That Thing Called Love by Susan Andersen

good-looking single guys at these games as a rule. It only seems fair that you sit in the middle.” She looked past him at her friend. “That works for you, right?”
    The petite brunette at his side didn’t come right out and say, “No, you can have him.” But the sound she made in her throat wasn’t exactly a rousing endorsement, either. Reluctantly, he slid down the bench in her direction.
    Tasha squeezed through the remaining spectators separating them, inched past the woman who had been sitting next to him until a second ago, and plopped down alongside him. Leaning forward, she handed Jenny her can of soda, then gave him his and extended the molded cardboard container to him. “That one’s yours,” she said with a dip of her chin, then sat back to unwrap the foil from her own hot dog and open her can of pop.
    She dug her elbow in his side. “Move over a little. It’s been a while since I’ve rubbed shoulders with such a wide set, and they’ve got me practically in Maryanne’s lap,” she said, indicating the woman whose place she’d taken. “I need some elbow room.” When he didn’t promptly fall in line with her directive, she gave him a nudge of her own shoulder. “Move, Bradshaw!”
    His response to the command was purely reflexive, and he raised his butt up to scootch down the bench. Tasha instantly crowded him, claiming more real estate than he’d intended to relinquish. The next thing he knew, he was pushed up against Jenny from knee to shoulder.
    And, swamped with sensation, he could only think hazily, What is this, goddamn Groundhog Day ?
    Dammit, being plastered against this woman was not in his best interests. Only by making a joke this morning had he escaped the nearly overwhelming urge to slide his hands up beneath her top to cop a feel of her warm, bare skin, or down over her jeans to cup that sweetly rounded ass. He’d had to clamp a lid on an unwelcome craving to take a big juicy bite out of her.
    Now here he was on the same damn day, breathing in the same scent of her shampoo, conscious of her feminine warmth, her softness pressed against his own harder muscle and bone. He looked down.
    Only to have his dick give a mighty twitch at seeing her doing some pressing of her own.
    Oh. No. Erroneous information, pal.
    She was leaning around him. “Tasha, quit hogging all the space,” she said. “Maryanne’s not the only one who’s suddenly got someone practically in her lap—and Jake weighs a lot more than you do.”
    “Oops.” Tasha inched over. “Sorry, babe.”
    He couldn’t believe how grateful he was for the breathing room. And if that wasn’t bat-shit crazy, he didn’t know what was. As sexual titillation went, a little fully clothed, public press-and-rub of body parts that no one in their right mind would ever term erogenous was strictly bush league—and G-rated bush league at that. Which sort of begged the question, didn’t it?
    What the hell was he doing sitting here in the wake of said unimportant body press, sporting a dick that had pulsed itself to the early stage of an erection? Not even the been-a-whiles covered a response this juvenile.
    He knocked back half of his soda in one long gulp. Daaaamn. If it wasn’t the lack of recent sex, then it had to be the world of memories, the sensory overload, brought on by finding himself at his son’s baseball game on the field where he’d spent every spring of his school years.
    Why that should matter, he couldn’t say. It had been a long time and a lot of miles since his high school days.
    A lot of miles. He raised his hot dog to his mouth.
    Still. His responses, his mind-set, sure seemed to lean in that direction.
    He stilled, the hot dog poised at his open mouth. Christ. Because, a lot of distance or not, that was what he’d felt like. Not the sexually responsible man he’d been for the past thirteen-plus years, but a high school kid getting his rub-on against a girl simply because she smelled good and felt