“That’s cool. Got a girlfriend?”
Ryan’s small body convulsed in dramatic dry heaves. “Girls are gross.”
“Cooties?” Gray asked knowingly.
“I dunno. They’re just stupid. I like baseball way better.”
Gray smiled into his beer. Sometimes he thought he liked baseball better too. There was none of the drama, and the rules of the game were straightforward. With baseball, there was no worrying about why sometimes a woman looked at you like she wanted to curl up in your arms and stay there, and other times she looked at you like you were an inconvenience she had to somehow explain to her family.
Baseball had no distractingly wide blue eyes or slim curves or smile a man could drown in.
The beer turned slightly sour in Gray’s stomach as he realized he hadn’t been thinking about Brynn.
“One pepperoni pizza, coming right up!” Ian announced, scooting past the row of knees as he made his way back to them. He plopped a small box into Ryan’s lap as he passed, and then, settling into the middle seat, handed another box to Gray.
“Am I off the hook from healthy eating too?” Gray asked, as he opened the personal-sized pizza box.
“We’re splitting it,” Ian said as he handed out napkins like the most experienced of dads. Gray nearly smiled at the gesture. Hard to imagine this was the same wiry frat boy who once refused to let anyone be admitted to his house party unless they could eat nachos with no hands.
The three of them settled into companionable male silence and watched the Mariners battle a close game. They weren’t exactly bringing in the runs, but neither were the opposing Yankees, so all in all it was a relatively well-paced game.
“How’s the job going?” Ian asked as he finished off Ryan’s barely touched pizza. “All settled in?”
“Fine,” Gray said. “A challenge. Brayburn Luxuries has genius behind it, but I’m not sure Martin was as adept at the operational aspects as he fooled everyone into thinking. I find that most of my time is spent trying to find records of previous deals and the contact information for existing clients. It’s pretty fuc—” He glanced at Ryan. “Pretty messed up.”
“You were going to say ‘fuck,’” Ryan announced disinterestedly as he blew bubbles into his Coke.
“Ryan!” Ian exclaimed. “Where’d you learn that word? Are you trying to get me in trouble with your mother?”
Ryan shrugged. “Mom’s the one who said it. The other day in the car when some other car cut in front of her. She told me never to tell you.”
A slow smile broke out over Ian’s face at the spousal ammunition his son had just unknowingly handed over. “Did she, now? Son, did I ever tell you how much I love you?” He pulled Ryan close to his shoulder for a moment, and at six, Ryan was still young enough not to be embarrassed by such displays.
Gray looked away, disturbed that the casual gesture gave him a vague sense of discontent that hadn’t been there a few months ago. With their identical blond hair and brown eyes, they were the classic father-son baseball duo. Gray felt like an outsider. It was a feeling he’d long become accustomed to, but it had never bothered him quite so much before.
“Okay, so work’s not great, but it’ll get there,” Ian said, returning his attention to Gray. “You’ll turn it around in no time. It’s why Brayburn selected you as his replacement.”
“I guess,” Gray said noncommittally.
“Well, that’s the enthusiastic businessman I know so well,” Ian said with a raised eyebrow. “What’s the deal, you homesick or something? Got your period?”
Gray didn’t bother to respond to that, and took a sullen bite of pizza.
Ian pressed on. “It’s your bratty siblings, isn’t it? Jenna is still giving you crap for not taking her ice-skating when she was nine, and Jack’s still treating you like an impersonal stranger.”
Gray tensed at that, but it was nothing he hadn’t heard before. Hell, it was nothing he hadn’t thought before. “The twins are fine,” he said. “Jenna’s actually coming to visit in a couple weeks. I doubt we’ll be spending any white Christmases together anytime soon, but they seem to have forgiven me for whatever it was I did or didn’t do when they were kids.”
Ian nodded thoughtfully, having met Jack and Jenna often enough to know that those relationships were nothing they were going to solve before the end of the ninth inning.
“Woman problems, then,” Ian said.
Gray’s chewing slowed for a moment, and his jaw tensed, but he said nothing.
Ian chuckled. “I fucking knew it.”
“Dad, you said—”
“Look, the moose!” Ian said quickly, pointing at the Mariners’ mascot dancing on top of the dugout. “Why don’t you go see if you can shake his hand?”