“I’m surprised you let him live.”
“Connor put himself between us, but the shit I yelled over his head got us both thrown out of the bar.”
“Mom sent me upstairs in the first half. By the third or fourth time Dan got sacked, she said I wasn’t fit for company.”
“That doesn’t sound like sweet, polite little May.”
She ducked her head and smiled sideways at the couch. “It’s possible that I’m a little irrational when it comes to football.”
He let himself smooth his hand over the slippery jersey fabric on her shoulders and the broad, stiff numbers flanking her spine. Just once. “Bloodthirsty wench.”
Hiding behind the curtain of her hair, she bit him on the collarbone, inflicting a sharp, secret wound that made him suck in a breath.
“You’ll pay for that,” he promised.
“After the game?”
“There’s always halftime.”
* * *
They barely lasted a quarter. Somebody stood and blocked the TV about ten minutes in, and he started to grumble. May politely asked the woman to move, but the die was cast.
After that, every time someone laughed too loud over at the bar, Ben stiffened, and May turned up the volume on the TV. Allie wasn’t even pretending to watch, her mother had spent the past hour talking about the wedding with three of her friends, and her father was oblivious at the bar, deep into swapping hunting stories with all her uncles, who were in town for the wedding.
When the Packers called a time-out, two different neighbors swooped in to ask Ben questions about his imaginary job. Nobody asked May what it was like to watch her ex-boyfriend play his ex-team while she sat on a couch next to the guy she was falling for.
Which was good, because she wasn’t sure she could have told them what it was like. She didn’t have the words, and Ben had too many.
“You know, it’s the endorsements that take the most time,” Ben said. He packed the statement with such contempt, she expected her neighbors to recoil. To lift their hands and say, Whoa. Forget I asked. But it was as though no one could hear it but her. No one else was really listening to him.
“People always talk like endorsements are quick cash, but let me tell you, somebody is spending hundreds of hours working on those deals,” he said. “It’s just not the players. By the time you add up the lawyers hammering out the terms and the riders on those contracts and the PAs like me, who have to schedule all these phone conferences between four different people only to be told at the last minute that your talent has some unspoken objection to the whole idea of endorsing deodorant—”
The game came back on, and Ben’s eyes went straight to the screen. He stopped listening to himself. “It’s a pathetic time-wasting circle-jerk.”
“Excuse me,” May said. “I need to borrow him for a minute.” She grabbed his hand and pulled.
Ben followed her upstairs, past the TV in the living room. “Where are you taking me?”
“You’ll see.” They padded up the carpeted stairs to the bonus room on the top floor.
Ben found the remote before she’d even finished flipping on the lights. “You’re a goddess,” he said, his eyes already on the blue glow of the TV’s warm-up screen. “Help me find the channel.”
She did, and they sat side by side on the couch, their thighs pressing together but their attention entirely on the screen.
Almost entirely. Ben leaned forward most of the time, legs spread wide, elbows on his knees when things were going well, the palms of his hands braced against his kneecaps when the team required his full attention. At one point, he reached over and absently rubbed his hand up and down her thigh. “You lock the door?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
Then there was a call he didn’t like, and he threw both arms in the air and flung his torso back against the couch cushions, his whole body a protest.
A few seconds later, he sat forward again, resuming his vigil.
May paid attention to every play, but beneath—between them both—arousal built. A player fumbled, Ben called him a fucking idiot, and desire contracted between her thighs, low and hot. He groused at the refs now and then, but the Packers were ahead, so there was a pleasant halfheartedness to it.
“Einarsson’s not playing his best,” he said.
“Don’t make me feel bad.”
Ben put his hand back on her knee. “It’s not your fault.”
When the Packers’ new quarterback threw away the ball, then sprinted after the opposing lineman to pull an open-field tackle from his ass at the forty-five-yard line, May said, “I’m going to marry that man.”