Hardball (22 page)

Shakespeare didn’t have enough words to describe how delicious you are

He’d gotten filthier as the weeks wore on, until the words
cunt
and
cock
didn’t make me flinch anywhere above the waist.

I got on birth control, and without the extra step, we wound our bodies together even more easily. He was considerately merciless, bringing me to orgasm repeatedly, pounding me insanely with a dick that never got tired or worn out, and keeping me up late talking about the silly nonsense people talk about between kisses.

Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a wrapped basket of fruit showed up at the office. Mostly apples. The kids went nuts when he sent a dozen pineapples once. Iris would never have a vitamin C deficiency her entire life with the amount of fruit she ate. Jim and I peeled them in the faculty lounge, and every kid in the school came by the library to have a piece. I thanked him by screaming his name at night, every night.

And the clock wore on.

The days on the calendar didn’t slow down for us.

His workouts got longer, and he came to me sweaty and sore. The smell of him. Testosterone and musk and the leather of a worn-out ball. He was rougher after a workout. More passionate. Less talking. More bending, twisting, grabbing. He growled lower and fucked harder. I couldn’t come enough to satisfy him.

But if I didn’t see him right after a workout, if he dressed and we went out… if he was showered and shaved and ready… he was not just powerful and strong but commanding and purposeful. I trusted him, and even as I took pleasure in that, I called myself a fool. Because I knew what was coming. His workouts weren’t getting harder because he had nowhere to go.

“They look good this year,” Jim said, handing me my crappy black coffee.

I was wiped out, as usual. Sore pussy. Knees a little rubbed from being on them. Overtired. High as a kite. “Yeah.”

“You might have caught yourself a winner.”

“I don’t think I caught anything,” I said. “He’s going to Arizona in a few days.”

“You going to the Freeway Exhibition?”

“Yes.” I rolled the coffee between my palms.

Every year, I looked forward to the game in the middle of the practice season. Every year, my hometown team played the team two hours south on the 5 freeway, and every year, one team creamed the other before they both went off to polish up for Opening Day.

This year, I didn’t look forward to it as much because it wasn’t about me sitting with Dad all summer and screaming at the TV. It wasn’t about sitting in the bleacher seats a few times during the summer. It was about Dash and me and what I could or couldn’t expect from him.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal all things considered. He’d come back.

“Right?” I said in a moment of insecurity before the season-opening dinner. “I mean, you live here. You’re not disappearing into a black void and never coming back.”

I’d been trying to talk about where we were going during the whole car ride and gotten my nerve up way too late.

“I don’t want you to worry about that,” he said, pulling up to the valet.

Guys in white shirts and black jackets opened our doors before I could press him.

He held his arm out for me, and I took it.

The dinner was at Joe Westlake’s place in Pacific Palisades. More money than God. Normally I’d have taken a moment to absorb the riches of the mansion. The view. The gardens. The opulence. But I couldn’t.

“You’ve been avoiding this,” I whispered. “Dash, I can’t. I can’t not know what’s happening.”

“Shortie!” Westlake called. He wore his bow tie and seersucker jacket. Same as always, except now he was just another thing between Dash and me.

Dash shook his hand and introduced me as if I mattered. So I must have.

Right?

I hated feeling like that. Hated the way the gourmet food tasted like plastic. Hated being jealous of all the other girlfriends and wives for knowing what would happen next, what they’d be doing, who they’d be seeing.

I almost wished we’d agreed to part ways when the season started. This felt somehow worse. The not knowing. The insecurity. I hadn’t thought this would feel like a bigger gamble, not because I didn’t have the stomach for him leaving but because he’d already been clear, from the beginning,
he
didn’t have the stomach for it.

“What’s wrong, sweetapple?” he asked softly in my ear.

What was wrong was three glasses of wine. He drove when we were together, and after I’d told him how my mother died, he stopped taking even a sip when he was behind the wheel. So at Joe Westlake’s house, I had one more than I should have. The nerves kept me from feeling tipsy until it was too late.

