Page 35

TUCKER

“P ractice isn’t for another two hours,” Josh said as we pulled into the stadium.

My mind was still spinning from what his mother said. Josh was somehow mixed up with Silas and the Shores and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how or why. I shut off the engine and hopped out without answering him before wandering over to the players entrance and going inside. I needed to talk to him but I didn’t know where to start. All I knew was that if I wanted him to be honest with me I needed to distract him from what was really going on.

I stopped by the medical offices to grab a first aid kit. Josh followed behind, still grumbling and muttering questions about what we were doing.

“Do you ever stop being cranky?” I laughed and pushed open the main doors that led out to the concourse. I waved to one of the security guards and started out on the field with the kit and on a mission. “Sit,” I said to him and pointed to the dugout bench.

“I don’t need first aid for a scratch, Tuck.” He scowled and stayed standing.

“Humor me?” I asked, and it took him a minute, but eventually he caved.

I pulled some of the antibiotic wipes out that Silas always uses on our scrapes and handed them to him, but he’d already got his arm out to me. I looked down at it, and when my brows furrowed, he huffed.

“Fine, I’ll do it myself.” He tried to snatch the wipe, and I held firm to it.

“No it’s just… I wasn't expecting you to let me,” I said. He stared me down, the angry expression on his face never faltering as I worked up the courage to take his arm in my palm. When my fingers brushed against his skin I felt him bristle but he sat as still as possible as I cleaned the scratches.

“Are you okay?” I asked him when he closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, but he nodded and I tried to finish up as quickly as possible. “Done,” I told him as I pulled away and headed toward the bats. I turned my back to him to give him a moment to regain his composure and grabbed the handle of my favorite bat.

“Here,” I said, extending it to him.

“What the hell are you doing, Tuck?” He asked, but took the bat.

“Distracting you. Arlo does it with us sometimes,” I explained and climbed from the dugout. “Makes it easier to talk about shit if you’re concentrating on pitching balls.”

“What do you think I need to be distracted from exactly?” He asked me but followed me out to the batter’s box.

“The questions I’m about to ask you,” I said, with unbridled honesty.

“I don’t want to do this.” Josh shook his head and turned on his heel, but I caught the bat he was holding and pulled him back.

“Doesn’t matter, you either answer my questions or I’ll go ask Silas,” I said and Josh rolled his eyes. It was glaringly obvious that Josh did not want Silas’s side of the story told. “Give me the bat,” I said and handed him a crate of baseballs.

He huffed, trading me and wandering out to the pitcher's mound with a scowl on his face and an attitude in his step. “This is stupid,” he said, but rolled the ball in his hand.

“What did your mom mean?” I asked him and he looked up at me with a frown. “She said a lot about the Shores, what did she mean?”

“Maybe you should mind your business,” he said, his arm pulled back, and he let go of the ball in a smooth motion that looked like a rolling wave. I wasn’t ready for it, but I made contact regardless, and the ball cracked against the wooden bat, soaring through the infield and landing deep in the left grass.

“You are my business, tough guy,” I said softly, smiling at him as I readied for the next pitch.

Josh scowled at me, his dark brown eyes narrowing at my jab, and he threw a second ball. That one flew right out of the box and almost hit me in the shoulder before it bounced off the back cage and into the dirt.

“What did your mom mean?” I asked again, my mind twisted in knots of possibilities, each one worse than the last. “Do you owe the Shores money?” I asked him.

“No,” he laughed, like it was a ridiculous stream of thoughts.

“Then what?” I got frustrated and snapped at him. I fought against the urge to push him, the deep down need to know that it wasn’t bad but that wasn’t me, and that wasn’t us.

“Silas is my brother,” Josh said and suddenly everything that I had been thinking of wasn’t so bad. “Half brother,” he corrected himself.

“What?” I asked, stunned by the confession, dropping my bat from my shoulder.

“When a man gaslights a woman…” Josh started in a grumpy tone.

“So your dad is Charles Shore?” I asked, cutting him off from his angry explanation of the birds and the bees.

“My biological father is Charles. I never had a dad,” he corrected and threw the ball hard that time. It whizzed by my head and I ducked to the side before it hit my face, a stinging sensation telling me it didn’t miss clipping me in the ear.

“Hey!” I said, pointing my bat at him.

“This was your idea,” he snapped, hurling another ball. Each one was harder than the last, and he wasn’t giving me much time to prepare for them.

“You seriously have anger issues,” I muttered, shifting the bat in my grip.

“Get better insults, Tuck.” His serious expression faltered for a second with the twitch of his lip as it curled into a tiny smirk. He threw a few more balls and I hit each one without effort, cursing myself each time they dropped into the outfield. I’d have to collect each one when we were finished.

