Page 115 of Tasting Fire
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Emmy feltlike a certified stalker as she hid beneath the bleachers watching Cash chat with the Steele Ridge High School’s head football coach. Coach Barrows, who had an old football wedged between his arm and rib cage, was a relatively new addition to the coaching staff. The man Cash had played under—Coach Switzer—had moved on years ago to a bigger school in Asheville, but it appeared there wasn’t anyone in town Cash didn’t know and get along with.
Part of her was still a little unsure of what she’d set in motion here. Probably the way Cash felt when he’d put himself on the line for her.
As men tended to do, Cash and the coach stood on the fifty-yard line for what seemed like a century. Pointing toward this goalpost, the field house, and—oh, crap!—the bleachers near where she was skulking.
Didn’t Coach Barrows remember that he was supposed to hand over a clue instead of having a good-ol’-boy BS session?
She’d give anything to hear what they were going on and on about, but the only way that would’ve been possible was to bug Coach Barrows. She’d had a hard enough time convincing him to take time to do this favor for her.
Just hand it over, Coach.
Finally, after they’d either ironed out a plan to eradicate world hunger, cured the common cold, or outlined the team’s offensive strategy for the next decade, the coach casually transferred the old football from under his arm to his palm.
He did that toss-up-and-spin move that men comfortable with a pigskin instinctively fell into, like a woman might sway with a baby.
The move caught Cash’s attention and his head followed the movement up and down. Up and down.
The third toss, Coach Barrows sent it up, but Cash reached forward to intercept as it came back down. He frowned at the slightly deflated ball. Then he scanned the message on it, and his frown turned into a scowl.
Oh, crap. She’d known she should’ve wrapped it in paper instead of taking a Sharpie directly to what had been one of Cash’s prized possessions back in the day. She taken the guarantee of his love too far.
But when a slow smile transformed his face as he rotated the ball, reading her less than lyrical poem, hope bloomed in her chest. Maybe he was just happy to have it returned to him. After all, it had been sitting in a U-Haul box at her mom’s house for years. After they’d broken up, Emmy had been a coward and kept all the treasures he’d given her.
But maybe it hadn’t been cowardice. Maybe it had been foreshadowing.
Cash tucked the ball under his own arm and reached out to shake Coach Barrows’s hand. The other man strode across the grass toward the field house. Cash stood in the center of the field, turning a full circle, as if remembering the glory days of his high-school football career.
And then, as he walked off the field heading for the gate to the parking lot, he shot a wide grin toward the spot where Emmy was hiding.
In that empty football stadium, Cash had caught a hint of movement under the west-facing bleachers. He’d known it was Emmy. After all, if criminals couldn’t resist visiting the scene of the crime, Emmy wouldn’t be able to resist overseeing her grand plan.
And damn if he wasn’t enjoying this wooing game of hers. When he’d first seen the words written on the football he’d won the final playoff game with his senior year, his heart had taken a hit like a lineman sacking the QB.
But he’d quickly realized he felt a lot like The Rock inThe Game Plan. If you loved a person more than you loved a prized football, it didn’t fucking matter if she bedazzled it.
But man, Emmy sucked as a poet.
A man who made the leap
To lifesaver from championship winner
Be sure to check the sweets
During Sunday dinner
When he’d called to invite Emmy to today’s Kingston potluck and offered to pick her up, she’d insisted on meeting him. After an official apology from the ER director and the hospital’s chairman of the board, she’d been reinstated at the hospital. She was working back-to-back shifts, so she’d been crashing at her mom’s place, which was closer to St. Elizabeth’s, for a few days now.
So with the graffitied football in one hand and a new bacon-studded dish in the other, Cash strolled into his parents’ kitchen alone.
Yeah, he was gonna win this family potluck competition just like he’d done with those Brussels sprouts. It took a friggin’ master to come out victorious with a casserole dish of mini-cabbages.
And in the Southernized words of Bachman Turner Overdrive:Y’all ain’t see nothin’ yet.
One glance at him, and Maggie immediately crossed her arms and stared him down like she might the kingpin of a drug cartel. “What do you have in your hand? You know how the potluck competition works. The winner is supposed to sit out for the next round.”
Cash slid his well-covered platter to the kitchen island and grinned at her even as Jay rubbed her shoulders and leaned down to whisper something into her ear. Thank Jesus his big sister had finally found someone who could talk her down off those high horses she liked to ride like a rodeo queen.
