Back To U

chapter Seven

Pepper can add surprising heat to any dish.





As the pep rally broke up, she thought they’d head back to campus, but Max took them towards the bridge. She hadn’t been there yet, and she’d loved the old walking bridge, its wood creaky but sturdy with a lacy metal canopy overhead. Her favorite time had been in the spring when the river beneath ran murky and fast, but she had only seen that her freshmen year. By her second year, she’d been gone in December. This time she’d be repeating that. She wouldn’t be there to see the branches and logs float by during the high tide of nature’s spring cleaning.

Max stopped half-way across, leaned his forearms on the scarred rail that had been replaced at some point but still looked lovely from wear. She copied his stance, enjoying the dark and quiet, the river hardly audible with its low fall level. "Thanks for the pep rally. I needed it."

Max smiled. She could tell from his profile and the way his body moved just a little next to hers and maybe because there were still some things she knew about him. He relaxed more beside her. "Where do you suppose the word pep comes from?"

"Pepper."

He looked at her as if he was considering whether or not she was joking. "Really?"

"Yeah. Pep means vigor, and it's short for pepper, which adds vigor to food." It really did pay off to study with note cards. It sometimes amazed her how quickly she could digest one of Deb’s lectures. She realized he was waiting for some explanation, like she’d just given the stats on the average rainfall of the Amazon rainforest. She shrugged. "I seem to know a lot about cooking."

She felt him stiffen next to her like she’d said something wrong, and she didn’t think he’d say any more, but he seemed to relax himself deliberately. "I’ll try not to hold that against you."

Surely he was kidding, but his serious look didn’t go away. What an unusual man. He’d been an interesting boy as well. She tried to remember them together on the bridge. They must have crossed it a dozen times. On foot it was the easiest way to town and the grocery store right on the other side that stocked enough beer to float the campus.

She listened to the conversations mingling behind them as groups headed towards the restaurants and bars. She tried but didn’t have one clear memory of Max to pull out of storage. It was too bad memory didn’t work that specifically. Maybe good. Wonderful memories faded, bled together to become a general one, but so did the painful ones.

She wished, sometimes, she could store the past as conveniently as she stored recipe cards. Card by card, she could long for and retrieve a September day riding a bike across the bridge, Max beside her saying something bright and clever or maybe laughing at something she’d said. That would have been a good one to re-live in detail. Just like the recipe card with the individual ingredients that made up the whole, she could whip up a memory. September twenty years ago she would have complained about her mother half a cup and worried about what she was doing in elementary education since it was already proving a poor fit. Deciding what to major in would be a whole cup. The best time of her life with Max beside her deserved a quart. And, whether she wanted to see it or not, the doubts about him were probably the beginning of a teaspoon then.

Even on the best September day when she’d been in the middle of being in love with him, she’d doubted some too. At the end she thought he was every doubt. But to be honest, most of the doubts were about herself, gallons of doubt that drowned out the taste of everything.

Did it still flavor all that she did? Was that the dominate ingredient of her life? She’d waited months for Steve to come back, but doubted she had the ability to make it work even given a chance. God knew she doubted her relationship with Missy. Maybe mid-life came with a twisted silver lining. The collapse of her marriage and F report card in parenting had eliminated some of her doubt about the collapse of things. Total collapse had been confirmed. Disaster had come out of the oven.

She turned to see if Max was ready to go, the evening sad now for her, too nostalgic to give her anything real, or maybe too real to give her even this moment of nostalgia.

He leaned closer, and she registered for a second that he was going to kiss her. She felt a pulse of panic and then Max so soft against her lips, along her jaw, down to the pulse point on her throat. She registered the question of it and felt her heart kick up a notch in answer.

"Hey, I… sorry."

Gwen stepped back, stared big-eyed at Max. She watched him turn, eyes narrowed at the interrupter.

A student gripped a camera bag, tried a smile, the kind designed to calm down a rabid dog. "Sorry, man."

"I’m flunking you, man."

"Not after you see these." He patted the bag like it held treasure.

Max laughed and tipped his head toward Gwen. "They can't be that good."





