But it had turned out that Davis Blake hadn’t acted like I had expected him to. Apparently, he wasn’t just silent at dinners with friends; his lack of communication also extended over all other areas of his life. That meant he had kept the news about the baby to himself, and hadn’t told anyone else on the Woodsmen. I kept waiting for it, but still, no one else knew. It remained a secret, just as I had wanted. And it was feeling stranger and stranger, worse and worse. I wasn’t sure why getting what I wanted felt so bad.
César and I were back to being mostly fine, since both of us had independently decided to forget that night had ever happened. We ate together, watched movies together, argued about who was going to empty the dishwasher—normal, everyday roommate stuff. And still, I felt bad. Something was off.
“Are you staying up much later?” he asked me. “We leave early in the morning. My mom is planning to meet us at the airport, probably with a sign and balloons.”
“Is that a joke?”
He laughed. “You’ll see. She misses me a lot and she’s so excited to meet you.” He reached over and put his hand on my knee, shaking my leg a little. “Stop looking like that. What do you think is going to happen? Are you afraid that they won’t like you, or are you afraid that they will?”
It was hard to pin down what was scaring me so much about this trip. “I’m not afraid of anything,” I told him. “I was just thinking about work. Apparently, taking off tomorrow means that I have no more vacation days. Euna spends most of her time staring at me with her nose all pinched and then writes stuff down in her binder. I’m pretty sure she’s not jotting down lines of poetry or something.”
“Remember Dan Dorbeek? The Woodsmen CEO?” César asked me suddenly. “He was at the dinner tonight. He said you had a lot of ideas about the team.”
“I do?” I thought. “Well, I guess I do. When I run into him at the practice facility, I tell him what I think about the events the Woodsmen put on. They’ve been doing everything exactly the same ever since I can remember, and probably well before that. They could shake things up there for sure, and that’s what I’ve said to him.”
“Tonight he asked me all about you, how I know you, more about what you do for work. He said you talked a lot about our exhibition game against the Junior Woodsmen and about Fan Day at the stadium this summer.”
“Oh, I have so many ideas for those events! They don’t have to be totally sports, they should be like giant parties for all of northern Michigan.” I launched into a few of my ideas, which turned into maybe a few hundred.
“You should write that up and send it to Dorbeek,” César said. “I bet he’d want to talk to you more.”
“Maybe I will.”
“Maybe you should. Maybe you should do whatever I say, which includes going up to bed.” He stood and offered his hands to me, pulling me to my feet.
I didn’t let go right away. “César? I don’t want you to worry about me with your parents. I’m going to work really hard to make a good impression with them, so they’re not upset with you anymore.”
“I’m not worried about them liking you, because I’m sure they will. I want you to feel the same way, though. You’re going to have to be around all of us for years. We’re going to be connected because of the baby.”
I nodded, and when he tugged my hands, I followed him up the stairs. I sat on my bed and listened to him in his room, thumping some, and then the mattress creaked as he lay on it. I didn’t sleep for a while, thinking about the next day and nervous that it was going to go wrong for César.
∞
“Will you take a picture with me?”
“Sure,” César said, for the jillionth time since we’d gotten to the airport. He bent down a foot or two to put his face next to this latest fan, and grinned at her phone as she clicked away. “Ok, I have to run to get my flight,” he told her.
“Go Woodsmen!” she said, starry-eyed.
“Go Woodsmen,” he agreed, then turned to me. “We really do have to hurry.”
Lucky thing I had been doing all that cardio. We rushed through the airport and made it to the plane just in time. “Ok?” he asked me as we took our seats, and handed me the water bottle he’d already filled and also some protein-y snacks. We—ok, I—had been running a little late that morning and had finished getting dressed in the car, so there hadn’t been a lot of time for breakfast.
César spent the flights reading and working on stuff on his laptop, and I mostly studied up on my Spanish, secretly. “Increíble salvada. Un cabezazo perfecto,” I whispered, staring at my phone.
He picked up his head. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” I told him, and he went back to reading about the Samnite Wars. I had put my cheek on his shoulder and checked out his book to see what he found so fascinating, and then I’d had to ask what the hell the Samnite Wars were. César had explained in detail, but I still had a hard time understanding why he found them so exciting that he barely heard me when I asked him to move because I had to go to the bathroom. Again.
I also borrowed his computer and worked for a while on an email for Dan Dorbeek, the Woodsmen guy, about some more concepts that I had for team events. It was just like the winery: they had potential for so much, but they weren’t using it. I typed and typed, and then César wanted to see and we
