“Precisely.”
“I suppose that’s fair. I don’t know. Maybe it’s you.”
The first flicker of true emotion I’d seen in her passed across her face. Had I surprised her?
“That doesn’t seem to be a likely possibility. Are you taking erectile dysfunction medication?”
I snorted out a very unflattering laugh. “Like Viagra? No. Definitely no need for that.”
This was probably one of the weirdest conversations I’d ever had, but even talking in such straightforward terms about the fact that I was sporting a chubby wasn’t bringing the big guy down. If anything, I was getting harder the longer we talked.
“Hmm.” June settled back against the pool, the water buoying her boobs. That was not helping the hard-on situation. Not at all.
“Is it bothering you?” I asked.
“Your erection? No.”
“Okay.” I swallowed, trying to think of something to say that didn’t involve my man parts. “You knew my name. Do you watch football?”
Another glimmer of emotion passed across her features. Her eyes lit up, but when she spoke, her voice was still monotone. “I follow a number of professional sports, but football is my favorite.”
Despite her tone, I could feel something emanating from her—a spark that flared when she said favorite.
“Awesome. Are you a Philly fan?”
“I don’t follow teams, I follow players.”
My mouth hooked in a grin. “Do you follow me?”
“I did, prior to your injury.”
“Ouch.”
“Is your knee still causing you pain?”
“Sometimes, but that’s not what I mean. I said ouch because you said you don’t follow me anymore.”
“That’s not what I said.”
I crossed my arms. “No? You said you followed me prior to my injury. Doesn’t that mean you don’t follow me now?”
Her eyebrows knitted together. “Since you’re not playing, you’re no longer generating player statistics. There’s nothing for me to follow.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding dawning. “I feel you. You were into my stats, not so much my personality.”
“Precisely. I know very little about your personality.”
“But you know my numbers?”
June nodded. “More than ten thousand six hundred yards over your nine-and-a-half seasons. Eighty-two touchdowns, four two-point conversions. Seven fumbles. An additional two thousand eight hundred ninety-four yards in punt and kick-off returns.”
My jaw dropped as I listened to her distill my career into a chain of numbers. “Wow. That’s… impressive.”
“I know.”
“You just keep all that stuff up there?” I asked, tapping my own temple to indicate her head.
“Yes. I have a natural propensity for numbers.”
“Huh.” This girl was fascinating. “All right, June Tucker. Do you know the stats for a lot of players?”
“Yes.”
“Who else do you know?”
“Would you like a list?” she asked.
There was no sarcasm in her tone. She wasn’t sassing me. I had no doubt that if I said yes, she’d easily rattle off a list of players.
“No, I don’t need a list. I’m just curious how that works. How do you remember so many numbers?”
She shrugged, and her tone remained nonchalant. “I have a high IQ and a nearly photographic memory when it comes to numbers.”
“What about other things? Do you have a photographic memory for stuff other than math?”
“My capacity for recalling information in a variety of subjects is much higher than average,” she said.
“But you’re best at numbers.”
“Yes.”
“That’s very impressive.”
The corners of her mouth twitched into the closest thing I’d seen to a smile. “Thank you.”
I leaned back and rested my head against my hands. I liked this girl. Hoped I’d see more of her—and in a town this size, I had a feeling that was likely.
5
June
The ice cream counter in Moo-Shine’s Ice Cream and Cheese offered twelve different flavors, but I didn’t need to look at the selection. It was February, which meant rocky road. November was chocolate. Peppermint in December. January was strawberry. It was February, so I’d have rocky road.
“Hi there, June.” Penny Waverly, the owner, came out of the back. She was my parents’ age, and Cassidy and I had gone to school with her children. She’d opened the shop a few years after discovering she was lactose intolerant. She had declared she’d live vicariously through her customers, since she could no longer eat dairy.
“Hello, Penny.”
“Hi, June. What can I get you?”
“One scoop of rocky road in a sugar cone.”
She picked up the silver ice cream scoop and waved it back and forth. “Of course, of course. I should have known. You want anything else with this? Cheese fondue? It’s awful cold for ice cream.”
“The ice cream will be sufficient, thank you.”
She smiled as she scooped out a round ball of rocky road ice cream and placed it on top of a pointed cone. “Here you go. One scoop of rocky road on a sugar cone.”
I took my ice cream and paid, then chose a seat at one of the round tables near a window. No one else was in the shop. She didn’t do much business in the winter. Ice cream was much more popular when the weather was hot, although her selection of cheeses did attract customers, particularly on the weekends. But weekdays in the early afternoons were typically quiet in the winter—often just me and one or two other customers—which was exactly why I came in every Tuesday for an ice cream cone when the weather was cold. I liked being where other people weren’t.
The door jingled and I looked up from my cone to find George Thompson entering the shop. The former all-pro receiver—and until his injury, star of my fantasy football team—was significantly taller in person than I’d expected. It was illogical, given that I’d known his height and weight—and all his other pertinent statistics—before I’d ever seen him in person. But his size was surprisingly intimidating.
