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I swallowed hard and gripped the steering wheel, turning my knuckles white. “I can’t help but feel we’re off-topic.”
“Again, what else are we supposed to talk about?” His hot gaze flicked up and down my body before he settled on tracing my profile. “The weather? Football? Shoes or some shit?”
“We could talk about football.” I moved the car forward a few feet.
He did a double take. “You want to talk about football?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to, I said we could. I used to watch it with my dad, so it’s not like I don’t know anything about it.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. Bewilderment contorted his features, from his one raised eyebrow to his parted lips. “What? Don’t look so shocked.”
“I just don’t peg you for a woman interested in football. Then again, I didn’t think you had the eating habits of a three-year-old, either. You continue to surprise me.”
“I’m like a Russian doll. Just when you think you’ve gotten to the middle of me, boom. I throw a curveball your way.” I moved the car a little more.
“You really watched football?”
I sighed, briefly meeting his eye. “That’s how my parents met,” I said it slowly so the pang that always accompanied talking about them together wasn’t so strong.
I had to say it slowly. If I said it too quick, I’d choke up.
Damien opened his mouth, but I spoke again before he could.
“Dad played football in both high school and college. Mom made the cheer team when he was in his junior year. She said it was love at first sight. He said it was the start of a six-month long attempt by him to get her to pay him the blindest bit of attention.”
“Was it?”
“Love at first sight or a long attempt at getting her attention?”
“Either.”
“Both.” I laughed quietly, moving the car a little more. “She told me once that it didn’t matter if she liked him or not. He had to prove to her that he was worth her time, but she had to prove it to him, too. She was absolutely certain that the key to their relationship was the fact they both knew the other was worth whatever hard times would be thrown their way. He felt the same.”
Damien said nothing.
“They would watch football together. Every game of the season as long as I could remember, and they got tickets to the UNLV games whenever they could. I didn’t care about it until she died.” The traffic moved forward several feet, so I moved with it. “Dad tried to watch the first game of the season after, but he couldn’t. I’d never watched a damn game, but I did then, just so he didn’t have to watch it alone.” I swallowed as the pain clogged in my throat. “After that, I watched every game I could with him.” I slid my hand around the steering wheel just to feel the softness of the leather against my skin. So I could focus on the stitching where the leather joined. Anything but the sadness that was taking hold of my body in the wake of the memories.
“She really made him work for her attention for six months?” he asked, shaking his head.
The exaggeration in the way he said “six months” pulled a laugh from me instead of the sob I feared was coming.
“Something tells me he wasn’t as persistent as someone else I know.” I slid him a knowing look, hitting my blinker to move into the lane one over. I slipped into an empty space when the car behind didn’t move into it. He flashed his lights and beeped, so I reached back between our seats and stuck my middle finger up at him through the back window. “Ass.”
“Road rage,” Damien said dryly. “Awesome. You’re a box of tricks, aren’t you?”
“Not for much longer. There’s a great ice cream place a few blocks off the Strip if this traffic will just start moving.” I punctuated my last few words with a few beeps on my own horn.
“A cocktail bar and an ice cream parlor. Is this how I get my girl card?” he asked, deadly serious, his expression void of all emotion.
“No,” I said, trying to look past the car in front of me. “Cocktails and ice cream is how you increase the likelihood of me sitting on your face.”
Damien leaned over the car and rammed the heel of his hand into the horn. “Come on, assholes!”
Well.
His opinion changed pretty quickly.
Nineteen
Dahlia
“An emotional talk about feelings, cocktails, and ice-cream.” Damien shoved his hands in his pockets, stretching his legs right out in front of him and tilting his face up to the sun. “This is the most feminine day I’ve ever had, and I have two sisters.”
“You do?” The question escaped before I had a chance to hide the surprise in my voice. Did I know that? Had it ever been mentioned?
