Free Backwoods by sara12356 Page A

the other
nodded once.
    “You ever play before?” Santoro asked,
chalking up her cue stick.
    “Uh.” Andrew shrugged. “Sure.”
    When she tossed him the little, well-worn
cube, he fumbled, then dropped it on the floor, leaving a bright
blue smutch on the linoleum. She rolled her eyes. “Great,” she
muttered within his earshot. “This should be fun.”
    She leaned over and beat him to the punch,
just as he, too, reached for the fallen chalk. “Okay, listen,” she
said, her brows narrowing. “Nick just broke. They’re solids. That
means we’re trying to hit the balls with the stripes on them…” She
mimed holding a ball in her hand, painting a stripe around its
diameter. “…into the pockets.” Now she pretended to plunk the
invisible ball into an equally invisible hole.
    “Thanks for that,” he said dryly.
    “Just try not to scratch and stay out of my
way,” she said. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
     
    Ten minutes later, Andrew leaned across the
table, his arm extended, his fingers fanned out to bridge his cue.
“Corner pocket,” he said, leveling his sites on the eight ball near
the far end of the table. Pausing conspicuously, he glanced over
his shoulder at Dani Santoro, his brow arched. “It’s okay to hit
that one now, isn’t it? Even though it doesn’t have…” He relaxed
his grip on the back of cue long enough to twirl his index finger
in a circle. “…a stripe around it?”
    Without looking back at the table, he made
the shot, sinking the eight in the pocket he’d predicted, thus
winning the game for them—and all without the other team having
even had the chance to take a shot.
    “You ran the table,” Santoro observed as Greg
Taylor and Nick Jones slinked away, muttering together and shooting
dark looks in Andrew’s general direction.
    “I did?” Andrew feigned innocent
obliviousness while the next two players, Matt LaFollette and Mike
Turner chalked their sticks and racked the balls.
    “Where’d you learn to play like that?”
    Dropping her a wink, he said, “North
Pole.”
    On the next game, he let her take some shots,
primarily because he was curious to see if she was any good. She
turned out to be surprisingly so, particularly considering she was
short enough for her stature to have been a possible handicap when
it came to making long shots. He discovered something else along
the way that had been hidden beneath the drab and unflattering
uniform—Dani Santoro had a great ass. And when she bent over the
pool table, stretching out her arms to take aim, the dark cotton of
her shorts stretched tight, the bottom hem riding up just enough to
make the crotch of Andrew’s jeans feel uncomfortably tight.
    “Go ahead, Santoro,” one of their opponents,
Turner, said as she lined up a shot. “Put it up the little tramp’s
ass.” Leaning against the nearest wall, his arms folded across his
chest, he dropped a conspicuous sideways grin at his partner,
LaFollette, who then guffawed.
    Santoro glanced up from her cue, her brows
narrowed. “Real funny,” she said, and whatever the private pun was,
it clearly bothered her. Even though she redirected her attention
to the table, she missed the shot, the nine ball glancing off the
bumper and narrowly skating past the pocket.
    “Little tramp’s ass?” Andrew said, curious,
his brow raised.
    “It’s nothing.” Santoro glowered at Turner
again.
    “It’s a Langley-ism,” Turner offered
helpfully, though this meant nothing to Andrew.
    “Like I said. It’s nothing,” Santoro said,
still frowning. With this, she turned, handing her cue stick to
Andrew. “I’ll be right back. I need to hit the latrine.”
    Andrew couldn’t help but notice he wasn’t
alone in not-so-surreptitiously checking Santoro out as she left
the room.
    “Man,” LaFollette said, sucking in a hiss
through his teeth. “How’d you like to tap a piece of that?”
    “Watch it, man,” Turner said. “Don’t let
O’Malley hear you say shit like