Beautiful Player (2 page)

“ ‘Someone’? Jensen, your point is that I have no friends. It’s not
exactly
true, but who do you imagine I should call to initiate this whole get-out-and-live thing? Another grad student who’s just as buried in research as I am? We’re in biomedical engineering. It’s not exactly a thriving mass of socialites.”

He closed his eyes, staring up at the ceiling before something seemed to occur to him. His eyebrows rose when he looked back to me, hope filling his eyes with an irresistible brotherly tenderness. “What about Will?”

I snatched the untouched champagne flute from Dad’s hand and downed it.

I didn’t need Jensen to repeat himself. Will Sumner was Jensen’s college best friend, Dad’s former intern, and the object of every one of my teenage fantasies. Whereas I had always been the friendly, nerdy kid sister, Will was the bad-boy genius with the crooked smile, pierced ears, and blue eyes that seemed to hypnotize every girl he met.

When I was twelve, Will was nineteen, and he came home with Jensen for a few days around Christmas. He was dirty, and—even then—delicious, jamming on his bass in the garage with Jensen and playfully flirting away the holidays with my older sister, Liv. When I was sixteen, he was a fresh college graduate and lived with us over the summer while he worked for my father. He exuded such raw, sexual charisma that I gave my virginity to a fumbling, forgettable boy in my class, trying to relieve the ache I felt just being near Will.

I was pretty sure my sister had at least
kissed
him—and Will was too old for me anyway—but behind closed doors, and in the secret space of my own heart, I could admit that Will Sumner was the first boy I’d ever wanted to kiss, and the first boy who eventually drove me to slip my hand under the sheets, thinking of him in the darkness of my own room.

Of his devilish playful smile and the hair that continually fell over his right eye.

Of his smooth, muscled forearms and tan skin.

Of his long fingers, and even the little scar on his chin.

When the boys my age all sounded the same, Will’s voice was deep, and quiet. His eyes were patient and knowing. His hands weren’t ever restless and fidgety; they were usually resting deep in his pockets. He licked his lips when he looked at girls, and he made quiet, confident comments about breasts and legs and tongues.

I blinked, looking up at Jensen. I wasn’t sixteen anymore. I was twenty-four, and Will was thirty-one. I’d seen him four years before at Jensen’s ill-fated wedding, and his quiet, charismatic smile had only grown more intense, more maddening. I’d watched, fascinated, as Will slipped away into a coatroom with two of my sister-in-law’s bridesmaids.

“Call him,” Jensen urged now, pulling me from my memories. “He has a good balance of work and life. He’s local, he’s a
good guy
. Just . . . get out some, okay? He’ll take care of you.”

I tried to quell the hum vibrating all along my skin when my oldest brother said this. I wasn’t sure
how
I wanted Will to take care of me: Did I want him to just be my brother’s friend, helping me find more balance? Or did I want to get a grown-up look at the object of my filthiest fantasies?

“Hanna,” Dad pressed. “Did you hear your brother?”

A waiter passed with a tray of full champagne flutes and I swapped out the empty one for a full, bubbly glass.

“I heard him. I’ll call Will.”

One ring. Two.

I stopped pacing long enough to pull back the curtain and peek out the window, frowning up at the sky. It was still dark out, but I reasoned it was bluer than black and starting to smudge pink and purple along the horizon. Technically: morning.

It was three days after Jensen’s lecture and, fittingly, my third attempt to call Will. But even though I had no idea what I would say—what my brother even
expected
me to say—the more I thought about it, the more I realized Jens had been right: I was almost always at the lab, and when I wasn’t, I was home sleeping or eating. Choosing to live alone in my parents’ Manhattan apartment instead of somewhere closer to my peers in Brooklyn and Queens didn’t exactly help my social options. The contents of my refrigerator consisted of the odd vegetable, questionable takeout, and frozen dinners. My entire life to this point had revolved around finishing school and launching into
the perfect research career. It was sobering to realize how little I had outside of that.

Apparently my family had noticed, and for some reason, Jensen seemed to think the solution to saving me from impending spinsterdom was Will.

I was less confident. Much less.

Our shared history was admittedly scant, and it was entirely possible he wouldn’t remember me very well. I was the kid sister, scenery, a backdrop to his many adventures with Jensen and his brief fling with my sister. And now I was calling him to—
what
? Take me out? Play some board games? Teach me how to . . .

I couldn’t even finish that thought.

I debated hanging up. I debated climbing back into bed and telling my brother he could kiss my ass and find a new improvement project. But halfway through the fourth ring, and with the phone clenched so tightly in my hand I’d probably still feel it tomorrow, Will picked up.

“Hello?” His voice was exactly how I remembered, thick and rich, but even deeper. “Hello?” he asked again.

“Will?”

He inhaled sharply and I heard a smile curl through his voice when he said my nickname: “Ziggy?”

I laughed; of course he’d remember me that way. Only my family called me that anymore. No one really knew what the name
meant
—it was a lot of power to give then-two-year-old Eric, nicknaming the new baby sister—but it had stuck. “Yeah. It’s
Ziggy
. How did you—?”

“I heard from Jensen yesterday,” he explained. “He
told me all about his visit and the verbal ass-kicking he gave you. He mentioned you might call.”

“Well, here I am,” I said lamely.