He’d taken her home after the kiss was cut short on the bridge. Hell, he’d had to drop her off at her dorm building. Not that he wasn’t completely in control of himself, but he hadn’t intended to kiss her and he did and wouldn’t have stopped, maybe ever, if Dalton hadn’t arrived in all his cluelessness. There were rules about interrupting a guy kissing a female that Dalton should know. The rules applied whether the guy was thirteen or a hundred and thirty. Who was educating these kids?

And he still felt restless Saturday afternoon. He hadn't been able to stand another minute in his house and found himself staring out his office window onto the empty campus. He’d kicked around the night before and kicked himself for thinking Gwen was someone he should even make eye contact with let alone lip contact with. In the first place, he shouldn’t have followed her into Psych. There was a sign. Psych. But it had been so much fun sparring with her again. She still had that girl-quality that made her gullible but with a woman’s edge that made her a match. A match. Hell. He had enough trouble without adding Gwen to it.

Every man was entitled to the woman who could tie up his whole world and make him crazy. But when it ended, and it would, and badly, he learned and never went back. You get measles once, and you’re immune. That’s how it was supposed to work. It did work. He was immune, just human, and he’d gone without sex for a long time, months, camel time in a man’s world. He was being an idiot to even think it was anything more than that.

He grabbed his camera because there was nothing a couple of hours of shooting wouldn’t cure. He left the office and headed down the hallway, but when he stepped outside the building, he could hear the muffled announcer at the football stadium. He’d do some all American photos. He never did those. He’d give himself an assignment. Capture the purity of the game, the true believers who worshipped there. No edge, no comment, no twist, no framing the beautiful through the gum encrusted bleacher bottoms. Just frame the world the way everyone else seemed to see it, full of softness and second chances.





Annie walked surprisingly fast given the diameter of her legs. Gwen had a hard time keeping up with her as they trekked across the campus with grocery bags. Annie had even taken the heavier ones out of consideration for Gwen’s advanced age. That made her smile and consider there was a lot to the girl she’d once thought of as the gopher. She’d gotten Annie into the kitchen for a lesson early one morning, and they'd made tentative muffins because that was how Annie approached things, even baked goods.

They’d used the lavender sugar, and it proved to be both lovely and not easily overpowered. That’s how she’d come to think of Annie. The girl possessed several strengths not apparent to the naked eye, not apparent, yet, to Annie herself. They’d talked, as much as interactions with Annie could be considered talking, about her family. Every one of them for several generations was a practicing attorney. Her parents had been the second round of a husband-wife team. Her grandparents took what some would say was the dubious honor of being the first.

It appeared that Annie's brother was the first to break the chain. He attended a private high school but was already given up on by the parents for reasons Gwen did not ask about and Annie probably wouldn’t have said. That left all their lawyer eggs in one basket. It was up to Annie to keep the family chain letter going, and there might be dire consequences for breaking the tradition. Annie didn’t seem up for the fight.

They walked over the bridge in silence, Annie because that was her natural state and Gwen because she'd been kissed there recently. The truth was that not kissing anyone but her husband for twenty years, and not even him that often, was her natural state.

And Max of all people. She tried to concentrate as they left the bridge and encountered the spill-over crowd from the tailgate parties nearby. The music and voices already rocked half of the campus. Max, of all the people in a world of people, was the last person she should have kissed. Well, to be fair, she hadn’t really kissed him. She wasn’t using that as an excuse, she’d just been too stunned to technically kiss him back, and his lips had quickly made tracks down her neck to the… shit, she felt the edge of real trouble.

Another couple of seconds and she might have gotten over his taser effect on her and gone crazy, been unleashed, taken him like a--

She jumped when Annie knocked her shin with a grocery bag.

Annie stood, rooted on the path. Gwen took in her startled face then looked ahead and saw the boys running towards them. They had a field to go, and they had some speed, but also they didn’t want to spill their drinks, so she had a minute.

She set down her bag, put her hand on Annie’s back to help support it. The poor girl really did spook easily. "That’s a sight. Bunch of big guys charging." She considered that maybe Annie didn’t spook easily so much as spook with good reason. "You know, they remind me of the jerks in high school, that pack of mean jock boys. They were the ones who did things the principal called practical jokes. But they weren’t either practical or funny were they?"

Annie shook her head.

