Cal took a deep breath of the cool autumn air, braced himself, then walked through the gates of the Bloomsburo High School football stadium.
The place hadn’t changed much since Cal himself attended the school more than a decade before, but what the facilities lacked in polish and state-of-the-art equipment, they made up for in enthusiasm. In a small town like Bloomsburo, football played a big role. He never participated in the sport himself, always going out for cross country in the fall, but he usually went to the games to cheer on his friends. By junior year, Carter had packed on enough muscle to survive on the field. As for Wyatt, well, he’d always had what it took to dominate on the field and off.
Wyatt. Now there was a hell of a complicated figure. For as much as Cal wished his high school recollections only included him and Carter, he’d be lying if most of his memories didn’t include all three of them. It felt like a damn lifetime ago.
Despite the bitterness that thoughts of Wyatt brought to mind, Cal had to smile, thinking back on his high school days. The best part of not playing football in a football town was the ability to chat up all the girls in the stands while the biggest jocks were otherwise preoccupied. And in a way, though had just hit thirty, his role at the Friday football games each fall really hadn’t changed much. As the Chamber of Commerce director, a lot of his job involved getting out in the community, so when most of Bloomsburo gathered at the stadium on a Friday night, that’s where he was, making small talk, shaking hands, supporting the sports boosters, and cheering for the home team.
The work suited his personality and strengths, but it could be exhausting. Sometimes he longed for a Friday night at home on the couch, watching something mindless on Netflix.
“There’s trouble,” a familiar voice called, bringing Cal back to the present. He looked up to see Carter, in full uniform, smiling at the post where he supervised the stadium security check.
Cal took some solace in the fact that if his work required him to show up for every home game, his best friend was in the same boat. And at least Cal’s work never required him to reprimand teenagers after they’d raided the family liquor shelf.
“Go on, pat me down. You know you want to,” Cal laughed, reaching out to shake Carter’s hand. “Busy night?”
“Not too many problems, but it’s early yet.”
Cal nodded.
“I get it, by the way,” Carter said quietly, and a bit more seriously.
“You get what?”
“I met her. And I get it,” he said, his brow rising suggestively.
Cal gave his friend a stern look, though he didn’t know if it was out of defensiveness or jealousy. Either reaction was ridiculous, of course. His friend could acknowledge Winnie’s charms. It’s not like Cal held some claim on her. Hell, he’d been actively avoiding the woman all week.
None of these facts helped explain the discomfort that tore at him at the thought of Carter and Winnie.
Carter and Winnie. The pairing felt unnatural and nauseating, like peanut butter and pickles.
“There’s nothing to get,” Cal said flatly.
“Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.”
Cal rolled his eyes and continued his walk toward the stadium.
“One other thing,” Carter called.
Cal turned around, annoyed.
“What?”
“I think Greta smelled you on Winnie.”
Greta Johannsen. The rich blonde trust-funder from Broadsville who loved mind games and getting her way. She’d had her sights set on Cal for years, and, given that she was a classic narcissist, his rejections had only fortified her resolve to win him.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Greta didn’t give Winnie a very warm welcome at the city council meeting. It’s like she could sense your connection to her.”
“I don’t have a connection to Winnie,” he said with more bite than he meant to.
“The hell you don’t. Even if you’re going to try to maintain like an idiot that you’re not interested in the woman, she’s living in your mom’s backyard. Even that small intimacy is going to have Greta seeing red when she figures it out.”
Shit. His friend wasn’t wrong, which pissed him off all the more.
“That’s just great.”
“Hey, don’t look so down. A man of your advanced age should be grateful when a cat fight breaks out in his honor. Those opportunities are growing few and far between.”
“Go to hell.”
“Love you, too, man,” Carter said with a laugh, and he turned back to his security duties.
Cal scowled as he walked toward the stadium, but he couldn’t indulge the sulk for long, nor did he have time to process the thoughts bouncing around his brain after the brief conversation with Carter.
Before Cal walked even ten steps, he needed to transform back into Cal the Chamber director and hometown boy, shaking hands and making small talk about the September weather, about how the team was doing this year, about the latest addition to his mother’s gardens, about how old his nieces were now, about the entertainment lineup for Bloomsburo Days, and about his thoughts on the new stoplight going in at the corner of Maple Street and Twelfth Avenue.
