the chimneys.
“You must be my partner. He needed one more couple. He asked me to do it and said he’d scrounge someone up for me.”
“I guess he flipped over a few rocks and there I was.”
“Oh boy. Maybe I just got the exact wrong impression, but I’m thinking you don’t have any experience in participating in a Not Such an Ironman Ironman Contest?” Her voice seemed to hold a little hope, and he had to admit he started to feel a few butterflies fluttering in his stomach. This was just a small-town non-Christmas Christmas festival.
“No?”
Her lips flattened. “I’ll see if I can get you a booklet of instructions, helpful hints, and secret tricks you can read before it starts tomorrow.”
“Competition that stiff?”
“Typically, they have two high school kids, two young adults—which I’m guessing is us?—Two older ladies and two older gentlemen. The competition is fierce. Have you ever been beaten by your grandmother?”
“I didn’t really have a grandmother.” He almost wanted to eat the words as soon as they came out of his mouth, but they hung there in the air.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Don’t be.”
He opened his mouth, but she spoke before he could.
“Is that the grit stuff you were talking about earlier? The stuff that makes you a good football player?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m sorry, please don’t take this wrong, but I feel like family is more important than football.”
“I wouldn’t disagree with that. But you make the best out of what you get, and I feel like I’ve done that.”
She nodded thoughtfully, looking at him.
She started to move, and her fingers slipped a little on his arm, but his hand came over and covered hers. Holding it there.
He wasn’t exactly sure why he did that.
He was just...enjoying.
It was so uncanny the way she put him in mind of The Healing Pen.
It was a small town, there was no pressure to be the big football star, there wasn’t even any pressure to keep his past hidden. He felt more comfortable with her than he had with anyone, ever, that he could remember, and yeah, he didn’t want to lose the connection.
To cover the awkwardness of what he had obviously just done which was keep her from removing her hand from his arm, he said, “So are you serious about the handbook? Because I study our playbook all the time. There isn’t a person on the team who knows it better than I do other than our QB, Rascal. And yeah, that’s his name. The one his mom gave him. I feel like maybe his mom didn’t like him too much when he was born, but maybe he grew on her, because she kept him. In contrast, Mom gave me an okay name, then she kinda ditched me, maybe when I lost my cuteness, I don’t know.”
He had been trying to make a joke, but he should have known that he couldn’t really joke about something like that with people who didn’t know him. He and Rascal joked about it all the time.
Actually, she took it better than he was afraid she was going to. A shadow crossed her face, and her lips turned down a little, but then she smiled.
“Running joke?”
He nodded. “Can’t change it. There’s no point in getting upset about it. It is what it is. I used it to my advantage. I’m not gonna cry about it for the rest of my life.”
She nodded. “I like that.”
Chapter 11
Dante felt like a kid in kindergarten who had just had his teacher praise him. It was a good feeling. But also scared him a little that this woman whom he’d just met, barely knew, could make him feel like he’d done something praiseworthy. When he really hadn’t done anything at all.
He kind of forgot it was his turn to talk while her eyes, green and filled with humor and somehow mesmerizing, locked with his.
There were a thousand things that ran through his head, things he wanted to say, ask her, and probably the top question of all was one that was impossible.
After meeting Race and talking to him, he had even more respect for the man and didn’t want to break the conditions of being a pen pal.
“I was kidding,” she finally said.
He’d been out with a lot of girls. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that to The Healing Pen, but honestly, the time he’d spent with those girls had been more about him than them. He wasn’t sure how to tell if a girl was seriously interested