“Why does your mind jump straight past plausible to ridiculous every single time? Do you even know how much a dolphin weighs? I’d never be able to—” I cleared my throat.
Andi’s eyebrows were up. “No, professor. Maybe you could tell me? In fact, I think you could tell me exactly how much a dolphin weighs. You could probably even tell me more about their feeding patterns, couldn’t you?”
“What are you implying?” I asked.
“That you’re some kind of freaky dork dom hybrid. You waltz around your little club with its golden cock key in your pocket, but deep down, you’d rather be petting dolphins and counting colorful fishes. I saw the way you lit up when that lady offered to tell you more about the clown fish. You looked like a fly who just found an elephant with diarrhea.”
I cringed. “A fly who… Where do you come up with these things?”
“Because flies like to eat shit. I just mean you looked really excited.”
“Next time, why don’t you say that instead?”
“Or maybe I could say you look like you just stumbled on a bunch of pinecones in the forest.”
Those damn pinecones.
“You two,” the girl standing up on the box called. “Are you listening? What’s the number one rule?”
“Listen to our trainers,” I said mechanically, then I wished I hadn’t. I could feel Andi grinning like an idiot at my side.
“Okay, good,” she said. “Moving on!”
“Dork dom,” Andi whispered. “Wisten to our twainers,” she muttered through stifled laughter.
I briefly considered throwing her into a nearby pool of water. I wondered if she’d look as smug when she was cartwheeling through the air.We stepped out of the dolphin tank almost an hour later. I managed to ask our trainer for an extra half hour when Andi wasn’t looking. The bonus time meant we got to stay with the dolphins while everyone else headed back to the locker rooms and eventually filtered out, leaving just us, the dolphins, and our trainer. Even Andi had forgotten to be a surly, sarcastic nuisance by the time we were done.
She unbuckled her life jacket with a huge smile on her face. “Okay. I think I’m ready to let it slide that you’re weirdly fascinated with coming here. That was amazing.”
“Good,” I said. “I was really worried about your opinion of me.”
My dry tone seemed to bring back the usual Andi. She pursed her lips and crossed her arms, which coincidentally pushed her breasts up in her pink swimsuit. It took a little more effort this time to keep my eyes on hers. The damn woman was seriously starting to tempt me. She practically oozed defiance, and I was getting more and more curious to see how she’d handle a little taste of submission.
“Oh, shit,” the trainer said. She tugged on the men’s locker room door, which was locked. “I forgot to tell them not to close up, and I don’t have the keys for this one. Do you mind hanging out for a while? I’ve got to track down Kyle for the key to the men’s room, and God only knows where he ended up.”
“No problem,” I said.
“Okay, awesome. I’ll send him here as soon as I find him. See you later, right Landon?”
I tried to pretend I hadn’t heard that.
“See you later, will she? Do you tie her up at the Golden Pecker, or something?”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were jealous.”
Andi blew out an unimpressed breath. “You wish.”
It shouldn’t have mattered if Andi was going to think less of me—to assume I screwed around with any and every woman I met. But for some reason, it did. “She said that because I come here. Kind of often.”
The way Andi smiled told me she’d suspected as much. “How often, exactly?”
“At least once a month.”
“You are such a dork. I have to admit, though. The dorky side makes you a little easier to swallow. Like slathering a burnt, crusty old French fry in a few gallons of ketchup. The dolphin thing is the ketchup, and you’re the old, nasty French fry, by the way.”
“Yeah. I got that much. I also got that you’re planning on swallowing. It’s good to get this kind of information out in the open.” I was teasing her, but only because if I didn’t, I worried I’d open up—that I’d start blabbing about what this place meant to me and why I came so much. Or worse, that I’d talk about my parents—about how things were before the divorce and before my brother and I were replaced with Andi and her sisters.
Andi glared, then pointed to the locker room. “Your clothes aren’t even in there,” she said. “So, you can wait out here while I go get changed.”
“Or,” I said. “We could cross an item off William’s list. You’d be that much closer to getting me out of your hair.”