Hardball (10 page)

Not that I should have.

Maybe my living situation was saving me from myself. Because I didn’t want this thing with Dash to end. Not now. Not yet. I wanted to extend it for as long as I could. He might never call again if he didn’t get laid tonight, but if I did take him inside and I never heard from him again, I’d feel worse.

“Thank you,” was all I had. I popped the door open.

He reached across me and closed it. “Wait.”

He got out and walked around the front of the car then to my side. He opened my door and held out his hand for me. I took it and let him pull me up.

We walked side by side toward my steps. Mrs. Scotson’s yappy dog barked. A bus rumbled down Olympic. The little brown crickets chirped, and above me, our sycamore tree rustled in the wind, dumping a rain of fluttering leaves.

We stopped at the front door.

“Thank you,” he said. “The whole night would have been boring without you.”

“Really?”

“Why do you look so surprised?”

“I don’t know,” I lied. “Anyway. I liked seeing you. I’m going to do my best to find your glove.”

He leaned down, mouth near mine, breath on me, and whispered, “Good night, sweetapples.”

He brushed his lips on mine, and when I responded, he held my jaw while he kissed me. I parted my lips enough to let his tongue slide against mine, warm and wet, demanding attention. The rustling of the dry leaves slid away. The traffic on Olympic was silent. The universe existed only where our bodies met. My hands on his wrists. His hands on my neck. Our mouths locked in a dance whose steps coursed down my spine to the neglected space between my legs.

He pulled away, and I gulped for air.

“Yes,” I gasped.

“Yes to what?”

“I forgot the question. But it’s yes.”

“The question was, ‘How many times do you want to come tonight?’”

“I…”

How many times?

Was there a number above one? Or sometimes?

He put his finger on my collarbone, at the center of my neck, and moved it outward. My brain shut down to feel the sensation of his finger pushing my neckline aside.

“You’re a beautiful woman. I’ve been looking at your body all night. I want to see it wrapped around me. I want to feel you come.”

Yes. Yes yes yes yes. Yes and yes. God, yes.

I reached for the doorknob. The door was ajar.

“Oh, Dad.”

I couldn’t bring Dash Wallace inside. My father was probably up. What would I do? Introduce this man to my father then slip him into my room, telling Dad we were going to listen to records?

“Dash…” I slipped off his jacket and handed it to him. “I’m sorry. It’s a bad time.”

He took the jacket languidly, draping it over one arm while reaching for me with the other. He drew me close and put his lips against my neck, holding me up while setting my body on fire. “When’s a good time?”

I couldn’t answer before he kissed me with an urgency I hadn’t felt before. He kissed me as if now was the only time in the world because this heat was all there was. I wrapped my arms around his neck, and his hand went down my back to my ass. He pulled me into him, hitching my leg over his waist.

I gasped into his mouth when I felt his erection. My body was about to go from matter and mass to pure energy as I pushed against it. I didn’t care about what he wanted outside sex. Didn’t care if Dad was up. Didn’t care about anything but that dick grinding against me, those hands, that mouth. He pushed me against the doorjamb and moved against me, with me, nose to nose, watching my face as my body pulsed toward him, soft to hard—Goddamnit, what was I doing?

I pushed him away before I had an orgasm on my front steps.

He smiled like a cat who’d just eaten a pet shop full of canaries, taking my hands off his chest and holding them. “Not tonight. That’s fine.” He kissed my right palm. “I want to see you again. This week. Next week. From now until I leave for spring training.”

He pressed his lips to the inside of my wrist. “You have no idea how many times I can make you come in the next few weeks. You’re going to beg me to stop, and guess what? I’m not going to. Not until you forget how to speak.”

I swallowed. “The next few weeks?”

“I’m offline when I’m in Arizona. And after that, I’m hard to get. By November, we will have both moved on.”

His hands out in apology, streetlights brash on his face, and all the warmth of the past minutes gone, I felt the same as when my teenage cousin had shown my eight-year-old self how to play 52 Pickup. I’d begged him for a game of gin rummy, and he’d thrown the cards all over the living room.

