Page 50 of When to Call a Blitz

To see him fill the doorway, that absent, faraway look he gets on his face when he’s trying not to think too hard about something.

When he’s just trying to block out the world.

“You good on your homework?” I ask Juni, who scratches her scalp with her pencil before nodding. “I’m going to go check on your dad, okay?”

She gives me a quick thumbs up without even looking. Although I know she understands our points about the skunks, I can still tell she’s upset.

Theywerecute, and if we could have kept them, I probably would have begged Emmett on my knees.

The second I open the door to the garage I’m once again hit with the most annoying divorced dad rock music imaginable. But the second thing I’m hit with is Emmett bent over the front of his car, his arms tightening something around the engine.

“Hey,” I call over the music, not trying to startle him.

The second his blue eyes meet mine, the corners of them crinkled as he scans me, I melt into a puddle on his floor. “Hey,” he responds softly.

Swallowing the ginormous lump in my throat, I walk toward him, leaning against the side of the car. I watch him as he finishes what he was doing, and once he’s satisfied with the outcome, he grabs the small hand towel from his work bench and cleans the oil and dirt from his fingers.

“You heading out?” he asks without looking up from his hands.

Without thinking, I respond, “Do you want me to?”

His eyes snap to mine, searching them in a way he’s never done before. Eventually, his jaw sets. “I don’t think so.”

I nod. “Then I think I’ll hang out for a little longer.”

I watch as he fights a small smile, hiding it by tilting his head to the side, his thumb at his lip.

I settle onto the car, stretching my legs on in front of me. “Can I ask you a question?”

“I think we both know you’ll ask even if I say no.”

I exhale, knowing I have to spit it out before I lose all my courage. “Can you explain football to me?”

Emmett throws the towel on the work bench, settling across from me with his arms over his chest.

“What are you wondering?”

I shrug. “I’m not sure honestly. I just want to go to a game and not feel stupid when something gets said and I have no idea what it means.”

“Well let’s find a place to start,” he tells me without a beat, and appreciation blooms in my chest.

I don’t want to constantly feel as though I’m defending myself, or that I’m the dumbest person in the room.

I think about what I want to ask for a second. Where I want to start and a question that will receive the least amount of judgement.

But I realize that there’s no escaping any of it. To Emmett, if he’s going to judge, he’s going to judge it all. I may as well just ask what I want and hope for the best.

“How does the scoring work? The other week you guys got a touchdown and then kicked a field goal, and then another time you guys threw the ball in and got two more points.”

Without skipping a beat, he starts explaining. “In that game, we were up by only three points before that touchdown. We only had a few minutes left in the game, and we wanted to make sure that if they got a touchdown, the only way they could have won is either they get a two-point conversionandkick a field goal, which means that they would have had to hold our offense back, get possession of the ball again, and made their way down the field, or if they didn’t get the two point conversion, they would have been screwed either way and they would have had to get another touchdown on top of the first.”

“So it’s kind of like assurance.”

“Yes.”

“But what happens if you guys didn’t make the conversion?”

He shrugs. “Then we could be in trouble because the touchdown would have only been worth six points. That means that they could have come back, gotten the touchdown, and then could have easily tied with us.”

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