In a Rush (Friendship, Rhode Island #2)

by Kate Canterbary

“You can.” “What?” I turned the water glass, letting the condensation slick my palms. “What do you mean?” “Stop looking. Marry me.”

“I think marrying my best friend—the girl from back home, the one the media called my high school sweetheart in all of the Heisman packages because there are so damn many photos of us together after my games, the one who waited all this time for me to find my way back to her—will do the fucking trick.”

“I guess it’s nice to know I’m not at the bottom of your list or something depressing like that.” He met my eyes. “You’re the list, Em. You’re it.”

“Ryan Ralston has a heart,” he said. “I haven’t seen it until now because you left it with her.”

“How do you know her again?” Stella asked. I watched Emme help the karate-kicker tuck a disaster of papers in his desk. When she was finished, she gave me a nod. I felt my lips turning up into a smile. The obvious answer was from back home, from high school, from ninth-grade biology, from listening to music in her car during lunch all of senior year so I didn’t have to talk to anyone. But I heard myself say, “She’s my favorite thing in the world.”

“Am I allowed to touch you?” “Of course,” she said. “Like you’re my wife?”

So, when I found myself staring into the eyes of the only woman I’d ever loved, I knew it wouldn’t feel like work at all.

“I’m going to spend a little over sixty million on these teams when the ink is dry,” he said, the words low and husky. “That’s less than what I earn in a year before postseason bonuses, before endorsements.” He released my hair and let his fingers trail down my bare arm to circle my wrist. “Buy all the books you want, wife.”

“You look like the first day of spring after the coldest, most brutal winter,” he said. “No one is going to be able to take their eyes off you.”

“I buy shirts with little orange blossoms on them because I want all the reminders of you I can get. I don’t know who I am without you, and I don’t want to find out.”