When he’d proposed to her yesterday, everything about it had been wrong. Everything. The bright lights that made him sweat onstage in his tuxedo, the crowd of witnesses at the breast cancer luncheon where he was supposed to be giving a fund-raising speech, the fact that he’d been nervous and had braced his courage with beer—way too much beer—and worst of all the things he’d said.
Then I met May, and she changed my life.
She was different, you know? No makeup, no fancy clothes, no fancy anything. Just as plain as you see her now.
She was this nice, pure, innocent girl from Manitowoc … one hundred percent patient with me.
I asked her out, and she said yes, and I thought, you know, Don’t mess this up, Einarsson. When Coach met her later, he said the same thing. “She’ll keep your head screwed on straight.”
One date had turned into two, then three. He’d courted her for three months before he kissed her—because, he said, he had so much respect for her.
How amazing that had been. Ordinary May, being pursued by the Packers’ bad-boy second-string quarterback. Being respected by him. And from the very beginning, she’d kept his head screwed on straight.
Oh, she was an idiot.
A plain, unremarkable sort of idiot, standing on a stage where she didn’t belong, wearing shoes that hurt her feet and loathsome Spanx that left a red line of shame on her belly when she finally peeled herself out of them.
Unsexy. Uninteresting. Steady. That’s what Dan saw when he looked at her. He loved her for being mind-numbingly safe.
It’s been four years since I met May, he’d said. I left all my old ways behind. I quit thinking about sex and started focusing on the one thing that matters to me most.
Her heart had tripped then. Don’t, she’d thought, with encroaching dread. Please, please, don’t make it worse.
But he had. He’d told three hundred strangers that the one thing that mattered to him most was—wait for it—football.
And something had happened to her.
The diamond in Dan’s hand flashed under the stage lights, so bright it made her eyes hurt. So bright it set surreptitious shards of fierceness ablaze in her. Her toes had curled inside the sexy shoes she’d bought for this special occasion. Her calves had bunched beneath her silk stockings. Her stomach had tensed below its corset-by-another-name.
She’d felt so bad, it was almost good.
And that moment—those seconds—had drawn a line across her life, dividing it into Before and After.
She didn’t want to remember all the lurid details: the shouts, the camera flashes going off as Dan inspected his injured hand in shock. How placid and far away she’d felt afterward as Dan’s agent rushed them offstage and shuffled them, not to New Jersey, where they actually lived, but to Dan’s Manhattan apartment, where they were instructed to hole up and keep their mouths shut.
She was still angry, but her anger had gone underground and turned into a sort of muffled restlessness. A buried, insistent refusal that made it hard for her to sit still, to do as she was told, to listen to Dan reassuring her that she was being hasty, that it wasn’t over, that everything would work out.
He’d left for a meeting with the team’s PR people, and she’d written him a note, grabbed her purse, and run.
Her plan was to get to Newark Airport, change her ticket, and fly home. But she hadn’t gotten that far, because the lobby had been full of flashbulbs and shouting, and a man dressed like a security guard had grabbed her by the arm, led her to a side entrance of the building, and—just when she was feeling relieved to have escaped—plucked her purse off her shoulder and run.
She’d been left in an alley with five bucks and a MetroCard, and the only logical thing to do was go back to the apartment.
But the before-and-after line she’d drawn had followed her into the alley. She’d sensed that if she turned around she might see it, thick and black and wet, painted across the ground directly behind her heels.
The line said You can’t go back.
She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to talk to Dan. But neither did she want to be sitting here, broke, with no purse and no friends or family within a thousand miles, and no phone to call them with.
She wanted a magical unicorn to arrive, nicker at her with gentle understanding, and fly her to her family’s cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where she could take the rest of Labor Day weekend off from reality.
Too bad there were no magical unicorns in sight. Only the bartender, whose gaze she was assiduously avoiding.
And this guy.
This guy with the book and the elbow and the face that said Don’t even fucking think about it.
The trouble was, it was difficult to know what to look at when you couldn’t look at the guy or the bartender, and you’d already been sitting at the bar for two hours. She’d had plenty of time already to take in the tiered rows of liquor bottles and the decorations—the novelty cheese-wedge Christmas lights strung along the ceiling, the pristine gold and green HOLMGREN WAY street sign, the placard that advertised the availability of Old Fashioneds made with real Door County cherries.