I went back to the small apartment I shared with my son and typed up all the audio that I had from our couple of meetings – I half-wished I had recorded our last encounter, so I could relieve how insanely hot it had been. Not that my brain was doing a bad job recounting the details; I could practically still feel his breath on me, the way his fingers felt sinking into my ass. I couldn’t get him out of my head, and he wanted to see me again. It didn’t get much better than that.

So why was I still fighting that little nagging feeling in the back of my brain? The one that told me things weren’t as easy as all that? Well, it was just a reminder that he still didn’t know about my son. There wasn’t exactly a point that I could easily have pounced on to drop the bombshell, but I couldn’t imagine that he would be expecting the news. He seemed sweet, but it was always hard to tell how guys would react to the fact that I had a kid and that I was devoted to him. Especially because Jacob didn’t have a direct father figure in his life, a lot of guys seemed to jump to the conclusion that I was just out scouting for potential daddies for him instead of potential partners for me.

I lost myself in the transcripts, and before I knew it, it was time to pick up Jacob from school. I walked down happily, glad that I would be able to spend the afternoon with him, and he waved at me excitedly through the gate as soon as he spotted me.

“How was your day?” I asked as we made our way back to the apartment, his superhero backpack bouncing against his little shoulders enthusiastically.

“It was good,” he beamed up at me. “We got to watch a movie!”

“Oh, yeah? What movie?” I asked, and it didn’t take long for me to forget about any of the niggling little thoughts I’d been having about Adam as I focused in on my son. We spent the evening cooking some dinner and going through his homework for the next few days, and I was reminded just how much I loved spending time with him whenever I got the chance. He was a little knockoff of me, hard-working and ambitious and a little stubborn. He was exhausted early in the evening, and I was happy to put him to bed to work on some pitches for Irina the next day. I wanted to come in with one foot forward to prove to her that I had my head on properly with all this stuff. If Adam and I did end up together, the last thing I wanted was her eyebrows to raise over the interview, especially if it seemed like I hadn’t done my best work. Just as I was getting into it, my phone buzzed. I dived towards it, not realizing just how excited I was to hear from Adam until it went off.

I peered at the screen, and bit my lip with a grin.

“I can’t stop thinking about you,” he started. “When do you think you’ll be free for dinner?”

“Not sure, sometime next week?” I replied, and stuck a kiss on the end for good measure. Before long, the two of us were involved in an intense text flirtation, the kind that made me want to curl up on my couch with a glass of wine and giggle and raise my eyebrows and generally act like a teenager whose crush had just started paying attention to them. I forced myself to stay focused on work as best I could, but before I knew it I was yawning with exhaustion and ready to head to bed. It had been a pretty packed-out day, in my defense, and I had done a lot of, um, physical activity.

I fell into bed happily, and grinned at the goodnight text that Adam sent me before I closed my eyes. But before I could fall asleep, I found my brain whirling with questions that needed answers. It was the reporter in me I could blame for that, even if I knew I shouldn’t have been overthinking all of this.

I couldn’t help but go over the last time that I had gone on a date with a guy. Mom had set me up with someone – obviously – that she met at her church, and he had seemed perfectly sweet. Toby, his name was, as I remembered it. I was a couple of minutes late arriving thanks to work, and apologized profusely – I hated being late, even though he told me that he had barely even noticed. We went to grab a drink, but at the time, I was still breastfeeding and couldn’t. He eyed me curiously.

“Wait, you have a baby?” He pulled a face. I scrunched mine up at him in response.

“Yeah, I assumed that my mom had told you?”

“I didn’t realize that you had, like, a baby,” he shook his head, and I felt a sense of doom creeping up on me before we’d so much as ordered appetizers. And that was when it really hit me for the first time – having a kid was going to get in the way of my love life.

The date finished up and he tried to kiss me as I climbed into the taxi, but I ducked it and just went home instead, feeling as though someone had punched me in the stomach. I knew I was being way too dramatic, but I could fight the feeling that this was how it was going to be for the rest of my life, or at least until I got Jacob out of the house. He was so little back then and I was so completely enamored with him that I hadn’t even considered the thought of what life would look like outside of him. Mom had tried to warn me when I was pregnant, that dating would be infinitely harder with a baby in tow, but I had dismissed her, thinking that she was just trying to convince me to find a decent father for my kid before he turned up. As it happened, she’d been completely right, and I felt like a fool for ignoring her. I cried when I got home that night, because it had only really just hit me in full force that dating was going to be a freaking nightmare with a kid.

And I love dating. Or at least, I did before Jacob came along. I loved the thrill of meeting someone new, of that frisson of chemistry that shivered in the air before your first kiss. Being with Adam had reminded me of what I’d done such a good job of forgetting over the last few years, and that was that I loved romance and sex and dating and everything that came with it. Accepting that again, only to risk having it all torn away…yeah, that was going to be tough to reconcile.

