“I normally like it. But this morning wasn’t the right time. I was freaking out.”
“Yeah, well I was, too, after I hung up with you. I couldn’t concentrate on what the coaches were saying. I stared out the window at the rain, worried about you, and wished I could be here to help you.”
Feeling bad for him now, I calmly, gently say, “Why don’t you accept that you’re not going to be able to fix everything all the time? That would be a good start.”
He exhales loudly and lets me go altogether. After a pause, he replies, “Okay. So, how did it go?”
“It went fine.” My smile returns when I amend, “Better than fine. Cynthia was impressed. Which means I probably have this responsibility for the rest of my life.” My eyes land on his broad chest. I stare at it while I follow my logic, and my euphoria fades a bit. “I’ll have to keep topping myself, and that’s stressful, but I’m not going to think about that right now.”
I blink and return my attention to his face. The gleam in his eye and knowing smile spread a warmth through my chest that the damp, chilly evening can’t touch. “Enjoy feeling good for a few minutes. You deserve it.”
“I will. I’m just relieved it’s over and that my vacation starts”—I tap the imaginary watch on my wrist—“now.”
When my San Diego plans were nixed, I debated canceling my vacation days altogether and saving them for when Jet will be making this up to me. On a beach. In the middle of winter. That will have to wait until after the season, though, and my vacation days will have reset by then. I’m also so burned out that I need this time off, even if I sit in my house the whole time, sleeping and watching movies.
Actually, that sounds pretty awesome right now. Maybe not as good as kicking off the week in California, at a professional football game, but dwelling on that impossibility has brought me nothing but misery the past couple of weeks.
Jet rubs my shoulders. “You deserve it, too. And your cardboard friends? How’d they hold up?”
“With tape and Velcro and pins. On the booth backdrops.”
“Great idea!”
I tap my temple. “Thought of it on my way to work.”
“You’re so smart.”
“Yeah, I know.” We laugh at my affected smugness.
“Can I take the most amazing job counselor to dinner?”
My stomach growls before I can give him a verbal answer, but when I picture what dinner out would probably look like tonight, four days before his comeback game, I wince and reply, “Now that the adrenaline’s wearing off, I don’t know if I can sit upright for much longer, much less smile through seven hundred interruptions while we try to eat.”
He tucks my hair behind my ear. “There goes that exaggeration again. We’d probably only be bothered about a hundred times.” Leaning down, he bumps lips with me. “Then how about we go back to my place? Beau made something for me for dinner before I impulsively came out here to meet the victor. Chicken-broccoli-rice something-or-other. It’s not gourmet, but it’ll taste good, and the only one who will interrupt us at home is white and furry and can be locked in a different room until we finish eating.”
“Sounds amazing. I need to get my weight off my feet before they—”
Without warning, he lifts me from the ground, presses his mouth to mine, and silences me with one of the most eyeball-spinning, head-lolling, panties-dampening kisses I’ve ever experienced. Despite its intensity, though, it’s short, and I groan with frustration when he withdraws.
He waits for me to open my eyes. Then, with a half-smile, he asks, “How’s that?”
“Good start,” I approve as he sets me down. Too bad that’s as far as it’s going to go. Instead of whining about it, though, I simply smile bravely at him, turn to retrieve my flowers, and say, “See you there.”
Thirty-Four
San Diego Surprise
“And that’s the game, folks,” I say with gleeful authority, standing to collect our empty beer bottles.
Colin lurches to his feet. “Wait!”
I freeze in my stretch, my arms suspended over my head, my back arched.
“Don’t you want to watch to the end?”
Relaxing my posture, I yawn. “This is the end. That’s called ‘the victory formation,’ and watch…” We both keep our eyes on the television as Jet cozies up to the center, receives the snap, and immediately kneels on the turf.
“Why’s he doing that?” Colin asks.
“To run out the clock without the chance of turning over the ball.” I point to the screen with the beer bottle in my left hand. Jet stands with his teammates in a loose huddle, watching the play clock tick down to ten. Then they line up in the same configuration, wait until the clock hits “one,” and snap the ball again. Once more, Jet rests on one knee. “See? Every time they do that, it kills forty seconds from the clock. So you can eat up as much as two minutes of play time with three downs and not risk a turnover.”
“Ah!” He grins. “Clever. Now that you mention it, I’ve seen teams do that before halftime, too.”
“Same thing, only that’s generally called ‘taking a knee,’ since it’s not about winning at that point; it’s mostly about getting to halftime more quickly. Sometimes losing teams do it to end their first half misery.”
“So it’s a throwaway play. That looks incredibly frustrating for the losing team.”
“It is,” I reply with a smirk. “I hate when our defense has to sit back and watch it happen. But I love watching Jet do it.”
Colin clears his throat. “You like to watch him kneel?”
I laugh. “I didn’t mean it like that, but”—I think more about it—“yes.”
When I move to leave the room again, he quickly and loudly asks, “But wait, wait, wait! How does that differ from spiking the ball?”
I stop again and face