Winding his way through the crowd, Cal ran into family friends, cousins, old high school classmates, business owners, two current neighbors, and a few of his late grandmother’s friends, who to this day couldn’t resist patting his cheeks with affection. He stopped by the concession stand and grabbed a bite to eat from the sports boosters, bought two homemade friendship bracelets for his nieces from a Girl Scout fundraiser booth, and then eventually succumbed to a seven-minute aside with Betty Jean Finnegan about logistics for the upcoming craft show during Bloomsburo Days.
By now it shouldn’t surprise him that the woman could talk about folding chairs for so long, and with such passion, and yet it did.
From a distance he could hear the sounds of the game—the shrill shrieks of the whistles and the crunch of the helmets colliding and the syncopated cheers from girls with pom-poms and the loud murmur rising from the packed bleachers. By the time he actually arrived at the stands, the game was already well into the second quarter, and Broadsville High was kicking Bloomsburo’s butt. It looked to be a long, depressing night for the home team.
Cal walked up the bleachers, only making it halfway up before a former coach and his wife stopped him where he stood at the railing. They caught up for another minute or two. While talking with them, Cal occasionally scanned the bleachers, trying to determine if there was anyone else he should greet. He saw many more familiar faces, but only one that made his heart pound.
Winnie.
But it wasn’t just Winnie who caught his attention, it was the fact that there, in the middle of the bleachers, sandwiched between groups of friends and extended families, she sat alone, surrounded by empty metal bleacher benches on all sides where people had given her room as they turned to talk and laugh with the people they’d come to the game with.
His heart seemed to lurch. It seemed to actually lurch out of his chest when he saw her there, all by herself. Here he was, bemoaning the fact that he had so many people to greet and chat with, and she sat there on her own, rubbing the arms of her too-thin sweater in an attempt to keep warm, and looking down at the notebook in her lap with confusion. No one to talk to. No one to joke with.
Hell. The lust the woman evoked? That he could work out in other ways. But the lurch. Well, it complicated things.
Then again, maybe it simplified them.
He tried to imagine if it were one of his younger sisters in Winnie’s shoes: relocating to a new town, a new state even, where she didn’t know a soul. Sitting alone and shivering, more or less invisible in a sea of people absorbed in their own lives.
Winnie hadn’t even been in town a week. She had no family here. She wouldn’t have had enough time to make any real friends. If that were his sister, he’d want someone to go say hello.
And even though Cal was probably her closest acquaintance in town, he had spent most of his week blowing the woman off, merely because her presence rattled him, both by day and at night in his dreams.
He sighed. It was time for him to ask a little bit more of himself.
He said goodbye to his old coach, and made his way over to where Winnie sat.
“For what it’s worth, our team’s not usually this bad,” he said, breaking the ice. Her brown eyes were so big and bright, he thought they couldn’t grow wider, yet they did as they looked up into his and registered his presence.
It took only a second before they narrowed more cynically, though.
“Is that right? Well, I’m surprised you didn’t send Danny the Intern over here to share that dispatch,” she said, her right brow rising in that very Winnie way.
Despite the flash of guilt her comment produced in him, he had to grin. He shouldn’t attempt to smooth over his bad behavior with humor, but he couldn’t help himself. “Well, what good is an intern if you don’t have him do all your dirty work for you?”
The firm line of Winnie’s smooth lips curled ever so slightly upward. Seriousness didn’t come naturally to her.
“May I join you?” he asked, his gaze flickering over her bright floral scarf, her soft navy cardigan, her burnt orange skirt and the polka dot leggings beneath them. Something about the way the woman dressed just made you want to soak in the details. He found himself needing to make a deliberate effort not to stare at her for too long.
After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded and he sank to her side. Her eyes lowered to the colorful friendship bracelets twirling between his fingers.
“Doing some jewelry shopping?”
“Have you ever tried to say no to a Girl Scout? It’s impossible, the adorable little fiends, especially when my nieces would love these bracelets. It was a difficult choice, but I ultimately parted with the five dollars.”
Winnie gave a genuine smile, so different than the distant and lonely look she had just moments before. It occurred to Cal that coaxing those smiles from Winnie’s lips could become habit-forming.
