Page 51 of The Art of Catching Feelings

It wasn’t his fault there were apparently no drivers in the entire Charleston area, after all. She hung up, taking another glance out the window. Chris was still there, leaning against the streetlamp.When he’d removed himself like that she’d thought maybe that was how little he wanted to spend any time with her—that some chivalrous impulse wouldn’t allow him to walk away, but he’d be damned if he’d actually stick around totalkto her.

Only now did it occur to her that maybe he’d done it specifically to give her some space, to not crowd her.

She rolled down her window.

“I’m calling a rideshare,” she said. “It should only be a few minutes.”

“No worries.” He hesitated. “Do you need a ride?”

That brief pause told her everything. She didn’t particularly want to spend time in an enclosed vehicle with him, and shereallydidn’t want to as some kind of obligation. “No, no,” she said. “I got it.”

She lived half an hour away from the stadium, which normally she didn’t think of asthatbig of a deal. But when she put her destination into the rideshare app, all of a sudden the little car icons disappeared until there was only one, fifteen minutes away. Whatever. It was still better than waiting for roadside assistance, right, if it meant that she was home by the same time she would’ve still been waiting in the parking lot?

“Let me give you a ride,” Chris said. While she’d been looking at the app, he’d come closer to her car, near enough that she could smell the faint scent of his soap when the wind blew the right way. It smelled like fresh aloe and summer, and she wondered randomly whether players brought their own soap or if they used whatever the clubhouse provided. This scent was veryChrisin some way she couldn’t define.

“It’s kind of far,” she said.

He took his car keys out of his pocket, seeming to sense that she was capitulating. “That’s okay,” he said. “I could use a drive.”

—

For the first ten minutes, they didn’t speak, except for Chris to ask where they were going. His car wasn’t what she’d expected, not that she’d knownwhatto expect. But maybe flashier, like what Randy had, or more luxurious, like Marv’s. Chris’ car was very clean, and obviously fairly new, but other than that it was just a regular car.

Once he’d merged onto the highway, he glanced over at her. “Are you cold?”

“Oh, no,” she said, pulling at the hem of her skirt to hide the goose bumps that had broken out over her knees. “I’m fine.”

But he reached over to turn the dial for the AC down a notch anyway.

“You’re doing a good job, you know,” he said.

“Sorry?”

He cleared his throat. “With the reporter gig. It’s not easy…absorbing all that information, getting ready on the fly, knowing how to talk to everyone. You’re doing a good job with it.”

“Thank you,” she said, a little surprised. “I know it came from ignominious beginnings.”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Ignominious,” he said. “Yeah.”

And for a while, that’s all she thought they were going to say. He seemed content to just drive, and she had to admit that there was something almost peaceful about being in the car with him. He drove easily, one hand resting on top of the steering wheel, the other resting on the gearshift almost as though he were used to driving a manual. He used his signal light and didn’t follow too closely or speed too much. She found herself staring out the window, watching the passing streetlamps and trying not to thinkabout the way things had just ended with the very same man who was sitting so close she could feel the body heat coming off his arm.

“Why did you say that comment, about Christopher Robin?”

It actually took a second for her to catch up to what he was talking about. The incident that had started it all, and it seemed so long ago now. Like that had been another version of her entirely. She was so sick of all the different versions of herself.

“I don’t know. I was drunk. I was trying to get into the game, and the guy next to me was shouting different stuff, but I didn’t know much about baseball so I could only riff on people’s names, and your name is Chris and the guy said you hadn’t been hitting well, so…”

She shrugged awkwardly. A circle of hell should definitely be having to re-explain your unfunniest joke again and again until the end of time, because it was its own excruciating torture.

But he laughed, the sound low and husky and a little sudden, as though he’d surprised himself with it. “Your name should be Christopher Robin, ’cause you’re hitting like Pooh,” he said. “That’s pretty good. Who says that at a baseball game?”

“To the home team, no less?” She groaned. “God, I wanted to die.”

His smile fell, and she only thought about what she’d said after it was already out there. Her excuse for the heckling might’ve been the drinks she had, but there was no excuse now. She’d just been thoughtless and insensitive.

“I used to watch that movie so much as a kid,” Chris said. “Winnie the Pooh.”

“Really?”

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