Gwen hoped that whatever had happened to the girl had been bruising and not scarring. "A couple of them in my high school liked to make up names, but they weren’t that great. We could come up with better ones." She glanced at Annie, eyes still straight ahead. Hayden was down now and took out Bryan and Jason in a pile of blue and silver athletic gear. Jason lost his hat, and Gwen realized she’d never seen him without it. He really did look like a high school boy.

"And they did, one of those boys, maybe, to some girl… do something lots worse."

Annie lifted her head, lowered it. "My friend, Marianne."

Gwen felt relieved that the story wasn’t Annie’s and then guilty like she’d wished it on a girl she didn’t know. "I’m sorry, Annie."

She could see the boys were on their feet now and running again, although at a slower clip. She only had a couple of seconds. "Annie, listen, you go on toward the dorm. I’ll get rid of them and catch up." But Annie stood her ground even though Gwen felt her shift a couple of inches closer. Strength. "If it helps, think of them as overgrown puppies."

Annie tried to smile at her.

"They all are until thirty." She thought of Max, too jaded and worldly to ever be called a puppy, but still undomesticated. "Then they’re wolves."





Two hot dogs in less than twenty-four hours, it was a good thing she’d bought vegetables at the store. She was in the decade when cholesterol numbers meant something.

Annie seemed surprisingly relaxed, drinking her full-sugar soda, the lucky girl. She watched the boys closely but with more amusement than the discomfort she’d shown at first. They’d tucked their grocery bags in the cooler and found themselves pre-game partying with the fraternal order of Chi Omikron. Gwen’s plan was to finish her processed meat and white bun, nurse her diet soda for the thirty minutes until kick-off, and head back to the dorm.

Meanwhile she watched the boys in action, and it was clear they were freshmen running with a pack of bigger dogs. The upperclassmen had earned a bit of their swagger, and the girls responded accordingly. She felt a twinge of something for the boys trying to make their way in a much bigger arena than high school. She'd not fully appreciated how difficult it must be to be a young male in the world.

Had some of Max's push to be free been him trying to stand out in a world of older, higher ranking men? Back then she’d wanted something too, something she couldn’t name. It had been Max and more than Max. She’d not even been close to figuring that out when she'd been shaken up. There’d been eighteen months of pure joy and then running wild with Max had gone from bliss to disaster. She'd been flying and discovered that when she really needed it, her chute didn't open, wouldn't open, couldn't open with him. She had to give Steve credit there. Whatever the usual disappointments found in marriage, and the colossal disappointments found in divorce, he'd always plodded on solid ground. She'd thought she did too.

Hayden came up to them with dessert. There had to be a hundred cookies in the box and it was only half full. The first hundred must be sitting in Chi Omikron bellies, already soaking up alcohol and mixing with grilled meats in probably some bad ways. "Thank you." She took two and handed one to Annie. Her impulse to fatten the girl up a bit she wouldn’t categorize as maternal. It was friendly, not caretaking.

Annie pointed into the crowd, the steady stream of people that made their way from tailgates to ticket gates. "Isn't that Guy?"

Gwen waved and was rewarded with a huge grin. That boy may not be able to communicate with words, but he had a joy that was apparent. He stopped in front of them, lowered his head to Gwen, then Annie, and Gwen put her hand out to stop Annie from falling out of her lawn chair. "Cookie, Guy?"

He smiled again, took two, and pulled up a lawn chair, sitting with great deliberation as if he were fully engaged in something even that small. She remembered seeing him with the TV remote and the same sense of purpose.

Jason came over, shrugged with male casualness. "Guy."

Guy smiled back, and Jason handed him a soda.

Well, men apparently did know how to host a party.

Bryan, a foam finger claiming victory, pointed his regular hand at the stadium, reconsidered, and aimed the giant one. "Game's starting. We'll see you at half-time?"

Gwen smiled, "Probably not but thanks for the lunch." Bryan waved the foam finger, rallying the boys to head in. Guy stayed, looked around, and seemed to determine where he'd have the best view. He settled on facing away from the mob and toward the river. Motioning for her and Annie to join him, they all turned their chairs around. It did have a superior view, and the three of them sat with their backs to the parking lot and stadium just past it. It was the most relaxing moment she’d had in so long, it felt foreign. Lovely and foreign.

She sipped her soda, enjoyed the cool sweet of it, diet and all. Behind them beat music and yelling, and the occasional hiss of a grill flare up, but it all accompanied the view in wonderful relief.

