Second Thoughts: A Hot Baseball Romance by Mindy Klasky Page B

prose, to plow through the emotions that were shoved down and down and down until they compacted into bedrock.
    That shit was a waste of time.
    Like a man working through a new weights regiment, he picked up his computer. He’d told himself the other day: his life with Jamie was over. Time to remind himself of that truth, in living color. Time to see if Shygirl6 had written back to him. It would be like taking medicine, routine doses until his goddamn heart caught up with his brain.
    He navigated to the TrueLove website and found a bright red heart pulsing over the usual logo. He rolled his eyes at the stupid graphic, but he opened his inbox.
    So Shygirl6 had a favorite body part. And a favorite position. All he had to do was tease her a bit, and maybe he’d get answers to both of those questions.
    This was stupid. He could better use his time hacking through the familiar Hemingway.
    But he could use a little diversion. Some harmless flirtation. A little rewiring, until he accepted the reality that he was never going to have Jamie in his life again, not in any romantic way. Shit. She hadn’t even told him about his daughter . She wasn’t ever coming back, and the sooner he got that through his head the better.
    It wasn’t like anyone ever met their one true love through online dating. Shygirl6 had to be in it for fun, for distraction. Just like he was. Just like he knew he needed to be.
    He glanced at the Live Five Questions for the day.
    What was his favorite postage stamp ? Okay, so much for relying on TrueLove’s brilliant social engineers.
    He opened up a text window and started typing. “Hey. I don’t think you really want to know my favorite postage stamp, what brand of soap I use, whether I prefer turkey or ham, or if I’ve ever gone skinny-dipping. I’ll skip all that and say I hope you’re having a nice day.”
    He read back over the words once and considered erasing every one of them. But if he did that, he might as well delete his account. And that would be stupid. He was paid up through the end of the month. And he had to take his medicine.
    He hit Send and leaned back on the couch.
    ~~~
    Jamie was curled up beneath a quilt, sipping her third cup of chai from an oversize mug. Olivia had woken her three times the night before, resisting every maternal ploy to get her back in bed. Of course, that meant the kid had been an animal to wake up that morning. Every bit of their routine had been thrown into chaos as Olivia complained about breakfast, complained about the clothes Jamie laid out, complained about breathing.
    Okay. She hadn’t actually complained about breathing. She’d just made such a histrionic show of doing it that she might as well have been complaining. Jamie had never been so grateful to drop her daughter off at the gaping front door of James K. Polk Elementary School.
    Jamie could only hope that Olivia was in a more pliable mood that afternoon. She grimaced. Lauren still didn’t have a verdict from her doctor; she was supposed to see a specialist on Monday. This was the first time since arriving in Raleigh that Jamie had truly regretted the distance from her family. If she’d still lived in New York, she could have taken Olivia to her mother or to one of her sisters—no questions asked, no need for lengthy explanations. If Jamie had been in need, her family would have taken care of her.
    Of course that care wasn’t string-free. Jamie couldn’t have spent the rest of the morning curled up in the perfect quilt-lined nest in the corner of her ideal couch in the peace and quiet of her flawless tiny home. She couldn’t have nursed her cup of vanilla chai and allowed herself to feel , to work her way across the shifting sands of the emotions Nick Durban had stirred up in her the day before.
    Because, like it or not, Nick had stirred up quite a lot in her.
    She’d thought she was done dwelling on their past. She’d imagined that she’d reached some sort of peace with what he’d done.