Chapter Eight
April was still several yards away from the open meadow in Armstrong Park when she heard the sounds of the flag football game in progress. She came upon the couple dozen men scampering around the grounds and had to take a minute to collect her senses.
They were shirtless. All of them.
She didn’t think she had a thing for sweaty, shirtless men running around trying to grab a flag from each other’s back pocket, but apparently she did.
She spotted Damien among the pack of players and instantly the others ceased to exist. There had never been a doubt that she had a thing for this particular man. She’d always had a thing for him.
And yesterday he’d kissed her.
April waited for the tingles she knew would travel across her skin at the thought of the kiss she and Damien had shared.
Those tingles had popped up so often since last night.
She craved them. Relished them. Because they signaled a change in their relationship.
The change she’d spent more than half her life hoping and wishing would happen.
April took a seat underneath a tree, just to the right of the lighted archway at the park’s entrance.
She put all thoughts of yesterday’s kiss out of her head and just allowed herself to enjoy today.
As she observed Damien playing, she remembered how much she used to enjoy watching him on the field back when they were in high school.
Even though she’d never been much of a football fan, Damien made her appreciate the sport, simply because of what it had meant to him.
Football had been Damien’s way out of his old life.
April didn’t want to think about what could have happened to him if he had not had the sport as an outlet.
He’d been smart, but he hadn’t started applying himself early enough in school to get an academic scholarship.
Football had been his ticket to his college education and eventually to a graduate degree.
Without this sport, Damien could have very well gotten caught up in these streets, becoming another statistic.
She shivered at the thought of that happening.
It was what she and her colleagues at A Fresh Start were trying to prevent with the boys who attended the program. She wanted them to all beat the odds the way Damien had.
April stopped short. She slapped a palm to her forehead, blown away by her own lack of vision.
“Why didn’t you think of this before?” she said.
Football. That was what those boys needed. It could be the same outlet for them as it had been for Damien.
“Now to convince him to teach them,” April murmured.
Once the flag football game ended, Damien and the rest of the guys on the field lined up to give each other handshakes. Once he reached the end of the line he jogged over to a patch of grass where all their shirts lay, picked up a pewter T-shirt and pulled it over his head.
Her body mourned a little over the loss of all that beautiful naked flesh.
He came up to her, a smile on his face.
“I thought I was meeting you at your place?” he said.
“I was thinking that we could discuss your classes over lunch,” April said. “There’s this great little Asian fusion place a few blocks from here. It’ll be my treat.”
“No way.” He shook his head. “I let you get by with buying that cinnamon roll the other day, but you don’t get to pay for my lunch. Ever. Consider it payback for all those times you used to do it back when we did homework together.”
She rolled her eyes, but a part of her liked that he still remembered what she did for him back in those days.
Once his dad was killed, things became even harder for his family, financially.
It wasn’t as if her family was well-off by any stretch of the imagination, but both her parents had well-paying jobs.
It turned into a weird kind of game for her, figuring out the best way to pay for Damien’s meals without him seeing it as charity.
He’d always been so damn proud, but he couldn’t hide his circumstances from her.
Yet, look at him now. She was in complete awe of the man he’d become. He truly was the best kind of role model for her kids at A Fresh Start.
“I was thinking,” she said. “We have about thirty young boys who attend A Fresh Start, and while I’ve been able to convince some of them to take my music classes and Nicole has even gotten them into dance—although I think that’s because they have a crush on her and want to see her in tights—there’s still something missing when it comes to recreational activities. ”
Damien’s eyes narrowed into slits. “What are you going for?”
She ignored his question and tried another angle. “Would you say that football helped to shape you into the man you are today?”
“Of course,” Damien said. “Teaches discipline, responsibility, teamwork—” He cut himself off. “I know what you’re getting at,” he said. “Forget it, April.”
“But just think of how beneficial this would be to those young boys,” she said. “Not all of them will get to play on a high school or college team, but there are lessons they can learn through football that will help them throughout their lives.”
