Page 39 of Fight Or Flight

He turned his attention back to his shoes. “You follow her on Instagram?”

“I do now. Along with about two hundred thousand other people. Did you know she’s mildly famous?”

Ethan paused. Two hundred thousand?

Adam turned the phone back to himself and swiped across the screen. “It surprised me, too, but it’s easy to see why. You should see some of these pictures. They’re amazing.”

Ethan let go of his laces and sat up, then snagged the phone out of his friend’s hands. He did a quick scroll down through her photos. One after the other was Natalie standing in front of some famous landmark. The Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China. Thrown in the mix were a few photos of her biting into incredible-looking food.

And then there was him. In a boring little town that she hated.

He gave the phone back and finished lacing up his cleats.

“Check out the comments on your picture,” Adam said.

“I’d rather not.”

“Fine, I’ll read them aloud.” Adam cleared his throat, then put on the most ridiculous, high-pitched girl voice he could manage. “Damn! Canadian guys are hot!”

Ethan’s brows rose. “Someone wrote that?”

He nodded and continued. “Ooo . . . a boy! You never post photos with boys. Who’s he?”

“That can’t be true.”

“Oh, it is, my friend. I looked,” Adam said, then went back to scrolling through comments.

She’d never posted a photo with a guy before? That seemed impossible. But she did say she never dated . . .

“Look at this one,” Adam said, holding out his phone. “It’s just three fire emojis.”

“What does that mean?”

“They think you’re hot, you knob. What else would it mean? God, you need to get out of your snake pit and start living in the real world. And”—he paused for effect and pointed a finger at Ethan—“you need to get an Instagram account.”

“You clearly don’t understand the difference between a want and a need.”

“I understand the difference, and I stand by what I said.”

With a roll of his eyes, Ethan grabbed his glove and water bottle from his bag, then hooked his bag onto the chain-linkfence next to Adam’s. He tried to walk out of the dugout to the field, but Adam stood in his way.

“So it’s getting serious between you two, I take it?”

“There is no it. I took her to see some waterfalls and lectured her about why she shouldn’t sell to a developer.”

“Wow, you really know how to show ’em a good time, eh? I can’t believe you actually had the day off.”

“I . . . had to switch something around. It was nothing.”

A smug smile pulled at Adam’s face. “One thing?”

Ethan nodded. It was actually three appointments and lunch with a colleague, but he wasn’t about to volunteer that information.

“It looks like you two had fun,” he said, fishing for more information.

“It was fine, other than Michael Bublé.”

Adam’s brows rose. “Bublé? You guys spent the day looking at waterfalls and listening to Bublé?”

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