She wanted to hold it like a living picture, the grassy field in front of them, straw-colored with the growth of summer past. Sections of it remained beaten down from the pep rally the night before. There were a few cups and bottles missed in the clean-up, but by March the grass would spring up fresh and green again.

Across the way, she could see the bridge. Even without the up-close beauty of the wood, it still impressed her with its spidery rust red structure spun over the river. From a distance, the water, low and dark, didn't even seem to move but stood a dark blue stroke of water color in the tan of river banks.

And beyond the river, the brick back of the grocery store followed a line of mixed stucco and aluminum-sided stores until the buildings passed out of sight and dark roads branched and disappeared into city blocks. Above it all, around them all, a rim of mountain range. It showed dark blue from the distance, even though gray rock and evergreens and soil couldn't add up to the color good mountains always wore. And the peaks, still free of snow, would know the next season soon enough. By October some edges wouldn't have escaped a dusting of white.

She felt herself melt into the back of the lawn chair, let her head fall back, eyes open to the sky where a wisp of cloud lay like a woman's scarf thrown across the blue. She heard the click everyone else missed and tried not to move. She'd learned that much in the time she'd been with Max. Never react to the camera. Just be and let it capture the moment, your moment just as it is.

But it changed things, the click. It meant he was there and watched her in that impersonal yet deeply personal way he could with a camera in his hand. She lifted her head and met the eye of the camera. Silence.

She waited for the click, but Max didn't move. The confusion must have shown on her face, and he lowered the camera, fussing with it around his neck. She'd not seen him conscious of his camera since the first day he’d carried one and never seen him use it to distract himself. Or her, maybe.

He waved vaguely toward the stadium. "Taking some shots of the game."

She sat, watched him, and felt something shift in who was and wasn't comfortable. She could be the cool one for a change, the one who, oh-so-casually, just kept on being relaxed. "Better get going. Game's starting."

He nodded. "Yeah, I'm taking some shots of the game."

"That's what you said." It was so fun to see him flustered. She didn’t know why he was, but she should figure it out and do it more often.

"I did?"

And it would be fun to poke him a little bit, not mean so much as mildly zinging. "And you'll take dark ones too… the cheerleader caught looking pissy, a section of bored or crazed fans. You'll be shooting underneath the bleachers because you always had a fondness for the gum on the underbelly of mankind."

He looked like he might try to defend himself, and she felt a little guilty and held up her hand. "I'm sorry. You do brilliant work. Everyone always said so, and I've seen it myself." Not that she’d set out to see his work. She might be a little guilty of paying attention to photo credits in magazines but didn't everybody?

Max smiled.

Damn. She could see she'd made a tactical error when he quickly recovered his god-given state of sure of himself-ness. Just like that, one minute she was on top and then wham she was on the bottom. That didn’t sound right. She needed to defend herself. "I didn't follow your career or anything. I've never yahooed you."

"Googled. And I will believe your denial about anything internet related now that you've said yahooed. Thank you for the clarification. I feel safer knowing you couldn't find me via satellite."

"I don't have to. You're everywhere I am."

"It's a small campus."

"Not that small."

"And I am too going to capture the purity of Americana during this game."

She snorted.

"You could do better?"

"I couldn't take better pictures, but I could capture American purity." She laughed. "A hell of a lot better than you could. You wouldn't know nice, lovely humanity if it bit you on the ass."

He arched an eyebrow, so sure of himself she wanted to kick him in the shin. "If humanity bit my ass it wouldn't be the nice and lovely humans doing it." He got the wolfy look on his face again. "Although if a centerfold was an ass-biter, she'd be lovely by trade, and it might be nice--"

"You're making my very point." She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes as if she were relaxed. Maybe power would revert back to her if she were cool enough, like in tennis when it advances from love to fifteen all. They were tied, but with her superior calm, she’d be deuce. Wait, deuce wasn’t winning, was it? It was just another tie but with a higher score?

She felt Max grab her hand and pull her to her feet. She tried to sputter some sense of outrage, but he pulled the camera strap over his head and pushed it into her hands. "You get the first half of the game. I take the second. And the winner..."