“I can’t believe you’re pulling this on me,” he said. He shook his head. “Give them an inch and they take a yard. My mom used to say that all the time. Now I understand what she meant.”
April persisted. “It would be one extra hour a week.”
“An extra yard,” he countered.
“Would it help if I said please?”
His head went back with a laugh. “I’ll think about it. For now, why don’t we work on the project that you’ve already roped me into doing. I took a few minutes between meetings yesterday to capture notes in my phone. I have some ideas for the upcoming money management classes.”
As they walked toward the entrance of the park, they had to walk across the running path. They waited for two women who were jogging to pass, but one of the women abruptly stopped and turned.
“Damien?” the woman yelped. She jogged over to them and threw her arms around Damien’s neck.
April would have been more mindful of slinging her sweat on someone if she’d been jogging, but she guessed it didn’t make much difference since Damien was just as sweaty from his flag football game.
Great. She was being forced to witness two beautiful, sweaty people hugging in the middle of a park.
“Eva,” Damien said. “It’s been a long time. How have you been?”
“I’ve been okay, Mr. Top Ten Bachelor,” she said with a pretty laugh.
April immediately hated that laugh.
Damien chuckled. “Please, don’t bring that up.”
They chatted for several moments about Damien’s inclusion in the Get to Know NOLA list before he finally remembered April was standing with him.
“I’m sorry,” Damien said. “Eva, this is world-renowned cellist April Knight. She and I went to high school together. April, meet Eva Gutierrez. We, uh...”
“We had a different kind of...ah...schooling,” Eva said, her rich laugh saturating the air around them.
April wanted to shove a finger down her throat and make a gagging motion, but that would be juvenile. Maybe choking to death would have been a better option. At least she wouldn’t have to stand around in the midst of the awkwardness that suddenly surrounded them.
“I should let you get back to your run,” Damien said.
Eva nodded. “It was good seeing you again. You should call me sometime. My number hasn’t changed.” She winked and then returned the earbuds to her too perfect ears and resumed jogging, her too perfect ass looking way too perfect in her spandex running shorts.
Damien hooked a thumb in the jogger’s direction. “That was, uh—”
“Eva,” she said, helping him out.
“Yeah. We, umm...we dated a while back. Well, not really dated.”
April put a hand up. “No explanation necessary.” Please. The one thing she did not want to hear about was his relationship with the brunette goddess with killer legs.
As uncomfortable as that was to witness, April was actually happy that it happened. After their kiss yesterday she’d allowed herself to get so caught up in the fantasy that had played in her head so often that she’d stepped too far out of reality.
She was no Eva. And despite what Damien said last night after their kiss, Eva was the kind of woman he was used to having on his arm.
April couldn’t allow herself to forget that. Damien had always been out of her league. Just because she’d shed the Coke-bottle glasses and baby fat of her youth, it didn’t mean she fit into his world.
What happened with the perfect Ms. Gutierrez a few minutes ago was the perfect reminder to proceed with caution where Damien was concerned.
Yesterday’s kiss may have marked a new era in their relationship, but she needed to take things slowly.
The potential for heartbreak was too great, and leaving herself exposed would be foolish.
And if there was one thing that was certain, it was that she was no fool.
* * *
“You definitely need an entire session on filing for financial aid, maybe two,” April said.
“We have a number of kids who never even considered college when they started with us, but now it’s on their radar.
Maybe we can set up a projector and you can take them step-by-step through the FAFSA application. ”
Damien stared at April as she sat across the table from him, several yellow legal tablets, colorful sticky notes and pencils laid out between them.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
He tapped a pencil on the tabletop, continuing to study her.
The change between the woman pre-Eva and post-Eva had been pretty dramatic.
Where she’d been lighthearted, even playful before, she was now all about business.
She had not stopped talking about his upcoming lessons for the kids at A Fresh Start since they sat down.
She barely gave him a chance to speak, as if she knew Damien would bring it up.
And he would.
He couldn’t sit here while a five-minute encounter with an ex-girlfriend threatened the progress he’d made with last night’s kiss.