“You were!”
“I had one foot on the bumper. I was clinging, if anything.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“He got halfway through the beer,” Cole says, “hit a pothole, and sprayed Bud Light all over the coach, me, and a handful of donors.”
Wade slaps his knee. Jackson folds forward laughing. Even Dana is snorting now.
I clap a hand over my mouth. “No.”
“Yes,” Cole says.
I look at Grayson. “Please tell me that’s not true.”
He takes a slow sip of his whiskey before answering. “It was Coors.”
That only makes everyone laugh harder.
Another story rolls right into that one, then another. Mandy tells one about Jackson drunkenly raging about losing pinball so badly that he got kicked out. Wade tells one about his wife accidentally saying something offensive to a local on their honeymoon. Grayson, though, has enough old football-party lore attached to him to last the entire night.
Most of it is harmless and stupid. The kind of thing men survive in their twenties and then retell like battle stories once they’re old enough to know better.
But somewhere between Dana leaning sleepily against the pool wall and Mandy nearly dropping her drink because she’s laughing too hard, Cole says, “Honestly, Gray was lethal back then.”
Grayson’s head tilts back with a quiet groan. “Cole.”
“I’m serious,” Cole says. “NFL body, zero common sense. Women were lining up to ruin their own lives.”
Jackson nearly spits out his drink.
Wade points at Grayson. “I absolutely believe that.”
“No one asked you,” Grayson says.
Cole ignores him. “And then after the divorce?” He whistles low and long. “Man went a little feral.”
Dana rolls her eyes. “Can we not talk about your friend like he’s a zoo animal?”
“I’m just saying, his body count probably doubled.”
Mandy, drunk enough to have lost all sense of self-preservation, turns in the water to squint at Grayson. “You do have kind of a high-body-count vibe.”
I choke on my own laugh.
Dana covers her mouth, horrified but amused. “Mandy. You can't just say that.”
“What?” Mandy says. “He does.”
Grayson smiles, but it’s forced at the edges. I can see it even from the pool. The muscle in his jaw ticks once before he looks down into his drink.
Of course Grayson has a past. He’s forty-five and gorgeous and rich and used to be a professional athlete. He's not a monk or a priest.
But... still.The thought slides in anyway, quick and mean.
How many women has he touched like that?
How many women has he wanted for a few weeks, a few nights, a weekend?
