Page 33

CHARLIE

She’s back in my house. Not just in it. She’s suddenly everywhere. Her luggage is in my bedroom, her makeup and perfume sitting on the dresser, and behind the door in the corner of the room, the shower is running and a warbly version of Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ is echoing out from the ensuite.

Not that I’m complaining.

Not at all.

When she waltzed in this morning, it was such a shock that I didn’t really get to process it, but now?

Now, I don’t even want to consider a time when she doesn’t have free rein over my space.

And I know if I say that to her, I’ll destroy the odd sort of tentative in-between space we’ve agreed to occupy while we work together.

Rapping two knuckles against the bathroom door, her song cuts off followed quickly by the sounds of the water. “Yeah?”

“I’ve got the flight ready and,” I hold out the towels in my arms, like she can see them through the door, “I grabbed you some clean towels. I’m going to leave them on the bed.”

The door creaks open a couple of inches and a manicured hand appears along with some tendrils of steam and I hand them over, determinedly looking away just in case.

But she doesn’t seem to care because, a couple of seconds later, she’s out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around her securely.

“Christ, Sullivan,” I mutter, and she shrugs.

“We don’t have time for your midwest sensibilities,” she says, blithely. “You said the plane is ready. Does the team know we’re coming?”

“They do, and we have a car waiting for us at the airport when we arrive.”

She moves over to her suitcase and carefully unzips a small bag, pulls free a scrap of black silky fabric and bends at the waist to pull them up under the towel while I do my best to keep my eyes focused up and over her head.

I’m only semi-successful, catching quick glimpses of silky thigh and the curve of her breast as my hands feel the phantom softness and weight of her in my palms. And a bed just a few feet away is not helping.

It’s too easy to imagine this is a normal morning, her getting ready while we run through the day ahead of us, back in Brooklyn, down in Clearwater or wherever the game takes us next, the one constant through our lives.

The one constant through all the years . . . has been baseball.

I’ve been in the game too long to not hear that sentence in James Earl Jones’s voice, talking to Kevin Costner about the game I’ve played since I was a little boy. But why couldn’t it also be about this, about the constants that baseball has brought me?

Francesca Sullivan has been a constant in my life for years and now she’s crept slowly but surely into nearly every other part of my life. She’s a necessity now, as much as the game is.

She pulls on one of her pencil skirts, slate blue like the lettering on the Eagles’ jerseys and drops the towel entirely, exposing the smooth length of her back to me as she fishes a bra out of her luggage, sliding it quickly into place – it’s not the one from that night in Arizona – nude colored this time, to remain hidden beneath the cream silk camisole she slips over her head.

“Charlie?” she asks, spinning around and raising an eyebrow at my slack-jawed gaping. “I’m going to need you to focus up, Avery.”

I snort and she has the self-awareness to smirk just a little bit, but then move on.

“What was the question?”

“The boys have been fully briefed?”

“Javy’s on the way there now. He’ll make it a couple of hours ahead of us and prep them.”

“Am I crazy, to put the fate of this team . . . my entire career really, in the hands on three twenty-one-year-old kids?”

Her voice is steady, but there’s an underlying waver in her voice, a ripple of nervous energy that I don’t recognize.

“Yeah, but it’s the right call.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s what my gut is telling me,” I reassure her, the best way I know how.

“The same gut that used to be my mortal enemy?” she asks, reaching out and giving my midsection a gentle thwack.

I’m too quick, though, and I grab her hand, holding it in mine.

She’s deflecting, but, right now, she needs to deal with whatever doubts are in her mind because there won’t be any room for them in a little while.

I’ve been there.

And I can help.

“Yeah, that gut.”

“They’ll be here in a few minutes,” she says, her eyes flicking toward the bedroom door. “We should make sure everything’s perfect.”

“Gregory’s handling that. Right now, I just need you to take a deep breath.”

“What?”

“Take a deep breath and relax your shoulders,” I say, firmly, so much so that she does it without questioning it.

Huh. Good to know that works and I file it away for when, one day, I really need her to listen to me.

I squeeze the hand that I still have possession of gently and then tug on it. “C’mon.”

I bend into a squat and look up at her, expectantly. With a quick, but maybe affectionate roll of her eyes she joins me.

“Better?”

“Yeah, a little, how did you . . .”