He ran a hand through his thick brown hair as he studied the selection. He hadn’t seemed to notice me sitting here. He was indeed tall, and wide. Broad shoulders stretched the limits of his winter coat and his arms looked so long.
When I’d seen him at Moonshine, he’d been seated. I hadn’t gotten an adequate assessment of his size. Even in the hot spring, I hadn’t realized how big he was. Certain body parts had certainly appeared very large. I felt my cheeks warm as I recalled seeing his erect penis beneath the water. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a man naked, and he hadn’t appeared to care that I’d seen him unclothed, so it was curious that I now felt a surge of embarrassment over the incident.
What an odd sensation. My facial capillaries were flushing with blood and no doubt turning my cheeks red. It made me unsure whether I should look away, or perhaps sneak out of the shop before he could see me. I had a strange desire to flee.
But then my eyes traveled down his long arms to his hands.
Those hands that were so adept at catching a football, protecting it from the grasps of opposing players who meant to take it from him. Those hands were so… appealing. Long, thick fingers. Wide palms. They were huge. Much bigger than they appeared on TV.
Of course, that made sense. Typically, players were surrounded by their teammates on televised games. Seeing a large man next to other large men had the effect of disguising their size difference compared to the average person.
There were no other players here. Just George Thompson, with his height, and his broad shoulders, and his huge hands.
And other huge things, currently hidden by his pants.
I tore my eyes away. My heart rate had increased and the blood rushing to my face intensified. I could feel my pulse thumping in the hollow of my throat, beating in my wrists. My stomach tingled wit
h an unfamiliar swirl of sensation.
Was I getting sick? Perhaps I’d eaten something questionable and I was feeling the beginnings of a bout of food poisoning. I looked at my ice cream. The bottom of the scoop near the cone was beginning to soften. A drip was forming, but the odd fluttering in my stomach made me reluctant to eat any.
“You might want to lick that before it drips on you.”
“What?” I heard my voice ask the question and a part of my brain scoffed at my own ridiculousness. I knew exactly what he’d said, and what he’d meant. There was no need to ask him to repeat himself. But I just had.
George pointed to the bead of melted chocolate ice cream hovering at the rim of my cone. “Your ice cream is about to drip.”
“Oh.”
Instead of bringing the cone to my mouth so I could lick it, I watched as the ice cream slid down the outside of the cone toward my fingers.
George’s hand moved into my field of vision and one of those impossibly large fingers traced the drip’s path up the cone in the opposite direction. He swiped the ice cream with the pad of his finger, then brought it to his mouth and sucked it off.
I looked up at him in awe. If anyone else had touched my food, I would have been unable to continue eating. I had a very strict no touching my food policy. But watching George Thompson lick my ice cream drip off his finger did not have the immediate effect of making me want to dump the rest in the garbage.
In fact, I had the oddest experience of briefly imagining it had been my mouth sucking that drip of ice cream off George Thompson’s finger.
“Sorry,” he said and gave his fingertip another quick suck. “It was going to drip on your hand.”
I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. Seeing this man’s naked private parts had not rendered me speechless, but watching him lick ice cream off his finger had.
None of this interaction made sense.
“That’s okay,” I managed to say. I forced my gaze back to my ice cream so I’d stop staring at George Thompson’s mouth. And his huge hands.
“Nice to see you again, June.”
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I said, still not looking at him. “Dressed, this time.”
“That I am,” he said. “Although it’s too cold not to be. Still, freezing temperatures aren’t enough to keep me from enjoying some ice cream. I see we have that in common.”
“Apparently we do.”
I looked up again and noticed he’d also chosen rocky road on a sugar cone, although his was piled with two scoops, not one. I was about to point out our similar taste in ice cream as being another commonality we shared when the door opened, letting in a blast of cold air.
Misty Lynn Prosser waltzed in. She wore a puffy pink coat with a thick band of fake fur around the collar and a pair of skin-tight jeans. Cassidy and Scarlett hated Misty Lynn. I didn’t waste energy on hating her. She was unintelligent and unnecessarily promiscuous—hardly worth anyone’s notice, as far as I was concerned.
Instead of going to the counter to order something, her eyes landed on George. Her lips curled in a predatory smile and she sashayed over to my table. And suddenly I had a feeling I understood more about why Scarlett and Cassidy hated her.
“Well hi, there,” she said, her greeting clearly meant for George, not me.
George’s eyes darted to me once, then to Misty Lynn. “Hi.”
“Aren’t you a big hunk of man,” she said, openly appraising him. “In town for a visit?”
His brow furrowed and he leaned slightly away from her. “Guess so.”
“I’m Misty Lynn.” She traced a finger down the zipper of his coat. “Welcome to Bootleg Springs.”
A surge of heat poured through me and I dug my fingernails into my palm. My ice cream was still melting, but I didn’t care. I did not want Misty Lynn to touch George Thompson.
“Are you here for ice cream, Misty Lynn?” I asked. “Or something else? I don’t think Penny carries nicotine gum. You’ll have to get that at the Pop In.”
She finally looked at me, her expression annoyed, as if she’d been trying to pretend I wasn’t here, and I’d ruined it by speaking. “No, I have plenty of gum.” She patted her coat pocket and turned back to George, her smile returning in an instant. “I was in the mood for something sweet, so I figured I’d stop in.”
