Page 40 of Love is a Game

Her eyebrows lifted in feigned innocence. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Yeah, sure. Do you know how angry Carly was when she found out I was arguing to end women’s suffrage? I couldn’t get her to understand it wasn’t my idea!”

“It’s not my fault your girlfriend was too dim to understand how the debate team works.”

He rolled his eyes and gestured toward the shoreline. “Come on, let’s go down to the water.”

She finished off the last bite of her ice cream cone and followed him.

“So what will you do when you leave the library?” she asked as they reached the edge of the tide.

“I’m not sure. I’ve thought about practicing on my own, but I haven’t made any decisions yet.”

He picked up a rock at his feet and held it in his hand, rubbing his thumb over its flat surface.

“I don’t want to go back to being the person I was before,” he said quietly, his eyes fixed on his hands. “I worry it’s all part and parcel, that if I go back to law, the rest of it will come back too.”

Sadie dug her toe into the wet sand and then met his eyes. “I think you should give yourself more credit. You’ve changed a lot. You’re still a pain in the neck,” she added with a smirk, “but less so.”

He met her smile with one of his own, then pulled his arm back and launched the rock over the water. It skipped eleven times before disappearing.

“Eleven, huh?” Sadie bent down and searched for a flat rock of her own.

“Come on, you can’t beat that.”

“We’ll see,” she said, gripping her rock against her thumb and forefinger.

She took a deep breath, got her feet into position, and then swung her arm forward. It was a strong throw. She held her clenched hands against her face as she silently counted. Eight skips, and then it sank.

Andrew tutted. “There was no way you were going to outthrow me.”

She shrugged. “It was worth a shot. Think how amazed you would have been if I did.”

He shook his head and let out a confused chuckle. “You’ve changed, too, Sadie Connor.”

“Oh yeah? More brilliant and beautiful than you remember?” she asked with a gleam in her eye.

She waited for some clever comeback, but it didn’t come. His features softened as he looked down at her. “Something like that,” he said quietly.

She felt heat creeping up her neck and turned away from him to walk along the waterline. He followed, walking close enough that their arms bumped against each other every time her foot sank into the wet sand.

“How do you know Julie and Tyson?”

Andrew shrugged. “Everyone knows Tyson. He pulled me over a couple weeks after I moved back and we got to talking. In the end he gave me a ticket and invited me to poker night.”

Sadie laughed. “That sounds about right.”

“Are you and Julie close?” he asked.

“Yeah. I don’t get back here as often as I should, but we talk on the phone almost everyday. Maybe too much,” Sadie added, wincing at the confession. “You know she has all this art that she sells, which is amazing, but I think she gets lonely being home by herself all the time.”

“I know she was really excited about you being in town. Must be nice to have this time with family.”

Sadie nodded. She couldn’t tell him the truth, that it was nice but it was also hard. She loved having breakfast with her dad in the mornings and hanging out with Julie and her mom after work, but they now had a daily opportunity to voice their opinions about her job. They said she was overworked and overstressed, that she didn’t have a good work-life balance. She knew it came from a good place, but she wasn’t sure how much more of it she could take. They’d said the same thing about the time she devoted to school, growing up, but her hard work had paid off, then, and it would again, once she managed to get her foot in as a brand director.

She glanced at Andrew. As far as she knew, his mom was his only relative. How could she complain about her family when his was now gone?

He saw her watching him and he chuckled. “You can say it.”