Pick them up and put them in order in less than ten minutes.

Make sense of this in three seconds, or you’ll look like an ass.

We both worked nine months out of the year.

But completely different months.

Was he saying he only wanted to have this relationship until spring training?

That wasn’t what I wanted.

He’d be traveling half-to-two-thirds of the time between April and November.

How did people usually do it?

What did I want from him?

“What do you want?” I asked.

He held his coat open by the neck. “Right now, I want to get you warm.”

“I don’t want your jacket. I think this might be a short conversation. What do you want here? With me?”

“I like you.”

“You like me but?” I asked.

“There’s no but. I like you, and I want to spend the next few weeks with you until I have to go to spring training.”

I realized how well I’d gotten over Carl when I felt the air go out of my lungs. After he left me, I’d spent months with a collapsed chest, and the transition back to normal had been so slow I hadn’t noticed it.

Now there I was, freezing my ass off in the street while Dash tried to put a jacket on me, feeling as though someone had squeezed my lungs flat.

I hated feeling like that. I pushed the jacket down. “I’m sorry. I don’t like expiration dates. I’m not saying I want more from you or anything like that, but it’s too risky for me. The whole thing.”

“Promising anything past March—”

“I don’t need a promise.”

“Promise is the wrong word. Attempting. Trying. That’s risky.” He wasn’t committed to putting his jacket back on, and I wasn’t accepting it, so he stood there holding it between us.

“We have opposite ideas of risk,” I said. “Things last until they don’t. I can’t do this your way. Thanks for the lift home.”

I pushed the door open before I could change my mind. The warmth of the house blasted my face, and I stepped away from him. Into the foyer. Turned. He stood there with his jacket over his arm, his posture telling me I could still change my mind.

“Nice running into you too,” I said. “I’m still looking for the glove. I’ll have it sent if we find it.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay. Bye.” I gently closed the door.
Click
.

I didn’t lock it. I didn’t want him to hear the clack of the deadbolt. It seemed rude.

I watched out the window as he got back into his car, revved the engine, and sped away. I ran into my room, threw off the shoes, and got under the covers. It seemed as though it took forever to get warm.

I regretted that he couldn’t see it my way. I regretted that I’d given him so much of myself while getting pushed against the door, but I didn’t regret saying no to his proposal. I knew the limitations of my heart, and having a relationship with an expiration date would have hurt me more than cutting him off on my front steps.

I didn’t want an expiration date. I wanted to go in with both feet. I wanted to be blind and dumb when my heart was ripped out of me. To go in faithfully, with everything, so when I stood alone again, tears welling up, I could tell myself that he was the asshole. He’d fucked up. He was awful, and my mother was right. Too good-looking, too talented, too rich. How was I supposed to soothe myself if I went in knowing when it would end?

Cynical. The whole idea of it was cynical.

Eventually I fell asleep in my mother’s gold dress, feeling as though I’d dodged a mess of heartache.

Dash

Youder came by to work out. The weeks before spring training were spent making sure we didn’t get our asses kicked in Arizona. We were out of shape, lazy, sloppy. Youder and I had worked out together three times a week from January to March the same way for the past five years.

We took the old stone steps down the hill to the southernmost point of my property and turned right around. The hill looked like a sheer face with bushes and rocks latching onto the dirt to defy gravity. We scrambled back up the hill on well-worn trails, hitching and heaving, working out arms and legs against our own body weight.

Twenty-five laps per session in January.

By the first week in April, we could do a hundred even if it took all afternoon.

He had his foot on the top of the fence separating the patio from the baby fig tree, stretching, and he spoke as if what he was saying wasn’t supposed to mean anything to me. “Trent’s pushing me to move.” He took his leg down and put up the other one.

“That’s how he makes his money.” I twisted at the waist, stretching the sleeping back and shoulder muscles.

“Yeah. He says Baltimore’s got a young team. They’re looking for maturity, and they have a third-base coach moving into retirement.”

Jack would make a great coach. He was a natural leader and a clear-and-unemotional thinker. He knew the mental game. He’d mentored me when I was at Cornell, and he’d been on the team that wanted me the most. He was the reason I was playing for Los Angeles and not Pittsburgh.

