“Are you still?”
“What?”
“Afraid of getting water in your eyes.”
“No. I’ve successfully conquered that fear. But the tennis pro thing, did you seriously spend summers learning better tennis swings? Did it help you get girls or were you that good at tennis or what?”
“My grandparents thought it would help me be more well-rounded. I wasn’t athletic as a child. I’d already proven that downhill skiing was not going to be in my skillset. I owed it to them to master a sport. Eventually, I gave up tennis to refine my golf swing.”
“Golf is a lot like taxes: You go for the green and wind up in the hole.”
He laughed. “I love how you make me laugh.”
“Good. I was hoping it wasn’t driving a wedge between us.”
He laughed again. “I love a good golf pun.”
“Do you love golf though?”
“It’s okay. Fair. However, deals are made on golf courses, as cliché as that sounds, and on tennis courts sometimes as well. These were necessary lessons for a boy with a future in his grandfather’s company. I’d be a liability if I couldn’t acquit myself well in such things. I also played doubles squash during the winter season at Exeter, and we went to state my final year.”
“Is squash like cricket?”
“No. Why?”
“I mean, isn’t it just a rich boy sport for people who want to pretend they’re British?”
“No! Squash is like racquetball, but with smaller balls and bigger racquets.”
“Smaller balls? I mean, you’re not supposed to brag about that part,” she snorted.
Luke playfully rolled his eyes, “Cricket is a ball and bat game with the wicket. Team sport. Totally different from squash.”
“But still pretentious and it exists only because you don’t get a lot of polo teams and rugby pitches in the US. Right?”
“There’s polo in the US.”
“The horse kind, not the water kind,” Paige said. “Like in Pretty Woman.”
“Clearly that was set in California, illustrating my point that polo is, in fact, played regularly in the United States.”
“No way. That proves nothing. It’s just a movie.”
“I agree that it’s fictional, and not terribly realistic, but there are, in fact, rich white people in California who play polo as depicted in that movie, silly as it is.”
“Shut. Up.”
“I beg your pardon!” he said.
She squeezed his hand. “That’s a great movie. It isn’t silly. It’s beautiful. Just like Julia Roberts. Her kindness and honesty prove she’s worthy of a modern-day prince.”
“Did I miss the part where the rich asshole who picked up a hooker was too good for her? The man was twice her age and was paying her for sex. How is that supposed to be romantic?”
“Because it was more than that! It’s a very deep story. You obviously didn’t get it,” she said, flipping through the program, “You need to watch it again. Pay attention to the fact that she was poor and entered the sex trade to survive. He gives her a chance to see the possibility of a different life and is willing to give her up and give her the means to start over.”
“That’s a travesty. The film I saw by that name had no trace of noble sacrifice on his part. He boned a twenty-two-year-old, let his creeper friend grope her, and then paid her off. It wasn’t like he made speeches about wanting her to reach her potential or have a secure existence—I cannot think why an adult woman would find that scenario romantic.”
“You lack imagination. It’s a Cinderella story. I love those.”