"Winner what?" Damn. She needed to stop talking altogether. It didn’t matter what spin he could possible put on taking her down. It was still down. And she for one wasn’t going to--

"Winner takes all."

She felt him try to tug her along toward the stadium, but she pulled back. "Not so fast, mister. Some of us find it critical to set the parameters of a bet before we rush into anything."

"Not a gambler. I knew that."

"I have gambled plenty." She tried to get her hand back, but he didn’t release it, and she didn’t want to make a scene in front of Guy and Annie, although they were still studying the mountains with Zen-like concentration. "I've been to Vegas."

"With a bunch of girlfriends, I’m thinking. You got blitzed on a nice merlot and threw it all away on nickel slots. Am I right?"

"Please. There were shots of serious alcohol and poker and, uh, craps. Nude show girls. I mean, not one of them had their tops on. And there was a--"

He laughed. "You went with your mother."

She didn’t have to admit anything, and so what if she'd been forced to go because no one wanted to be the Bunco group’s designated driver?

Max tugged her a couple of steps toward the stadium as if they both hadn’t noticed they were moving. "The winner gets one day."

"One day doing what? Exactly."

"Whatever the other person wants. Exactly."

"So I could get you to wax my car or do my psychology homework?" Not that she hadn’t done her psychology homework so far ahead she’d probably already reached the end of the semester.

He dismissed the difficulty of that with a wave. "Please."

"Drive two hours and clean out my mother's basement?"

"Does she keep any bodies down there?"

"Winner takes all, doesn't she?"

"Yes, he does, and the longer you stand here, the greater your odds of missing the kickoff, which, as you know, is the summit of man's goodwill."

"I don't know…" She motioned to Annie and Guy who appeared to have mastered relaxation to the millionth degree. "Annie, are you okay if I go to the game ‘cause I don’t have to. We can head back to the dorm or…"

Annie waved her on.

Well, maybe she would go, but there ought to be more rules. Max just couldn’t be allowed free rein. She couldn’t risk that, even though the picture she had in her head wasn’t them from twenty years before but the two of them on the bridge the night before. She rushed on. "Nobody can ask the other person to do anything that the other person feels is inappropriate or otherwise deeply unwise or could potentially complicate what shouldn't be complicated at all but may be even though it's not, and I know that you and I, well I don't know and wouldn't know because there's nothing of, you know, any..." She took a breath. "Why did you kiss me?"

Max didn't even blink. "I don't know."

He must have thought about it too if he could answer so quickly and without any insight. No one could have insight about the kiss because it was plainly and simply wrong. "It shouldn't happen again."

He hesitated but nodded in agreement. "Now, are you gonna get in there and shoot some niceness, or are we gonna stand here while you lose?"

She slung the camera around her neck, and it dipped her head forward with its surprising heft. She threw her shoulders back for counterbalance. "Oh, this game's on."





Gwen's Journal - October 4th, Sunday 1989



Max picked me up at my room last night. I wore that pink sweater I had for the senior class Spring Fling. We saw a movie at the Fox, and it wasn’t very good, but I don’t know if I could have paid attention anyway even to a good one. Sitting that close to Max for two hours… I mean, at his parents we sat across. In the car, you know, there’s stuff in between. But we just had an arm rest we both kind of used, and it was hard to relax.

We walked back to campus and stopped on the bridge, and I just thought, wow, I’m with this guy. I’ll never forget it. And then we talked in his room for hours. We talked about everything, parents and school and our majors. He wants to see the world. He’s a photo-journalism major. It just sounds good, like architecture, except that sounds terrible when you look at the classes you have to take. He’s already doing really well. I saw some of his pictures. The one of me in the cafeteria didn’t even look like me it was so good. We’re going out next week. He’s a really good kisser.



Gwen's life - earlier that morning…



If she stayed any longer the sun would be up, and she’d have to scoot across campus to her own room in broad daylight. Not that anyone cared or would see her, and it was hard to leave Max. She felt his warmth, his heartbeat, just like she’d always imagined. Well, she’d hoped the thump of the guy’s heart with her head on his chest worked that way. She was glad that even with clothes on she could have that.

