Page 86 of Good Guy Gabe

“She’s got the seventh-biggest online quilt shop in the U.S.,” Gabe boasts, having heard that a dozen times by now probably.

“Oh, that’s wonderful! Well done.” She looks ready to step out of the conversation, but then she eyes us up more scrupulously, her gaze bouncing between us. “You two look familiar.”

“She’s famous,” Gabe tells her.

“So are you,” I remind him.

“Yeah, but you’requiltfamous. This is Joss Page right here.”

“Oh lord, I do know you,” the lady laughs. “I’ve got a couple of your FPP patterns. Do you teach at all?”

“She teaches so much!” Gabe says loudly enough that everyone in the shop looks at us.

From the back hallway, one of the storage rooms we let our regular customers into for stuff like batting remnants and leftover packaging, Rachel pops her head out. “Gabe?” she says, surprised.

“You’re one of the Juggernauts,” the newcomer says as I hold up mine and Gabe’s hands to Rachel. I’m not angry with her about blabbing to the rest of the quilters about how Gabe and I had broken up, not angrier than I have a right to be because I get that it was hot gossip and wearepublic figures. Still, I want to make it clear right now that Gabe and I are together, working things out, and it’s not anyone’s business what’s happened behind the scenes.

I swear I see Rachel scowl like she’s upset about this, but then she lights up and shoots us a big thumbs-up.

Gabe grunts. “I know this is going to be a weird thing to say, but I don’t think Rachel’s going to be making me cookies anymore.”

“Nobody’s making you cookies anymore.”

“Because I’m not on the team next year?”

I slug his arm. We don’t need negativity today. “Because you’re mine. So I’m the only one who should be making you cookies, and I don’t know if you deserve my cookies.”

He spins me to face him in a quick, weightless swirl, his giant hands taking mine and pulling them behind my back so I have nowhere to go except against him. Right where I want to be. “Ahh, and that’s just about the kindest thing you could have ever said to me because I have it on good authority that you haven’t yet met a cookie dough that you didn’t burn to a cinder in the oven.”

“That’s me!” Barb pipes up from behind the cutting counter. “I warned him!”

Grinning, Gabe tugs down on my hands, forcing me to bend back and tilt my head up for a kiss that’s highly inappropriate in front of my customers and employees. And once I’m breathless, he whispers in my ear, “I have a secret for you. I make the best snickerdoodles you’ve ever had.”

“Why don’t we test out that ramp, see if we can get you up to my place so I can try some of your snickerdoodles?”

Whether he takes that to mean rummage through my cupboards for the ancient bag of flour to bake cookies or just experiment with sex positions that don’t mess with his knees, I’m good.

Chapter 35

Gabe

“THAT IS LOOKING INCREDIBLE, Shaunessy. I wish Sinclair was as easy a patient as you.”

It’s because Blaise lacks patience, but I’m not about to have that conversation with Doc Keltner. Instead, I’m going to be really happy with the fact that we’re only a week into March and my MCL is already getting an ‘incredible.’

“Seriously, I wish this was the injuries we were getting during the season,” he continues as he takes hold of both sides of my leg and flexes it. It’s stiff, but that’s from the brace. The only reason I haven’t been taking the stairs at Joss’s place is she gives me that look. She’s personally taken it upon herself to decide when to clear me for construction, too, so it’s been a lazy few weeks. “Out one game? Medical advisement the second, good to go by the third? Can’t ask for better. I do want you to go easy on the running, stick to the elliptical for your cardio to help on the impact, but once practice starts up again? You’re clear to go.”

Clear to go.Doc Keltner doesn’t know anything about what’s going on upstairs, he just knows that I needed my knee fixed and my badge is getting me into the clinic to get it worked on. When I went down on Super Bowl Sunday, we called Coach Keenan, who made Bodley hand the phone to each of us so we could all get yelled at before he ordered Vedder to throw my ass in the back of his SUV and drive me down to the facility. His professional assessment was that because I was talking on the phone, I didn’tneed an ambulance, just a ride. Doc Keltner’s been treating me ever since.

If this is my last hurrah here, I guess it’s a good one.

I’m in the middle of some PT, on that elliptical that I’ve graduated to from the aquarobics the guys have been razzing me for, when Maurice Bradley, the GM, pops in and heads right to me. “You got a minute to talk, son?” he says, and my soul withers.

This is it. Every time I come here, I feel this dread. I can understand waiting until the end of the season before telling me I’m not coming back so I didn’t pull any nonsense on the field, but I figured it would have happened right after the end, not almost two months later.

I want to tell him no, just so I can cling to this stupid elliptical another couple minutes, pretend that I’m still a pro football player and I don’t have to figure out what’s next yet, just play ball and be a dad and make Joss happy. But Doc Keltner claps my shoulder and says, “He’s all yours. That MCL of his healed like a champ.”

“That’s great,” Bradley says without inflection.

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