He caught up to me and caught my fingers with his own. “Definitely a compliment.”
I smiled and squeezed his hand.
* * *
For dinner, when the rain really poured down, we retreated back into Manhattan and wandered toward the financial district until we found a small restaurant with gleaming wooden tables and dark stouts on tap.
“So did you work anything out with Hart’s girlfriend?” Ryan asked after we’d ordered.
“Who?”
He rolled his hand. “The Bison’s QB. The girl with the book?”
Ryan was more plugged into gossip than I’d thought if he knew of Alexa and Nate’s relationship. “I did. Here, we even started a website Monday.” I snagged his phone and logged in to the blogging platform before spinning the phone back to him. “Obviously it’s still bare bones, but it will give you an idea of what’s going to be there.”
I waited nervously as he clicked through the pages. “You got all this done since Sunday?” He shook his head.
“What do you think?” Alexa and I had been on the phone for the last three days figuring out the quirks of the site. She gave me her writings and ideas and I built the actual pages, adding my own touches and then talking them over with her. We hadn’t made it public yet, but it had taken less time than I’d expected to put the skeleton together.
“It’s great. Have you shown your boss?”
“Oh, not yet, no. But I will in a week or two. She might not even care, you know, but—it’s worth trying.”
He considered me. “You know, Couch wrote a book, and so did Dustin Jones—he was the starting QB before me. I’m sure they could get you two an editor interested—”
“No,” I said quickly, and then amended it. “Maybe. But I want to try first—to do this myself.”
The waiter arrived with our meals in baskets, a corned beef sandwich for him and a mushroom Swiss burger for me. I squeezed out a heavy dollop of ketchup and dug into the fries.
He watched me with steady attention that I would have found unnerving from anyone else. “You don’t like taking help.”
I shrugged. “Who does?”
“Hmm.” He took a bite of his sandwich. When he finished, he kept his gaze on the platter. “You want to come to Boston?”
Actually, I kind of did. Then again, the idea of traveling four and a half hours two days in a row did something sad to my soul. “Eh. When’s your next home game?”
“Oh, God.” He rubbed his forehead. “We’re on bye next week, and then it’s in Baltimore. So I guess the week after that. That’ll be the Bills.”
“On bye?”
“We’re not playing. Gives us a couple of days to relax.”
Or not relax, as the case may be. “That’s kind of exciting. It’s Halloween.”
He leaned back and grinned at me. “Please tell me you’re dressing up.”
Yeah, like I had the money to blow on a Sexy Insert-Occupation-Here costume. “I was thinking of being a Charlie Brown ghost.”
He sat straight up, his eyes widening. His lashes were so long I wanted to reach out and touch them. “Oh, God, you should be Lucy.”
I stopped, French fry halfway to my mouth. “Why do you say that so...emphatically?”
“Come on. You would totally be Lucy. You’d pull the football right away from poor Charlie.”
I pointed the fry at him. “Not funny.”
He grinned, unrepentant. “But thematic.”