“Barnett’s never retiring,” I said.

“Trent says otherwise.”

“He doesn’t know shit. He’s an agent.”

“He knows plenty. He’s an agent.”

I stopped stretching. “You’re not going to Baltimore.”

He regarded me seriously, putting both feet on the ground. “I might.”

I took a deep breath and looked toward the horizon, over the stretch of the Los Angeles Basin, to the stadium, like a bird’s nest on the east side of Elysian Park. At night, it looked like a spaceship landing, but in the day, it was just a grey cleft in the city.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “We have three winning seasons behind us. They can pay the best—”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “But Baltimore’s a loser. For you.”

I didn’t wait for an answer but trotted down the old, cracked steps that led to the southernmost, wildest, and lowest edge of my property. My meds hadn’t kicked in, and I was going to say something impulsive.

It was his career. He could do whatever the fuck he wanted.

He caught up to me at the bottom, and without a word, we started up. My anger at Jack abated as my body expended energy, dealt with pain, opened my thoughts.

I don’t like expiration dates.

I pulled myself up on the trunk of a bush, needles catching my arm and going for my face. I was impervious to accidents and pain. More stimuli to get me through and distract me enough to let me pay attention.

Expiration dates
.

The treadmill was impossibly boring without a book. Free weights were no better unless I had an audiobook in the headset. Counting reps literally caused me psychic pain, the urge to run was so strong.

This I could do. Climbing up a hill I could fall down was good. I could give it attention, and the stakes were high because falling could lead to a career-killing broken bone.

Things last until they don’t
.

I threw myself up the hill and back down again. One step at a time. I’d built the charms in my life one at a time, and one at a time, they’d collapsed.

So one at a time, I’d have to build them again.

I didn’t have women in Los Angeles, yet the hopefulness of that thought brought Vivian to mind. I tried to shake her as I climbed. I had reasons for the rules.

So no.

But I tasted her in my dry mouth. Heard her in my gasps. Once her voice came to my mind with its talk of expiration dates, I couldn’t shake it. She was in my invigorated muscles and the ache in my arms, and the harder I pushed, the harder she did.

Maybe I could break the Los Angeles rule.

It seemed reasonable. If things were going to fall out of the bottom, I couldn’t just fill from the top. I had to rethink and remake the setup of my life then hold fast again.

One step at a time with her. No rushing. I could have her by the time I went to the Cactus League. I would have her. Own her. Make her body mine. Satisfy my unreasonable, disproportionate craving for her. I gasped for it with every wrench up the hill, every burning muscle, every drop of sweat down my face.

As I climbed the hill, lifting myself by a tree branch, leveraging enough weight to get my leg up to a ledge in the slope, I passed Youder for the third time.

“Last lap,” I said, breath heaving.

He gave me the thumbs-up and scrambled behind me.

When I got to the top, I grabbed his bottle and sat on the edge. I’d never gotten this far ahead of him.

He threw himself on the flagstones at the top of the hill, where my patio started. “Jesus.” He barely had enough breath for the two syllables.

I leaned back and handed him the bottle. “You have two months to get it back.”

He sprayed his face with water even though it was freezing out, then he downed half the bottle. “I won’t.” He sat up. “This is it. This is where the shit starts filling up the bag.”

“Whatever.”

“The age thing. It’s real, son.”

“You’re just lazy. Julio Franco played until he was forty-nine.”

“I’m not Julio.”

He wasn’t Julio. I wasn’t saying he was. I couldn’t tell if he was being intentionally thick or if I was bent out of shape for no good reason. Let’s face it, I didn’t make the effort to figure out the difference.

“People look up to you. They look at you, and they see a guy who could play ball to the end. You start getting soft, you work through it. Get a little older, work harder. If you leave, you just prove this game’s like all the other ones, okay, but it’s not. And it’s not because guys like you play.”

“Old guys?”

“You know what?” I stood and put my hand out for him. “You’re not a free agent until October. I’ll see you tomorrow.”