“That day when I fucked up with the press, before Stew went down, this is what you were doing before you yelled at me. Figured it’s something that helps you calm down.”

“Yeah, it feels . . . safe.”

My knee creaks a little and I shift my weight. “Maybe for you.”

“You really should get that taken care of. The longer you put off surgery on one, the more likely it is you’ll need it on the other,” she says, rising with what seems like barely any effort while I grip her hands tightly and let her help me up before I fall over.

“At some point I will,” I brush it off. “Anyway, feeling better?”

“Yeah, it’s just nervous energy. I’ve . . . I’ve never really done this before.”

“You’ve never pitched an athlete before?”

“Not as the lead person in the room. Stew was always there and, before that, Brandon.”

“Shit, sometimes you just come off so fucking in charge that I forget you’re new at this.”

“Fake it ’til you make it?” she says, shrugging one shoulder.

“Okay, so you’re nervous, that’s fair. What will help to make that go away?”

“Well, you being so damn calm is more than a little annoying.” She laughs, but there’s a sliver of truth there too.

“You need me to be nervous?”

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

“Not a lot makes me nervous anymore, Sullivan,” I admit.

“Great,” she quips, sarcasm dripping from that one syllable.

“You . . . you didn’t let me finish. One thing does, though.”

“Yeah?”

Okay, here goes nothing.

“Can I be honest with you about something?”

“Of course.”

Of course, she says, like what I’m about to do isn’t the scariest fucking thing I’ve done in a long time.

“It’s been a while since I’ve felt any kind of way about a woman. And I know what you said, how you feel about something happening between us, but I just need you to know that if that changes, if you decide that you can . . . I’m here.”

“Charlie, I . . .”

“You don’t need to say anything. It’s . .

. well, it’s not fine, but it is what it is.

I just needed you to know that. Right now, you’re it for me.

You and this team. And, for the record, if it’s just the team, if that’s the only thing we have together, then I promise you, that’s enough.

I think we can be great, you and I, on the field, even if we can’t be together off it. ”

The silence is louder than the roar of any crowd I ever played for and, when I finally have the courage to look at her, there are tears in her eyes.

Shit, I made her cry.

Then she sniffs and shakes her head, somehow pulling them back and, a second later, her eyes are clear and the emotion entirely washed away from her face.

That’s impressive as fuck.

“Are we okay?” I ask, afraid I might have ruined everything, or made it worse somehow.

“Yeah, we’re okay.”

“Good, that’s good.”

“You were honest with me, so I should be honest with you, at least about this one thing.”

She’s smiling now, a little sadly, so it doesn’t give me much hope, but, despite that, I match it with one of my own.

“Okay, what is it?”

“There was a time and, it was not brief, where your poster was on the back of my bedroom door.”

“I knew it.”

“Don’t let it go to your head. My bedroom was basically wallpapered with baseball players.”

“Yeah, but you were a catcher and an LA girl, through and through. I bet I was your favorite.”

“You were up there and that’s all I’ll admit to.”

Okay, that’s better. Her humor is still there, but it doesn’t seem like she’s using it to hide anything anymore, at least not anything beyond what’s happening in this room right now.

Mission accomplished.

“C’mon. Time to go dazzle Nakamura, and I promise I’ll buy you a new poster for your bedroom wall.”

“I’m never gonna live that down, am I?” she asks, taking my hand as I pull her to her feet.

“Never.”

And I know what she did. I bared my soul, made myself vulnerable, and she couldn’t meet me there, so she gave me something else, something to break the tension and to keep us okay despite everything.

When they arrive, it’s deceptively unimpressive.

Two cars, one carrying Nakamura and Dan Wilson, the other a security guard and a guy I recognize from my playing days.

Nelson was an interpreter for the Dodgers, fluent in Spanish, Korean and Japanese, since it was easier to have one guy around that could translate for anyone on the team at any given moment.

“Gentlemen,” Frankie says, as we march out of my front door. She stops just ahead of Nakamura and executes a short bow, which he follows, then she shakes his hand and Dan Wilson’s, followed by the other two men before gesturing back toward me. “You all know our manager, Charles Avery.”

“Charlie,” Dan says, like we’re old friends, which in the broadest sense of the word friend, I suppose we are. “Good to see you.”

“You too.”

I don’t mean it, but I shake his hand and then Nelson’s before turning toward Frankie and Nakamura.