Page 33 of Going for Two

Would I care if that stained my lips tonight? Absolutely not.

“Hi.” She greeted me with one of her stunning smiles that made me a little unsteady on my feet.

“You look beautiful,” I told her. It was one of the first times I’d openly commented on my physical attraction to her and judging by the way her eyes flickered to the ground and a smile spread across her face, she appreciated it.

“Where to?” Another pleasantly surprised look crossed her face when I opened her door for her and offered her my hand to help her inside.

“The best restaurant in this entire town.” I didn’t want to give away too much of my plans. I had thought hard all day about how I wanted tonight’s date to go. Did I want to take her out to the most expensive place in Chicago? Or did I want to take her to my favorite dive that she’d probably never been to?

Ultimately, I decided that I wanted tonight to be low pressure. Neither of us was sure about anything going on other than the electric chemistry that we were slowly discovering, and I wanted us to get to know each other better without any extra expectations on the night.

When I pulled into the parking garage of my building, I could tell that Lottie was trying to remember if this high-rise had a restaurant that she didn’t know about in it, and only once the elevator doors opened onto my floor did she realize what I had done.

I had transformed my dining room table into something that closely resembled an upscale restaurant with candlesticks and a flower bouquet that I had spent way too much time deciding if it said too much or too little. I’d even called Hawthorn’s wife, Sarah, to see if she had any extra dinner plates that were nicer than the ones that I used. I’d ignored all lines of questioning from Hawthorn when I had gone to pick them up, but I knew that he’d probably already texted Derek about it and I was sureto face a full trial of my peers at the game tomorrow. My mom’s homemade spaghetti and meatballs was staying warm in my stove.

“I figured since we ruined your date at Formento’s that I could try to remedy that. It’s my mom’s recipe,” I told her as I ushered her inside of my place.

I hadn’t had anyone besides my friends over in years and suddenly I was self-conscious of everything I owned as I tried to look at it through a pair of fresh eyes. I realized the plain white walls with grey furniture with barely any art or greenery probably looked like a complete bachelor pad for a mid-thirties man, and, well … I suppose that was the truth.

“This was very thoughtful,” she replied as she walked over to the table to take everything in.

I’d never been so nervous to make sure I got something right before. Not even with my ex, Rachel. My relationship with Rachel had always felt like a box I needed to check, which in hindsight was never fair to her. But I was pretty sure she cared more about being a part of the group of wives and girlfriends of the players than being in a relationship with me. With Lottie, it was as if her fire was trying to consume me whole and I was a willing victim to walk into the blaze.

“Let me just grab dinner. I have a few bottles of wine you can pick from, if you’d like.” I motioned over to my wine cabinet where I kept a small collection of wine I liked to drink on rare occasions or with certain meals like this one.

Lottie took her time looking over each label before she gingerly slid one from the shelf. “I never pictured you as a wine guy.”

“My mom is like a third-generation Italian, and wine was always a part of every meal.” The two of us slid into our seats once the bottle had been poured and the spaghetti had been dished onto our plates.

“You haven’t mentioned your parents before,” she noted.

“They come to every game they can, but they usually try to leave to beat the traffic out of the stadiums. They stopped waiting for me to come out of the locker room after my tenth season. They’ve been waiting on me my entire life; it was only a matter of time before they got over it.”

Lottie snorted. Her hand flew up to cover her face, her eyes going wide. I let out a soft chuckle at her obvious embarrassment. She slowly lowered her hand from her face once she’d recovered. “Well, it seems like they raised a great son. I’m sure they’re wonderful people.”

“They’d love you,” I told her. “Especially my mom. She’d love the fire you have. You remind me a lot of her.”

“I hope that’s a compliment,” she hedged.

“My mom is one of the best women I know, so I’d think so.”

Lottie’s mouth screwed to the side to try and hide a smile. “Well, her pasta might just be the best I’ve ever eaten,” she added around a mouth full of meatball.

“She’d probably tell you that it better be seeing as she perfected that recipe over forty years.”

I watched Lottie’s smile slowly fade as she pushed the remainder of her pasta around on her plate. “It must be nice having parents that still support you like that.”

With the way Lottie was still looking down at her food and not up at me, I knew there was something heavy on her mind. “What about your parents? Are they around?”

“They’re not around.” Her words came out stilted and I knew I was suddenly treading though potentially unsafe territory.

“So, it’s just you and your sister?”

“It’s been that way for most of our lives.” Lottie gently set her fork down on her plate and lifted her eyes to mine. “My parents got a divorce after I had gone away for college, but during mysister’s senior year of high school. For most of our lives our home was not a safe place. We had to live in a constant war zone, never knowing when the next fight would be, and I took on the responsibility of protecting Olivia through as much of it as I could. I hated that I couldn’t be there all the time while I was at college, but I’d purposefully picked one of the schools here in Chicago so I wouldn’t ever be far away if she needed me.”

Suddenly everything about Charlotte Thompson made perfect sense—from how hard she’d worked for everything she had, to her no-nonsense personality, to the way she’d felt like most of her life had passed before her eyes. She’d had to raise herself and her sister practically on her own and work hard for everything that she had because she didn’t have the support of a family unit the way I had.

I had grown up with parents that had sacrificed a lot to help me get a football scholarship to one of the best colleges in the nation and all to see my dreams become a reality when I was drafted into the NFL. The entire time, my parents had been there every step of the way. Lottie and Olivia had to graduate high school and then college with no one in the crowd but each other. Lottie’s brusque exterior now only looked like armor rather than a know-it-all personality.