There was a groan and the whispering rustle of sheets. I absolutely did not try to imagine what degree of naked was on the other end of the line. But the butterflies in my stomach flew into my throat when I registered he sounded tired because
he’d been asleep
. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t technically morning
yet. . . .

I chanced another look outside. “I didn’t wake you, did I?” I hadn’t even looked at my clock, and now I was afraid to.

“It’s fine. My alarm was about to go off in”—he paused, yawning—“an hour.”

I bit back a groan of mortification. “Sorry. I was a little . . . anxious.”

“No, no, it’s fine. I can’t believe I forgot you lived in the city now. Hear you’ve been holed up over at P and S, pipetting in a safety hood for the past three years.”

My stomach flipped slightly at the way his deep voice grew husky with his playful scolding. “You sound like you’re on Jensen’s side.”

His tone softened. “He’s just worried about you. As your big brother, it’s his favorite job.”

“So I’ve heard.” I returned to pacing the length of the room, needing to do something to contain this nervous energy. “I should have called sooner . . .”

“So should I.” He shifted, and seemed to sit up. I heard him groan again as he stretched and closed my eyes
at the sound. It sounded exactly, precisely, and distractingly like
sex
.

Breathe through your nose, Hanna. Stay calm.

“Do you want to do something today?” I blurted. So much for calm.

He hesitated and I could have smacked myself for not considering that he’d already have plans. Like work. And after work, maybe a date with a girlfriend. Or a wife. Suddenly I was straining to hear every sound that pushed through the crackling silence.

After an eternity, he asked, “What did you have in mind?”

Loaded question.
“Dinner?”

Will paused for several painful beats. “I have a thing. A late meeting. What about tomorrow?”

“Lab. I already scheduled an eighteen-hour time point with these cells that are really slow-growing and I will legitimately stab myself with a sharp tool if I mess this up and have to start over.”

“Eighteen hours? That’s a long day, Ziggs.”

“I know.”

He hummed before asking, “What time do you need to go in this morning?”

“Later,” I said, glancing at the clock with a wince. It was only
six
. “Maybe around nine or ten.”

“Do you want to join me at the park for a run?”

“You run?” I asked. “On purpose?”

“Yes,” he said, outright laughing now. “Not the I’m-being-chased running, but the I’m-exercising running.”

I squeezed my eyes closed, feeling the familiar itch to follow this through, like a challenge, a damn assignment. Stupid Jensen. “When?”

“About thirty minutes?”

I glanced out the window again. It was barely light out. There was snow on the ground.
Change,
I reminded myself. And with that, I closed my eyes and said, “Text me directions. I’ll meet you there.”

It was cold. Ass-freezing cold would be a more accurate description.

I reread Will’s text telling me to meet him near the Engineers Gate at Fifth and Ninetieth in Central Park and paced back and forth, trying to stay warm. The morning air burned my face and seeped through the fabric of my pants. I wished I’d brought a hat. I wish I’d remembered it was February in New York and only crazy people went to the park in February in New York. I couldn’t feel my fingers and I was legitimately worried the cold air combined with the windchill might cause my ears to fall off.

There were only a handful of people nearby: overachieving fitness types and a young couple huddled together on a bench beneath a giant spindly tree, each clasping to-go cups of something that looked warm, and delicious. A flock of gray birds pecked at the ground, and the sun was just making an appearance over the skyscrapers in the distance.

I’d hovered on the edge between socially appropriate
and rambling geek most of my life, so of course I’d felt out of my element before: when I got that research award in front of thousands of parents and students at MIT, almost anytime I went shopping for myself, and, most memorably, when Ethan Kingman wanted me to go down on him in the eleventh grade and I had absolutely no idea how I was supposed to do so and breathe at the same time. And now, watching the sky brighten with each passing minute, I would have gratefully escaped to any one of those memories to get out of doing this.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go running . . . actually, yes, that was a lot of it. I
didn’t
want to go running. I wasn’t even sure I knew how to run for sport. But I wasn’t dreading seeing Will. I was just
nervous
. I remembered the way he’d been—there was always something slow and hypnotic about his attention. Something about him that exuded sex. I’d never had to interact with him one-on-one before, and I worried that I simply lacked the composure to handle it.

My brother had given me a task—go live your life more fully—knowing that if there was one way to ensure I’d tackle something, it was to make me think I was failing. And while I was pretty sure it hadn’t been Jensen’s intent that I spend time with Will to learn how to date and to, lets face it, get
laid
, I needed to get inside Will’s head, learn from the master and be more like him in those ways. I just had to pretend I was a secret agent on an undercover assignment: get in and out and escape unharmed.

Unlike my sister.

After seventeen-year-old Liv had made out with a pierced, bass-playing nineteen-year-old Will over Christmas, I’d learned a
lot
about what it looks like when a teenage girl gets hung up on the bad boy. Will Sumner was the definition of that boy.

They all wanted my sister, but Liv had never talked about anyone the way she talked about Will.

“Zig!”

My head snapped up and toward the sound of my name, and I did a double take as the man in question walked toward me. He was taller than I remembered, and had the type of body that was long and lean, a torso that went on forever and limbs that should have made him clumsy but somehow didn’t. There’d always been
something
about him, something magnetic and irresistible that was unrelated to classically symmetrical good looks, but my memory of Will from even four years ago paled in comparison to the man in front of me now.