Hardball (27 page)

“I’m wearing sweatpants, same as you,” I said. “Why are you here?”

“I forgot how sexy you are in the morning.”

“Who’s that?” came Dad’s voice from behind me.

I turned. He was in boxers and a T-shirt, hoisting a baseball bat over his shoulder.

“Dash.”

“Did you tell him it’s five thirty in the morning?” He lowered the bat.

“He’s wearing a watch. I think he knows.”

“There something wrong with the front door?”

I turned back to the man in the drive. “Dad wants you to come in like a normal person.”

“Coming around,” he said, projecting his voice. He stepped forward and whispered, “But you’re coming with me now.”

“After I shower.”

“Nope.”

He jogged down the driveway before I could respond. We met at the front door. He looked crisp and clean and ready for anything. Ten percent of my brain was still on the couch.

“Dash. What are—”

He craned his neck to address my father, who was leaning on his bat. Dad’s hips hurt. He never knew what kind of day he was going to have until he woke up in the morning.

“I need your daughter for a few hours.”

“Take her. Just don’t break her.”

“Funny, Dad.” I put my hand up to Dash, ready to explain the desperate need for a shower and a change of clothes, but I didn’t have a chance.

He grabbed my wrist and tugged. “Come.”

“Seriously, I need to wash up.”

He yanked me out the door. “No time.”

I grabbed my bag and let him pull me to his black Volvo. “We’re not seeing people, are we?”

“It’s five thirty in the morning. Only priests and bakers are up.”

He opened the door and tried to kiss me. I gave him my cheek.

“This is all you get when I don’t brush my teeth,” I said.

“Very considerate of you. Get in.”

I got in, and he got behind the wheel and handed me a bottle of water from the center console.

“Drink. You’ll feel as good about your mouth as I do.”

I took a long swig. I did feel a little better, but I was still going to withhold kisses out of playful spite just to see how long I could resist.

He sped down San Vicente, which was empty, and onto La Brea.

“Where are we going?” I turned on his radio. He had a hip hop station loaded, and I left it but turned down the volume. Hip hop was all right sometimes.

“Echo Park.”

“The King of Elysian Park going to show me his empire at sunrise?”

“I have to if I want to get you to work on time.”

“Lucky you, I’m off all week for spring break.”

He smirked as if he wanted to say something he couldn’t. I was just glad I’d showered before bed.

“You asked me a big thing yesterday,” I said as he stopped for a red light. We’d be on the freeway in a minute, and this was his last chance to take a long hard look at me.

“I did. And I still want you to travel with me. It’s not that big a deal.”

“I’m sorry?”

The light changed.

“Lots of players do it. When someone’s important to them, they just make arrangements.”

He meant it wasn’t a big deal
to him
. I had a few dozen responses, but I held my tongue. I didn’t want to tell him I had third graders who were less self-centered or that I was glad it wasn’t a big deal for him since that made what it meant to me as irrelevant as he thought it was.

I tried not to get mad at him for being a jerk or at myself for not having a big, important life.

“You nervous about this afternoon?” I asked.

“Why would I be nervous?”

His tone was just a little sharp. I didn’t know if he was aware that I’d seen
Spring Training Report
or if he cared.

“Opening day. Duh.”

The hills of Elysian Park grew in the distance.

“Yeah, well, I’m kind of glad spring training’s over. I’m ready to get out there.”

“How did it go in Arizona?”

“You saw the exhibition games.”

What did I have the right to say? What was my role here? We’d been broken up during that time, and we hadn’t even mentioned his poor performance. We’d been too busy ruining my good underwear.

But he was kind of asking, wasn’t he?

“Were you feeling all right?” I didn’t know how else to put it.

He surprised me by smiling. “No, not at all.”

“Bellyache?”

“Yeah, a two-month bellyache called Vivian-itis.” He exited at Elysian Park and wound through the back ways.

“Shut up.” He was making my face and neck tingle again.

“Symptoms include desperate longing and an inability to do anything but feel like a douchebag. Patient can’t do shit on the field but stand there like an ass, wondering what the fuck he’s doing with his life. It’s chronic. No known cure.”

