Truly(66)

“I’ve already done the groupie thing, thanks. I passed on the chance to make it permanent.”

“You felt like a groupie?” he asked. “With Einarsson?”

“How would you feel if all of a sudden you were getting asked to barbecues with people whose careers you’ve been following since the eighth grade?”

“Trippy.”

“Totally trippy. And like I didn’t remotely belong there. I never knew what to talk about, so I just talked about football. I was like that sabermetrics guy—you know, the baseball statistics one? Except for the Green Bay Packers. The other girlfriends teased me for it.”

“Which made you feel even more like a groupie.”

“Kind of. I felt like their mascot, sometimes. As if they were all grown-ups, tolerating the fangirl who’d wandered into their midst.”

“Not with Thor, though, right?”

“No. He liked how into it I was.” She gazed at a knot in the paneling opposite her, the tight whorl of its grain. “I think it was that Dan’s job was so huge and important, I had to be his number-one fan. As though, if I wasn’t his biggest cheerleader—his emotional support system—there wouldn’t be room for me in his life. So I guess I signed up for it.”

“Didn’t he give you anything back?”

“He gave me what he could.” She sipped her beer and let the admission unfurl behind her tongue, taking its final shape. “It wasn’t good enough.”

There. That was the reality of what had happened between her and Dan. He was an NFL quarterback, and she was a nobody. But even so, their relationship hadn’t been good enough for her. She’d tricked herself into not seeing it, ignored all the signs, until finally his proposal had bludgeoned her with the truth—and even then, she hadn’t entirely understood.

It had taken her four years to get it. Four years and a long weekend in New York City wearing different clothes and cowboy boots and being the version of herself she’d always secretly wanted to be.

The lesson of New York.

The good news, she supposed, was that she could go home and begin again and know. She could find a partner who would ask about her day, encourage her when she needed encouraging, listen to her describe the mundane details of her life with the same attention she gave him when he told her about his.

It wasn’t so much to ask, was it? Hardly a fantasy to want what so many people had. Just a hope for a certain kind of reality.

Ben didn’t say anything, and she gazed at the play of shadow and light over the vulnerable bare skin of the inside of his arms. The crease where it would bend. The shapes of his shoulders and neck, the breadth of his chest.

Compared to Dan, Ben was a small man. The unfamiliarity of his size made his body more exotic to her. She wanted to see him with his shirt off. To run her hands over his chest and arms, to feel his flat stomach pressing against hers.

She wanted to know him now, while she still had the chance.

“What happened with your restaurant?”

For a long time, there were only the sounds of the pinball machine. The lights and chimes and electronic blips, and the paddles smacking the ball back into play.

“I turned into Dan, I guess.” He glanced up. “Worse than Dan.”

“It seems like it’s a lot of work running a restaurant.”

He peered at the machine as though it would tell him what to say. “I came back from Europe planning to work my way up through the best restaurants in New York. I wanted to learn everything I could and get my own kitchen as fast as possible.”

He glanced at her. “Now, to be clear, these are shit jobs. The pay is shit, the work is shit, and they own you. No sick days, long hours on your feet, burning the hair off your arms at the grill or sweating to death at the pasta station.”

He hit another special bonus thing that required him to launch a fusillade of paddling. May traced the shapes of his arms with her gaze, every tendon and sinew taut. All that effort, thrown away on this pointless thing. This game.

In the lull that followed, he looked down at his hands. “The scars are from back then. Prep cooking, grill station, pasta. Hazard of the job.”

“That’s awful.”

“It’s just the life. You have to really want it, or you might as well find some other career.”

“You wanted it.”

“I wanted it as bad as anybody.”

With three hard whacks of the paddle, he lost another ball. All the fun had left his playing, replaced by that restless aggression she’d gone to such great lengths to avoid. May felt a pang of guilt, a stomach-flipping premonition.

But it was only pinball. They had to have this conversation—for her peace of mind, but also because she had a strong hunch that he wanted to talk about it. He needed to.