Page 6

CHAPTER 6

JENNER

“ W hy don’t you look happy to be back?” I slapped Brooks Briggs, our catcher, on the back. He’d left the second game because his woman had been in labor. I’d gone to see the baby in the hospital, which was why I’d had the run-in with Camden that day.

“I’m not.” He tossed his sneaker into his locker rougher than necessary as I went to my locker a few down from him. I had my best friend, Silas, on one side, and Jericho, one of the outfielders, on the other.

“Because of the baby or because you suddenly hate baseball?” I snickered to myself, but Silas elbowed me. I hadn’t noticed he’d moved so close.

I already knew the answer, especially since Brooks had asked Harlowe to marry him. He’d told us earlier in the day before our workout. It had been expected. He’d been saying they should get married for months. She hadn’t wanted to, so it wouldn’t seem like they were getting married because she’d been pregnant. According to her, they hadn’t even been together for long.

Of course, they’d known each other for a lot of damn years.

“Fuck off. You know I love the game.” He sighed. “But yeah, right now, I’d prefer to be home with my woman and three-day-old baby. ”

Yeah. I could get that. Not that I wanted kids anytime soon, but if I’d just had one, I’d want to be there. Brooks becoming a dad was surreal. The five of us had been playing together for years and were really like brothers. One of us having a kid wasn’t something I’d seen coming. Of course the pregnancy had been an accident, so he hadn’t seen it coming, either.

I just wasn’t interested in that level of commitment with just anyone.

“Luckily,” he continued, “Camden is there with them, so Harlowe isn’t on her own.”

My stomach clenched at the mention of their sister and for some reason, it was getting tougher—not easier—to make sure I had no reaction when they talked about her. Yet every time, a picture of her flashed through my head. Every. Fucking. Time.

“Not to mention,” he continued, “two days from now, we’re on a road trip. Gone six days. That’s a long time in the life of a newborn.”

He’d get most of the day Thursday at home with them because we wouldn’t leave until the evening. We were just headed to Minnesota and then Wisconsin. We wouldn’t be far, but I’d bet my entire salary that to him, it felt like we’d be on the other side of the world.

“Harlowe can’t just pack the baby up and go? Your sister would go with her, right? At least you’d see them.”

Brooks shook his head as the other three brothers kept getting ready. Cobb and Urban had been quiet since I’d gotten here .

“The baby is three days old, dummy,” he said to me. “Not to mention, Harlowe is still healing. I wouldn’t ask her to do that. That would be considered selfish.”

Yeah, he was probably right.

“Fuck,” Silas muttered under his breath. “This is why Dad wanted us to wait until after we were done playing, isn’t it?”

I furrowed my brows and clapped him on the back. “Are you saying your dad was right?”

A collective groan rumble over the group. “Fuck that,” Urban countered. “Even if he were, he could never know that.”

“No kidding,” Brooks added. “But no. He wasn’t right. I don’t regret Harlowe or Kelsie. Dad’s just a fucker.”

I shrugged. “He is, but this pull you’re feeling is what he was talking about, right?”

Brooks scratched at the back of his head. “There’s no way Dad had any conflict over being away from us. No way. He wasn’t there for Camden when she was a baby and he wasn’t playing then.”

“Speaking of… Thank god for Camden,” Silas offered, which had me pulling back from the conversation. If they were going to talk about her, I couldn’t be involved.

Urban chuckled. “You’re going to have to buy Camden one hell of a Christmas gift this year.”

Brooks gave him a big smile and nodded. “That’s true, but she’d do it, anyway. She loves Harlowe. That’s her sister, as far as she’s concerned. Camden has a big heart, so she’d be there no matter who the father was.”

“One thing you can say for sure about Camden,” Cobb offered, “she’s reliable as hell. Would drop everything to help any of us even while she’s still in school.”

“That’s her big heart,” Silas said as if I weren’t right there dying inside listening to all of them talk about how fantastic Camden was. It was the truth, but fuck.

“Just don’t get on her bad side,” Urban added, causing them to roar with laughter.

Yeah, I didn’t have to hear about that because I was on her worst side. The side that would never be forgiven and brought back into the fold. Yet every single thing they were saying was true. Having Camden on your side made things feel doable. Like she was the best cheerleader, someone who could make you feel ten feet tall.

Being outside of that bubble… fuck. It hurt. And the fact that it hurt didn’t mean I didn’t deserve it, either.

Sometimes I thought about telling her brothers that I was the reason she’d gotten injured that day. But fuck. I’d lose my family.

“Oh, shit,” Cobb muttered as he looked up. “Camden is graduating this year. We have to do something for her. Something big.” The brothers nodded but didn’t say anything. “She’s really been there for each one of us this last year. I mean, she always is, but she’s taken every single girlfriend under her wing when we needed her to because we couldn’t.”

“She’d do it for you too, Jenner,” Silas said as he nudged me with his shoulder. “Even though she seems to hate your ass. She’d still do it because you’re part of our family.”

