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“And you get intense?”
“I’ve been known to take it a little more seriously than I probably should.”
He resisted the urge to tuck a strand of her hair more securely behind her ear. Not something a friend would do.
He didn’t want to be her friend. Not if it meant acting like this. Feeling like this.
“Remember that Seahawks game with the replacement refs? I had to leave the room. Allie thought I was going to have a heart attack.”
“I got kicked out of Pulvermacher’s,” he admitted.
“What’d you do?”
“You probably don’t want to know.”
“Did you hit somebody?” Her breath was coming faster now, and she was leaning into him, her hand on his thigh.
“You look like you hope I did.”
“I was so mad about that game. I couldn’t sleep that night. I just lay awake, being furious. Maybe if I’d hit somebody, I could have slept.”
“I didn’t hit anybody. I got into an argument with some hippie who told me, ‘Chill out, man. It’s a game.’ ”
“I’m surprised you let him live.”
“Connor put himself between us, but the shit I yelled over his head got us both thrown out of the bar.”
“Mom sent me upstairs in the first half. By the third or fourth time Dan got sacked, she said I wasn’t fit for company.”
“That doesn’t sound like sweet, polite little May.”
She ducked her head and smiled sideways at the couch. “It’s possible that I’m a little irrational when it comes to football.”
He let himself smooth his hand over the slippery jersey fabric on her shoulders and the broad, stiff numbers flanking her spine. Just once. “Bloodthirsty wench.”
Hiding behind the curtain of her hair, she bit him on the collarbone, inflicting a sharp, secret wound that made him suck in a breath.
“You’ll pay for that,” he promised.
“After the game?”
“There’s always halftime.”
* * *
They barely lasted a quarter. Somebody stood and blocked the TV about ten minutes in, and he started to grumble. May politely asked the woman to move, but the die was cast.
After that, every time someone laughed too loud over at the bar, Ben stiffened, and May turned up the volume on the TV. Allie wasn’t even pretending to watch, her mother had spent the past hour talking about the wedding with three of her friends, and her father was oblivious at the bar, deep into swapping hunting stories with all her uncles, who were in town for the wedding.
When the Packers called a time-out, two different neighbors swooped in to ask Ben questions about his imaginary job. Nobody asked May what it was like to watch her ex-boyfriend play his ex-team while she sat on a couch next to the guy she was falling for.
Which was good, because she wasn’t sure she could have told them what it was like. She didn’t have the words, and Ben had too many.
“You know, it’s the endorsements that take the most time,” Ben said. He packed the statement with such contempt, she expected her neighbors to recoil. To lift their hands and say, Whoa. Forget I asked. But it was as though no one could hear it but her. No one else was really listening to him.
“People always talk like endorsements are quick cash, but let me tell you, somebody is spending hundreds of hours working on those deals,” he said. “It’s just not the players. By the time you add up the lawyers hammering out the terms and the riders on those contracts and the PAs like me, who have to schedule all these phone conferences between four different people only to be told at the last minute that your talent has some unspoken objection to the whole idea of endorsing deodorant—”
The game came back on, and Ben’s eyes went straight to the screen. He stopped listening to himself. “It’s a pathetic time-wasting circle-jerk.”
