"Lights out, sweetie," said Tami, putting her hand on the switch.

Gracie had already dropped her book across her chest and was half asleep, but she protested anyway. "Just one more chapter!"

"No. It's already 20 minutes past lights out."

Graice sighed, picked up the book, closed it, and lay it on her night stand. Roald Dahl's Matilda. This was her third time reading it. The first had been with Tami, who helped her with a few of the words. Tami didn't know what it meant, that her daughter's favorite book was about a brilliant little girl who was unappreciated by her boorish parents.

"One more hug and a kiss?" Tami asked.

Gracie outstretched her arms. Tami came over to her bed and hugged her close. When Gracie kissed her cheek, she said, "I love you, Mommy." Tuck-in was the only time Gracie still called her Mommy. Otherwise, it was always Mom. But Eric was still Daddy, 24/7. Tami supposed Eric would be Daddy for life.

Tami had just poured herself a glass of wine, lit the fire in the fire place, and settled on the living room couch when the front door opened. Eric soon slid down next to her, plucking off his forest green cap and laying it on the coffee table. With a weary sigh, he leaned back his head and half closed his eyes.

She put her hand on his knee. "That was a long coaches' meeting."

"I know. Sorry. But it's playoffs tomorrow."

She patted his knee. "I know, sugar. You'll win. I believe in you."

He raised his head straight and turned to look at her. "Because you're a crazy woman."

She chuckled and kissed him. When she put a hand over his shoulder and squeezed, she felt how tense he was. "You need a little pre-game relaxation?"

"You mean a shoulder rub?" he asked.

"Or another kind of rub."

His eyes brightened. "You don't mind? We just did it yesterday. I don't usually get two nights in a row. And if I win tomorrow...that'll be three."

"Might be three even if you lose."

"Really?"

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Eric."

He smiled. "I'd rather do something else with your mouth anyway."

She shook her head. "Not suave, Coach Taylor. I can always retract my gift offer at any time if you fail to perform to my satisfaction."

"You look very beautiful today," he said softly. "Did you do something different with your hair?"

"No."

"Must be the radiance of those gorgeous baby blues giving it a new sheen."

She laughed.

He glanced around the living room. "The house looks really nice. Did you clean today?'

"No."

"Must just be your smile brightening up the room." He took the glass of wine from her hand and set it on the coffee table. "You're the best wife a man could ask for." He kissed her, and she laughed beneath his lips. "I love you, Tami." His voice grew low. "I want you." He buried his hand in her hair and kissed her more passionately. This time, she stopped laughing and responded, slipping her tongue into his awaiting mouth.

When their kiss had deepened, and their breaths had thickened, he pulled away slightly. "I need you, Tami," he whispered. That's no line. That's just the God's honest truth."

"You better take me then."

[*]

Afterwards, they showered together, pulled on warm sweats, re-ignited the fire that had dwindled to ash while they were pleasantly preoccupied, and settled onto the couch to finish the bottle of wine Tami had opened. Eric told her about his previous night's conversation with Nate, the wife, the divorce, the new guy, everything.

"Hastings Ruckle?" Tami asked. "Did you know he was gay?"

Eric shook his head. "Did you?"

"Well, you knew him better than I did!"

"Yeah, but you're the counselor, a woman with her finger on the pulse of this generation."

She laughed. "I don't know about that." Those words had been in speech Glen had given at her going away party. "And you're more perceptive than you think, Eric. He must have been deep in the closet."

"Well…I guess there were signs, in retrospect. I don't remember him ever having a girlfriend. And once I heard the guys laughing about how he gave away the porn mags the rally girls left in his locker."

Tami sighed and rolled her eyes. "I hate that. I hate that whole rally girl thing."

"I know you do."

"Did you get porn in your locker from your rally girls?"

"I just got brownies. We lived in a more innocent time."

Tami raised an eyebrow. "I don't remember it being that innocent."

"Well, maybe not overall, but not nearly as many girls were throwing sexual favors at boys right and left, like they seem to be doing today. That's why these boys today don't know how to open doors or write a love letter or pick up a dropped book."

Tami chuckled. "Did you really just get brownies?"

"Why? What did you give Mo?"

"He was my boyfriend. So…"

"You're not going to tell me, are you?" he asked.

"You don't want to know."

"Fair enough."

"Brownies?" she asked. "Really? Just…brownies?"

"Yes, just brownies. Of course, some of the brownies I got my junior year had hash in them. Which I did not know. I just thought they tasted kind of funny. But I was hungry after practice."

