Page 17

LOGAN

“Y ou coming over?” Van asked, before I could slip away after dinner. The fire had already started, the last one before we packed up and left the camp. There was no way I could refuse, not after how well the practice had gone, but I wasn’t really in the mood to be surrounded by their toxic love for one another.

Not with my mom’s missed calls still lighting up my phone. I hadn’t gotten the chance to call her before I lost service again, and I wasn’t going to do it around Cael. She was calling for money; she always was.

“Uh yeah…” I sighed and changed my direction to follow him over toward the glowing ember haze and the sounds of laughter.

I watched as he settled down against the log between Cael’s legs and floundered. His long arms rested across Cody’s knees, and he leaned his body into him to listen to whatever story Nicholas was telling.

I looked around at them all and noticed Dean was missing. So was Silas, and my thoughts flickered to the brief conversation we’d had earlier.

“Where did you and Cael go?” Silas asked.

“Into town for a meeting. He needed one,” I lied.

“Funny, he said it was you who needed one.” Silas narrowed his eyes at me.

“Why ask if you knew what we were doing?” I slumped against the door frame and looked over my shoulder to make sure we were alone. More than one Hornet player had a bad habit of sneaking up behind people and eavesdropping.

“I wanted to see if you were going to lie to me again,” he answered, resting his hands on his hips. He shifted uncomfortably in the navy polo and jeans, his lips pressed into a tight line.

“I’m not the liar in the room, Shore,” I reminded him.

Silas sighed. "I’m not a liar, I was an unaware party and the moment—”

“Yeah, did you call me in here for excuses or?...” I offered him a tight, annoyed smile and stood up straight in the doorway.

“No, I wanted to see how you were doing,” he said.

I let out an unimpressed chuckle and shook my head. "Stop it.”

“What?” He asked, and I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely confused or just being an asshole and baiting the answer out of me.

“Acting like my brother.”

“I am your brother.”

I swallowed tightly and shook my head in disbelief at his calm tone. I hated that he just so easily accepted it. He should be angry, wound up and mean about all of it. But instead he was just there, asking me what I needed, and it was infuriating.

“No, we share the same bastard blood, but we’re not brothers, Silas. You’re just some rich asshole with a guilty conscience and too much time on your hands. How about you focus on your real family? Tucker’s missed 14 of the last 21 meals. ”

I watched him open his mouth to argue with me and then close it again, his hands tightening around his hips. The look on his face went from frustration to concern with a single blink.

This had happened before.

“14?” Silas asked. "You counted?”

“He’s the size of a bear. It's pretty easy to notice when he’s not around,” I deflected. “You have too many eggs in your basket to be worried about your daddy’s bastard son. Leave me alone and do your job so I can do mine.”

“Josh!” Silas called out as I left the office and went down to practice.

I pushed the argument to the back of my mind and focused on practice, putting one foot in front of the other and keeping my head down. My priorities were baseball and school, not on making Silas feel better about himself in a situation I never asked to be in the middle of.

I remembered catching her on the phone with my biological father… Mom was crying, asking him for more money. She had mumbled about it my entire life but I never believed her. I was thirteen when I found out that I had the blood of a Shore running through my veins with evidence that wasn't spilling from some drunks mouth. Thirteen, and every time I walked to school, I had to see his stupid face in the newspaper or on bus benches.

Charles. Mr. Shore.

Dickbag, deadbeat, dad.

It took another three years until I found out the story of how they knew each other. And knowing the story was more painful than the truth of who I really was. The bastard baby who was thrown away because I had the potential to topple an empire. She had been healthy, thriving almost, working as a nurse at St. Christian’s downtown. But Charles was handsome and persuasive; it wasn’t long before he was banging my mom in storage closets like a bad episode of some medical sitcom.

I wasn’t part of the plan, though, and the moment she had gotten pregnant, Charles found any reason to get rid of her. He paid her to get rid of me and then continued to threaten her after she didn't. Eventually, he started sending her money to keep her quiet.

That paper trail was how Silas found me.

I wanted nothing to do with them. I had worked hard to get where I was, and I did it without their help. I never saw a cent of that money, it had been funneled into drugs just to keep my mother’s heart pumping.

Every day of my life was spent listening to her blame me for our situation.

You ruined everything.

You look just like him.

You’re a piece of shit just like your Dad.

You’ll never be anything, just a rat scurrying around begging for scraps from a family that wanted you dead.

She tried more than once to see it through. When money was tight she’d let her shitty boyfriends into my room. They’d do what they wanted, take what they needed, and time after time it left me as a husk. An angry kid with a deadly codependency with vodka and enough PTSD to put down an army vet. I tugged at the collar of my sweater as my thoughts stirred.

I should have known from the moment Silas showed up at Lorette that day he’d be annoying about the entire thing. He’d claimed no one knew—that he’d found out by accident when the family accounts were transferred to him. But I didn’t believe him. His father—our father—had been keeping me a secret my entire life, and he’d just slipped up?

