“Hey,” I say.
I feel his lips graze the back of my ear after he speaks—accident or not?—and he steps back, watching me with those perceptive eyes of his as we ease apart. He looks like a dark prince of playboys today, dressed in gray sweatpants and a soft navy T-shirt, a duffel bag with lacrosse gear at his feet.
He’s going to a game, I realize, with a kick of excitement in my stomach. And true enough, ten minutes after we’ve all chatted animatedly about the baby, he excuses himself to leave.
“I think I should go to your game,” I cautiously say, then quickly amend when Saint and Rachel raise their eyebrows, “just so you win.”
When there’s only silence, I head to the door, raising an eyebrow to see if Tahoe challenges me.
He doesn’t. He smirks, his eyes roiling with mischief. “By all means, if I had my way, I’d have my lucky charm with me always.”
We say goodbye to the Saints, who exchange a glance that’s a mix of concern, puzzlement, and amusement.
As we take the elevator downstairs, I glance at his profile. “It was very sweet of you to give little baby Saint your first lacrosse stick.”
“Yeah, well. Saint’s my best friend. I’m loving that little kid as if he were my own.”
“You don’t plan to have any?” I raise my gaze to his.
But he’s watching the elevator numbers drop, and drop, and drop, and doesn’t say anything more until we head to his Ghost, climb aboard, and drive over to the lacrosse field.
“I’m pumped up you came.” His voice is deep and fiercely honest as he slides a mischievous look my way as his car screeches to a halt in his reserved parking spot.
“Me too.”
I sense him starting to get into vicious zero-zero mode as we climb out and enter the field building. “Hey.” His voice stops me a few seconds after we start down the halls, him with his duffel slung over his shoulder, heading toward the locker room, me starting in the opposite direction to the stands.
I turn to face him in the middle of the hall. He taps his dimple. I inhale for control. Then I head back and kiss his dimple. “Don’t kill anybody tonight.”
“Just team Black,” he says, grinning as he disappears down the hall.
*
He demolishes the other team.
All I keep hearing as he works his stick, checks team Black, clicks and pops the ball, and works the game is:
“Face off!”
“Score Red!”
“Face off!”
“Score Red!”
“Face off!”
“Score Red!”
“Face off!”
“Score Red!”
*
We’re the last ones in the locker room as he finishes changing, but rather than leave, he drops down on the bench and pulls me down with him.
“Hey. Next month…come over with me to my parents’ anniversary dinner? I’m tired of the speech they give me every time I go home, same damn tune over and over.”
“They want you to stop your womanizing ways, yadda yadda?”
“More like yadda yadda.”
“They don’t want you to stop your womanizing ways? Huh.”
“Just come.”
I flush. Not because I’m embarrassed, but because I know a man like Tahoe could definitely make me come.
The word sits in the air between us, low and soft. His eyes are dark and stormy, as they get when he’s thinking about something I can only guess at, and I wonder if the word has the same effect on him that it does on me.
I really didn’t need the image of him coming, but now it’s in my brain. I picture his features contorting in ecstasy, harsh with effort, the way I imagine a man like him comes, and he must look so sexy, so very sexy. How he pumps, raw and ready, and I hear him laugh now and I’m all red as I wonder if he knows that my mind wandered there.
He tells me the exact date we leave. “I’ll pick you up at nine. We’ll fly down there.” His eyes reveal none of his thoughts, but that does nothing to calm the flush on my face.
“What’s the weather like?” I ask, trying to sound casual.
“You’ve never been to Texas?”
“Never.”
He laughs. “It’s a trip to hell in the summer.”
ROOTS
It’s the second Thursday of September when I climb aboard Tahoe’s Hummer and we drive to the airport. Recently things have felt a little tenser between us. The air feels charged, as if our bodies are made of electricity and the space between us is a crackling outlet just waiting to be plugged in. I’m glad, though, that neither of us feels pressured to talk, and instead we listen to “Elastic Heart” by Sia and a few other songs that play on the radio.
Tense or not, we keep stealing glances at each other, and whenever we do, a smile tugs at our lips. Which makes me happy—happy that he seems glad to have invited me to join him.
He pulls us into an airport dedicated to private aircraft, where a pilot greets us and loads our luggage into the plane’s outer compartment.