“That’s nice,” George said, and I was not unaware that he still hadn’t given her his name.
Good.
“What’s that you’re having?” she asked.
She reached out toward him again and I had the strangest desire to fly out of my seat and claw her eyes out. George deftly side-stepped and sat in the chair across from me.
“I’m just having some ice cream with my friend June,” he said. “It was nice meeting you.”
His dismissal was so obvious, even Misty Lynn understood it. She stared at me, and her wad of chewed gum almost fell out of her open mouth.
I stared back. I didn’t have anything else to say to her, so I just waited for her to leave.
She pulled the gum back into her mouth with her tongue. With a dramatic roll of her eyes, she spun on her heel and left.
“Now you’re really making a mess,” George said.
“Oh.” My ice cream had dripped all over my hand. I hadn’t even noticed the cold sticky drips. I quickly licked the excess off the cone, then switched it to my other hand.
Before I could grab a napkin, George had my messy hand in his. It looked so tiny nestled in his huge one. With slow strokes, he gently wiped the ice cream off with a napkin.
Strange things were happening to my body. The feel of my hand touching his elicited a rush of heat between my legs. How very perplexing. George wasn’t doing anything overtly sexual. He was cleaning up the mess I’d made while I’d been in the throes of inexplicable jealousy. Why was this making me feel so tingly?
I pulled my hand back. “Thank you. Rocky road ice cream was invented by William Dreyer, one of the founders of Dreyer’s Ice Cream. He was reportedly inspired by his business partner’s candy. He cut up walnuts and marshmallows with his wife’s sewing scissors and added them to chocolate ice cream.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It dates to the late nineteen twenties. They named the flavor rocky road not long after the stock market crash in nineteen twenty-nine. Their intention was to give people something to smile about in the midst of the Great Depression.”
George licked his ice cream, twisting it across his tongue to get all the way around. “I didn’t know that.”
“I don’t know if it worked. I’ve never come across data that indicates the name rocky road, or the particular flavor combination, increased people’s happiness during that time in American history.”
“I’d be willing to bet it did, at least for some people.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
He held my eyes for a few heartbeats, his brow furrowed. “No. Why would you think I was making fun of you?”
“Because we don’t know each other. Usually people who don’t know me find me odd.”
“I don’t find you odd. That was an interesting anecdote about ice cream that I didn’t know. And I’d be willing to bet that rocky road ice cream made people happy. Then, and now.”
He licked his cone again and I mimicked his movement, swirling the ice cream across my tongue in a slow circle. It was soft and cold in my mouth, the rich chocolate flavor pleasing.
Even more pleasing was watching George deliberately lick his ice cream.
The persistent jumpy feeling in my stomach increased. Perhaps Penny had put something in this ice cream that didn’t agree with my digestion. Or it could have been something else I’d eaten in the recent past. I started cataloging everything I’d consumed in the last twenty-four hours. I’d have to throw away the leftovers I’d planned to have for dinner tonight. I couldn’t take a chance on making this strange stomach problem worse.
My heart was beating too fast. I swallowed hard, wondering if I was goi
ng to be sick. A part of me wanted to stay here with George. Another part wanted to run. I was vaguely aware that I was experiencing an acute stress response. My sympathetic nervous system was activated, releasing hormones into my body that produced the fight-or-flight sensation. But the release of catecholamines, including adrenaline and noradrenaline, was inhibiting my ability to think rationally.
“Goodbye,” I said, suddenly standing, and rushed out the door before George could say another word.
6
June
George Thompson had invaded Bootleg Springs.
Not literally. He hadn’t staged a coup to oust control of the town from Mayor Hornsbladt. And he was only one man. He couldn’t actually be in multiple places at once, as invasion would suggest. But it seemed as if he were. It seemed as if he were everywhere.
When I made my weekly trip to the library, I’d seen him walking up the sidewalk on the other side of the road. The next day, I’d come into town to pick up a few essentials at the Pop In. He had come out just as I was about to get out of my car to go in. I’d waited to exit my vehicle until he was out of sight.
I’d started keeping a mental log of George Thompson sightings. Counting the first time I saw him at Moonshine, our encounter in the hot spring, and eating ice cream with him at Moo-Shine, the tally stood at eight. Eight times I had seen or talked to George Thompson in the last week.
He was very distracting.
I drove into town and parked, then did a thorough inspection of my surroundings. Past incidents were a good predictor of future events, which meant the probability I would see him again was high. It seemed as if every time I left my house, there was a George Thompson sighting. Bootleg Springs was a small town, but how was it possible that he was constantly crossing my path? The numbers indicated it was more than coincidence. Yet I had no reason to believe there was any intent on his part. I needed to do some deeper research into the science of probability and statistics regarding coincidences.
Hesitating another few seconds, I narrowed my eyes and took another hard look around. Gray clouds hung low in the sky, threatening a late winter snow, and the streets were empty. No sign of George. It was probably safe to exit and proceed inside.
Bourbon Bliss: Bootleg Springs Book Four Page 4
