Page 45 of Base Block

“Back then? You’re beautiful now, too,” he told me. “I get so much shit about you.”

“I know,” I said, nodding. “You’re always having to tell them to shut up because they make fun of me.”

“Rainey, no.” He laughed. “They make fun of me. They want to know what a Denisovan is doing with a girl like you.” He lay back, resting on my pillow.

“They only called you that because of your phone,” I immediately said. “You don’t resemble one of those guys, not at all.” I had also looked them up and it definitely wasn’t a flattering comparison.

“Still, you look like a million bucks at all times, and I’m the guy with the bad beard,” he said, smiling. “They think I must have some kind of magical powers, because you were around before I made it to the big time and had some money.”

“Tell them that it’s your…you know. Tell them that I’m enthralled by it.”

He laughed again. “How about if I just tell them to shut the hell up? And by the way, you can’t say the word ‘penis?’”

I joined him on my mattress. “That was an issue today. Heidi was feeling sick to her stomach and she wasn’t ready to hear anatomical terms, but Anara had a lot to tell us about her sex life.” I shared just a little bit.

“She said all that? Hell, it’s more than I’ve ever heard in a locker room,” he said. He sounded impressed. “It’s an open secret that Demitrious is going to ask her to marry him when the season’s over. He wants to go somewhere nice, like an island in the Caribbean, and do it on a beach. I told him not to drop the ring in the sand because that would be a pain in the ass to find.”

“That’s romantic,” I said. “I used to want to go to a tropical beach like that.” Damian had promised Hawaii, but that was very, very far away now that I was in Michigan. There were beautiful beaches here but even this summer, the water had not felt very tropical. It was more like an ice bath.

“Are you interested in romance?”

I lay down next to him. “What’s your idea of that?”

“I don’t know,” he said. It sounded as if he was considering it. “I like when I come home and the house smells good, there’s food to eat, and you don’t call me names.”

“That is nice,” I said. “I like that, too.” I reached over and picked up my phone. “It’s really late.”

“I’ll go in a minute. I think your bed is more comfortable than mine,” he told me.

I didn’t think that was true but I didn’t mind him being here with me. It was nice how the mattress dipped down and rolled me toward him, and it was even nicer when he put his arm around me and pulled me closer, so that my cheek could rest on his big chest. Now, this was romance. I didn’t need a ring on a tropical beach, although I was excited about that for Anara. She probably knew all about the tiny animals that lived in the sand and Demitrious probably liked to learn from her.

I could tell when Callum fell asleep, because he stopped moving around and his breath got slower and deeper. I didn’t feel like waking him, especially when he’d said that my bed was more comfortable and I knew that he really needed the rest. The season was grueling and if there were going to be more cuts from the roster—well, he had to be at the top of his game.

I wasn’t looking at my phone so I didn’t know how much time had passed when I heard the barking outside. It wasn’t unusual, because this complex was pet friendly. It must have been because I’d just been talking about my aunt’s hell hound that I imagined that it was close.

I snuggled up to Callum and got rewarded when his arm around me tightened, holding me securely. This was just right, I decided. This was what I wanted and it was more than enough. I hadn’t ever expected to get to be with someone like this, a guy who treated me so well and didn’t expect anything in return except that I would treat him well, too. He was happy when he walked into our condo and I didn’t fling insults at him. He didn’t care that the dishwasher was broken again, either.

But was this all I wanted from myself? The dog barked closer, like it was near our front door. It was loud enough that it woke Callum, who jumped in his sleep and then said, “Rainey?”

“It’s noise outside,” I told him. “Go back to sleep.”

He sighed, and he did. But I kept thinking for a while, about jumping to the next guy, about college, and about Aunt Simone’s dog and what it had done to the helpless sheep.

The next day, just as I was about to leave for work, I got a text from him. He had woken up late because he’d left his phone with the alarm in the living room, so we’d both been running around frantically to get him to the stadium on time. “Thank you for shoving my ass out the door,” he wrote. “Sorry about last night. It must have been hard to sleep with me taking up all the room.”

Not at all. It had been wonderful, up until I had opened my eyes and had realized that the sun was brighter than it should have been, and that he should have already been gone.

“I’ll have dinner here so I’ll be home later than usual,” he texted. “Also, can you keep that thing about Demitrious and his girl to yourself? It really is supposed to be a secret even though he told everyone on the team.”

“I won’t mention it to her,” I promised. “I’m heading to my office now and I’ll see you later.”

“Let me know when you get there,” he suggested. Beau Gowan was out of town, on another shopping trip. He hadn’t really wanted to go because it meant changing around the custody arrangement with Victoria and missing his time with their son. He was as crazy about their little boy as she was.

When I stepped out of our front door, I looked around carefully for the dog that we’d heard the night before. There was no sign of it so I walked (alertly) to the rental car. It was cold this morning, making me glad about the sweater I’d bought and making me think that I would have to get a real coat pretty soon. That had been a good thing about Los Angeles: I had never needed a lot of outerwear because it never got too chilly. Although, when the temperature dropped below seventy, most people there started to bundle up.

“Hey, Rainey,” the building manager called. He came out of his office at the edge of the parking lot. “How are you doing? You look pretty today.”

“Thank you,” I said as I kept going. I didn’t want to be late even if Beau wouldn’t be in.