I’m not gonna lie, I was hard. That’s all it took with Evie. Jumping in the pool, running away from her chicken, lying on my couch with a cushion over her face while I helped pull a large splinter out of her crotch.
Even bending into her trunk to get her groceries, leaning into her fridge to get milk out for my coffee, smiling at me as she walked to her front door, the wave she gave me every morning as she left for work—it all made me hard, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“Why don’t you ask her out?” DB asked, snapping me out of my inner musings.
“Who?”
“Evie. She’s a lovely lady, and her kid’s pretty cool. She’s stable, you like her—”
Flicking my eyes from Evie to DB, I frowned at him. “I like her? As you just said, she’s a nice lady.”
Rubbing his lips together, my son looked at me with the look I used to give him when he was trying to lie his way out of something.
“Bull. Shit. We’re not talking about you liking her because she’s nice. We’re doing it because you have a soft spot for her, and you haven’t dated since the shit with Luli. Ask Evie out, see where it goes.”
Just the mention of my ex made me grind my teeth. Yeah, it’d been a case I’d been involved in, but even then, it was enough to put a man off relationships for life.
“Dave,” Tabby squealed, having noticed her husband watching her. “Can you go home and get me a sports bra? I’ve got one of them stuffed at the back of the drawer with the clothes I never wear in it.”
Both of us burst out laughing at her description of where it was.
“If you never wear it, why do you have it, fireball?”
“In case I do something that requires it. Like trampolining.”
“I don’t own one. I’ve got something that’s like it, but it’s not as brutal as the sports ones,” Evie said, trying to catch her breath. “I’ll bet a man invented them.”
I couldn’t help it, I had to know. “What’s wrong with sports bras?”
Evie narrowed her eyes as she looked at me. “Do you wear boxers or those jersey jockey shorts that hold everything tightly in place?”
“The latter.”
“Okay,” she said as she took a seat on the trampoline, not at all worried about the two women still bouncing on it.
“Picture going for a long run on uneven ground with boxers on that are two sizes too big. Nothing gets held in place, so your junk just bounces around. By the time you finish running two hours later, it’s going to be sore, right?”
“Jesus,” DB hissed. “Even picturing it’s painful.”
“No shit,” I mumbled. “Okay, I understand that.”
Nodding once, she continued. “Now, picture wearing an old pair of your jersey shorts, but the elastic’s been stretched, and the fabric’s worn away. Because it’s closer to your balls, it holds them in place better than the boxer shorts do. But, after two hours of running, you’d still be in pain. Correct?”
DB made a choking noise beside me, but I didn’t look away from her. “More than likely.”
“Finally, imagine you’re wearing the best jockey shorts available. They’re designed to hold you in place, so there’s no bouncing—”
“A proper banana and ball hammock,” one of her friends, who I recognized from when I’d passed her salon, added.
“After two hours running in those, you’d just be working off the burn in your muscles instead of wondering if you’ve given yourself a traumatic ball injury,” Evie pointed out. “But, imagine if they were two sizes too small, so they packed your junk tightly against your body.”
“You’d have a moose knuckle,” Tabby chuckled, then snorted as the others burst out laughing with her.
Unfortunately, moose knuckles weren’t a laughing matter for a man, so the two of us winced and wiggled our legs for reassurance our balls and dicks were okay.
“Exactly, because they’re that super tight. That’s what a sports bra’s like for a woman. They press hard against your boobs and try and merge them with your lungs,” Evie explained.
“You’re chucking that damn thing out when we get home, fireball,” DB growled. “What kind of bullshit is that? Why do they make them so tight?”
“For support, honey,” Tabby said slowly. “You can get the wrong size ones that just make you bounce all over the place, like boxers would for a man, but most of them are designed to press tightly against you to prevent that from happening.”
“They’re evil,” Evie muttered. “But I’ve got normal bras that work better than the one I’m wearing just now if I need total control over my blouse bunnies, so I don’t have to wear a sports bra.”
Then, almost like the conversation had never happened, all four women started bouncing around again. Granted, Evie was still sitting, laughing her ass off as she moved around the trampoline while the other three women bounced in sync with each other, but still.