Block Shot (Hoops #2)(6)

“Yeah, no different because you speak Russian.” I dip my head and try to catch her gaze, smiling when she sketches on her notebook and refuses to look up. “And Spanish. And Italian. And soon Chinese.”

“Well, Spanish was the first language I heard at home.” She shrugs one shoulder. “Mama thinks it’s a travesty for Hispanic people not to speak it. I grew up bilingual and realized I had a knack for picking up languages pretty easily.”

“You seem to have quite a few ‘knacks.’ Is there anything you don’t do well?”

A wry smile tips her mouth. “Jokes.”

“Jokes?”

“Yeah, I’m really bad at them.”

“Convince me,” I say, using Professor Albright’s signature phrase.

“What?” Eyes wide, she finally looks up from her doodling.

“Tell me one of these bad jokes.”

“Oh, gosh.” Faint color washes under her skin. “Okay.”

She traps her bottom lip and closes one eye, concentrating before clearing her expression and looking back to me and speaking.

“Knock, knock.”

“Seriously?”

“Knock,” she says firmly. “Knock.”

I sigh and bite into a smile.

“Who’s there?”

“Europe.”

“Uh . . . Europe who?”

“No, I’m not.”

I stare at her blankly in the waiting silence following her “joke.”

“Are you done?” I ask incredulously. “That was it?”

Laughter erupts from us at the same time.

“Yeah, that’s bad,” I agree.

“Well, I try.”

“But your horrendous joke-telling doesn’t quite outweigh how awesome you seem to be at most other things.”

“Ha!” She rolls her eyes and resumes doodling. “I wish my advisor agreed with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s old school. He doesn’t think women make great sports agents.”

“A lot of people don’t. There aren’t many of them, for sure. You know you’re entering a male-dominated field, but if anyone can handle it, you can.”

“Thanks, Jared. His views are pretty antediluvian.”

Shit. Those lips wrapping around the word “antediluvian” may as well be wrapped around my cock. Has my brain always been a sex organ, or did she do this to me?

“Did you hear me?” she asks, frowning.

“Sorry.” I was busy adjusting myself under the table. “What’d you say?”

“He keeps spouting survival of the fittest. He thinks women lack the killer instinct required to be truly successful sports agents.”

“He’s not wrong.”

The look she shoots me could cut the rest of my hair off.

“Whoa.” I raise my hands to ward off all that ire. “Not about women’s inability to succeed in this field.”

Her expression eases a fraction.

“But he’s not wrong about survival of the fittest,” I clarify. “That’s real. Most sports agents are assholes. Mercenary. Cutthroat. Ruthless. I’m perfectly suited for it and plan to be the best asshole in the game.”

She smiles, uncertainty in the barely curved lips and searching eyes. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do.” We stare at each other for a few seconds, and I let her see the truth of what I’ve said.

My dad, with all his military training and knowledge of how to kill people in a hundred different ways, is a kind man. My stepmother and stepbrother, good people with good hearts.

And then there’s me.

I never felt as nice as the rest of my family. It wasn’t until I started here at Kerrington that I realized it’s not that I’m not as nice, I just see people more clearly. I spy their twisted motives and ill intentions. The entitled brats here only honed that sense, only deepened my conviction that, by and large, people look out for themselves. If they’re gonna suck, I’m gonna manipulate them to my own ends. Thus . . . my choice of profession.

“I’m made for this job,” I tell her.

“So am I,” she fires back, her voice defensive. “My advisor says survival of the fittest, but I don’t think about life in terms of Darwin.”

“You mean science? Facts? Truth?”

“No, I mean in terms of the last man . . . person . . . standing . . . in terms of having to eliminate everyone else so that you come out on top. A food chain culture that thrives on atavism.”

That sounds like life to me, but I let her keep talking.

“I think less Darwin, more . . .” her eyes search the room as if the answer might be painted on the laundromat’s Pepto-pink walls “. . . Maslow.”

“Maslow?” I ask. “Two completely different schools of thought.”

“Yes, but both predictive of human behavior.” She leans toward me, warming to the subject. “Darwin used evolution, our most base biology, and Maslow used psychology, but both sought to understand why humans do what they do and how we end up with the best of the best.”

“And you think Maslow has it right?” I ask skeptically. “Convince me.”