Page 16 of Playing for Keeps

“Don’t make me cry. Let’s go back to my requirements in a man.” She reaches out a hand and touches my arm with a sincere, kind look, not sympathy, but more like empathy and warmth. Whether she knows it or not, we will be fast friends from now on.

“It goes without saying, but I’ll say it, I want a hunk, but I don’t want complications—”

“I understand completely,” she says. I figure we’re on the same wave length and she knows I don’t want a player—a football player that is—and I hope she knows some hunky non-football players, but then again, I bet she knows everyone of consequence in this town.

“I don’t mean to sound superficial.” I pause. “Okay, I confess, I don’t care if I sound superficial because I want a guy who can turn me on, someone I have chemistry with, someone not boring, a sharp guy. A man with strong opinions. Strong character too. A guy who doesn’t back down, who’s relentless about what he does no matter what. Someone who maybe had to overcome obstacles or struggles in his life, who knows what it’s like to lose something or someone special and survive and thrive.” I stop, wondering if I’ve described my perfect man or the male version of myself. I shrug. It is what it is.

“Wow. Tall order.” She gets a gleam in her eyes. “But I think I can fulfill it. Give me a little time to work on it.”

“Sure.” I’ve waited this long.

The waiter delivers a giant pepperoni pizza and a pitcher of red wine and I know we never ordered. I laugh.

“Grazi,” I say, exhausting my Italian, and the kid smiles and spouts off a whole paragraph of incomprehensible Italian as I nod and laugh. Cat shoos him away as if she knows him.

“The little lech,” she says to me after he disappears behind his counter. I laugh.

We demolish the pizza as if we’re two guys, except we leave a couple of slices that get boxed up and I insist she take them for Hunter. The wine we finish down to the last drop, and I plan on stopping for coffee on my way back to the office as a doze-preventing measure.

When we’re ready to leave after she’s insisted on paying the bill and I insist on leaving an extravagant tip—cementing the young man’s adoration forever—Cat says, “I’ll set up a dinner party in a few weeks—still during preseason—that way there’ll be less pressure with other people around the first time you meet your blind date. Then you can arrange to see him again, just the two of you if you hit it off. Or not.”

“Sounds painless. Possibly fun.”

“Definitely fun,” she says and I wonder if I’ve gotten myself into something difficult.

Of course I have. I always do. The grin pops onto my face of its own accord and I give Cat a big hug before I leave.

I love getting myself in and out of spots. It’s what makes life interesting.

It doesn’t occur to me until I’m in my car halfway back to the office that Fontanna, from what I know of him, has the characteristics I described to Cat. But I’m not sure how that’s possible. He’s the opposite of me, isn’t he? He’s conventional and I’m unconventional. But deep down I know there’s more to him, more similarities to me. We’re both competitive, like challenges. That comes with the territory for any pro athlete. But it’s more. I can sense his disdain for the easy and simple. Of course we’re both hard working or else we wouldn’t have gotten to where we are respectively. And I know, with certainty, that he’s a decent, loyal person. Like me. Fuck.

Gunning the gas pedal out of a stoplight on Tremont Street isn’t smart, but I’m angry. At who, I’m not sure. Or maybe it’s a cover for the small droplets of fear spreading in my gut. Taking a deep breath, I ease my grip on the steering wheel. It doesn’t matter if I might have possibly described Fontanna, because I still don’t know him well enough to be absolutely sure about my assumptions—and I am absolutely sure that he’s a paranoid antagonistic bastard. That’s mostly based on my very first impression of him and the Miss No-Name Reporter crack. Besides, it doesn’t matter, because Cat doesn’t know my hang-up over Fontanna and we agreed she wouldn’t fix me up with a player.

I force the calm through me, and as a result I’m left with an unsettled feeling, like there’s unfinished business, something just out of reach, that I can’t reconcile. Like a disturbing dream that you can’t for the life of you remember in the morning, but it still haunts you all day long.

That’s how I feel about Fontanna. That’s why I’m hoping and counting on Cat to find me someone to rid me of that feeling.

In the meantime, I’m going to dig into some heavy-duty research on him before I return to the stadium for the coach’s post-practice Q&A session.