Playing By The Rules. Beverly Bird

sure why I didn’t want him to hear me talking to Mill about this. Maybe because I didn’t want him to know there was suddenly a major crusade afoot to push us together and the entire city of Philadelphia seemed to be in on it.

      “I’ll get it, Mom!” Chloe shouted. Then, a heartbeat later, “It’s Sam!”

      “I’ve got to go,” I said quickly.

      Mill overheard. Chloe’s voice can be like a siren when she’s happy. “Sam?” he asked.

      “The pizza guy.” I hung up the phone fast.

      “I have two bottles,” Sam said, stepping into the kitchen. He held them both in one hand. In the other was his Glenlivet. That told me I could have the wine to myself—he wouldn’t be sharing it.

      “Was it going to take you that much to get Tammy into—” Then I broke off. Chloe was leaning against his right thigh, looking at me expectantly.

      “Get Tammy into what?” she asked. Then she looked up at Sam. “Who’s Tammy?”

      “Never mind, rug rat.” But Sam knew where I’d been headed with my comment. “One was for before,” he told me, “and the other was for after. I’m good. I don’t need much help.”

      Funny thing about a woman’s body. It has a mind of its own. You can react even when your brain is utterly sane with the understanding that reacting is stupid. It happens viscerally. I imagined “good” with Sam and when something rolled over inside me this time, it wasn’t in my gut. It was a lot lower than that. And after it rolled, it tightened up.

      Damn Grace. I rubbed my forehead again.

      “Neck rub?” he asked, noticing.

      “Just uncork the wine, Sam. And hurry.”

      Chapter Three

      I blame Sam’s wine as much as I blame anything else for what happened next. By nine o’clock, when Chloe was tucked into bed, my eyes were closed and my head was tilted back against the sofa cushions. My feet were propped on the coffee table. So were Sam’s. He was on the other end of the sofa.

      “You know what the problem is?” he asked me suddenly.

      I made the kind of noise in my throat that said I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, but that he should go on, anyway.

      “With dating,” he clarified.

      I opened one eye. “Ah, that problem. Your way or mine? Excessively or rarely?”

      “I don’t date excessively.” He sat up straight, indignantly. “Saturday night comes every week. I just like to use it accordingly.”

      “Sam, you date on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, too.”

      “My point is that too much or too little of this dating business is equally frustrating.”

      He was staring down into his scotch glass now. His expression was serious. After a day filled with Grace’s observations and Mill’s custody petition, Sam’s suddenly pensive mood worried me.

      “You go out with a woman for the first time and she expects all these subtle little things to immediately click right into place,” he continued. “Talk about pressure.”

      “As opposed to men,” I asked, “who don’t give a damn about things clicking one way or the other?”

      He looked over at me and his face took on that offended look again. “That’s not true. We give a damn.”

      “Before or after you catch sight of the finish line?”

      “Both.”

      I rolled my eyes to show my opinion of that. “Continue. What little things?”

      “Mental stimulation. Good conversation. Mental stability. Sexual attraction. Everything is supposed to happen all at once, and men are looking for that, too. I mean, some of us want it and some of us run like hell when it’s there, but it’s still an issue.”

      Suddenly, I was sure that Grace had repeated to him everything I’d told her earlier about my own over-thirty-five theory, my three-Cs rule of thumb—companionship, comfort and conversation. This was a little spooky.

      “Have you been talking to Grace?” I demanded.

      Sam looked around my living room as though expecting to find her there. “Not since McGlinchey’s. Why?”

      “What did she say to you?”

      He looked at me oddly. “You were there. You heard the whole conversation. You were part of it.”

      “You didn’t talk to her privately?”

      “When would I have done that?”

      “I don’t know.”

      “You’re really acting strange tonight,” he said.

      I grabbed the wine bottle from the coffee table and topped off my glass. “Having your daughter’s father sue you for custody can do that to a woman.” I’d filled him in on the problem after dinner when Chloe had gone to her room to watch television.

      Sam waved a hand negligently. “I told you I’d handle that.”

      “And I told you no thanks.”

      “You’re too close to it to represent yourself.”

      And he was closer to it than he knew. I could only imagine Mill’s reaction if Sam—the man I was reputedly seeing—appeared with me in court. “Get back to your point,” I prodded him. “You were philosophizing.”

      Sam slanted another look my way. “Okay. The thing is, somebody is always waiting, wanting, hoping for all those little things to click into place and coincide.”

      “The mental stimulation, the conversation and the animal attraction,” I said to clarify.

      “I didn’t say animal. Who said anything about animal?”

      I realized I had claws on my mind again. “Well, that’s what we’re all looking for, right?”

      His brows climbed his forehead. “Are you?”

      I definitely wasn’t going to get into that discussion again. “We were talking about you, Sam.”

      “All right. Fine. We’ll call it animal attraction. But it never happens, you know. Either you get the mental stimulation going, but then the animal business is missing—or it’s there, but the woman turns out to be a Looney-Toon, emotionally unstable. Or she thinks you’re great and you think she’s about as interesting as a can of vegetables.”

      I got stuck on the emotionally unstable part. “Like Tammy?”

      He didn’t argue it. He just shrugged. “Then you’re left trying to wriggle free without hurting anyone’s feelings or wearing some pink drink,” he said.

      He was like that, I knew. He worried as much about hurting women as I did about bad parenthood. “You looked ridiculous, by the way.”

      He didn’t rise to the bait. He lifted his glass and swallowed the last of his scotch. “I just get tired of it, Mandy. But it’s like some kind of…of addiction. We keep scrambling after it because we need that male-female thing going on in our lives. And the need makes us keep going out there, bashing our heads against walls, smashing ourselves all up, getting drinks tossed in our faces, just because we had the audacity to look for a partner who’s on the same wavelength.”

      “Wavelengths are shifty little things,” I agreed.

      He stood and went to the kitchen to retrieve his bottle of scotch. When he came back, he bent and picked up his shoes from my living room floor. Then he stood at the door, armed with all of it. “On that note, I’m going home,” he said. “Thanks for dinner.”

      Suddenly I felt an