"Seriously? I wish we'd gone to the same school our junior year. I would have loved to have seen you high."

"I'm not fun high. Trust me."

"I bet you're loose though."

"Hash has nothing on your love, Tami."

Her eyes sparkled in an echo of her laughter. "Well, it's a good thing that back in high school I made you wait for sex a few weeks so you could learn some good lines."

"A few weeks? You made me wait a lifetime!"

She put a hand on his cheek and pouted. "You poor thing."

He kissed the palm of her hand. She lowered it and poured them both some more wine.

"I wasn't loose when I realized what was in the brownies, though. I freaked out," he said. "I thought I might get kicked off the team for drug use, or that Nancy Reagan might come down from the White House and personally kick my ass."

"Not even pot relaxes you, huh?"

He shook his head.

"I can't believe I didn't know this about the brownies. I can't believe we've been married over a quarter of a century and there is still something I didn't know about you."

"It hardly seems fair." He peered at her over his wine glass. "So tell me something I don't know about you."

"Like what?"

"I don't know...Like the time you had that naked pillow fight with half the cheerleading squad."

"Your fantasies are so trite." She tried not to smile. "Okay, I'll tell you something. I'll tell you the moment I first began to fall in love with you."

He lowered his wine glass. "Our fourth date?" he guessed. "When I gave you that mixed tape?"

"God, no. Your taste in music was awful back then. At the homecoming dance."

"Homecoming? You were with Mo. We didn't even start dating until February. You barely knew me at Homecoming. I was the new kid."

"I know. But you didn't come to the dance with anyone."

"I didn't feel like I knew any girl well enough to ask," he said.

"Any girl probably would have said yes, Eric."

"Maybe, but I didn't know if I wanted to spend an entire evening with any of them. Figured I'd get to know a few at the dance." He smiled. "Then take my pick."

"And you wore a full suit, which none of the other guys did." Most just had on khakis and button down shirts.

"Well, it's what guys did in my old school," he said. "I had no idea. It doesn't make sense, girls getting all dolled up, and guys showing up looking like slobs. But I felt like an ass when I showed up all dressed up."

"Maybe you felt like an ass, but you didn't show it. You played it cool. You came off as the guy who doesn't care what anyone things of him. And you looked fantastic in that suit. All the girls wanted to dance with you."

"Not all of them. Not you, Ms. Homecoming Queen."

"You never asked."

"I didn't want to tick off Mo."

"Didn't stop you from kissing me under the mistletoe at the Christmas party."

"I had an excuse to do that. You can't deny tradition."

The Christmas lights from the tree twinkled on and off. Tami glanced up at the mistletoe above their heads, and when she looked back at him, Eric was smiling, not with his mouth, but with his eyes. She felt a sudden tremor of expectation. Was he really going to do this, with Mo a few feet away at the punch bowl? He leaned in.

Eric's lips touching down on hers and sliding ever so gently across them was like a match striking to fire across a strip, and when he brought his lips back, and pressed them more firmly against hers, Tami thought something was going to burn down. At that very moment, however, Mo shoved him against his shoulder, and Eric stumbled out from under the mistletoe. Mo's lips crushed down on Tami's, and he made quite the scene of making out publicly with her. Eventually, Tami had to pull away. In that moment, Mo seemed to her like a dog marking his territory, and his lips felt more oppressive than pleasant.

For months, she had been fighting her feelings for Eric. She was wearing Mo's state ring around her neck, after all, and his letter jacket, and, up until the previous week, Eric had been dating someone. Tami and Mo had been together their entire junior year and half of their senior year. She wasn't ready to move on from him without a good reason, but she would soon discovered an entire trail of good reasons.

"So why did you start to fall for me at the Homecoming dance?" Eric asked.

"Because you asked that lonely girl in the wheelchair to dance, when a bunch of the guys on the team were making jokes about her even being there in the first place."

"Not a bunch of guys. Three guys. And they were assholes about everything."

"Still, you saw how upset she was, and you went right up there, asked if you could please have this dance, and wheeled her out on the dance floor. The look on some of those cheerleader's faces when you did that, too."

"It seemed like a good idea at the time, but then I didn't know what the hell to do when we got out there. Luckily, she did some pretty mean wheelies on that floor." That had been the year all the boys were into break dancing. It was a new fad then, and Eric had moon walked around the girl.

Tami smiled. "You were sweet, hon. Sweet as sugar."

"Nah. I wasn't being noble. She was cute. I don't know why the other guys didn't notice."

Tami laughed. "You didn't ask her because she was cute. You had a line of hot girls ready to dance with you, and you had your eye on Mary Anne."