I turned over and stared at the wall, wondering if I should just call him and tell him now. Get it out of the way once and for all. That way, at least, I would know one way or the other, and he could take a chance to get out before things got serious. Fuck, was him asking me out on an actual date a sign that things were serious? I had been out of the game so long that I had no idea what the signals were. I pressed my head back into the pillow in irritation and let out a loud sigh. Not to mention the fact that he was a famous soccer player known all over the world, whose every move was chronicled by the press and his fans alike. As if things weren’t complicated enough already, I had that to deal with on top of everything – the knowledge that nothing that happened between us would stay secret for long.

The next day, I got up with a new sense of resolve. I had nothing to feel guilty about, at least not yet. I was going to go in, pitch the hell out of this article, and then figure out what the next steps were for Adam and I. I was going to nail it. My problems weren’t going to know what hit them.

After I dropped Jacob off at school, I hurried to the office and scrabbled in my bag for my notes. It was good that I had enough to do today, plenty to keep my mind off the issues at hand with Adam, because I knew if I’d been at home I would have just sat there for hours staring off into space and overthinking everything to a ridiculous degree. Irina’s eyebrows practically shot off her head as soon as she laid eyes on me, and she ushered me quickly into her office.

“How are you?” She glanced at me casually, but I could see that she was really asking what kind of day I’d had seeing him again.

“I’m good,” I nodded neutrally. “I have the notes and transcripts and some ideas for the article here, if we can go over them?”

“Of course,” she nodded, professional again just like that as soon as I made it clear that I wasn’t going to be dropping the gossip until we’d laid out the most important stuff first.

I handed her my notes and sat down, tipping my head back for a moment and letting out a small sigh as I prepared myself for this. Even after all this time working for her, knowing that she had the utmost confidence in me, I still couldn’t help but feel as though I was playing at doing this job.

“You’re good,” Irina assured me. “You know I wouldn’t have put you on this if I didn’t think you could handle it.”

"I know," I raised my head and grinned at her. I was so glad to have someone like her on my side; Irina herself was a single mom too, and she knew all the trials and tribulations that came along with raising a kid and working in a career that practically demanded that you nurture it like a baby too.

“Okay, so this is what I’ve got so far…”

I gathered myself and launched into the collection of ideas that I’d come up with over the last twenty-four hours. I was pretty proud of my take on Adam; from all the articles I’d read about him, all seemed one-hundred-percent focused on his success and what that meant to him, none of them really tapping into where he had come from or why his success was so precious to him. I had a take on his story that I hadn’t seen before and I was proud of that, and Irina listened in silence, her face hard to read, as she waited for me to finish up.

“You know, I like your first idea,” she nodded. “I think you should run with that. Do you have enough here?”

“I’m pretty sure,” I assured her. “And if I need to get any more-”

I cut myself off before I could say anything that gave away the game, but Irina, with her keen journalistic instincts, pounced on my hesitation at once.

“Oh, are you still in touch with him?” She cocked an eyebrow. “You guys have another date planned?”

“We’re in touch,” I lifted my chin and tried to keep any hint of the complex emotions that I had about Adam and our relationship out of my face. “If I need another couple of quotes to fill out the article I’m sure I could get them from him.”

"Whatever you say," Irina cocked an eyebrow. "If you could have the first draft to me by the end of the week, that would be perfect. Think you can manage that?"

“For sure,” I promised. It would be tight, but it would give me something to focus on beyond Adam while we were waiting to meet up again.

“And good luck with whatever your…thing is with that guy,” she went on. Suddenly, her face took on a tenser edge. “And be careful, alright?”

“Huh?” I furrowed my brow, confused as to where this had come from.

“I know it can be easy to get swept up with a guy like that, trust me,” she shook her head. “But look out for yourself first.”

“I always do,” I smiled. I appreciated her advice, and couldn’t help but itch to find out where it had come from in her own experience, but I had to take this as it came and on my own terms.

“Good,” she got to her feet, snapping back into boss mode just like that. “Okay, well, I’ll hear from you soon?”

“Sure thing,” I bowed my head, and ducked out, my brain already whirring with excitement as I thought about how to structure the article and tried to write a killer opening hook before I got back to my keyboard.

With a burst of inspiration, as soon as I got through the door I headed to the computer and started to write. Before long, the entire afternoon had vanished out from underneath me and it was already time to pick up Jacob again. All that time spent thinking about Adam but at the same time not thinking about him had done me good; when his face appeared in my head uncalled for, I didn’t get the uncomfortable little uptick in my chest that came from the uncertainty that surrounded us. No, I had this under control. Or at least, I was pretty sure that I did.