Romance: SCREWED (An Arranged Marriage to the NFL Bad Boy) (A New Adult Contemporary Athlete Sports Football Romance) Read Free Page B

must really love her. She must have a great personality.”
    One year . I remind myself.
    Back when I was a stick-thin freshman, he definitely didn’t have an interest in me. For me, the freshman fifteen was a total reversal; I didn’t gain 15 pounds, I lost it. I was so stressed and poor that a bowl of ramen with some frozen veggies was all I ate in a day. When I was saddled with Jett as my “project” in the tutoring center, he took a long, intense look up and down my body, finally meeting my eyes with a smirk, and my pale skin instantly turned beet red. I knew what he saw. I knew he saw a scrawny girl with braces dressed in flimsy, secondhand clothes sewn and resewn together when they fell apart by a too-tired, overworked single mom, and I knew he found me seriously lacking.
    Even though he never said a kind word to me from the moment he met me, I was infatuated with him. To be fair, anyone would have been. He was tall, a bronze god with light brown hair streaked with natural blonde highlights, perfect white teeth, a slightly crooked smile, dimples, and the kind of lean, toned muscles every Hollywood actor strives for. On top of that, in my mind, he was already famous. He was the quarterback of the football team, the single element that had taken our school from a laughingstock to a real contender. He was like something out of a television show, with his easy laugh and sparkling smile. His detached behavior, especially with women, only made girls pursue him more. Everyone wanted to be the one to tame him. Jett Lang, the “bad boy” who was too charming to be legitimately threatening, but distant enough to feel like a rare treasure to be won.
    And I was stuck in a small library cubicle with him for five hours every week.
    Naturally, I immediately developed a crush, and that crush was easily perceived. I was shy in college, moving away from my small town and the few friends I had to swim in a sea of constant competition. I was an excellent tutor - my boss said that I was the best in the center - but I just fell apart when Jett looked at me.
    I would begin reading his papers, making notes and developing talking points, but once I started talking, a smirk would cross his face and I would start to stammer. “See - um - you see, this, uh, this paragraph is a little… disorganized?” I would say. He would glance up at me from his notebook (where he would be, inevitably, doodling extremely crude, but uncomfortably detailed, pictures of genitalia), and I would wither under his ice-blue gaze. “We can, um, talk about it. Do you - do you want to talk about it?”
    He never did. Any notes that I gave him were met with cold silence, open mockery, and - in some cases - blatant disregard for my existence. At least once a week, he would text his friends or listen to music while I was trying to talk to him.
    The only reason that Jett came to see me was because he was as terrible at academia as he was amazing at football. I knew perfectly well that he was only there because his coach forced him to be. But I always hoped that he was getting something out of our time together. I wanted to make some small, lasting impact on what I believed was the kind of golden life I would never be able to achieve.
    Which means that, when he asked me to go on a date with him after one of our tutoring sessions, I was so stunned and so thrilled that, naturally, I agreed before the words were even completely out of his mouth. I thought, maybe, that he’d been secretly shy all along too. If a boy’s mean to you, it’s because he likes you, I remembered countless adults telling me as a child.
    I feel my jaw clench as I watch Jett eat in the diner, thinking about the night of our “date.” I had been so excited. I could still see myself, as if floating outside of my body, waiting in my awkward, baggy dress and the cardigan that my mother had told me was cute. My roommate, an equally shy wallflower, had done my makeup, and I was feeling exceptionally