“How old are your nieces?”
“Six.”
“Both of them?”
“They’re twins.”
“Twins!” she said her hands clasping near her heart, and his mind flashed back to that first day on the porch when she made the same gesture upon learning the name of the She Shed. “I always wanted twins.”
Watching the blush fill her cheeks, he could tell that the intimate revelation embarrassed her. But it surprised him how well he could picture it: Winnie, married and content, with a flock of little dirt-smudged, curly-haired kids tugging at her skirt.
“They are amazing, though I’m somewhat biased.”
“You must be a good uncle,” she said, glancing at the bracelets once more before returning her attention to his face.
“Well, I don’t know about that. But I will say that if anyone in this world can bring out something good in me, it’s them.”
The way she looked at him then softened him. Unsettled him. Her gaze slowly lowered, zeroing in on his lips. She stared at them for a moment, transfixed, completely unaware of the power she held over him when she looked at him like that.
Completely unaware of the many things he wanted to do to her with that mouth. That he’d dreamed of doing.
He pressed his lips together, breaking her gaze on him. She glanced back out at the field, the flush of rose deepening ever so slightly on her cheeks.
“Do you have any nieces or nephews?” he asked, turning the focus back on her.
She cleared her throat.
“No.”
And she left it at that, a dozen questions hanging in the air between them. For a woman who made her living asking questions of other people, she sure had a knack for not answering them herself.
They sat there a minute more, Cal very aware of her proximity. She rubbed her hands once more along her upper arms, trying to keep warm in the crisp, cool evening air. It would be so easy to put his arm around her, to pull her into him and let the warmth of his body comfort her as he discovered just how soft she’d feel against him.
Luckily he glanced down just then at the notebook in her lap, and saw her notes on the game, conveniently reminding himself that no matter how good the woman smelled, or how much he might like to offer her bodily comfort, she was a professional acquaintance.
And if he wouldn’t pull Mayor Ralph Simpson into his body for warmth and pleasure at a Friday night football game, he damn well better not do it to Winnie.
“So are you covering the game?”
“Allegedly. But it’s not going so well.”
“Where’s Randy?” he asked. The Bloom’s sports stringer had been covering the local teams for the paper for at least a decade.
“Out sick.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Bad? It’s catastrophic!” Winnie cried. “For him. For me. For our entire readership.”
Cal grinned.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing to her notes.
Winnie handed him the notebook and then put her face in her hands as if she wanted to disappear.
He chuckled, reviewing what she’d written so far.
- Yellow = Bloomsburo
- Green = Broadsville
- First quarter - Green team scores.
- First quarter - Green team scores again. (But why only +2 pts. instead of +6?!)
- Yellow team calls time out. Coach looks like his head might pop off.
- Second quarter - beginning to wonder if yellow team actually knows how to score.
“So you’re a real football buff, eh?” he laughed, handing the notebook back to her.
“Don’t be cruel. This is serious. What am I going to do? I’m having heart palpitations over here.”
Cal thought for a minute.
“Well, I’m sure Randy’s listening to the game at home. They live stream the commentary on the local radio station, and then post it online after each game.”
“I’m not sure how that helps.”
“Well, Randy can listen to that, and add in the play-by-play commentary that he needs for the article. The most important thing you probably need to do tonight is to just get some quotes from a few players and coaches after the game.”
Relaxation spread over her face.
“Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?”
“Probably because you were planning strategies for surviving a football-induced panic attack?”
She laughed.
“Thanks for the advice.”
“It’s nothing.”
Winnie glanced down at her hands, which now busied themselves by fidgeting nervously with her pen.
“Cal, I’m sorry if my being here has caused you stress.”
Cal. His name on her lips for the very first time. So simple, yet not.
He wasn’t sure how to respond to her sudden candor. The woman had done nothing wrong, even if her mere presence disoriented him.
“I—” he started, but she cut him off.
“But you really should tell your mom that she doesn’t have to be so nice to me.”
“I should?” he asked, amused. Clearly Winnie didn’t know his mother that well. He’d have better luck convincing Rhonda that the grass was blue than convincing her to ignore her nurturing instincts.
