Asher
Two weeksafter the road trip, the Coach texts me.Adler, you have a minute to talk?
Even though it’s an off-day, I’m at the clubhouse lifting, my music playing without my teammates around to complain, though they’ve largely moved on to giving LeBlanc shit about his new haircut. I put down the weights, tell Coach I’ll be there in a few minutes. He probably wants to check in about my head—it was a mild concussion, but the team is being extra vigilant right before the postseason.
When I get into his office, he looks at me gravely. “Have a seat, son.”
It’s never good when middle-aged baseball men call you that. I sit.
“A few things have come to the team’s attention in recent days. We’ve been tolerant—encouraging even—of your eccentricities. The yoga.” He eyes my cut-up T-shirt that’s cropped at the hem and sleeves. “The, er, casual approach to our dress code. But we take the code of conduct in the clubhousevery seriously, including the ones governing players’ personal lives.”
Fuck.
Fuck.
They must know. Someone must have told them, or they must have figured it out or…
Too many possibilities to consider, each one as plausible as the last. That we were obvious. That someone mentioned it to the team. No.Snitched.
Panic sets in—the kind that shatters my ability to regulate it. I breathe in deep, blow out a breath through my mouth. That does nothing to unclench my hands from my knees or stall my heart where it’s beating against my ribs.It’s none of the club’s business. Of course it is.
Whatever it is, Coach hasn’t come out and said it. Now I know why Brayden calls himsirall the time—it’s much easier than saying what I want to say, which isfuck you. “Sir?” I ask.
Coach aligns his hands on the surface of his desk. Everything about him is neat, orderly without being fussy, from his hat to his creaseless polo to his ironed golf shorts. “When we caught wind of you sleeping with a married woman, well, you’re not the first player to do that, son. One could hardly blame you, really.” He gives a tight smile. “But then there is the more serious allegation of there being a…rather unorthodox relationship happening in our midst.”
Right. So they know, maybe not everything. But enough. “I see.”
“After my conversation with Forsyth earlier this season, I had hoped to put some of this behind us.”
My shoulders tense. “What conversation is that?”
Coach gets a look of fatherly concern that makes my hands go even tenser. “There’s a certain point at which image issues go from being clubhouse concerns to being matters for the generalpublic.” Because that’s what my being with two people is to him. To the team.An image issue.
“Fortunately, as my pastor would say”—Coach scrubs his palms together as if washing his hands of the whole situation—“the love of a good woman fixes a lot of ills. We communicated such to Forsyth.”
So Brayden and Savannah had gotten married because the team told them to? Several things click. Their sudden wedding. Their seeming newness to one another the first time we were all together.Did Brayden marry her only because of that? Was the whole thing just for show?
“So in that same spirit,” Coach continues, “we suggest you find yourself one such woman. Preferably someone who’snotalready spoken for. We would hate to have to arrange for either you or Forsyth to continue your baseball careers…elsewhere.”
It takes a moment for his meaning to sink in. If I don’t stop this with Brayden and Savannah, either he gets traded or I do. Or possibly both. Would it be worse to be split up or have them close—in the same city, on the same team—and not be able to touch them?
No.I won’t accept either outcome, not from this man with his khaki shorts and his fucking desktop plaque with a Bible verse about iron sharpening iron. My hands curl into fists. Red seeps into the edge of my vision. Anger—the kind I know. The kind I’ve worked so hard to tamp down, hot and bright and ready to consume all my good judgment.
“With all due respect,sir,” I say, “go fuck yourself.”
“Adler.” He says my name like a curse, which it might as well be. “Consider yourself benched for tomorrow’s game. I’m sure Crawford will be excited to have his old job back.”
Any reasonable player would take that as the cost of doing business. I should slink out of here, tail metaphorically tucked.Instead I stand, every muscle in my body hard with tension. “Fuck that and fuck you.”
“Three games, then.” Coach looks at me with a weary sort of skepticism. “Care to make it the rest of the season?”
I could quit now. Quit and figure out what my life would be without this shit. Back when I made that all-night drive—Pittsburgh to Chicago, on a dark highway at two a.m. with semis speeding around me—I told myself that nothing would stand in my way. I worked for what I have. And yet that’s nothing, if I have to give them up to have it.
Coach is still looking at him as if he expects me to fold. My hands are still fisted at my sides. It’d be so easy to…
No. I’m not that. Whatever else I am, I’m not that. Still, I shoot him a look hard enough that he recoils in his chair.
“I’ll let you know,” I say and throw myself out of his office before he has a chance to do it for me.
