Page 6

CHAPTER 5

SNOOZER

WILDER

T he heat curls around me like a blanket, and I lean against the wooden back of the Ramblers’ dugout a couple hours later, exhausted.

It’s the same old field I’ve been playing at since high school, and our little rec league fills the stands every game. The team is mostly made of guys I played with back then, including Remy, though I think he’ll be gone soon enough, if Jessa can convince him to try out for the minors. Hell, even my twin sister is part of the league as one of the assistant coaches, otherwise coaching the girls’ high school team. She’s in the first base coach’s box, giving Ash instructions behind her hand. Shelby’s hair is lighter than mine and a little more on the red side, but our eyes are the same shade of amber that we share with our mom. In fact, everybody says she looks just like Mom, but I barely remember her, she died when we were so young. I can kind of see it in pictures, if I can stop seeing Shelby as a brace-faced twelve-year-old instead of an adult.

Dad’s in the stands too, his old baseball hat sun bleached and skin leathered from a lifetime of fishing and cigarettes and ball games. Maybe a million between me and Shelby. I swear I’ve seen him clean shaven, but somehow he’s always wearing a five-day beard. If he wasn’t working, he’d make just about every game, even now. Hated when I was at school and in LA, despite flying him out when I could convince him. He’s a simple man, and things like digital boarding passes and Los Angeles traffic seemed to turn him off more than the prospect of watching my games on TV.

Honestly, I couldn’t say I blame him.

A yawn leaves me blinking slow.

I could sleep for a fucking year, curl up right here on the bench and wake up with a full beard like Rip Van Winkle. At the station last night, I didn’t sleep for shit after the call at Cass’s house, unable to get her off my mind. Once the crew was asleep and I had a little privacy, I couldn’t get her out of my other brain either, despite my best and most valiant efforts.

By the time my alarm went off at six, I don’t think I’d managed much more than a couple of solid dozes. When my shift ended at seven, I went straight back over to her place to clean up, then to practice, and now here. I’m not worth a damn.

At least we aren’t losing.

My mouth stretches in another yawn, my eyelids blinking slow. Surely it’d be fine if I close them for just a second. Couldn’t hurt.

Cass is on my mind still, running me in circles. The sight of her in that pink sundress today is driving me wild, the top all ruffly and cinched up like a milk maid, the fabric cradling her tits in a way that oughta be illegal. The way I want her certainly is. Pretty sure I’d get arrested in at least two states if she’d let me do what I want to her.

You know, when I was at Auburn and she was half a world away at Oxford, I missed her like a limb, but everybody said that was normal. At eighteen, your life experiences are laid out in front of you, waiting to happen. Like heartache, which I had in spades. First love, I’d already done, hence the heartache. But that’s life, right? It didn’t work out, but I got to love her while I could.

That was the kind of bullshit I told myself to convince my heart that I was fine. Just fine.

There was nothing to do but move on.

Move on. That’s what I called throwing myself into baseball with a level of obsession I’d never experienced. In my free time, I did what every star pitcher at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country did—I fucked around. Date? Nah, no time. But I often had a night. Maybe two. Never more.

Anybody could see I’d moved on. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a girl who made me feel like she did. Made me laugh like she could. Made me hope and dream and wish. I was just busy. I was good. Unaffected. Fine. I was unserious about girls because I wasn’t ready to settle down, that’s all.

When I graduated and was drafted to the Dodgers, it was the same old line. A pretty girl on my arm for awards nights and banquets, never the same one twice. There was never a shortage. But I was never satisfied. And that’s okay, I told myself. I was young. It didn’t matter. Someday, I’d find somebody who affected me like she did.

I thought she just set the bar high.

Turns out, no one could clear it but her.

Maybe my denial back then was because she moved on. She had a rich as fuck boyfriend, and she was happy, Remy said. I figured our relationship must not have meant to her what it meant to me. We were just kids, after all. We grew up.

Moved on.

It was fine.

When I tore my rotator cuff, the devastation was absolute. For the first time, I felt her absence like a physical thing, the truth of my feelings for her laid bare by my pain. There was no one I wanted at my bedside, save her. Not that I could have told her that. Not that I could’ve even fully admitted it to myself. When I was all healed up and we learned I couldn’t pitch over eighty-five, my career was over, and I wished she’d been there too.