He slid his arm around her shoulder and urged her to lean against him. "There was only one girl in that entire gym I really wanted to dance with."

"Mhm. But you didn't have any problem making out with Mary Anne in the stairwell later that night."

Mo tugged on Tami's hand and suggested they leave the dance and get back to his house before his parents got home from their date night.

"I just need to stop by my locker," she said. "I left my textbook in there."

"Since when do you care about textbooks?"

"Since I almost flunked Chemistry. I have to study this weekend."

When Tami and Mo started up the stairs, there was Eric, on the first landing, with Mary Anne pressed against the railing, one of his hands on the rail, the other on her hip, and his tongue down her throat. Tami had felt a sudden, sharp pang of jealousy, even though she had the star wide receiver's hand in her hand and was about to be in his bed. Eric heard the footsteps, pulled away, and flushed a beet red. Mo chuckled and slapped him on the shoulder. "Good to see you're settling in, new kid.

"His name's Aaron," Tami said, rolling her eyes. "Not new kid."

"It's uh…it's Eric actually," Eric muttered.

Eric now kissed the top of her head. "I was just biding time, babe, until you came to your senses and dumped Mo."

"Did you sleep with her? Mary Anne?"

"Not that night. I told you, our generation had to work harder for sex."

"But eventually, you did."

"I dated Mary Anne the entire football season, you know. You make it sound like I was a stud. I only ever went all the way with three girls in my life, including you."

"Four," Tami corrected him, and felt an instinctive spasm in her heart, which immediately unclenched itself. The spasm in Eric's muscles, however, did not fade. Tami could feel the tension in his arm around her shoulders. She hated these moments, when she accidentally stirred the pot of his guilt, or the now-calm sea of her ancient pain. "So how did Nate even meet Hastings?" she asked quickly.

He swallowed. His muscles relaxed a bit, but not entirely. He pulled her tighter.

"I mean," she said, "that just doesn't make any sense, that they would know each other."

A little breath escaped Eric, a sign of relief, perhaps. He put his feet up on the coffee table. "They met in a gay bar in L.A. Nate was there for business, with Joshua, and Joshua talked him into going. He was trying to get Nate to admit to himself that...you know. Hastings is out there for college. Playing basketball now. For the Bruins. Can't believe he went back to that sport when he could have played football..." Eric shook his head.

"He didn't get any scholarship offers."

"No, but if he walked on the basketball team, he probably could have walked on the football team instead."

"How did you handle it?" Tami asked. "When Nate told you?"

"Well, I was…I just listened. Asked questions. Tried to show interest. But I don't like it. I don't like Nate seeing him."

"I understand that you might be a little uncomfortable with Nate's homosexuality at the moment, but I know you, and I know - "

"- It's not that. It's…I wouldn't want my daughter dating Hastings."

"He wasn't a bad kid, was he? I don't remember him giving you too much trouble."

"Nah, he wasn't a bad kid, he was just...he's no Matt."

"There are very few Matt Saraceans in this world, Eric."

"Ruckle sat down and took off his helmet once. During practice!"

Tami looked at him and blinked. "Eric, you've picked up players when they were too drunk to drive before, you've caught them playing mailbox baseball, you've busted them using steroids, and you've even bailed them out of jail. And that's what bothers you?"

"He was just...smug. Cocky. He was kind of a cocky kid. Frankly, I don't know what Nate sees in him."

"Well…he's extremely good-looking."

"First off - why were you noticing that any teenage boy was extremely good-looking, and second off - are you suggesting my son is shallow?"

"First off, it's a purely objective observation. Second off, no, I don't think Nate is shallow, but I think he's clearly on the rebound. And a free spirit like Hastings, who's good-looking and lives on the other side of the country, might just be the right medicine at the right time."

"So you don't think this will last?"

"It seems unlikely to me, hon, but, before you knew who it was, you thought Nate was pretty smitten, didn't you?"

"I did. But maybe it's just infatuation. This is his first time with uh...with a guy. You're probably right. You usually are." He leaned down slightly and kissed her.

"Or, if, by some rare fluke, I am wrong, you can learn to think more highly of Hastings."

"He was a good wide receiver."

"There you go. It's a start."

"He thought we used cups in football, Tami. Cups."

Tami chuckled, shook her head, and stood up. "I'm going to bed. I have to go into work a little bit early tomorrow morning before your game. You should come to bed, too. You must be exhausted, as little sleep as you got last night."

Eric stood and placed a hand on the small of her back. "If I win this game, Nate will come to State."

"You better win then, sugar."