It felt slimy.

I didn’t want what Silas was offering: the truth, freedom, and money.

That was until Ian attacked me in the showers that night and, suddenly, I was in more trouble than ever expected. Trouble that I couldn’t talk or pitch my way out of. Silas had almost sounded excited when I called.

Only three people knew the truth: Silas, Coach Cody, and me. It had to stay that way. I was almost free, and I never wanted the Shore name; I just wanted to be clean of my past.

“What about you?” Arlo kicked his foot out and it connected with mine, bringing me back to the bonfire raging before me.

“What?” I shook out of my dissociation.

“Favorite holiday?” Ella asked for Arlo.

“Uh, I don’t know, I don’t really have one.” I shrugged.

“What do you mean you don’t have one?” Cael asked, as his fingers raked through Van’s chocolate brown mullet in circles. It weirded me out how comfortable they were with one another, and I was almost eighty percent sure that it had sent Mitchell to sleep.

“What’s yours?” I asked him.

“My birthday, duh.” He answered like it was obvious.

“The one day of the year where everyone is forced to pay attention to him for hours on end,” Dean said, coming up behind us and sitting down on the log beside me. “Last time we lucked out because Clem showed up and we didn’t see him for twelve hours after.”

“We fucked on every surface at the stadium and then got French fries.” Cael grinned lecherously, and I scowled back.

“That’s a disgusting overshare,” I said.

“I could go into detail, Logan. If you think that was an overshare, you have no idea,” Cael hummed and Dean practically growled.

“Not tonight,” he said, before Arlo could get the words out.

“Mine’s this,” Dean said from beside me. “I know it’s not a holiday, but these weeks out here with you guys. It’s my favorite time of the year.”

“Awe, Deano,” Van purred with his eyes still closed, but it confirmed that he was still awake enough to pay attention to the conversation.

“It’s just better out here, away from everything and everyone. The last few years have been rough on us; we all know it even when we’re ignoring the truth. This season won’t be much different. The second the world finds out that you have a gay captain, our lives are going to get harder.”

No one flinched from the sudden change in conversation except for me.

I had known of the whispers about Dean and Cael, it had been obvious for a long time that there was something there. And Cael Cody, for all his trouble, had never once hidden who he was as a person. He had flirted with me throughout our entire friendship… But to hear Dean Tucker, six foot something, two hundred and fifty pounds of sunshine, first baseman and captain of one of the best team in the NCAA, say it out loud and with no shame or remorse… something stirred inside of me.

“But we have what it takes to win this season, to prove to everyone in Harbor that you can break us down, switch us around, throw us in the dirt, but we're always going to get back up again. It’s who we are,” he added, looking around at everyone. “I know it’s a lot to ask for you guys to have my back this season with more than just baseball,” he started and was cut off.

“You don’t have to ask,” Van said, his eyes cracking open and every player that sat around the fire in one form or another confirmed with a nod or a tap to the chest.

“We already knew you were Bi, Tucker,” Louis said.

“Not Bi… Louis. Gay. Full gay,” Dean said like he was choking on the words.

“We’re a family, Tucker, and as long as you stop fucking rival players in the back of my truck, I don’t care where you stick your dick.” Van filled the awkward silence that followed.

Everyone laughed, and Cael shrugged, almost like he knew Dean was worried about the outcome of the conversation long before it had started.

“Gay Captain has a nice ring to it. You think when we win the series back to back, they’ll make it the headline?” Todd asked, and Dean laughed.

So simple was the decision to protect Dean from the world that I envied how quickly they all jumped to shield him from the realities of homophobia in male-led sports.

He was right about one thing; it would make everything a lot harder the second word got out about his sexuality. I knew it intimately, only, yet again, I was alienated by the way the Hornets handled it. No horrible jokes or slurs were rolling off their tongues. Only acceptance and love.

I had worked hard to hide my own sexuality from the world, from the Lorettes, but every secret has an expiry date, and the moment Ian saw the texts on my phone from my recent interests, I knew that trouble would follow.

It had taken him less than a week to corner me.

Less than five minutes for him to have me shoved up against a wall with my back exposed to him and no way out.

No more than thirty seconds for him to strip away every ounce of my remaining dignity,leaving me back in my bedroom, begging every boyfriend my mother had brought home to stop. It was like I had been locked in my own mind with my nightmares. Ian had no idea what he’d done, not really. Maybe I had snapped that day, gone too far, but he’d deserved every ounce of anger that flooded from me.

The only thing I wanted to remember from that night was how strong I felt.

It consumed me.

The scars on my knuckles from that night stung.

“You alright?” Dean’s voice broke through the veil.

“Yeah,” I answered. Turning to look at him, and finding that I hated the green in his eyes and how soft the hues became every time he looked at me. At first I thought it was pity or sympathy but now I understood the look and it terrified me. “Just tired.”

I pushed off the log and made my way to the cabin.

This time, Dean didn’t follow me, and I wasn’t sure if I was grateful—or disappointed.