Continuing on to the counter of her station, I leaned my butt against it and took in her clear, stressed but happy face. “Tell me when and I’ll do it for you.”
My boss nodded and raised her eyebrows, eyeing me closely. “How you feeling?’
“Like shit. You?”
“Like shit.”
I laughed and Ginny grinned. “How’d you get your car yesterday?”
“I made the kids drop me off. You?”
“The Larsens drove me.”
We both looked at each other for a moment before I finally blurted out, “Hey, is there something I should know about you and Dallas?”
She tipped her head to the side. “What do you mean?”
“Why don’t you like him?”
Her mouth formed anOshape before she closed it and sighed. “It isn’t that I don’t like him. We’ve never… hit it off. You know what I mean? When we were kids, he was serious and uptight. When we were older, like teens, it was always like he thought he was better than the rest of us. There’s nothingwrongwith him. I guess I just never really gave him a chance. I didn’t know I was still doing that, but he can’t be that much of a stuck-up if he hangs out with Trip, I guess.”
It was my turn for my mouth to form anO. Just as quickly as Ginny had, I closed my mouth too. I could definitely picture Dallas being this mountain of judgmental black and white as a kid. He was still like that.
The difference was, I liked it.
Ginny kept going. “Now, Jackson on the other hand, what a waste of a human being.”
* * *
Iam not goingto look at Dallas’s butt.
I am not going to look at Dallas’s butt.
Nope. Not doing it.
Not doing it.
As if tempting me, Dallas walked by in front of me, all of his attention on the boy beside him during practice. Deep in the outfield was Josh, running drills with Trip and some of the other boys. But as terrible of a person as it made me, it was Dallas I was busy looking at.
Dallas and the skintight, long-sleeve thermal shirt he had on and jeans I was not going to be focusing on. I was too busy not thinking about Dallas to notice when someone took the seat right next to me. It was the divorced dad.
“Hey, Diana,” he greeted me, his hair combed neatly, hands on his lap.
I smiled at him. “Hi.”
The man, who had to be in his late thirties or early forties, gestured toward my hand, his gaze was wide. “How’s your hand doing?”
“Much better,” I told him, mostly honestly. I was better. Way better. But that didn’t mean it didn’t ache like hell after a few hours of working. I’d been putting vitamin E oil on it every night before bed, but the skin still hadn’t completely healed.
He hissed, craning his neck to eye my hand closer. “Sheesh.”
I pressed my lips together and smiled. “It’ll get even better.”
The man tipped his head to the side, still eyeing me. When he didn’t immediately say anything, I thought he’d let it go. Most of practice had gone by, and the coaches had the boys in a huddle, talking to them before he finally spoke up again.
“I think I told you already I’m divorced.” He’d only told me about ten times since we’d met. “I’m not dating anyone seriously.”
But he was dating someone, and trying to weasel in some flirting. Great.