She studied the underside of the top bunk. Max was right. It was great to have a roommate who was gone on the weekends. She stretched a little just to feel the length of her body intertwined with his, the rub of jeans and twist of the blanket he’d thrown over them. He’d fallen asleep, and maybe she had too. They’d kissed and talked until the whispering made her voice hoarse and the kissing made her lips sore, and still she just wanted to kiss him some more.

Breathing in the warm scent of him, she felt his body hard against the give of her own. He didn’t know it yet, but she was definitely going all the way with him. And maybe, although she didn’t want to think past dawn, maybe even further.





Back to U…



He’d urged her to start small when the sheer volume of people overwhelmed her, and they hadn’t even hit the stadium yet. Where to capture a single image that said something good about everything around her?

The ground level cement corridors were packed and movement was slowed even more by the concessions. There were lines for pizza and lines for popcorn and lines for Hawaiian noodle bowls. Island cuisine didn’t seem like football fodder to her, but it smelled so good she wished she’d passed on the hot dog.

Max paused beside her and checked out the noodle bowl menu. "I think this image says melting pot. It says fiftieth state in the union. You should definitely get it."

She pretended to frame a shot of the guy stuck with the very hot job of stirring the oversized wok then she spun and got a picture of Max. She lowered the camera. "I think this image says smart ass. It says number one loser of the bet."

Max shook his head. "That’s just the kind of gum-under-the-seat shot I expected from you. I don’t think you can capture, what was it? Nice, lovely humanity that bites ass?"

A family walked by, the little boy wearing a Belmar sweatshirt, his hat on backwards. Gwen got down to his level and captured his dash away. His slightly older sister, decked out in a mini cheerleader outfit, turned as if on cue, smiled, and tossed her beribboned ponytail.

Gwen felt Max crouch beside her and scan the cement tunnel as if framing his own photos. "You missed the shot of the girl."

She rolled her eyes at him. "Her costume was disturbing on so many levels."

"So, you’ll leave the cheerleader shots for me?"

"You can bet on it. You always were a leg man." She cringed, embarrassed to have let herself get so comfortable it was like it had been between them. She stood, kept the camera to her face and pretended to work when she felt him rise slowly beside her. He visually made his way up her mercifully jean clad leg. Had she been standing in a skirt the experience would have been far more intimate. Plus, the Max she’d known would have definitely looked up it.

She spotted a group of younger teens, three guys who were probably football playing stars of their middle school if their swagger was any indication. It was like seeing the boys at the start of becoming the boys. She set off after them, hoping to get a photo before she lost them in the stands. She didn’t worry that Max would follow. He would or he wouldn’t. She had his camera.





Max followed her all the way to the end zone. She didn’t know if the end bleachers had names like the Blue End Zone or Visitor Zone versus the Home Zone, or directions like South End Zone, but she'd made her way to the top row of one of them. For the first time she could see the whole scene spread out before her, and it was beautiful, an odd thing to feel about a football game. The sun was out and shone down on all the color and motion of a couple thousand people enjoying a Saturday. The rectangle of grass glowed emerald, made more striking by the sharp white border, numbers, and grid that ran across it. There was a comfort to the orderliness of it all with its bear logo in the center and Belmar spelled out in a swirl of silver and blue.

The marching band took the field with the piccolo player Max had teased her about having a soft spot for. She forgot all about the camera and watched the director mount a white ladder to lead them. Once he made the first slash down with his arm, they took off without seeming to need direction at all. The fight song, words still escaping her, moved her anyway and so did the flash of bright uniforms and brass fanning out in a variety of shapes and patterns to the applause of the crowd.

It was the crowd that made everything great, the spectators blurring in team colors and vibrating with energy. She’d photographed some of them one at a time, but from the end zone, they were one.

Years before, she'd read something about coral reefs. They’d always seemed like a structure to her, one continuous thing, like a rocky mountain ridge that just happened to occur under the water and not above it. She should have known they were living things, living individuals that formed a community of one. Standing there, seeing that kind of community, she wished she could take that picture, but it was too much to get in one frame, too much for one image to capture, and there was no need to try. She’d just enjoy being there.

She handed the camera to Max, and he held it in his palm as if testing the weight of it. "Think you got it?"

She smiled. "I did." She watched him head down the bleachers. "I just can’t seem to keep it."

