Free It Had to Be You by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

back to boyhood when too much emotion had meant a trip to the woodshed and a walloping from his father’s belt.
    “You women are really something,” he sneered. “When are you going to figure out that God might have made two sexes for a reason? You can’t have it both ways. Either a man’s a man, or he’s not. You can’t take somebody whose nature is to be a warrior and then expect him—at your command—to curl up on the couch, spill his guts, and, in general, start acting like a pussy.”
    “Get out!”
    “Gladly.” He snatched up his keys and headed toward the door. But before he got there, he threw his final punch. “You know what your problem is, Valerie. Your underwear doesn’t fit right, and it’s made you mean. So the next time you go to the store, why don’t you see if you can buy yourself a bigger-sized jockstrap.”
    He stormed out of the house and climbed into his car. As soon as he got settled, he jammed Hank Jr. into the tape deck and turned up the volume. When he was feeling this low, the only person he wanted to be around was another hell-raiser.
     
    The Sunday afternoon preseason game against the Jets was a disaster. If the Stars had been playing a respectable team, the loss wouldn’t have been so humiliating, but getting beaten 25-10 by the candy-ass Jets, even in preseason, was more than Dan could stomach, especially when he imagined his three unsigned players lounging in their hot tubs back in Chicago watching the game on their big screen TVs.
    Jim Biederot, the Stars’ starting quarterback, had been injured in their last practice and his backup had pulled a groin muscle the week before, so Dan was forced to go with C.J. Brown, a fifteen-year veteran whose knees were held together by airplane glue. If Bobby Tom had been playing, he’d have managed to get free so C.J. could hit him, but Bobby Tom wasn’t playing.
    To make matters worse, the Stars’ new owner had apparently returned from her vacation, but she wasn’t taking any calls. Dan kicked a hole in the visitors’ locker room wall when Ronald McDermitt delivered that particular piece of information, but it hadn’t helped. He’d never imagined he could hate anything more than he hated losing football games, but that was before Phoebe Somerville had come into his life.
    All in all, it had been a dismal week. Ray Hardesty, the Stars’ former defensive end, whom Dan had cut in early August, had driven drunk one too many times and gone through a guardrail on the Calumet Expressway. He’d been killed instantly, along with his eighteen-year-old female passenger. All through the funeral, as Dan had watched the faces of Ray’s grieving parents, he’d kept asking himself if there had been something more he could have done. Rationally, he knew there wasn’t, but it was a tragedy all the same.
    The only bright spot in his week had occurred at a DuPage County nursery school where he’d gone to film a public service announcement for United Way. When he’d walked in the door, the first thing he’d noticed was a pixie-faced, redheaded teacher sitting on the floor reading a story to a group of four-year-olds. Something had gone all soft and warm inside him as he’d studied her freckled nose and the spot of green finger paint on her slacks.
    When the filming was done, he’d asked her out for a cup of coffee. Her name was Sharon Anderson, and she’d been tongue-tied and shy, a welcome contrast to all the bold-eyed women he was accustomed to. Although it was too early to speculate, he couldn’t help but wonder if he might not have found the simple, home-lovin’ woman he was searching for.
    But the residual glow from his meeting with Sharon had faded by the day of the Jets game, and he continued to seethe over the loss as he endured the postgame activities. It wasn’t until he stood on the tarmac waiting to board the charter that would take them back to O’Hare that he snapped.
    “Son of a bitch!”
    He pivoted so abruptly he bumped