Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Jack
“I can’t remember the last time I played mini golf,” I say across the table from Maggie.
After playing two rounds—when the first one was over, she poked out her lower lip in the saddest most adorable pout, and I immediately went over and paid for another—we found our way to a burger place not far away.
She grins at me, sipping her drink. “Oh, yeah? I used to go a lot with my friends when we were in high school.” She screws up her face, staring off to the side.
“You know? I don’t know when the last time I went was either.
I think Liam’s school did a fundraiser night at one when he was in Kindergarten.
It was probably then.” She turns her smile back on me.
“That was really fun, though. Thanks for springing for the second game. I really appreciated that. I wasn’t ready to be done yet. ”
“I could tell. I was having fun, too. It didn’t seem like stopping was even an option at that point. We needed another round of mini golf.”
She chuckles, and I’m glad things between us have relaxed from the awkward tension after I picked her up. I know I’m partly responsible for that, but she had some stuff going on too. Whatever it is, she’s either resolved it, or at least managed to put it aside for now, and I’m glad.
“If you weren’t on a no-partying ban, what would you normally be doing right now?” she asks, surprising me.
Leaning back in my chair, I rub a hand over my mouth, contemplating that question.
“Well, it’s early enough I’d probably still be at home.
But Connor Jenkins, the teammate I usually go out with, and I would have plans to meet up somewhere later.
Or he’d be hanging out on my couch being loud and obnoxious, possibly pregaming with a few beers.
Nothing too crazy, but it’s nice to already be loosened up before heading out.
In that case, we’d split a taxi or an Uber, hit our list of clubs for the night, have a good time, and stumble home sometime before dawn. ”
Her eyes grow wide as I fill her in on my usual lifestyle. “You do that every night?”
I shrug. “Not every night. A lot more often in the summer, though. It’s more rare during the season, so we let loose pretty freely in the off-season.
Can’t afford to let a night out affect practice, or worse, a game the next day.
And while I still recover pretty well—the secret is having a few good hangover cures ready to go—now that I’m in my thirties, I don’t bounce back as fast as I did five or ten years ago for sure. ”
Shaking her head, she grins. “You’re such a baby.”
Confused, I wrinkle my brows together. “I’m sorry?”
Laughing, she sits up, waving a hand back and forth.
“No, no. Not in a bad way. Not like a crybaby or something. I just mean, you’re so young.
‘Oh, I’m in my thirties now, so I need more time to recover.
’” For someone who claims she’s not calling me a crybaby, she just mocked me like I’m whining.
“Wait until you’re staring down the barrel of forty, and then come talk to me. ”
I let out a chuckle, and shake my head. “Please. You’re one to talk. You can’t be more than thirty yourself.”
Her eyebrows climb her forehead. “Try thirty-seven.”
“What?” I do my best not to let my jaw hit the floor. “Nah. You’re lying. There’s no way.”
She splutters. “What woman would lie about being older . I mean, by the time you’re twenty-one, there’s literally no incentive to make yourself seem older than you are.”
“Okay. Fine. That’s a good point. Still, though …
” I look her over, taking in her face, her smooth skin, plump lips, dark hair.
“Honestly, the only reason I think you’re probably thirty, or maaaaybe thirty-two is because you have a ten-year-old kid.
I’d peg you as mid-to-late twenties, easy.
If you told me you were thirty, I’d believe it, but thirty-seven?
” I shake my head. “Did you sell your soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth?”
Laughing, she shakes her head. “Ha. Hardly. I’ve been finding gray hairs for the last two years.
” She ignores my scoff and continues. “Eye cream only does so much in the battle against crow’s feet.
” Another scoff that she also ignores. “And we won’t even discuss the effects of motherhood.
” When I scoff again, she glares at me. “Like you would know.”
I hold up my hands. “Fine. True. I believe you that motherhood would change things, even if I don’t have any first hand experience with that. But none of those things invalidate the fact that you look about a decade younger than you are.”
She purses her lips, studying me, then finally says, “Okay. Thank you.”
“What about you?” I ask, deciding we should change the topic. “What would you be doing if you weren’t here?”
She chuckles, shaking her head. “I’d probably be home too, cleaning up after dinner and either griping at Liam about spending too much time on screens or spending too much time on a screen myself.
I’m trying to spend more time reading real books or making stuff instead, but sometimes at the end of a long day, I just want to veg and scroll.
It makes it hard to feel like I have the moral high ground, though, when I only let Liam have two hours of screen time a day.
” She tilts her head. “Well, two hours of video games or iPads. I let him watch TV and movies. Given it’s a Friday, we might be having a movie night.
We do that fairly frequently, especially in the summer.
And if he weren’t going fishing with my dad tomorrow, I’d be taking him to the pool most likely.
There’s one not far from us, and I like to take him as often as I can in the summer. ”
“Sounds like a lucky kid,” I murmur.
“I don’t know about that, but I do my best.”
“You sound like a good mom.”
She blinks rapidly, looking away, and I don’t miss the catch in her voice when she says, “Thank you.”
Part of me wants to push at that because why would that make her cry?
It’s more statement of fact than compliment, even.
But the obvious answer is that someone—and I’m pretty sure I only need one guess as to who—made her feel like she isn’t a good mom.