The property was a massive expanse of tight little gardens and concrete sections, all set with different chafing dishes from the best restaurants in Los Angeles. Nothing halfway. As usual. Third party like this in three weeks. It wasn’t boring, but all I wanted was to be alone with Dash. I touched him more than I should have, tightening my fingers around whatever part of his body was close, feeling the hardness of his muscles under his jacket, knowing what the force of them could do to my body.

“So you’re the schoolteacher?”

A woman. Raven-black hair and red lips. Black dress. Skin like porcelain and curves that needed a speed limit.

“Librarian.” I let Dash hold me up. He was talking to Gerry Jonson. Lot of numbers. Stats. I’d have kept up if this woman hadn’t assumed I didn’t want to hear it.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, sipping champagne from a flute. “How do you like being his good luck charm? Best thing ever, right?”

“Could be worse?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, but I must have looked more conversational than incredulous, thanks to the wine, because she smiled comfortably and rolled her eyes.

“I know, right? The life.” She winked.

I smiled, but my chest cratered, opening from the center out, sand pouring in from the edges, wider and wider as the evening wore on until I thought I’d fall into it.

I was pretty sober by the time we got in the car. His hand rested on the gearshift, and I placed my hand over it.

“In a few days, you’re going,” I said.

He didn’t say anything.

“I know this was a hard limit for you. Maintaining this over the season.”

“Maintaining?” he snapped. “What’s that mean?”

Maybe the alcohol drain had left me vulnerable, or maybe the weight of all my denials had dropped on my shoulders, but I felt as if I’d been slapped. I had a ball of gunk to swallow, and I had to take my hand off his before he noticed it was shaking.

And of course.

Of course, of course.

That was the moment I realized I was in love with him.

Dash

I didn’t mean to snap at her, but I did, and I didn’t take it back. I didn’t soothe her. I didn’t grab her hand back when she took it away. I wanted to, but a high-minded part of myself stopped me.

Terror took over my body. The walls squeezing in on me. The season and her and everything I had to do to prepare and hadn’t. I was two years from free agency and could be traded at any time. Pulled out of the deck, paired with a third baseman and a relief pitcher for an inside straight or an outfielder for a winning hand. The disruption would kill me, especially if it happened in the middle of the season.

I had no control. None. Maybe she was shaking. Maybe she was upset when I snapped at her, but I’d been losing my shit for weeks. The moment she walked out, the moment I saw her again, and all the moments in between were a hell of anxiety.

“I can’t tell you what’s going to happen,” I said.

“You can tell me how you feel.”

“How I feel? I feel like the sky is eight feet over my head, a million tons and falling fast. I don’t know what you want from me, but I’m pretty sure I can’t give it to you. I tried. But I’m squeezed.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time. I wondered if I could take it all back between now and the next traffic light. She was so soft, so vulnerable. I’d never do better than Vivian Foster, but the conversation was like quicksand. I was in up to the knees and getting sucked down.

“I don’t understand what this has to do with me,” she said, “or how I can help.”

Of course she wanted to help. She was that wonderful. I wanted to touch her. Take her home. Reveal the body under her clothes and crawl into it until her hurt was mine.

“I have my routines. If I break them, shit goes crazy. And already I’ve broken a lot. I have to put it back together. I have ADD, and I know everyone says they have it. Everyone blames the fact that they can’t pay attention on their ADD. Well, let me tell you this is different. Measurably different. I should be a failure at this sport. I shouldn’t be able to play, but I am. And the only way is through medication and managing my input and my distractions. I get up at the same time. I do the same things. I make sure that when I do something outside the routine, I’m prepared for it. The season is coming. I walk a tightrope six months out of the year. And I do it by keeping control of my environment. You turn my life upside down.”

“I get it.”

“You do?”

She nodded, and I took it at face value. I believed her. She was good. She understood. And that made the next suggestion seem sane and hopeful instead of insulting and demeaning.

“So we could just keep it geographic.”

“What does that mean?” She sounded hopeful, as if I’d thrown her to the wolves then told the wolves to take a cigarette break. I felt filthy.

