“Matt and Hannah. Do you think that will be us one day?” he asked, clarifying.
“Attending the BU homecoming game?”
Ryan stared at me with a small shrug. He didn’t correct me because, immediately, I knew what he was thinking. Ryan and me at the BU homecoming football game, teasing and holding each other without notice. In love. Me, I could see it as well, standing next to him, pregnant and pleased with ourselves.
I never thought about babies much before. The idea always felt so far away. Ryan, on the other hand, from the look in his eyes, he thought about them, and it was easy to see why. Ryan would be a good dad, patient and smiling.
I snorted. “Head in the clouds?”
“Only a little.” Looking up, Ryan grinned with his arm around my shoulders.
“Well, you’d definitely be Hannah.”
“Seriously?”
I scrunched my face. “The sweet ramblings.”
“My ramblings are sweet?” he asked. “You know, that makes you Matt.”
“I’ll take it.” I chuckled.
“Having fun yet?”
“Oddly enough.”
My answer appeared to have been the right thing to say as he tugged me along farther into the crowd, heading inside the stadium, but not toward the stands. “I want to do one more thing before the game starts. You showed me some of your world. Now, it’s my turn.”
“Your turn?”
He meant that the whole terrible cookout in the parking lot wasn’t already a part of that? I asked him as such.
He nodded, pulling me down toward the field instead of the bleachers. On the grass, parents and young children were learning how to throw and catch the ball with other players.
Understanding bloomed the moment he let go of my hand, rushing in his strange jog toward a lone football no one else was using.
“You can’t be serious.”
“It’ll be fun,” he promised. “Isn’t that what you said you were going to be today? Fun Lu-Lu.”
“Please stop calling me that.”
“Why?” he asked. “It’s so fun to see your face blush when I do.”
“I do not blush.”
“All right,” he said, obviously saying so just to appease me.
“I don’t.”
“I said you didn’t,” he conceded, though he was a little liar.
I could feel how hot my face had gotten, and it wasn’t just because of what was likely the final day of the warm sun beating down on us.
“Anyway, I have to practice if I’m going to be teaching the youngsters how to throw a ball next year, as you said.”
I was eating my words. “And I’m your practice run?”
“No one better.”