“I know she is just trying to be kind, but I don’t want to be an imposition to her. There was no way I could go to your family dinner on Sunday,” Winnie said.
He felt the blood drain from his face. “She invited you to Sunday dinner?” he asked, shock tinged with a half dozen other feelings he’d rather not acknowledge. It was his family’s most intimate, most important tradition. He’d never invited a woman to a Sunday dinner. Never.
Winnie’s hand covered her mouth in regret. “You didn’t know? I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“This is becoming a pattern, isn’t it? You knowing more about my mother than I do.”
“I’m sorry. But I knew you wouldn’t like it, so I said no right away.”
Cal sighed. He wanted to be mad at his mother, but Rhonda was an includer by nature. She always had been, and it was one of the things he admired most about her, even if this particular case caused him aggravation.
“You didn’t have to say no on my behalf,” he said, though he knew full well that his behavior had not supported this claim.
“It wasn’t only on your behalf. But I didn’t want you to feel uncomfortable at your own mother’s house.”
Fidget, fidget, fidget went her fingers around the blue ink pen. He made an intentional effort not to think of other ways she might preoccupy those hands.
“She does meddle, but she has a huge heart. She likes to take care of people. And like it or not, you’re one of her people now.”
Winnie’s face expressed the strangest mix of happiness and sadness. “Well, regardless, I said no. I’ll keep saying no, even though she promised to continue asking until she wears me down.”
Cal laughed. “That does sound like her.”
“I don’t need to interfere with your personal life, or encourage your mom’s absurd matchmaking impulses.”
Absurd. Right.
“But I do hope that we can be amiable associates,” she said, her eyes searching his before they dropped lower, gazing upon his mouth once more, as if something deeper, something stronger, was guiding her.
It wasn’t too much for her to ask. The fact that she offered an olive branch in the face of his avoidance this week, rather than scorn or guilt, spoke volumes about the woman. She deserved better from him, and he’d just have to learn to deal with the things she made him feel.
“Do you have your cell phone?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah,” she said, clearly confused by the random question.
She reached down and pulled her massive purse into her lap and began digging through it. She pulled out an umbrella, a whistle, a pack of shiny heart stickers, a deck of cards, and a bottle of Elmer’s glue before she asked for help.
“Can you hold this stuff for a sec?” she asked, dumping the random items into Cal’s lap before he had a chance to answer.
He looked down, chuckling despite himself. She was a regular Mary Poppins.
“Ah ha!” she said before pulling out a smart phone with a case covered in pink sprinkled donuts. “Got it.” She held the phone between her neck and her shoulder as Cal passed back the rest of the random contents of her purse.
“Now why do I need it?”
“Let me see it.”
She shot him a suspicious look, but she entered her code and passed it to him.
“Your phone background is a photo of John Krasinski?”
“Yes, it is. He’s my third favorite pretend boyfriend.”
“Out of how many?”
“Roughly seven.”
“Dare I ask who number one is?”
“A girl’s gotta have her secrets,” she teased. “It adds to my general air of mystery.”
She was joking, yet spot on. The number of things he wanted to know about Winnie Briggs, and how she landed squarely in the middle of his life here in Bloomsburo, grew daily. Like Dorothy, it was as if a tornado had scooped her up and dropped her right in his lap. Though not literally, unfortunately.
He punched his number, under the name “Cal the Great,” into her contacts. “My cell phone is the best way to reach me.”
Winnie perked up. “Oh, okay. You mean for work stuff?”
“Yeah.”
“Of course, because why would I be reaching you for non-work stuff. That’d just be absurd,” she rambled, her cheeks flushing in a way that made Cal want to reach out and stroke them. To see just how much crimson he could fill them with.
“Totally absurd,” he said, his eyes locking into hers, probably expressing as many uncertainties as hers did. He passed the phone back to her, and her fingers grazed his, sending tingles up his arm. She pushed a few buttons on the device.
“There, I just texted you. Now you’ve got my number, too.”
His satisfaction with this scenario couldn’t be masked.
“And is it safe to say that you’ll be sending any texts that come from this number, or does Danny J. McDonald the intern field these for you as well?”
A clever response sat on the tip of his tongue, but before he could reply, a figure appeared in the corner of his vision.
An impossibly blond, svelte, self-possessed figure to be more specific.
