After Hours. Karen Kendall

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СКАЧАТЬ around her. “Okay, ladies, good job on the sprints! Let’s work on some skills training for about ten minutes now, and then we’ll scrimmage. Brianna, Cathy and Dara—I want you focused on blocking.

      “Jody, Liz and Kimmie, pay attention to footwork and tip skills. Laura, you work on getting clear so that Danni can pass to you, and Danni, whatever you do, don’t get sacked. How’s that knee, Jen? You holding up okay? I don’t want you to overextend it again.”

      She had no time to think about Troy, or their awkwardness on the phone, or his feeble invitation to dinner. But later, on the drive back to the salon and in the blessed coolness of the showers there, she did mull over things.

      If she hadn’t called him first, would Troy have called her at all?

      Why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free? Her aunt Thelma’s old-fashioned saying popped into her head. Ridiculous in this day and age…but Peggy couldn’t help thinking about her sex-to-football analogy.

      It’s easier this way—you don’t have to worry about the downs—you just score.

      And Troy’s answer:

      It’s like the other team handing you the ball and inviting you over the goal line. That sucks.

      She’d definitely invited him over her goal line, and he’d scored multiple orgasms. So perhaps the thrill of the chase was gone. Perhaps he didn’t respect her, now that it was morning.

      But why did it always boil down to the woman losing the guy’s respect? What about her respect for the man? Why were women seen as giving something up, rather than receiving something that they wanted? She liked the modern-day response to the free-milk adage: Why buy the whole pig when all you want is a little sausage?

      Peggy decided she was a freewheeling woman in charge of her own sexuality and her own life…and her very atypical mother would be proud.

      Speaking of her mother, she hadn’t talked to her at all lately. She wondered what kind of crazy poem or performance art piece Mom was working on now.

      She only spoke in rhyme and she only wore green, varying shades of green ranging from chartreuse to hunter. The last time Peg had seen her, she’d been in an olive phase. But who knew? She might have moved on to teal or emerald by now.

      Mom had been divorced for years, ever since Peggy and Hal’s father had shacked up with a dolphin trainer from Sea World. It was then that her mother had lapsed into rhyme as a way of expressing herself…. Peggy understood her, but everyone else just assumed she’d had a mental breakdown.

      Of course, everyone who knew their family had always thought Peg’s brother, Hal, teetered on a fine line between genius and madness, too. So she’d looked like the normal one, even if she’d pursued an all-male sport with an intensity their community didn’t understand.

      Peg pulled her cell phone out of her bag and dialed her mother’s number, wanting advice, but her mom didn’t answer. She didn’t bother leaving a message.

      Suddenly she decided that what she really needed was a male point of view. Where was Alejandro? She tracked him down in the small, windowless office that he used for doing paperwork.

      “Alejandro?”

      “Yes, chica?”

      “Give me the male point of view on this situation. I spent last night with a guy—”

      “You slut,” he teased.

      She ignored that. “The guy and I had a great time. This morning that arrangement of flowers came. But when I called to thank him, he said he didn’t send them. Then, to make it worse, he asked me out, but almost as if he didn’t want to, as if he was just being polite. What does it mean?”

      Alejandro pursed his lips. “Is he married?”

      Horrible thought. Had she spent all last night having wild monkey sex with somebody’s husband? No. Somehow she just knew he wasn’t married.

      “I don’t think there’s a wife anywhere in the picture.”

      “Then maybe you just caught him at a bad time.”

      “No, I think it was more than that.”

      “Maybe you sprained his Mr. Happy and he’s in pain.”

      “Alejandro, be serious!”

      “Okay, okay. Maybe he’s just shy.”

      Peggy reminisced about some of the things Troy had done to her last night. “He’s definitely not shy.”

      “Well then, I’d say he was just a jerk who got some of your aunt Thelma’s free milk and isn’t thirsty anymore, but he did ask you out again. So, what’s to worry about, except who did send the flowers?”

      “Alejandro, listen to me. His tone of voice was weird. He was kind of cool toward me.”

      “Peggy, you women overanalyze these things to death. This could be as simple as he doesn’t like taking personal calls at work. What does he do?”

      It was a damn good question. Peggy couldn’t believe she didn’t know the answer to that. She’d have to ask him.

      By the time she left Alejandro’s office, she felt better. But she still didn’t know who’d sent her the damn flowers.

      “SO, WHAT DO YOU DO, Troy?” Peggy asked him as they sat at a table at Benito’s. The place was dark and simply furnished with long wooden picnic tables and benches; squat green candles set at two-foot intervals along them. You didn’t want to come to Benito’s in a tight skirt, since sitting down required a bit of climbing. Luckily, Peg had worn a loose-fitting jean skirt today. It was short, but she could maneuver in it.

      Benito’s was slightly cheesy, but cheesy in a charming way. Plastic pizza-wedge lighting blinked on and off around a large open window to the kitchen, where Benny’s high-school-age son would occasionally amuse kids and himself by juggling meatballs or twirling pizza dough. If his mother, Claudia, caught him with the meatballs, she’d whack him in the butt with whatever came to hand: a cooking spoon, a rolling pin, a box of spaghetti.

      Peggy rested her elbows on the red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, looking up surreptitiously every once in a while. Benito and Claudia had hung Chianti bottles over all the tables, intertwined with fake grape vines. She couldn’t get rid of the fear that one of the bottles would fall on her head and knock her unconscious. She might even pitch forward into the candle in the center of the table, catching her hair on fire.

      Troy repeated her question. “What do I do?” He looked vaguely uncomfortable. “I, um…well, I’m retired from the Jaguars and I decided to quit coaching after I left Gainesville, which was only a month ago. So I’m kind of…taking a break to work on my house in the Gables. And I’m planning to open a sporting goods store.”

      The awkwardness that had pervaded their phone conversation was still present. Peggy took a sip of the Cabernet she’d ordered.

      “A sporting goods store! How cool. So will it be here in Miami? Have you found a location yet?”

      His own glass at his lips, Troy СКАЧАТЬ