Same Time Next Year

I’m not volunteering to be crushed, I remind myself, but I can’t help but feel a very distinct tug low in my belly when he gives me a half smile.

And the world slows down as he grabs the front of his shoulder pads and pulls them off over his head, taking the practice jersey with it. He’s wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt underneath, but my God, it rides up all the way to his collarbone, and my ears begin to ring, my ovaries performing a complicated tango.

My husband is ripped to shreds.

And thick with it.

Uhh. Daddy? questions my brain.

There is hair on his chest. Like a really nice amount—and this is a weird observation that I wouldn’t normally make on a man, but he has great nipples. They look like they’ve been stretched tight, along with the rest of his skin, to accommodate all that pesky muscle, the edges slightly puckered from the cold.

“Hey, Britta,” he says, tossing his gear onto a seat and then swiping back his sweaty hair.

“Hi,” I respond, trying to sound cheerful, but I sound like my throat is being stepped on instead. “Good practice?”

“Yeah.” He indicates me with a jerk of his chin. “Better now.”

My skin starts to tingle ominously, the organ in my chest pumping a little faster.

Uh-oh.

Sumner drops heavily into the seat beside me, bending forward to remove his skates, and his triceps flex in a way that makes me bite my lip.

Usually, when Sumner comes into Sluggers, he’s wearing a sweatshirt, but

he’s not wearing one now. All that muscle definition is simply out in the open for public consumption. Or private consumption, really. Mine.

Objectively speaking, of course.

I mentally shake myself and cross my legs, finding a more comfortable position in the seat. “Are you ready to study?”

Sumner straightens, gives a quick scan of the immediate area. “You want to study here?”

“Yeah,” I say, retrieving the notebook from my bag and flipping open to the first page. “Where were you thinking?”

He shrugs one of those huge shoulders. “My place. Yours. Or we could go out.”

My throat tightens. “Like a date?”

“We don’t have to call it that.”

“Isn’t that what it would be, though?”

He exhales slowly. “We can study here, Britta. That’s fine.”

A weird combination of relief and regret clings to my insides. For the last three months, I’ve been careful to keep my relationship with Sumner professional. We meet in public—and only in public. He recaps his meetings with the lawyer. I update him on my progress in having my name added to the liquor license and deed to Sluggers.

We exchange necessary information . . .

. . . and I try not to notice the longing in his eyes when he looks at me.

One crook of my finger and this Goliath of a man would probably rush me to the nearest dark corner and take out a treasure trove of pent-up sexual frustration on me, those powerful hips pumping like a jackhammer. But I’m definitely not looking at the laces of his hockey pants and wondering how fast he could get them undone. I’m absolutely not doing that.

Words bleed together in front of me on the page of my notebook.

“Um. Okay, I figured we would start with middle names. Mine is Lark.”

“Lark? Really?” He turns as much as possible in the seat that is half his size, considering me with interest. “Britta Lark Mayfield.”

A gust of warm wind travels through my middle. “My grandmother on my mom’s side was a bird-watcher. I can’t really remember her face, because it was usually hidden behind binoculars. Anyway, larks were her favorite species. She used to say they sing the sweetest song.” He doesn’t blink once as I’m speaking, almost like he doesn’t want to miss something.

“What’s yours?”

“Wade,” he says.

“Is there some special significance to it?”

“Yeah.” He lounges back in the chair, resting his linked fingers on his stomach. “My parents met while their families were on separate vacations at Lake Louise. My dad was seventeen; my mom was sixteen. The first time he ever saw her, she was wading into the lake. He said that was the moment he started believing in magic. That’s where the middle name Wade comes from.”

My lungs have ceased to operate. “That is . . . breathtaking.”

He nods to himself, like he’s reminiscing. “They still go to the lake once a year on vacation. He has this wall in his office covered in picture frames. They hold the same snapshot of my mother where she’s wading into the water in the same spot she did when she was sixteen, but she’s a year older in each one. Think there’s around forty of them last time I checked.”

There is so much love in his expression that it makes my chest uncomfortably heavy, and I have to look down at the notebook. Not that I’m seeing much of what is written there. “He obviously loves her very much.

They must be the exception to the rule.”

My words cause him to tilt his head. “What is the rule?”

“Take your pick. What goes up must come down. All good things come to an end. What can go wrong will go wrong.”

A line is forming between his brows. “You’re implying relationships always flame out.”

“I’m not implying anything. Statistically speaking, they most often do.

The chances of them ending badly are too high to take the risk.”

He shakes his head. “No.”

I wait for him to elaborate. He doesn’t.

“Just . . . no?”

“No, I don’t agree with that. You can’t forgo the risk when the potential reward is so great. That’s why people do it. Fall in love and get married. Because if you get it right, you end up with forty pictures on your wall of the same woman. You have a person.”

What does that churn just below my collarbone mean? Maybe I’m just not used to anyone being this passionate when speaking about relationships.

Especially a man. Sumner is a different breed. “Not everyone needs a person.”



He concedes this with a nod. “Maybe that’s true. But even if you’re strong alone, when someone wades into your lake and you feel something . . . if you choose to ignore it, maybe that strength is actually just something else in disguise.”

“Weakness?”

“Fear.”

SUMNER

Britta shoots to her feet, fumbling the notebook closed in her hands.

Dammit. I went too far.

I should have just agreed to disagree and stopped talking. My only excuse is that I’m frustrated. I’m married to this girl, and she won’t even spend time alone with me. We don’t text. We don’t share meals. Nothing.

And believe me, I’m well aware that she stated her terms up front. The relationship is a business arrangement only. I have no right to be irritated, because she is proceeding exactly as discussed.