“Well.” I had a moment to stop myself and say something else, but when I glanced at her, she looked so optimistic and beautiful I forgot who I was, and mostly, I forgot who she was.

Stop it, Dashiell. You’re going to lose her, and it’s going to hurt like fuck.

“We could do it this way.” Not being able to look at her while I drove made it easier to say. Stupidly easier. “I have mostly night games, and you’re off in the summer. I could fuck you senseless every afternoon I'm in LA.”

“And when you’re not in LA?”

I didn’t know what made me think she wouldn’t ask that or that it could be answered easily. Maybe I’d hoped she’d just know and be okay with it. But no. She was too smart for that, and I was too stupid to understand why.

“Well, when I’m not in LA—”

You’re really going to say it?

Dance around it.

Say but don’t say.

“Then we’re not together.”

“Meaning?”

Meaning she was going to make me say it.

Stand firm.

Everything is riding on this.

It hurts already.

“Meaning, I just… I have routines. Things I do to make sure I perform. And I can’t do them if we’re together.”

“Such as?”

Fuck it.

I came to a choice in the road, where I could go toward figuring us out or trying to go back to normal. I chose the hard-won routines that had made my career possible.

I continued south on Beverly Glen instead of turning east.

I knew that wasn’t just a direction on a compass. It was a decision made too quickly, under pressure, when all choices were cruel.

She didn’t look at me. When I glanced at the right side mirror to make a turn, I saw the back of her head. She lived close by, in her father’s house. He’d be there for her. That seemed important. If she was upset, she’d have someone who loved her better than I did because before it was even out of my mouth, I knew that even if she agreed to be my LA fuck, I wouldn’t do her the disrespect of allowing it.

“There are women I see,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything. Not like you do. But it’s a ritual, and I can’t stop because of you.”

“I see.”

“Look, you can’t come between me and what I’ve worked for my whole life. I love fucking you, but if I stop playing ball because of it—”

“I never told you to stop playing.”

“If I slump, I stop.”

“Everyone slumps.”

“I do not.” I roared it, pointing at her, leveling the truth. My truth.

If I stopped fucking pussy from the city I was playing, I stopped winning. I wasn’t turning back. Shit was going to get really blunt and really ugly if she pressed me. I was going to tell her where exactly I needed to come and how. Then she was going to cry.

God. This was a mistake. All of it. I hated anyone hurting her, and that night, I hated myself. I was repulsed by my own heart because it was small and mean and only had room for my own desires. I was a disgusting man.

“If I didn’t like you,” I softened it because I cared what she thought of me, “if I didn’t think about you every second of the day, I would have just left. But I can’t do this.”

“You intended this the whole time,” she said, looking out the side window.

“No. No, I didn’t.” I pulled up in front of her house.

“Liar,” she whispered so softly I barely heard it.

“I thought it would solve itself.”

“Whatever.”

She opened the door, and I cracked mine, making the dashboard
ding ding ding
. I was supposed to open her door. It was a habit. But she was out and gone, slamming the door and running up the stone path.

Getting out first and opening the door for her was a promise of something more. A promise that I’d be careful with her body and her heart. As she ran up the steps and pushed the door open without needing to unlock it, I knew I’d broken that promise.

If I couldn’t keep my word with a woman like Vivian, I’d never be a worthwhile partner to any woman. I sat outside, coming to terms with the fact that she was it. She was my last chance at love, and I’d blown it. I’d had a choice between a woman I could love the rest of my life and baseball.

I’d made the only choice I could have, and I had to be okay with that.

By the time I got home, I’d resigned myself to a life alone but secure, steady, and predictable.

Packing was easy. Sleeping was hard. Impossible.

The sheets smelled like fucking.

I stripped the bed, made it again, and stared at the ceiling until morning.

I missed her already.

Vivian

I wasn’t surprised. I’d known deep down that it wasn’t going to work, so I was as good as someone who had cut the bungee cord and jumped anyway. So I fell and fell hard, but I wasn’t shocked when I met the ground.