“We’ll try to manage the symptoms.”

He pulled up to a back gate where a security guard sat by a portable wood stand. The guard was older than dirt, with a big smile and a bounce to his step as he approached the driver side.

“Number nineteen!” he exclaimed. “You’re early. Grounds crew isn’t even here yet.”

“I know.” He handed the security guard his license. “I’m just making sure it’s all there.”

“I think you’ll be pleasantly unsurprised.” He crouched to look through to me. “Hello, miss. Do you have a license you can show me?”

“Oh, sure.” I fished it out, and he went to his little stand and wrote down our license numbers. “I still don’t know why I’m here.”

Dash rested his head against the back of the seat, eyes running up and down my body and landing on the bare ankle over my Keds. He stroked the bone and the skin along the edge of the sneaker. “If I tell you, it’s going to be weird.”

“I like weird.”

“Good.”

The guard handed back our IDs and hit a button on a little grey box he’d taken out of his pocket. The chain-link fence swung out.

Dash pulled forward.

Dodger Stadium was not a suburban, outer-city stadium. It had landed like a spaceship in the middle of the densest part of the city, with a huge forest of a park on the west side and the concrete crease of the Los Angeles River on the east.

The south crescent of the stadium was three hundred acres of sixteen thousand parking spots. I’d seen the lot full, clothed in darkness and spotted with floodlights. I’d been stuck in it for an hour, trying to get out after the eighth inning of a late-season blowout and during meaningless mid-season games. If there was a better way to plan for the exodus of sixteen thousand cars, no one had come up with it in time for Dodgers Stadium.

But that morning, the lot was empty as a winter’s day, its grey as uninterrupted as a Christmas sky. The stadium below looked shoved into a corner like an afterthought. I took a deep breath. I’d never come in this way. Never seen the structure from that angle on such a clear morning. It was both diminutive and majestic.

“It’s overwhelming,” I said.

“You should see it from the field.”

He twisted down into the lot, and everything fell back into proportion. After a few more checkpoints, we pulled into the back of the stadium, where an empty spot waited among many. The sign at the head said “Dash Wallace #19.”

“It must all be worth it for your own spot at Dodger Stadium.”

“Money’s pretty good too.” He shut off the car but didn’t move.

I waited. He tapped the wheel.

“Why am I here?” I asked gently. “It’s hours before game time, and you have plenty to do, I’m sure.”

“Trust me.”

Did I trust him?

He hadn’t earned it.

But I did. I needed to. The alternative was unspeakably dreary.

“We’re already at the stadium, slugger, and the sun’s barely up. I must trust you.”

He pulled back and took a look at me, eating me for breakfast, before getting out and opening my door. I took his hand and stepped out. When my little rubber sole hit the asphalt, I’d accepted a challenge I didn’t think any living woman could meet.

Dash

In hindsight, I was crazy. At the time though, I was getting control of my life. Being proactive. Solving problems. Fixing what was broken. All of those phrases seemed sensible when put next to what I was doing.

When she was finally in arm’s reach, I knew everything would be all right. She would forgive me. I could have her again. Shit started clicking. It wasn’t anything I could point at. I wasn’t playing, so I didn’t have any stats, but my guts stopped twisting. I felt hopeful. Not skipping-on-daisies hopeful, but I didn’t dread getting on the field for opening day.

The bowels of the stadium were empty and scrubbed clean. The floors and walls would get progressively filthier over the season, but now they smelled like pine and bleach. New things.

“Wow,” she said when I turned on the lights in the locker room. “I never thought I’d see this.”

“How unimpressive is it?”

“Not special at all.” Her eyes were as big as donuts, fingers drifting over everything. She stopped at my jersey. WALLACE and a big #19.

“I wanted you to see it before it got too busy.”

She plucked my glove off the shelf and put it on her left hand. “No pin. You sure you’re okay with that?”

“No choice, really.”

“Here.” She whipped off the glove and slapped it against my chest. I took it and she touched her right earlobe with both hands. “I still feel bad about the pin. I’m not a superstitious person, but let’s pretend it matters.” She got the gold hoop with the pearl at the end off her ear.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“I know. Where should we put it?”

