I laugh. I’m not sure what I’m laughing at more—the ridiculousness of the analogy or the idea of finding love in my personal life—but I laugh, nonetheless.

“Life is too much of a shit show to go into a movie and not be sure if she gets the guy or not,” I say. “Sometimes, you just want to know that it’s going to end well for a change.”

He nods approvingly. “I get it. Do you happen to know of any movies where the baseball god retires unexpectedly and lands with both feet on the ground, a solid trajectory, a wife, and maybe a dog?”

I grin. “I don’t know of one offhand, but I’m sure it’s been done.”

He leans his head back on the sofa. “Maybe that’s what I can do with my life now. I can make movies.”

“We lead such different lives.”

“Why?”

“Because I’ve never, in my entire life, thought, ‘Ah yes, I’ll just go make movies now.’” I smirk. “Well, I did hear you can sell foot pictures online, and I might have considered that once or twice.”

He drops his jaw.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” I ask. “It’s easy money.”

“Tell me you haven’t done that.”

I shrug. “I mean, I haven’t, but I do like the entrepreneurial spirit of the whole thing.”

He runs a hand over his face while his chest rises and falls.

“And I do have cute feet.” I hold a foot up just to screw with him. “I bet that I could get fifty bucks out of this.”

“You’ve lost your mind.”

I pretend like I’m considering that. “Definitely. Fifty bucks a pop might be on the cheap side.”

“Stop it,” he says before taking a pillow and tossing it at me.

I catch it and laugh. “At least I have a backup plan. Well, you do, too, but your whole making-movies thing sounds a lot more involved than mine.”

“I’m not actually going to make movies.”

“Why not?”

He holds his hands out. “I don’t know. Because I don’t know how. It doesn’t interest me. There’s a plethora of reasons.”

“Okay. What interests you, then?”

He crosses his arms over his chest. “Baseball.”

“You can’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s obvious.”

He blows out a breath. “Surfing, even though I’m terrible at it.”

“I already know that.”

“Are there any other rules that I need to know?” He laughs. “Damn.”

“No,” I say, grinning. “I just want to know new things that interest you. Things that I don’t know.”

He shifts his body so that he’s leaning on his side. He looks longer, more muscled, as the sunlight rakes over the lines of his figure.

I shiver and hope that he doesn’t notice.

“I like to cook, I think,” he says.

“You think?”