Greta Johannsen.
If bantering with Winnie caused Cal to warm into relaxation, Greta’s sudden presence blasted him with cold discomfort like a suddenly opened freezer.
He glanced at Winnie, who was less skilled in masking her emotions than Cal. Winnie’s face shadowed over. Her hands tensed.
“Well, Cal, if my tempting salary and benefits package hasn’t enticed you to come and take over the Broadsville Chamber of Commerce office, maybe the prowess of our football team will,” Greta said, her hand stroking his forearm. The woman wasn’t capable of speaking to him without also laying her hands on him.
He sighed. When Greta first moved back to the area after going to college on the West Coast, she’d merely wanted him as a man. She was a gorgeous, bored, pampered young woman in a quiet part of the world, and she desperately wanted Cal to add some sizzle to her life.
The feeling wasn’t mutual. Sure, Greta may be the most technically attractive woman for hundreds of miles, but she had a cold edge and a hunger for power and control that only bolstered Cal’s defenses against her advances. She wasn’t looking for a lover or a partner, but a plaything she could sink her hooks into. Cal wanted nothing to do with her.
Dozens of polite rejections had done little to weaken the woman’s resolve, so her strategy changed. Now, courtesy of her daddy’s money, she was the mayor of neighboring Broadsville, so she had professional reasons to contact Cal on a regular basis. This meant that in addition to hounding him on a personal level, hardly a week could go by without her trying to hire him away from Bloomsburo to serve as her town’s chamber director.
He knew, of course, that ‘the benefits’ of the job went well beyond health insurance.
“Come on now, Greta, you know I’m not a fair-weather fan. I’ve got to support Bloomsburo, even when they can’t manage to get on the board.”
Her hot pink lips curved, revealing perfectly white, perfectly straight teeth.
“You’re such a good man. It’s why I have to have you,” she said, her eyes flickering with utterly non-professional intentions.
“Greta, have you met Winnie Briggs?” he asked, deflecting. He didn’t want to do this with Greta, and he sure as hell didn’t want to do it in front of Winnie.
He watched the woman pry her gaze off him and redirect it toward Winnie. Cool. Assessing. Disapproving. Suddenly Carter’s earlier comment made a lot more sense.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Greta said, offering nothing more by way of introductions.
He watched Winnie straighten her shoulders and extend her hand.
“Nice to meet you. I’m the new editor of The Bloom. I noticed you at this week’s city council meeting, but I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself before you left,” she said, polite and composed, if lacking the warmth she’d exuded just minutes before.
“I didn’t notice you,” Greta said, giving Winnie’s hand a brief, light squeeze before recoiling.
Confusion flashed across Winnie’s face. Clearly there was more to their first meeting than Greta was indicating.
Protectiveness swelled in Cal’s chest. Close behind it was a wave of guilt, knowing that now that Greta had seen Cal and Winnie sitting together, laughing and talking, Winnie would get an even colder shoulder than normal from Greta.
“Greta is the mayor of Broadsville,” Cal continued, filling in the holes of the woman’s shoddy introduction.
Unsure how to respond, Winnie merely nodded.
“Speaking of, Cal, there’s something you simply must help me with,” she said, her thin, perfectly manicured hand reaching down and grabbing his own, causing her excessively flashy rings to glitter beneath the stadium lights.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A few of our local business owners are on the away team bleachers, and they were having the loudest debate about sales taxes. They’re practically causing a scene. I had to come find you to see if you might help resolve it, given your expertise.”
Cal sighed. Only with Greta was flattery served on a knife at his throat.
He looked at Winnie, a silent apology.
“Duty calls,” he said dryly, managing about as much as enthusiasm as if he were off to remove wallpaper.
She laughed, a burst of nervous energy released.
“Okay, then. Have a great weekend.”
“You, too,” he said, surprised at the loss he felt as he left Winnie’s side.
Greta linked her arm into his and began to pull him to the stairwell. He looked back at Winnie one more time after making it to the bottom of the bleachers, and he noticed that her right index finger had already made its way into her hair, twirling and twirling those pretty brown curls.
He wondered briefly if she even knew she had the nervous tick.
He wondered for much longer what other little secrets he might learn about her body if given the opportunity.