religion is.”
“He might care that you lied to him.”
She was silent for a moment. I hoped she was rethinking it, developing at least a temporary conscience, and would tell this guy the truth.
“ If it keeps going well,” she said, “I could always secretly convert.”
I swiped the screen on my iPad, then opened the browser. “Good strategy.”
“Are you multi-tasking ?”
“What?”
“I hear clicking,” she said. “You’re typing on your iPad.”
She was right. I was listening to her, but I was also typing Sam’s name into Google.
“I’m listening. I was just looking up something. Get this…”
I told her about Sam, how I knew him, how we’d run into each other in the airport all these years later, the definite flirting he was doing…
“But he didn’t recognize you?”
“Nope. Am I that forgettable?”
Rachel ran through the reasons it was understandable that Sam hadn’t remembered me—all the ones I had told myself—the weight loss, longer hair, no more glasses.
“Did he flirt with you back then at Barneys?”
The first search results popped up on my screen. Sam had a Wikipedia page.
“No,” I said. “He was married and talked about her all the time. No flirting.”
“Tell me his last name again? I want to see this guy.”
I told her his full name as I skimmed his Wiki page. He was indeed divorced from his wife, Sandra, but there were no details about it. Almost a year and a half before the divorce, Sam had sustained a career-ending injury during a game. That was three years ago. Since that time, he’d been working in broadcasting, providing analysis for Major League Baseball on ESPN.
“Holy hell. Hello , Mr. Poole,” Rachel said.
“Cute, huh?”
“Cute?” Rachel let out a heavy sigh. “That’s not cute. That’s hot. That’s take-me-to-bed-and-never-leave hot .”
We were both silent for a moment, reading through Sam’s bio. There was a lot in there about his achievements on the field, none of which made much sense to me, other than the fact that it was pretty obvious he was a big deal: twice he’d been named to the All-Star team, and in the season in which he sustained his injury, he was a top candidate for Most Valuable Player in all of baseball.
Rachel finally broke the silence. “I don’t get most of this, but it sounds like it really sucked for him.”
“That’s putting it mildly.”
“Oh well, too bad you missed out on this guy. Then you wouldn’t be…”
That was Rachel’s way of raising the subject of Ian. She’d done this from the first time she met him. She later told me she got a really bad vibe from him, even just having met him twice, and her reaction got even stronger as I kept her updated on our relationship. But lately, it was becoming a topic she wanted to revisit nearly every time we talked.
“Oh, God,” I said, closing the browser and clearing Sam from my screen. “I can’t even think about that right now.”
“You’re going to talk to Ian when you get back, though, right? Like you said?”
“Definitely.”
Later, as I was drifting off to sleep with the baseball game still on the TV, the camera cut to the announcers. I thought I had noticed something about Sam earlier, and had been waiting to see him again to double check.
The suit he was wearing looked just like one I’d sold him years ago.
. . . . .
My phone rang at 6 a.m. I fumbled around the nightstand to grab it, looked at the screen, and wasn’t surprised to see who it was.
“ Wake-up call.” Ian sounded like he’d been up for a while, and he probably had. It wasn’t unusual for him to get up before five, work out, shower, and be ready to start his workday by seven. It was one of the things I had never gotten used to. I preferred to sleep in as long as I could.
“Hey,” I mumbled.
“That voice. I love hearing it in the morning. I miss you, Sweet.”
I heard a knock at the door and sat up quickly.
I groaned. “Who the hell could
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