Page 12 of Spring Breakup
Tyler couldn’t help but read into every touch between the men, every glance between Dean and Rosie. He was nervous to broach the topic with Rosie but felt like he should.
Hey, so how was the sex last night? It looked fun from my angle.
“Bears wake up and leave their dens occasionally when water from snowmelt is dripping into their dens,” Tyler rattled off like he was reading from a book. Then he gestured toward a spruce tree that was dribbling water from the tip of a branch. Theplop, plop, plopof melting snow was everywhere once you started paying attention.
“We’ll talk loud so the wet, lethargic bears hear us coming.” Rosie smiled.
Tyler scrubbed his face. He felt rough.
She gave his hand a quick squeeze. “Every morning, my kindergarteners arrive at the door with bows in their hair and tucked-in shirts. Their shoes are tied. Their clothes are clean. They’re ready to face the day. Fresh as daisies.”
“Kindergarteners are the cutest.”
She hummed. “By the end of the day, their hair is a disaster, their clothes are a mess, and they have dirt on their faces. They’ve lost shoelaces and barrettes and jackets. It’s one of my favorite things, seeing that change by three p.m.”
“Why?”
“Because it means they’ve learned hardandplayed hard.”
Tyler was not following the point of this anecdote. “Give it to me straight here, Rosie.”
She laughed. “You look like my kindergarteners. But I think you’ve only learned hard. Maybe it’s time to play hard too.”
“In what way?”
Rosie pulled him to a stop. Dean and Leo were horsing around on a higgledy-piggledy row of boulders lining the road. There was a light sprinkle from the rain clouds above, but it wasn’t unpleasant. It felt like walking through the vegetable aisle at the grocery store when they turned on the misters.
“What do you enjoy doing outside of work?”
Tyler picked up a smooth rock and skipped it across the thin ice of the lake. “God, I have no idea.”
Honestly, who had time for hobbies in this economy? Tyler got home and worked on IEP paperwork, wrote up lesson plans, and tried to save his failing relationship. His job took up the brunt of his emotional bandwidth. His thief of an ex had taken up the rest.
“We should go to trivia night,” Rosie said, grabbing his hand again and dragging him back into a walk. Rosie was much more physically demonstrative outside of work, and he was soaking it up.
“I have a team already, but they’ll probably kick me off.” God, Tyler hadn’t even thought of that. His trivia team consisted of Francis’s friends from college, plus him.
“They’d kick theJeopardychampion off the team?” Rosie said.
“Well, I’m sure they expect me to bow out gracefully for Francis. They don’t care about winning, so my trivia stardom is inconsequential.”
“I’ll be on your trivia team. We can recruit Benji and William. They’d be good at questions about… I don’t know… reality TV and cars?”
“Your hot brother and his hot boyfriend will be too distracting for me to answer any questions myself.”
“Gross.”
Tyler laughed. He would love to be on a team with Rosie and anyone she deemed worthy.
“Also, I can cover the pop culture questions,” he said. “What we need is someone good at mythology. I suck at that.” He’d missed a finalJeopardyquestion about mythology once.
“I’ll put out feelers. I bet we can find the perfect person. Maybe Dean knows his Persephone from his Proserpina.”
Tyler grinned. She looked like the cat who ate the canary. Whether that was because of her not-so-subtle Dean mention or the fact she knew Persephone’s Roman counterpart was Proserpina, Tyler wasn’t sure.
“We clearly don’t need Dean.”
“He’d be too distracting? Like my—gag—brother?”
