Page 41 of The Game

My fingers shook as I held my phone and gazed at the screen. All my carefully kept boundaries were beginning to blur, and I no longer knew what was a game.

Lyssi: Thank you. I texted back.

At nine the next morning he was on the doorstep, shopping bags and cricket bat in hand. He didn't say anything, and neither did I, he just stepped in and went straight for the kettle.

Frozen pizza was his sinful choice of the day. At this point, he transformed from mortal man to God in Sammy's eyes. We’d never had frozen pizza because I knew how full of shit it was. The little guy was so excited he insisted on carrying the boxes back to the car, with the Lion stepping in every so often to grab them as they toppled out of his arms. There was a lot of pizza.

We were finishing lunch and discussing what exercises to put his shoulder through that afternoon when the unexpected happened—a clap of thunder. The little guy shot out of his chair.

"It's just thunder, Sammy." The Lion smiled at him and slid his hundredth slice of pizza towards him. Sammy's eyes stared at the French doors, and the most deafening noise filled the room.

"Bloody hell." I slid down from my stool and sloped over to the door in my flip flops. Ping pong sized balls of hail were smashing against the glass. "Where on earth did this come from?"

"It was forecast, don't you check the weather?" The lion smirked, and I stuck my tongue out at him.

"Playstation." The little guy turned those big browns on me. I could hardly deny him; the poor thing was outside constantly, taking part in one game or another with me.

"An hour max." I wagged my finger at him.

He didn't even bother to say anything, he just grabbed his pizza and ran.

"Food in the kitchen only," I hollered after him, but he didn't venture back out from the den. I turned to the Lion, evaluating him as he sat spinning a biro on the counter top. "If you knew it was going to hail, why did you come over to practice?"

He continued to spin the biro before pinning those startling blues on me. "I didn't have anything else to do."

"What, no mates to hang with?"

Those sandy lashes flickered over his eyes, and he shrugged in answer.

"No girlfriend to see?" Didn't he always have some tall, beautiful woman hanging off his arm?

Another shrug.

"No family?" Bloody hell, this was like Twenty Questions with a brick wall.

This time he shook his head but his eyes glanced to the side, and I decided not to pry.

"So it's just me and you stuck indoors on a rainy day?" I asked.

The blinding smile, so similar to the one splashed on the posters upstairs, lit the room. Wow.

"Do you plan to talk at all during this rainy afternoon?"

Those damn blues flashed up at me. "Why did you pretend to have an injury?"

I straightened my back. "I didn't pretend."

"There is absolutely nothing wrong with your knee, no more than any other sportsman out there," he said, and I narrowed my eyes.

"It hurt." I folded my arms across my chest.

"Ooh, poor baby." He flicked me with his fingers. "Grow a pair, Rivers. Now tell me why you stopped playing."

"You tell me why you quit when you could have treated your shoulder easily?"

Shifting off his stool, he went to the patio door, holding his arm against the door frame above his head and watched the hail as it lessened into torrential rain. "I was getting old."

"What?" I held in a stifled snigger when I saw how tight he was holding his back muscles.