Page 95 of Sure Shot
Not you, too!After I let out a groan, though, I realize I need to talk to Dave. So I tap on his name and return his call.
“Hey, Bessie!” he says after picking up on the first ring. “How’s business? Do you think my boys are ready?”
“I’m sure they are. But don’t ask, okay? There are eighty-two games this season, but everyone is wound a little too tightly about this one.”
“But how is practice going?” he asks.
“Great,” I promise him. “There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about, though.”
“Yeah? Do you have some intel on the Dallas injuries?”
“No, blockhead. It’s not about hockey.”
“Oh,” he says, and I can hear him wondering what could possibly matter more than hockey. “What, then?”
I take a deep breath and then let it out. “I’m dating someone.”
“Dating someone,” he echoes. And then he’s silent for a moment. “Nice. Can I meet him? I promise not to punch whoever it is. But I might need to threaten him just a little bit, so he understands that I’m lethal if he’s not good to you.”
That’s more or less what I expected him to say, so I let out an uncomfortable chuckle. “It’s possible you punched him already at least once.”
“What?” Dave yelps. There’s a brief silence, and I can practically hear him doing the math. “You arenotdating a hockey player. You can’t mean that. I haven’t really punched anyone, except Robbie Oswald in the fourth grade.”
“It’s not Robbie Oswald,” I say with a sigh. “Dave, I’m dating a perfectly nice hockey player here in Brooklyn.”
Dave actually moans. “I have to kill one of myteammates?”
“You don’t have to kill anyone. And he was never your teammate. It’s Mark Tankiewicz. The trade from—”
“Dallas?” Dave’s horror practically radiates through the phone. “Bess, nooooo.”
I sigh. This is exactly why I haven’t ever gotten around to telling him about Tank. Dave has a very fierce Big Brother Mode. When it kicks in, we’re eleven and fourteen again. I know Dave can’t really help his reaction. And Big Brother Mode saved my life at one point so I try not to get too irritated.
It doesn’t always work.
“You don’t know Tank,” I say as gently as I can. “But I’ve known him for almost ten years. We were briefly together when I worked for Henry Kassman.”
“How nice a guy could he be?” Dave grunts. “He’s from Dallas.”
“He’s from Washington state,” I correct. “By way of Dallas. And cut it out, because I like him very much. Also? I’m thirty years old. You don’t get a say.”
Dave falls into an unhappy silence, which means I can hear Zara in the background. “Are you getting on Bess’s case? Let me talk to her.”
“Tell Zara I’ll call her tonight,” I say, because I’m crossing under the Manhattan bridge, and both the post office and Brooklyn’s best cookie shop are in view. “I have a meeting in five minutes.”
“That’s why you dropped this bomb right now!” Dave says. “Because you have a meeting in five minutes.”
“Seems like a pretty good decision,” I say drily. “The only acceptable response to me telling you that I’m happy is for you to say, ‘That’s great, and I can’t wait to meet him.’”
Dave sighs. “That’s great,” he says woodenly. “I can’t wait to meet him.”
I laugh out loud. “Nice try. Maybe practice it in a mirror. Later, big brother.”
“Later. I love you,” he says, his voice sullen.
“Back at you.” I disconnect the call and shake my head. I run into the post office and drop off my express-mail envelope, and then hurry over to the coffee shop where the company is not quite so judgmental.
The moment I walk in the door, Becca beckons me toward a table in the corner. After I sit down, she says, “Bess, thank you for coming. I am taking on a big project, and I am going to need some of your wisdom.”