Which is so shitty. Especially when she’s given up pretty much her whole self in service of her ex and then transferred all of that energy into being the best mom she can be.
It’s ridiculous that she would even give credence to the suggestion she might be a bad mom when there’s so much evidence to disprove that.
But I know it’s easy to get in your head, to wonder if someone else is maybe right about everything.
Hell, even the fallout from this interview has me questioning how good of a player I really am, how valuable I am to my team and to my sponsors.
Even though I know damn well I’m not responsible for our loss in the playoffs, and I know that my team and the coaches know that too, I can’t help wondering if I’m maybe not as big of an asset as I think I am even so.
It’s a shit way to feel, and I hate that Maggie is experiencing it about something so important.
Our food comes, giving us both something else to focus on besides the moment of vulnerability we both stepped in on accident.
“Oh my god, I’m starving,” Maggie says, just above a whisper. Then she takes a big bite of her burger, groaning in pleasure.
My blood rushes south at the sound, and I shift in my chair, hoping I can avoid getting a raging boner—or at least hoping it subsides before it’s time to go. Instead, I focus on my own burger, taking a bite and seeing if it’s as orgasmic as Maggie seems to think.
It’s fine. Not terrible, but nothing spectacular. She must be hungrier than I thought.
“We could’ve eaten earlier if you were that hungry,” I state, meeting and holding her eyes.
She shrugs, holds her hand in front of her mouth as she finishes chewing, and shakes her head.
“No, this is perfect. It was one of those things where I didn’t really realize how hungry I was until I was absolutely ravenous.
And by then, we were on the way here.” Her eyes twinkle.
“Unless you have a time machine in your trunk, we couldn’t have done anything different. ”
Laughing, I shake my head. “No, sorry. No time machine.” I’m about to say that if I had one, I’d use it to go back in time and not do the interview with her boss, but then I realize that if I hadn’t done that, I never would’ve met Maggie.
She never would’ve showed up to The Salty Salmon that night because she only knew about it from meeting me there when she said she wanted to buy me a drink.
We never would’ve gone to the paint and sip night, I wouldn’t have our paintings hanging up in my hallway, and I wouldn’t have the chance to take her out to go mini golfing or eat a burger or watch a baseball game.
“So you grew up a baseball fan?”
Mouth full again, she nods. “Yeah. My parents are big fans, and I grew up watching games with them. We went to quite a few professional games growing up, and they’re still season ticket holders to the minor league team in Tacoma. I feel like it would be harder not to be a fan growing up like that.”
Chuckling, I nod. “For sure.”
“My dad had me out playing catch from the time I was pretty young. I honestly don’t remember not knowing how to play catch.
I played T-ball and softball through high school, but I wasn’t good enough to play in college.
I majored in marketing and minored in broadcast communications, and …
” She shrugs, leaving the rest left unsaid.
I suspect a great deal of that blank she’s not filling in involves her ex-husband, and I imagine she doesn’t want to talk about him right now.
Which works for me. Dude’s a deadbeat asshole as far as I can tell. I’m happy not to talk about him either.
“Does your son play baseball too?”
She tilts her head from side to side. “Not as much. He played last year for the first time, but it was not that great of an experience, really. He got sick at the beginning of the summer, missed the only practices they had, and since he hadn’t ever really played before, he didn’t do that well.
We played catch some, and that helped, but he would get mad any time I tried to show him how to do anything, so …
” She shrugs. “Anyway, he said he wanted to play again this year, so I signed him up. He has his first practice next week. This year’s coach seems a little more intense, saying something about two practices a week through the season.
” She grimaces. “On the one hand, more practices will help him a lot. On the other hand, sometimes guys that are that gung-ho about kids baseball can be …” She trails off, seeming to shrink into her shoulders like she doesn’t want to say the word that immediately comes to mind.
“Raging assholes?” I offer
Straightening up, she laughs and nods. “Yeah. That.”
Thinking back over my own experience as a kid playing sports, I shrug. “That can be true, but some coaches just really want to help the kids learn as much as they can. Most of mine were like that when I was young, and that foundation helped me be the player I am today.”
She chuckles. “I’m under no illusion about my kid becoming a professional athlete. And anyway, he’d want to be a basketball player, not a baseball player.”
I grin. “You can always tell him that Michael Jordan did both.”
Laughing, she shakes her head. “That’s cute you think he listens to me about sports.
According to him, his dad is a god, the bearer of all sports information, and I’m just Mom.
It doesn’t matter that I worked on his dad’s show from the start, helping build it from the ground up, or that I still work in sports media. I’m just”—she shrugs—“Mom.”
“Oof. Ouch. That’s gotta sting.”
She puts a smile on it, but she nods. “A little, yeah.” A shrug. “It sorta comes with the territory, though.” I can tell there’s more that she could say but doesn’t. Part of me wants to press, but I don’t want to take us down a conversational path that ends with her sad.
“Well,” I say lightly, “maybe when he learns his mom’s hanging out with a professional hockey player, that’ll raise your standing.”
She laughs, a full throated laugh, and shakes her head. “First off, he’d have to find out about that, which isn’t in my plan at this point. And second, I’m not sure that would matter much to him. Now, if you were a basketball player …”
“So harsh. I’m wounded. Truly.” That gets another laugh, and I feel like I’ve successfully navigated us back into safer territory. Let’s just hope I can keep us there.