“When did you find out?” I asked him between the next pitch.

“A couple of months ago.” He shrugged. "I guess Charles was frozen out of his accounts, cut off from the family. So Silas took them over. He found out his dad was giving my mom money, and the bastard didn’t hide his trail very well. I’m just another one of his indiscretions, he was paying her to keep her quiet.”

Charles had been cut off? That was news to me. Silas was pretty good at keeping things close to his chest, but that seemed big. I wondered if Arlo knew about Josh…

“Does Arlo know?” I blurted and missed the next ball in my confusion. I caught the tail end of it and it skipped through the out field near Josh, who scooped it up into his glove effortlessly.

“I don’t know.” Josh shrugged. "If he does, he hasn’t said anything to me.”

I chewed on the inside of my lip and nodded. "So no one knows but you and Silas?”

“And you,” he added.

“And me…” I huffed. “Your mom doesn’t exactly seem like the kind of person to keep secrets.”

“She told me, she’s been telling me my entire life. I never believed her. She’s a drug addict, Tuck, she said a lot of shit to a lot of people. Would you have taken her at her word if she told you that your father was one of the richest men in Harbor?” Josh rolled the ball in his palm but kept his eyes trained on me. Waiting for an answer.

I couldn’t understand how he was so nonchalant about all of this, his mood never shifting even after telling me his secret. Joshua Logan wasn’t even Logan. He was Joshua Shore.

“Yeah, right…” I processed the information. “And Silas knew before your hearing?”

“He did,” Josh said. "I didn’t want his help, though. This wasn’t some weird blood-pact thing. I didn’t want to come to the Hornets. I still don’t want to be here,” he added.

Ouch .

I guess I couldn’t expect him to change his tune, after all, it was he who kept swearing we were nothing but a necessity to each other. A way to survive. What I didn’t understand was the definition of necessity because it clearly meant something different to him.

As if I was like sleep or food, he needed it in his daily life to get through the day but to me necessity meant something so much more. It was water, it was air… I looked at him, the way the sun kissed his sculpted cheeks and scarred skin under the light of the open roof. His eyes casted upwards and the sun reflected around in the hazy gold color that hid beneath the darkness.

When did needing Josh to survive become second nature?

His shoulders were so tense, and his strong arms flexed as he focused on the ball in his hand and the stadium around us. The breeze kicked around his chocolate curls against his neck, and he shifted in his hoodie as he prepared to throw another ball, distracting himself like I meant for him to do, but suddenly it was me who was in knots.

“So you’re a Shore…” I whispered as it all fell into place. “And he knew it and he left you…he left you in that place?”

Josh growled, the memory of his childhood bubbled up so quickly he couldn’t prevent the animalistic reaction.

I dropped my bat again, my arms going slack and swallowed tightly. “I get your anger now,” I said after a beat, watching his expression harden. “But I don’t know how to help you with it…”

“I didn’t ask for your help, Tuck.” He pulled his mitt off and chucked it into the crate.

“You should go see Ms. Cody,” I said to him, ignoring the way the heat and stress rolled off of him in waves as he turned around on the mound to avoid my gaze.

“No.” He shook his head. "I don’t need another Cody telling me how to feel about something they don’t understand,” he grumbled.

“This is different.” I pushed. "It’s not…” I stepped forward, closing the gap between us. “It’s not her telling you how it feels, it's her helping you manage it.”

“I’m managing just fine,” I snapped.

“No you’re not, you’re still angry and you’re allowed to be, shit Josh. But… It’s not healthy,” I said.

“Don’t preach to me about what’s healthy.” He whipped around and looked me up and down. "I was doing just fine until you started to dig under my skin. Why can’t you just leave me alone?” The words came out of his mouth, but I could tell that he didn’t mean them; it was just him pushing back like he was so used to doing.

“I can’t, Josh,” I said softly, dropping my gaze to the turf for a split second before reconnecting my gaze with his. I dug deep for the courage to say what I felt.

“You’ve been left alone enough,” I said. “It’s about time someone pushed their way in—because that anger you’re carrying is going to eat you alive. You don’t want to hear it, but that anger is a threat to everything you’ve built, despite your mother and in spite of him.”

“Big talk from a boy who can’t even face the press, Tuck,” he snipped.

“You can’t turn this on me, it’s not about me. I’ll deal with my shit, if you deal with yours,” I said to him.

Josh’s tongue slid out over his bottom lip in frustration as he looked away from me. Hook, line and sinker. He couldn’t resist having the power in the situation.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll go see her, but if she starts bossing me around, Tuck, I’m out.”

I laughed, a smile forming on my face. “She’s a Cody,” I said, my tone lightening. “Bossy is her only setting.”