Page 71 of Interference

Kelsey guffawed. “We have two Great Danes!”

“But dogs aren’t evil like cats are!”

“What?” I scoffed. “They’re not evil. They just sense fear and exploit it to troll you.”

“See?” Chip waved a hand. “Evil!”

“Are they actually evil, though, Aussie?” Wilks stroked his chin. “Because I feel like we could turn them loose in the visitor locker room to fuck with the other teams’ heads before a game.”

“They wouldn’t do anything, though,” I said. “They might run off with someone’s jock strap or tear up a jersey, but they’re not going to attack anyone.”

“And your concentration wouldn’t be fucked up before a game if some oversized mutant cat came in and stole your jock?” Wilks picked up his beer bottle. “Could be a great psyop.”

“Ooh,” Young said. “Do you think we can train them to use goalie pads for scratching posts?”

“Probably,” I said with a shrug. “If Beaus wants to donate a set so I can—”

“What am I donating?” Beaus called from a few seats over.

I leaned past Wyatt to meet our goalie’s gaze. “Can I borrow a set of your pads to train my cats to use them as scratching posts?”

He stared at me like I’d lost my mind. Then he rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Aussie.”

I snickered. “Way to be a team player, Beaus!”

The response to that was a middle finger.

Kelsey sighed with exasperation and looked across the table at Wyatt. “See, this is why we have a kids’ table. It’s not so we get a break from the kids—it’s so no one’s a bad influence on them.”

Immediately, we were all protesting loudly and insisting we were innocent. That we would never be bad influences on the kids. Filthy lies! Pure slander!

“Uh-huh.” Monica tilted her glass toward Simon. “So we all just imagined you teaching them all how to curse in French?”

“I beg your pardon?” Simon put a hand to his chest. “I didn’t teach them how to curse in French. I told them that if they were going to curse in French, they needed to pronounce it right.”

That got some groans from the wives and chuckles from the husbands. I even managed a laugh myself. It was a callback to happier times with the man beside me.

“You’ve almost got it,” he’d said to four of the kids, who were all probably eight or ten. “Tabarnak. Tabarnak. Tab—there you go! You’ve got it!”

“Oh my God, Cars.” Haylie, whose husband had since been traded out of Seattle, crossed her arms. “Are you teaching them to cuss?”

“What?” He’d shown his palms. “It isn’t like I taught them to say ‘sacrament’!”

In an instant, all the kids had started trying to mimic his pronunciation of the word, and the collective facepalm among the parents had had me howling with laughter.

The memory was bittersweet now. A glimpse of the playful, fun-loving man I’d fallen for back then.

Unaware of me stumbling down Memory Lane, Simon gestured at Chip. “Hey, at least I’m not the one who taught them to chant, ‘Refs, you suck,’ at games!”

“Oh come on.” Chip stabbed a piece of turkey with his fork. “The refs did suck that season, and they needed to know it!”

Much like back when Simon had been teaching the kids the finer points of Quebecois profanity, there was a facepalm among the adults. The moms, at least.

Beside me, Wyatt was chuckling, and when I glanced at him…

Whatever I’d meant to say died away.

That smile. That mischievous sparkle in his gorgeous hazel eyes. Whoa.

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