But whatever. No big deal. Peachy keen, jelly bean.

When I moved back to Roseville afterward, I missed her with a deep ache, like a part of me had been scooped out and left hollow. It’d always been that way, I think, but I didn’t know until I was back here and she wasn’t. I’d never been here without her, and I fucking hated it. But I told myself I was just being sentimental. I even dated around to prove it, because it didn’t matter. I wasn’t supposed to settle down yet. Nobody else had.

And then Cass came home for her wedding.

The moment I saw her for the first time after all these years, I learned with the certainty of a freight train to the chest that I was absolutely not fine and never had been. There was nothing left on the tracks but guts.

All those years, I wasn’t just young and sewing my oats.

I was waiting for her.

I still marvel over how blind I was to the fact that part of my heart had been unknowingly, eternally locked up because it was hers, the padlock welded shut the second we said I do . Before that, even…long before I had the words or the experience to understand the feeling. I was kidding myself to think that anybody else in the big, wide world could have gotten through it. Imagine my surprise when a couple days after she hit town, my wife smiled at me from across Main Street, and that padlocked motherfucker flew open like a jack-in-the-box. I haven’t been on a date or hooked up with anybody since.

Scared the shit out of me.

My wife.

Gooseflesh breaks out across my arms even in the dead heat of the dugout.

Never have I wanted anything so fucking bad as I want her. Not in my whole entire life. In the dead of night, I decided to say yes to any opportunities that present themselves with her, whether it be telling her we’re married, or kissing her or…whatever. I’ll figure out how to tell her the secret. It’ll work itself out. I’ll just put it in the hands of the divine, since they’ve taken such good care of me so far. They dropped her in my lap after all this time, and not even God himself can convince me to ignore the gift.

That gift is mine, and I’m making my move.

My head lolls, and I jerk awake with a sharp inhale.

Tate gives me a look. “You okay?”

“Just tired.” I shift so I’m sitting a little straighter, trying to make myself uncomfortable so I don’t nod off again.

“Man, did you hear about that house fire in Franklinville last Sunday? The guys were talking about it last night. There was a fatality.”

I frown. Fire fatalities are uncommon enough in small towns. It’s no wonder word had gotten around. “Really? Damn.”

“Yeah. Girl who died was our age. House burned down in her sleep. I texted Jack Hannigan about it—he said it was arson. I’m trying to get her name, but he hasn’t answered.”

“The fire marshal should know better than to tell you shit,” I warn.

“Sure, but we’ve played ball with Jack since before we knew which direction to run when we hit the ball.” Tate shakes his head. “I keep hoping there will be an obituary or something, but I haven’t seen any names yet, just the story.”

I hmm, but before I can respond, Carlin strikes out and the inning is over. He trots back to the dugout shamefaced, but we clap him on the shoulder anyway.

Our team’s stacked with ringers, and everybody but Carlin played at the high school level, at least. Half played through college. But Carlin is only playing because he spoke Klingon to his mama one too many times, and she told him if he didn’t play, she was kicking him out. I hadn’t expected him to last a season, but he’s taken right to it. He even started working out with us and is finally starting to fill out.

Only took him twenty-five years.

We take to the field and warm up. I set up, wind up, throw to Tate, and when it’s back in my hands, I’m drilling the infielders.

Between all that, I sneak glances into the stands, finding Cass easily. Could be her copper-red hair, or the pretty pink dress she’s wearing, pale against her alabaster skin. Could be the fact that I can feel her eyes on me, our gazes snapping together like magnets every time I look in her direction. She sat up in those stands through high school with a Roseville-red bow in her ponytail sporting the number thirteen, always cheering for me. Always had my back.

I never told her why I picked that number when I couldn’t get my original number twenty-seven freshman year of high school—thirteen is how old I was when I fell in love with her. I knew even then. The moment she agreed to go to the dance with me would follow me for the rest of my life.

It’s absolutely sick just how bad I need her, and now’s the time.

I’m lining up to shoot my shot.

All I have to do is not fuck it up.