Chapter 20
“What is a finger sandwich?” Levi mumbled to his brother as they watched Haddie, Emma, and Emma’s mom load a cart with some three-tiered-plate contraption on it along with a silver teapot, teacups, and saucers.
Matteo elbowed him in the ribs. “Sandwiches you eat with your fingers!” he whispered loudly.
“But what if I want to use my whole hand to eat a sandwich? Or both of my hands?” Levi argued.
He knew his irritation stemmed from somewhere deeper than sandwich etiquette or the fact that he’d never had afternoon tea before and didn’t want to look like an asshole in front of Haddie.
After the fitting room fiasco and their subsequent rescue, he’d let Haddie and Emma walk several paces ahead of him on their way to the inn.
He used the term let loosely, considering the second they made it outside of Layla’s shop, Haddie hooked her arm in Emma’s and practically sprinted the first block, leaving him and his thoughts in the dust.
Do you or do you not want to have sex with me right now?
Never in his wildest imagination since he and Haddie became roommates had he thought Haddie Martin would say those words to him. And never in his even wilder than wildest imagination did Levi think he would hesitate in order to have the Where is this going? chat.
Levi had never been a Where is this going kind of guy.
In high school, if you knew Levi Rourke, you knew the game came before everything.
In college, he was too lost after losing his mom and career to be even remotely present in any relationship.
And now that he was a grown-ass adult who should have figured this all out, he realized he was just repeating the same pattern.
He’d replaced playing the game with coaching it.
And he’d traded his guilt and apparently unprocessed grief for trophies to prove his worth.
But he wasn’t worthy, was he? Otherwise Haddie wouldn’t have freaked out when he tried to tell her he was crazy about her. Shit. How did he let that happen?
“The sandwiches are too small for your whole hand, dingus,” Matteo said, dragging Levi out of his spiral.
Levi glared at his younger brother. “What did you just call me?”
Matteo rolled his eyes. “I have called you several names in the past eleven to fifteen seconds, and that’s the one you hear? You are in deep, big bro.”
“What are you talking about?” Levi let out something between a cough and a laugh.
“In what deep? Where? I mean, what?” He grabbed the pitcher of ice water that sat on the table and filled the glass in front of him.
Then he drained it in one gigantic gulp.
When he finished, his brother stared at him with a one smug-ass smile.
“Shit,” Matteo lamented. “Emma was right, and she is never going to let me live this down.”
Levi glanced to where the three women seemed to be leaning over the tea cart conspiratorially, and dammit if looking at Haddie didn’t turn his blood into something molten.
“Live what down?” Levi asked, but the defensive tone of his voice gave him away. He wasn’t an idiot. After what happened in that fitting room today, Levi didn’t have the resolve left to hide whatever it was that Haddie Martin was doing to him.
Matteo’s only response was to sit back in his seat, cross his arms, and gloat.
“You’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?” Levi asked with a groan.
His brother shrugged. “Say what…dingus?”
Levi ran a hand up the back of his neck and over the top of his head. “It’s complicated,” he finally admitted.
“It’s actually not,” Matteo countered without missing a beat. “‘Complicated’ is pretending like you don’t feel what’s all over your damned face.”
His brother was right. The pretending drained his focus and his energy. It was probably the reason why he couldn’t wrap his head around how to help his team. His brain short-circuited whenever Haddie was around, whether he wanted to admit it to his brother or not.
“Fine,” Levi relented. “I have cannonballed off the high dive into the deep end, and I might actually be drowning. Which makes zero sense because we barely know each other.”
“Except you feel like you’ve known her for twenty years,” his brother countered.
“Yes! What is that?”
Matteo shrugged, unfazed. “When you live with someone, time moves exponentially faster. When I was…um…locked up…”
Levi winced at his brother’s mention of his short time in prison, the worst of the fallout following their mother’s death.
Matteo cleared his throat. “Anyway,” he continued.
“By the end of my first week, I knew the names of all my cellmate’s pet rabbits, and I mean all of them.
Living or dead. Do you want to hear about how Snuffles insisted on sitting on his shoulder like a parrot, even when she was full grown?
Or about how Skipper could hop up onto the kitchen counter and wreak havoc with the battery-powered salt and pepper shakers? ”
“Rabbits?” Levi asked.
Matteo nodded. “Rabbits. So. Many. Rabbits.”
Levi groaned. “Fine. Maybe Haddie and I know each other better than we would if we weren’t roommates, but what would even be the point of pursuing this…this…”
“What are we pursuing?” Emma asked, and Levi startled so hard that he almost tipped over his chair but caught himself at the last second.
He sneered at this brother, who was grinning back at him in a way that said, You were so wrapped up in your feelings about your roommate that you didn’t even notice her heading to the table…but I did.
Levi coughed. “Um…a…strategy for my team to maybe actually score at our next game, which is Tuesday right after school.”
Haddie made eye contact with him for the first time since the fitting room, and Levi had the sensation of falling all over again, except this time his chair had all four legs on the floor.
“Tuesday?” she said, eyes wide. “Why didn’t I realize your game was on Tuesday?
We should be home drawing up plays. Or…or on the field so we can demo the plays.
