How to Date the Guy You Hate by Julie Kriss Page 0,13

palm and then another with satisfying force. I stood for a moment and felt the power of the stance, the way it circled the motion of the ball and contained it, the way it kept me perfectly ready to move in any direction. My brain had shut off and I was nothing but a body, blood pounding in my veins, when I looked up and saw Megan.

She was crossing the park toward me, wearing a soft jersey dress that hugged her hips, her toned legs flashing over her sneakers. She had her arms crossed over her chest in the chill. “Hey,” she said when she got close, the tone of her voice a little uncertain.

I realized I’d frozen in place, still crouched, the ball gripped in one palm, watching her. I was soaked, and staring at her, and I had a bruise on my cheekbone from the punch Half-Assed Beard had thrown. I made myself blink. I was completely taken by surprise.

“What are you doing here?” I managed.

She stopped at the edge of the basketball court and stared at me, her gray-green eyes dark with something I couldn’t read. “I was looking for you,” she said. “I went to the bank to talk to you, but they said you weren’t there.” She tilted her head. “They said you were fired this morning.”

I straightened, letting my arms drop. “Congratulations,” I said. “You’re witnessing my finest day.”

“Why did they fire you?” she asked.

I pointed at the bruise on my cheek. “This isn’t in line with their image,” I said. “That, and I was late this morning. For the sixth time.”

She nodded. “Why were you late?” When I didn’t answer, she said, “Seriously, Jason, you can’t think I’m judging you for getting fired? This is me you’re talking to. I get fired all the time.”

I sighed. My muscles were aching and my head was pounding. I was so fucking tired. “I’ve been late to work because I took a second job as a bouncer at Zoot Bar, so I work a few nights a week.”

Megan blinked. “Zoot Bar? Where the college kids go?”

“That’s the one.”

I thought she might scoff at me or make fun of me—I mean, she couldn’t stand me, and with good reason—but instead she just stood there, taking this in. “Huh,” she said thoughtfully. “Holly doesn’t know about any of this. The firing, the bouncer job. Neither does Dean.”

“Neither does my mother,” I said. “Though she’s going to figure it out when I don’t go to work tomorrow. Unless I come back here and shoot hoops all day. Which reminds me—how did you find me?”

Megan bit her lip. “I went to your house—your mom’s house—after I left the bank, looking for you, but there was no one home. The old lady on the corner was in her yard, and she said she’d seen you come this way with a basketball in your hand.”

“That’s Mrs. Greene,” I said, the words automatic. “She tends to watch the street a lot.”

Megan lowered her chin and looked at me skeptically through her lashes, and the look was so unexpectedly sexy that I felt a pulse jump in my dick. “She referred to you as ‘that nice Carsleigh boy who mows my lawn.’”

I bit back a laugh. Mrs. Greene was eighty, and unaware of anything that could be taken as innuendo. “Yeah, that’s me.” I rubbed my cheekbone, hoping the throb of pain would distract me from the fact that she was starting to make me hot. “What do you want, Megan?” I asked, hearing my fingertips rasp over my skin, pressing the bruise. “Why were you looking for me?”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again. The rain was beading in her curly hair, trickling through the loops that spun down her back, over her shoulders. She swallowed, and I could see the movement of her throat. How the hell had I not known that Megan Perry was hot? Or was it that because I’d been with someone, I hadn’t let myself know?

She blinked, as if she was struggling with her words, and then her gaze dropped down me—my black basketball shorts, my gray t-shirt that was soaked in sweat and rain—just briefly, but just enough. Every time I look at you, you look naked to me, she’d said, and suddenly I knew it: I looked naked to her right now.

Well, that was fine with me.

“That guy who hit you,” she said, buying time, not asking what she really wanted to ask. “Who was