I jerk my head back in surprise. “Wait a hot second. Are you referencing a movie from the nineties? And you said I was from another generation.”
“I am a study in contradictions,” he says. “It makes me all kinds of fascinating.”
“It sure does,” I mutter under my breath as we near a small lake along the edge of the course.
“And the flick is from 1995. I’ve seen it about twenty times because it’s my grandfather’s favorite movie. There’s this line early on when Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise are running a sequence for the moon landing, and Sinise wants to run it again. At first there’s some resistance, but then Tom Hanks says, ‘Well, let’s get it right.’”
“And that stayed with you? ‘Well, let’s get it right’?” It says a lot about him—about his work ethic, which matches mine.
“It applies to a lot of things. Doesn’t matter how much you practice or how many hours you’ve put in. The goal isn’t to check off time on a box. The end game is doing it till you get it right.” He shrugs, but I know what he’s saying is important to him. “That’s why the early morning workouts. Not to log hours or reps or miles, but to win games.”
I nod along. I see it that way too, but I like how he’s said it. “Words to live by.”
“Movies have some good ones now and then,” he says.
For a flash of a second, I imagine watching a flick with him, then turning it off because I’m overwhelmed by the way he smells and how much I want to lick the column of his throat, drag my lips over his jaw, rub my face against his stubble.
God help me.
A caw rends the air—we both jerk our gazes to the edge of the lake as a heron swoops down, joining another one. The male snaps his bill then stretches his neck.
“Ah, the mating call of the heron,” I remark. Maybe it should be “Heron help me,” because the break in tension has saved me.
“How do you know they’re mating?” Grant asks. “They aren’t banging. Also, how do birds bang?”
This, I can talk about easily. “He’s preening for her. Soon he’ll bring her twigs. They might even exchange them.”
“Ah, the twig exchange. Of course.” Grant shoots me an amused smile. “And my other question, Mr. Ornithologist?”
“The how-do-they-bang one?”
“Yes.”
“Well, Grant,” I sing-song, “when a male bird loves a female bird very much . . .”
“Enjoy this bird,” he says, flipping me the middle finger.
We keep that up, running and shooting the shit, and before I know it, I’ve peeled off an hour. Grant makes these morning workouts something they’ve never been before—fun.
But are they too fun?
I’m here to work, after all, not to get to know this fascinating man.
Should I end them?
Cut them off?
But they have a natural end every damn day, when we join the team for practice. Once we hit the diamond, we’re catcher and shortstop again, and that’s working out just fine.
That day, the Seattle Storm Chasers arrive for a home game, and we destroy them.
That’s all that matters.
Friendship with Grant isn’t a detrimental distraction.
These morning workouts aren’t hindering my game.
The problem is lying in bed at night, thinking about how badly I want morning to come.
10
Grant
Like that, we’ve become workout partners.
Early birds and all.
It’s not deliberate. It just happens. We run. We lift weights. We spot each other. One morning, I’m on the bench press and he asks where I’m from. Funny that this hasn’t come up in our many conversations.
“I grew up in Petaluma. It’s not too far from San Francisco,” I say, pushing up the weight bar.
He gives a slow and easy smile. “I know where Petaluma is.”
“Didn’t mean to imply you didn’t know your geography as well as your ornithology,” I tease, lowering the bar then pressing it up again. He stares down at me, his eyes roaming over my chest but never straying too far.
“I know my geography just fine. I also live in San Francisco,” he points out.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you venture to Petaluma.”
“I’ve been there on the way to wine country,” he says.
Out of nowhere, envy thrashes in my chest, painful as a cleat in the ribs. This is what happens when you become friends with your crush. I know why he’s been to wine country. He once dated a guy who lives there, a chef. I picture him cruising up the highway, laughing with some other guy in the passenger seat, free and easy. He’s headed for a weekend getaway. A weekend he could spend with that guy because they weren’t teammates.
“Must have been nice. Going to wine country.” I push up the bar, doing my damnedest to shove away this dumb jealousy too. “You from there?”
“No. I grew up in Los Angeles, but we moved to San Francisco when I was in middle school.”