you’re breathing deep. Sweat drips over your skin. It’s impossible to hold on, but you have to. Because you’re testing every inch of your body, pushing it to its limits, twisting it in ways you can’t even imagine. Everything inside you burns until you want to scream—”
She snaps her laptop close.
“All done?” I ask.
She crosses her arms. “You’re playing me.”
I raise an eyebrow in response.
“Long and hard? Tensing muscles, screaming? I’m not an idiot.”
And I don’t like matcha. Or green apple. Especially not in combination.
Yet what I do like is the flush on Kennedy’s face. The one she tries to hide by gathering her things and standing with jerky movements. As I watch, it spreads from her cheeks, a hint of pink running along her neck. I wonder how far down it goes beneath the high collar of her shirt. How much brighter it can get. As red as the lipstick she’d put on in the