I shook my head and tossed my shirt into my locker. “She doesn’t hate me.”

And I’d spend the rest of my life wishing that were true.

She did fucking hate me and in some ways, I couldn’t blame her. I’d hurt her back then. Caused her to run off and get fucking stabbed by a goddamned tree. If that didn’t mean she should hate me, I didn’t know what would.

And there was absolutely zero chance that she’d take any woman under her wing for me. What she’d done for her brothers was one thing. Those women—minus Amity and to a lesser extend, Harlowe—hadn’t known anything about this world. They’d needed someone to show them where to go at the park, help them get their passes, all that shit. Just in general learn about this life in a way that the guys would never be able to teach them.

The alternative was to let them navigate it alone and that could go very badly. Though the Briggs brothers had chosen the right women for them and I was sure each would’ve been able to figure it out, I’d bet my right nut that having Camden there had made it all a whole fucking lot easier .

The guys went on with whatever they needed to do, as did I. Silas was the only one who remained right here.

“Do you think it has to do with the accident?” he asked, bringing all kinds of confusion from me. What the fuck was he talking about? I could’ve guessed, but we didn’t talk about that. Ever.

“What? Do I think what’s because of the accident? What accident?” But I didn’t meet his eyes. He’d seen the panic in mine or… something else if we were talking about Camden.

“Camden,” he said, folding his arms over his chest. “Camden’s accident.” My jaw hardened, but I pushed forward by dropping into my chair so that I could get my cleats on. “I mean, you say she doesn’t hate you, but she sure as hell doesn’t like to be around you. Do you think it’s because you’re the one who found her?

I squeezed my eyes closed to try to keep that night from flooding back.

Finding her on the ground with a cross between a large stick or a small branch coming out of her chest and just below her ribs on the right side. The icy-cold fear that had flooded me then nipped at the edges of my mind now. There was nothing to be afraid of anymore. She’d survived that. She’d had a few surgeries and an infection and a fucking ton of pain, but she’d made it out the other side.

The tears running down her face… me knowing that they’d already been there before she’d been impaled.

All because of me .

“Don’t tell anyone.” Her words echoed in my head.

Don’t tell anyone what I’d done? That I’d been the one to send her running? Or something else? She hadn’t elaborated and hadn’t been in a position to.

“She says it wasn’t her proudest moment.” Silas’s voice snapped me away from the night that I’d floundered in more times than I could count. “Did something happen? I’ve always wondered what she’d meant with it wasn’t her proudest moment. Because we’d think she was clumsy? But she never wanted to talk about it.” He sighed. “We never talked about it, other than her saying she fell.”

“I don’t know if anything happened,” I lied to my best friend because his sister didn’t want anyone to know. That was the reason. It wasn’t the nagging guilt because that could be gotten over by telling her family the truth. Even if it cost me them. Actually, the idea of them hating me was why I went along with her not wanting them to know.

I fucking hated secrets.

“And I don’t think she really hates me,” I added as my chest tightened and my skin grew itchy. This dull, throbbing pain appeared at the back of my throat as my stomach turned on itself the way it did whenever the accident was brought up.

All those years of me telling Silas that Jayce’s accident hadn’t been his fault—because it hadn’t been—had made me realize over and over just how much Camden’s accident had been mine.

“I don’t know.” He grabbed his glove out of his locker. “I think women only act like Camden does when they really hate you. I heard about the two of you at the hospital. It’s either that or…” His jaw tightened and his eyes steeled as he turned to me. “Is there something going on between you and my sister?”

“No.” I chuckled. That wasn’t something that would ever happen. “Camden is honest about her feelings. I just like telling myself that she doesn’t hate me.”

He took a step closer, making me pull my eyebrows together and the corner of my mouth turned up. “Has there ever been?” Now his voice was lower, like he was making sure no one else would hear and also trying to be vaguely threatening.

I snorted. “No. How the fuck can you even ask me that? You’re the one convincing me that she hates me.”

“She seems to, but there has to be a reason and a woman whose heart has been broken can be really fucking angry.”

Now I steeled my eyes as we had a stare-down. Then suddenly, Silas narrowed his eyes on me as if he’d somehow seen the truth when there was no way.

Then he stepped back.

“Make sure that’s true,” he said before wetting his bottom lip. “There’s no shortage of brothers who’d kick your ass if it isn’t.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I brushed him off.

Her brothers weren’t even a factor in why I wasn’t with Camden. Maybe her brother being my best friend along with her being younger had been the factors when I’d been in college… basically that night. But neither would matter now .

Except that she hated me and all baseball players because of it.

I needed to change that and quickly.

For now, we had a game to play and luckily, it was like Brooks hadn’t missed a game. We were playing like the team that had won the World Series just months ago and even though it was the first week of the season, we were playing like we wanted to go back.

This made everything right with the world… Well, almost everything.