Emma and Matteo, you could come too! If I have someone to represent the opposing team, maybe I can finally help get it through Coach Rourke’s head what the hell ‘offside’ means! ”
“I thought it was ‘offsides,’” Levi replied.
Haddie shook her head. “The proper way to say it is ‘offside,’ but of course, America colloquialized it to ‘offsides.’ But if I’m going to teach you, I’m going to teach you correctly.” She crossed her arms and raised her brows.
This was all it took to get her out of her head about what had almost happened between them but didn’t…
again? Soccer? How was she able to redirect while Levi—who’d been living and breathing football since he was barely able to tie his own shoes—was pretty sure he’d forgotten how many points a field goal was worth.
“Can’t,” Emma replied, just as Matteo said, “I’m sure we could…”
But Emma cut her fiancé off with a look, solidifying the response to Levi’s unanswered question.
He and Haddie weren’t hiding shit. Emma and Matteo were betting on the whole Will they or won’t they? And Levi and Haddie had been too caught up in their own worlds to notice that everyone else was noticing.
“Sorry, Bro,” Matteo amended. “I guess you two are on your own for Sunday afternoon P.E. class. Emma and I have—”
“A thing!” Emma interrupted. “For the wedding.”
“What wedding thing?” Haddie asked, turning her attention to her friend. “Didn’t we just have a wedding thing at the dress shop? And shouldn’t the maid of honor be helping with all wedding things?”
“It’s…a surprise!” Emma blurted out. “My surprise gift to Matteo.”
“What surprise, sweetheart?” Lynette Woods asked as she set the three-tiered stack of finger sandwiches and what Levi could see were also tiny pastries in the center of the table.
“You know, Mom…” Emma replied through gritted teeth. When the other woman opened her mouth to once again express her confusion, her daughter quickly filled it with a tiny sandwich. “I’ll remind you about it after I surprise my husband-to-be.”
Matteo reached for what looked like a tiny cream puff and popped it into his mouth before leaning back with a conspiratorial grin. “I am very much looking forward to this surprise.”
Emma looked at her watch and gasped dramatically.
“What is it?” Haddie asked, stopping midway as she attempted to sit down to likely enjoy her own plate of different tiny foods.
Why was everything so small? Also, why was it called tea if it was more than tea?
These were the hard-hitting questions taking up space in Levi’s brain because they made about as little sense as soccer or almost having sex with Haddie in a bridal shop fitting room.
He had so many questions, and no one would give him a straight answer.
“I just got a calendar reminder for the thing…the surprise. You know what, Hads? We’re burning daylight here. How about I make you and Levi an afternoon tea to-go package, and you can head on out to the soccer field for a little one-on-one before nightfall.”
Matteo coughed.
Haddie stood all the way up again.
And Levi pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and wondered how the hell Haddie didn’t see what they were doing.
Wait… Haddie didn’t see what Emma and Matteo were doing.
They were gifting him time alone with her to either finish what they started or put an end to it all together.
And if he could also wrap his head around offside or offsides or whatever it was that kept resulting in the opposing team earning free kicks against the Muskies, then even better. This thing either started or ended now.
“You know what?” Levi stood abruptly. “I just realized that I don’t even like tea. But I’d be happy to take some tiny treats to go.”
“Wait right there!” Emma cried, and she disappeared back the way she’d come, pushing through saloon doors Levi knew led to the Woods Family Inn kitchen.
Thirty seconds later, she was back with what looked like a gallon-sized zip-top plastic bag into which she dumped one of the three tiered plates.
She sealed it and offered it to Haddie. “Here you go! Tiny treats for you two to enjoy whenever the mood strikes. Maybe you can have a little picnic on the soccer field!” When Haddie didn’t immediately accept her offering, Emma shook the bag until she did.
“Okay…you are weird when you’re trying to surprise someone,” Haddie told her friend. Then she turned her gaze to Matteo. “I’m kind of a little scared for you.”
Matteo laughed, then wrapped his arms around Emma’s waist and pulled her into his lap. She yelped and burst into a fit of giggles herself. “I think it’s safe to assume we should all be a little scared of Emma when she’s trying to keep a secret. Sometimes she is way too obvious.”
“I just wish I remembered what the surprise was…” Emma’s mom mused, staring with concentration at the ceiling and mouthing something inaudible to herself as if she was trying to do calculus in her head.
“You two should go.” Emma shooed Levi and Haddie with her hands, then laughed when Matteo reached for another cream puff and tried to feed it to her nose.
Haddie’s brows furrowed and Levi shrugged. “Guess it can’t hurt to work some stuff out in full scale, right? Not like anyone else is scheduled to practice on a Sunday afternoon.”
“Right,” she agreed, then dangled the bag of small treats between them. “And I guess afternoon tea in the goalie box or something.” She pivoted back toward Emma’s mom. “Thanks to you and Mr. Woods for making all the goodies. I guess we’re going.”
Levi nodded toward his brother and fiancée. “Teo…Emma.”
“Um…thank you, Lynette,” Haddie said to Emma’s mother, and less than a minute later, Levi and Haddie found themselves on the sidewalk in front of the Woods Family Inn.