Page 74

My phone starts to ring just as we’re sitting down to dinner, and when I see it’s my sister calling, I send it to voicemail. I’ll ring her back later. Right now, Travis and Harper are my priority.

Travis shows off the pictures he took today when he toured the house, and Harper immediately decides which bedroom will be hers—the one that happens to be furthest from the master suite, surprisingly, but it’s also the largest of all the rooms.

I can’t help but wonder whether she’ll stay in her room at the new place or end up in Travis’s bed every night.

I know I want to end up in Travis’s bed, but obviously for very different reasons.

Harper heads up to the shower after dinner, and I listen to the voicemail my sister left while Travis starts clearing the table.

“Hey Tor, it’s me. I was wondering if you could bring your new boyfriend to dinner at Mom and Dad’s on Sunday. We’d like to meet him and, you know…confirm it’s legit before we feel comfortable having you bring him along to our wedding. Anyway, call me back. Bye.”

I blow out a breath as I stare out Travis’s patio door.

“Everything okay?” he asks. I watch his reflection in the glass as he walks over toward me. He stops just short of me and rests a hand around the back of my neck.

I lock eyes with him in the reflection of the glass. “My sister apparently wants proof we’re together, so she basically demanded I bring you to dinner at my parents’ house Sunday night.”

He jumps right in. “I’m down. Can I bring Harper?”

“God, this is all just…a lot. I normally don’t introduce the men I’m seeing to my parents until we’ve been together longer than a few days.”

“Excluding the ex, right?” he points out. “Since he’s friends with your sister’s fiancé.”

“Yeah,” I murmur, surprised he remembered that. Surprised he listened. Surprised about everything, I guess.

“If it’s too much, I’ll see if Harper can have dinner at Bella’s on Sunday.”

I nod. “I think it might be better to introduce you one at a time, you know?”

“I get that. But I also think they’ll like me better if she’s there.”

I laugh, and I turn around to face him. “Yeah, you’re probably right about that.”

He chuckles good-naturedly. “What time?”

“They usually eat around six, so five-ish until…seven or eight?” I guess.

He pulls his phone out. “Text Evan. Would you mind watching Harper on Sunday from around five until nine?” He presses a button, and I watch with a bit of curiosity that he’d voice such a simple text message rather than type it out.

“Do you always voice text?” I ask. I walk over to the table and grab another dish, and he heads back to the sink to finish cleaning up.

“Yeah. It’s just faster than me fumbling with fat thumbs to draft a text.”

I get the feeling there’s more to it than that, but I don’t press. Instead, we quietly work together on the dishes as we clean up from dinner.

“Hey, you’re a teacher. What sorts of memory tricks do you have?” he asks.

“For what?”

He hands me the clean but wet pot I used for the noodles, and I dry it.

“I don’t know how much you follow football, if at all, but we just got a new offensive coordinator who decided to fuck up my world with an entirely new playbook,” he says.

“Swear jar!” Harper yells gleefully as she pads back into the room in her pajamas.

“Are you saving up for something?” I ask.

She nods. “I want a dog.”

Travis grunts, and Harper rolls her eyes.

“Also, Jasmine in my class has the most amazing case for her iPad and I need one.”

I giggle as I walk over and help her brush out her wet hair. “Yes, I can help,” I say to Travis. “But first, we need to read with Harps.”

Harper makes a face at me, but I stand my ground. “Go pick out a book.”

She does, and then I sit on the couch with the book. Harper sits on my right, and once Travis is done in the kitchen, he sits on my left.

And then we read.

We sing to Harper together and get her down to bed, and I can see this easily becoming our nightly routine. The only strange part is that I’ll retire to my own little apartment rather than heading up to bed with Travis.

I’m trying to emotionally and mentally prepare myself for that.

Once we get her down and we’re back downstairs, I debate what to do. I should go. I can’t spend the night here again, not with Harper home—as much as I want to.

But just as I’m about to tell him I’ll head out, he says, “So you said you could help me with the playbook?”

I nod. “Can you show it to me?”

He grabs a tablet, and I sit on the couch. He settles in beside me, just a smidge closer than he did when we were sitting with Harper. My brain tells me it’s because he’s showing me his playbook, but that ache between my thighs claims it’s because he wants to be close to me…and I want him close, too.

Before he unlocks the screen, he looks at me. “I need you to promise me nobody will learn the contents of what’s in here. It’s locked under an NDA, and it would be bad for both me and for you if word got out you knew what was in here. Even worse if you shared the specific plays with anybody. Understand?”

I nod solemnly, though the threat is a little terrifying.

He flips to the first page and hands me the tablet. I glance through it. It talks about a huddle and some code words that he’ll need to know, and there’s a whole ton of information I don’t understand at all. I’m not quite sure how I’m going to help him memorize this when I don’t even know what I’m looking at, but I realize as long as he knows what he’s looking at, that’s all that matters.

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem since I have no idea what any of this means.”

He chuckles as I flip to the next page and the next, and then I get to the plays.

It’s basically filled with letters that are circled with a bunch of lines and arrows showing the route they’ll need to take when a certain play is called by the quarterback.

I keep flipping. “How many of these are there?”

He shrugs. “I haven’t looked through the entire thing yet, but there are usually around a hundred receivers need to know, anywhere from twenty to thirty that we’ll use in any given game during the season. But the more familiar I am with them now, the easier it’ll be when the QB calls the play on the field. You don’t ever want to be the guy scrambling because he doesn’t know where the fuck to run, you know?”

I nod. “So how does the quarterback call the play?”

“Unless our new guy changes things, it’s been formation, motion, o-line protection, route, and snap count.”

“What’s an o-line?” I ask.

“Oh, Jesus. You have a lot to learn if you’re going to teach me.”

I laugh. “I don’t need to know this. You do, and if you know what all these squiggles mean, I can help you memorize them.”

“How?” he challenges.

“Well, the first is repetition. You review it over and over and over, and the more times you review it, the more you’ll remember it. It especially helps to visualize it.”

He sighs. “Yeah, I’ve been trying that with the first few, but it doesn’t always stick.”

“Have you ever heard of a memory palace?”

His brows draw together and he shakes his head.

“Our brains remember things based on spatial recognition, sort of like locations. A memory palace is you creating a map in your own mind and locking away the things you need to know in there so you can visit your palace and pull them out when you need them. Does that make sense?” I glance away from the playbook and over at him.

He stares at me blankly.

“Okay, so it’s like this. Picture a place. Maybe your new house. Each room has four or five items in it, so when you think of, say, the kitchen table, you’ll associate that with this play here.” I point to the playbook. “The Willie. Then you memorize what The Willie is and picture the kitchen table, and suddenly you have an association in your brain so when the quarterback mentions The Willie, you know what to do.”

“I can get on board with that,” he says.

“So choose your map. What do you want to picture when you’re learning these plays?”

He answers without hesitation. “Your body.”

I purse my lips and roll my eyes. “Be serious.”

“I am. You said choose my map, and I choose your body. The Willie might be this spot right here,” he says, and he nips a small kiss to my neck.

I shiver a little. “Start that and we won’t be getting any memorizing done,” I warn.

He chuckles. “Then we save it for another day.” His voice is low and close to my ear, and then his tongue darts out to taste the skin of my neck.

I lean into him a little—totally involuntarily.

I clear my throat. “No rewards until we have the first three memorized.”

He huffs out a sigh but leans away from me. “Fine.”

We get to work, and I definitely think I’m going to enjoy helping him memorize his new playbook—even though I have no idea what the hell any of it means.