Staying to witness the exit of the marching band, she waved at the piccolo player, and smiled at her own weaknesses, some large enough to take her down. She should just leave, leave the stadium, leave Belmar probably. Leave Max certainly. She saw him clear the last row of bleachers and look up at her. She certainly didn’t need to follow him. She’d taken her shots, and he didn’t need her, but he smiled and she found herself making her way down the aisle. It was a pleasure to see him work. She wasn’t following him because he’d smiled at her in invitation.

He turned when he realized she was behind him, and she caught the burst of football players beginning their second half. She had a second half too. If she was lucky, she did. Maybe she’d hit forty and keel over from the sheer fright of it, but she doubted she’d be that lucky. She was born to be a plodder and to just keep going until she wore down enough to plod herself right into her own grave. Well, hell. She took a deep breath. That was depressing as hell.

What she needed was to concentrate on the difficulty of the moment not the difficulty of a long and grinding life. And the difficulty of the moment was rationalizing why she was closing the distance between her and Max. It wasn’t because walking behind him she could see he still had a great, great butt. She hadn’t even noticed that. She might be willing to admit that when she’d handed him the camera and the wind ruffled his hair, she’d felt something like longing. But that’s what a plodder felt in the presence of a sprinter. And that was the real reason she followed him. Sprinters had passion, the obvious kind, but the other kind too.

She cleared the bleachers and saw him make his way around the side of the stadium where he spotted a pair of brothers playing catch with their young dad. The camera and Max were indistinguishable. He just seemed to see the photo and capture it. The angles he took of the boys seemed so odd to her. She wanted to know what the picture looked like from there because it wasn’t where she would have stood or the way she would have leaned. It was pure Max.

She'd always loved seeing people do what they were meant to do. Max lost Max with a camera. He seemed to connect with something greater and just flowed so unselfconsciously. She felt a stab of envy then realized she felt some of that when she cooked. She’d not thought of it that way, but there were times when the task at hand took on a life of its own, compelling the next thing and the next without thought. It was something she did without doubt, maybe the only thing.

Max straightened, dropped the camera around his neck, and, just like that, he was back. He walked toward her, and she thought he seemed on the verge of asking her something, but then he headed toward the nearest exit, and she fell in beside him.

On the way out they had a view of the underside of one stadium section, and Max waved to the photography student she recognized as the one who'd interrupted their clinch on the bridge. "Dalton!"

The boy grinned and ran over, and the very location he was shooting made Gwen laugh. "Gum under the bleachers shot." She put her palms together and bowed to Max. "He learns from the master."

Max acknowledged her accuracy by ignoring it. "Hey, Dalton," he opened up a flap at the bottom of his camera and pulled out a memory card. "I want you to take this and print the best photo on it."

Gwen stepped closer, "No way!"

Max tried for innocent. "Every contest needs a judge."

"But the bet isn’t the best photo. It’s the…" she considered how to sum up the flavor of the winning shot.

Max raised an eyebrow. "Good. He’ll be able to do that."

"Okay." She stood in front of Dalton, looked intently at him to make sure she had his attention. "Pick the photo that captures everything the Beatles sang about." She held up her hand before Max could interrupt. "I know they weren't American, but who captured humanity like the Beatles?"

Max snorted. "The kid doesn’t know anything about--"

"Man, everybody knows the Beatles. My mom’s favorite is Yellow Submarine."

Gwen knew she was in trouble with that one. It couldn't be the song with the octopus in the garden. Were they having tea? That wouldn’t do, not one of the weird Beatle's song. "No Yellow Submarine but any of the others."

Max leaned closer as if to help her explain. "She wants that kookokachoo song. Those are the kind of lyrics she'd like you to have in mind when you choose." He patted Dalton on the back. "Good luck with that."

Damn. Max was going to confuse the kid so much that he’d just pick the best photo, and she was not going to win that bet. And if she lost the bet, god knows what he’d ask her to do, and she might want to and that would be extra bad. How could she… She started to sing The Long and Winding Road, and Dalton was smiling back at her when she got to the part where she'd seen the road before because it leads to your door. She had the contest in the bag. "That kind of Beatles song."

Dalton put the card in his pocket. "Got it."

She turned to Max. "You’re so gonna lose." But he just stood there with an expression she hadn't seen before. "What?"

He didn’t answer, just shook his head, and led them out from under the bleachers.