We huddled over the glove and found a strap the little earring fit around. I kissed her when it clicked. I kissed her long and hard, pushing her against the lockers because I wanted to thank her as much as I wanted to own her completely.

Vivian

When he kissed me, it was as if he forgot himself for a minute, and I was no better. We were both rudderless in each other. He put his hands between my legs, four fingers flat on my crotch. The fabric of the sweatpants didn’t stand a chance against him, yet it was too much of a barrier.

I reached for his dick, groaning when I found the shape of it.

He pulled back, panting. “Fuck, woman.”

I heard a click or a tap from somewhere in the building. Not the locker room itself but close enough to remind me that we weren’t alone. But he didn’t pull away. He kept his hand still and on the warm, damp spot between my legs, his body so close I could see the brown flecks in his blue eyes.

They narrowed a bit before he spoke. “Come on.”

He took his hand off my crotch and wove it in mine, leading me away.

“Where are we going?”

He didn’t answer but pulled me alongside him, out of the locker room, past a long stretch of cinderblock hallway with buzzing fluorescents overhead, into a bigger area with benches and shelves full of equipment. He smacked the push bar of a nondescript door.

I assumed there would be another hall, another minimal room, a private place for us behind it. Instead the doorway opened into pure open space.

I stopped.

He pulled. “Don’t be scared. No one’s here yet. Almost no one. The grounds crew is on the way. We don’t have long. They’ll start wiping seats and heating up the hot dogs. I wanted you to see this. I wanted you to imagine me out there, thinking of you.”

I wasn’t scared, and I wasn’t worried about who was there. The stadium was empty. Just fifty thousand or so unoccupied seats. But I needed a moment to appreciate where I was going. Because the open space wasn’t directly across the outfield or across the parking lot. It was the view from the dugout. I hadn’t seen it since I was a ball girl.

I hadn’t even been allowed in the dugout as a ball girl. It was sacrosanct, and superstition dictated only players, coaches, and managers in uniform could enter.

“It gets disgusting by July,” Dash said when I stepped onto the concrete.

It was scrubbed clean. Every corner. Every surface. Every object I’d seen on television for years jumped out at me. The beige phone. The wood bench and bat rack. The bins of blue helmets.

He closed the door behind me.

The field was enormous. The seats went on forever. In the rows, people walked like ants on vertical pavement. Security guys checking for people and packages that didn’t belong. I remembered them from my ball girl days.

“It seems bigger on the inside than the outside,” I said, leaning over to touch the gravel.

I felt his hands on my shoulders then down my back, pushing me forward. I put my other hand down to steady myself, and he curved his body over me.

“You’re a fucking knockout,” he whispered in my ear, hooking his fingers in my waistband.

“What are you doing?”

“I told you to wear a dress.” He yanked down my sweatpants.

I stopped breathing. The morning air hit my bottom. He’d gotten the underwear too.

“You are not—”

“I am. I’m christening this field with your orgasm.”

“Jesus, Dash, I can’t.”

I had a reasonable explanation for why I wasn’t going to let him fuck me in the dugout, but his arm snaked around me, and his finger found my clit before I could get a word out. All the air left my lungs. My clit was hard and wet and ready for him to turn circles all over it.

“What if someone…”

I couldn’t finish. He unzipped, and the sound of it made my pussy clench and pucker for him.

He pushed my legs open with his foot. “No one’s coming but us.”

His dick at my opening, dry on wet, a four-alarm fire where we touched. I glanced all over the field. No one was looking. But it wouldn’t take more than a glance for us to be a spectacle. No one did. They were far away and doing their jobs.

Slow and steady, he pushed forward inch by inch, almost methodically. I was so soaked for him he didn’t have to thrust.

He pulled me up and spoke in my ear. “Act natural.”

“You’re joking.”

He slid out slowly, his finger circling my clit. “Kind of. But try anyway.” In again. Slow again. My eyes fluttered closed when he buried himself completely inside. “I want to fuck you on every base and eat you out in centerfield. I want to play every game with your pussy on me.”