Page 6 of The Startup (The Erotes Circle #2)
CHAPTER SIX
2009
“Violet, if you think I’m going to let you talk about Lucia all day and not tell her all the nice things you’re saying about her, you’re dead wrong, I’m sorry.” Kim said, tossing the ball back to me from the catcher’s box.
I caught the ball and adjusted my cap, then looked around, “And now you’re talking about it out in the open like this, Kim…please…” I tried to focus on throwing, on what I was here in the bullpen to do, but as usual, Kim had me distracted.
She wasn’t wrong, I had been talking about Lucia a lot in the past few weeks, and maybe Kim was getting sick of it. I didn’t consider myself a lesbian, or even bi, but Lucia had me questioning that, hard. Maybe it was the androgynous look, her short black hair sleek and shiny, a stray tendril always falling on her forehead in that perfect accidental way that made her look like Superman, or Superwoman, or…super something at the very least. Maybe my mistake was telling Kim that my admiration for Lucia went beyond platonic friendship and instead was hinting toward something…different. Wha t kind of different, I wasn’t sure. I don’t even know if I’d be able to face the prospect of having sex with a woman, it just seemed so foreign.
But having ended my relationship with Samuel three months ago, and the diminishing returns when it came to finding a man that sparked anything at all within me made me take pause. And when I paused, my mind always seemed to drift back to women. But who was I kidding? They drifted to Lucia. “I just don’t want to talk about it right now.” I said, trying to focus on the thing I was here for, and not Kim’s goading.
But Kim didn’t wait long to needle me further. As soon as I wound up and released, she fired back both the softball and a verbal volley. “She thinks you’re hot. Wanna talk about that?”
“Kim!” I looked around again, seeing the other players and staff around us in the training facility…they were some distance from the bullpen Kim and I were using, but still, there was a chance one of them could hear a stray bit of conversation, and the ‘is Violet into girls?’ rumor mill would start up yet again. “Someone could hear us!”
“Lucia can’t hear us, though…the infielders are already done practicing. Lucia is probably in the showers right now, all soapy, maybe reaching over her head and running her hands through her hair…something that I’m sure doesn’t cause any kind of odd feelings within you, does it, Violet?”
Kim tossed the ball back, and I readied my pitch without pause, firing a thunderous fastball that threatened to punch through the webbing on Kim’s glove. This is what she did, pushed and prodded me about things that preoccupied me in one way or another, hoping that I’d release that frustration in increasingly aggressive pitches. And this stuff with Lucia was almost beyond preoccupation for me at this point. Damn, she was good.
“You’re cruel, you know that?” I said.
“I’ve been told. So, Lucia is hot, and she thinks you are too…you guys should hang out. That’s all I’m saying, just go see a movie or something. I might have already told Lucia that you had agreed to it and wanted to go out tonight…”
Kim braced for the pitch that she knew was coming her way, but I decided to fuck with her, changing the fastball she signaled for to a circle change that would have clocked her in the mask if Kim wasn’t such a damn good catcher. Before the ball even hit her glove, I started approaching the box to talk to her.
“Now who’s cruel?” Kim said, standing up from her crouch, “Should I tell coach that you’re disregarding signs from her star catcher?” She pulled her mask off, revealing her heart-shaped, cute face, a face that could reel you in to thinking she was an angel, but you quickly found out otherwise if you got on her bad side…or, if you were her best friend, I guess.
“Kim, you didn’t…” I pulled my glove off and slapped it against my knee, knocking the dust off.
She just smiled at me. That smile was both cute and menacing, and usually, I could pick up on which side of that Kim was going with when she used it, but this time I couldn’t read her. It was probably both. “You weren’t going to do it, and I was tired of you talking about how you haven’t gotten laid in months, and talking about how interesting you found Lucia, so, I put two and two together, and…”
Heat rose up my neck as the anxiety spread, “Kim, I don’t even know if I’m into girls…”
“Well, it’s abundantly obvious Lucia is, and she seems like a damn good person to let you know if you’re into girls, right?” Kim put her arm around my shoulder and led me out of the bullpen, toward the locker room. “If it doesn’t work out, hey, you get to have a nice night out with another player on the team. And if it does work out…” Kim winked at me.
My stomach clenched at the thought of it, but the butterflies that filled my gut and rose up through my chest told me something else. Kim wasn ’t wrong, if I could spend time with Lucia and figure out which of my thoughts about her were mere admiration and how many were something else, maybe this would answer some things for me.
“Plus, you’ve already seen each other naked, so you already know what you’re getting if things go the right way.”
“Seeing someone in the showers isn’t the same as seeing them in my bed, Kim.”
“Oh, you’re already planning for things to end up in your bed, not hers?” Kim chuckled.
I slapped Kim on the ass with my glove, hard. “Stop it.”
Kim put her arm back around my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. “Violet, I’ve watched you get wound tighter and tighter as this season has progressed and your relationship with that guy fizzled out. I need my favorite pitcher relaxed, and I need my friend to stop complaining that she can’t find anyone. Two birds, one…aggressively quick fastball that obliterates them both.”
I let Kim have the last word. I was still trying to process the fact that I’d be going on a date with Lucia tonight. The way my heart was racing and my stomach was full of fluttering butterflies had rendered me unable to speak.