Page 50 of Summer Affair
Jillian’s entire body felt one giant zing of awareness. “Are you asking me out on a date?”
“Depends. Are you saying yes?”
“That’s not how it works,” she teased. “You don’t get to know the ending before you ask. It’s like a football game. You go into it not knowing the outcome.”
“Oh, when I go into a game, I have a plan, and the outcome is we win.”
Jillian laughed at him, but his expression was dead serious. “Okay, then do you have a plan?”
He let loose one of those smiles that always kicked her heart into hyperdrive. “Oh, I have a plan all right. I even have a sitter lined up in case you say yes.” He lowered his voice even more. “All you have to do is say yes.”
His gaze was soldered to her mouth. She couldn’t scold him since she’d caught herself ogling at him at least ten times in their five-minute conversation. She nodded.
“Is that a yes?”
“I won’t be home until two-ish.”
“Then I guess we’ll leave at three.”
One of the coaches from another team blew a whistle in the background, breaking their spell. “We’d better get to coaching,” he said.
“Actually, you’d better get to coaching. I’ll be watching from the sidelines since I need to be taught as much as the kids do.”
“I’ll make it my personal mission to teach you everything about the sport. Especially the contact part.”
Chapter Fifteen
Resolutions from Jillian’s Journal
Listen to yourheartgut.
“Dating is like having an orgasm, you have to be proactive.” Jillian recited what Dr.Claire had said in that week’s podcast.
“If you’re thinking that hard, you’re with the wrong man,” Darcy said.
Darcy was dressed in a knee-high, vintage black dress and to-die-for sparkly silver heels, with her hair pulled up into a feminine twist at the back of her head. Her makeup was flawless, her vibe professional whimsy—like Cinderella collided with Cupid, making her the perfect wedding planner.
Jillian had to agree because with the right man one could have an orgasm without even being in the same room.
“I spent eight years without having a single man-made orgasm,” she admitted. “I know all the signs of the wrong man. Like how Dirk is hemming and hawing over coming to the Parent/Frog football game at the end of the month.”
“I thought he got back from his trip next week,” Darcy said.
“Oh, he does. But he said with their busy summer schedule, he can’t quite commit to that date. He has to ‘check his calendar,’” Jillian put up some seriously pissed off air quotes.
“What kind of father does that?” Darcy asked.
“A lot of dads,” Piper said, and Jillian felt awful for even bringing it up. Her problems were trivial to what Piper had gone through.
After years of living in an abusive and unsafe environment, Piper and a friend had run away. At fifteen, they’d managed to make it all the way from Atlanta to Portland on their own. Shortly after arriving, Piper’s friend died of an overdose, leaving Piper alone on the street with no one to look out for her.
As for Darcy, after her ex died in a car accident, she was left to raise her daughter alone. No support, no backup plan, and her ex-fiancé’s family—the Eastons—blamed her for how everything had gone down. Oh, they’d come around and apologized profusely when the truth came out about Kyle’s cheating ways, but some things leave lasting scars.
Jillian might have had an absent father and dick of an ex, but her problems didn’t even compare.
“I can’t imagine Dirk is the only worthless dad. Can’t you play in his place?”
“I’ve already signed up as Sammy’s plus one. But even after a week of practice with one of the top players in the world, I still don’t understand the game. At all. And I can’t throw a football straight to save my life. Plus”—and this was a very big plus—“Sammy asked Clay to be his plus one.”
