“Don’t do this. I could…” I flex my hand in his grip.
“But you won’t. You won’t because you’re not him.”
Brayden doesn’t say whohimis, because I know. Know it as much as I carry half his DNA, in the letters of my name stitched to the jersey I wear every day. A reminder of who I am, even if I hate the name. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.” Brayden adjusts his hand, fingers settling in the valleys between my knuckles. “You’re a good man.”
I shake my head. Distantly, my face feels wet. It’s possible that I’m crying, like all the anger inside me is overflowing onto my cheeks. “I’m not, I’m not.”
“You are. And you made me realize that’s who I wanted to be too—for Savannah. For you.”
That gets my attention. I freeze just long enough for Brayden to drop my hand, to extend his arms and wrap them around me, hard.
“Hey.” He breathes it in my ear a few more times. “Hey, that’s it.”
Eventually, my heart rate settles. My hands unfurl.
Brayden places his hand gently over my wrist, and we walk like that, slowly, out of my room, down the hallway and into my bathroom. Brayden runs the shower, fiddling with the water until the showerhead is pouring out steam.
“You taking these off?” he asks, tugging at the waistband of my joggers.
I shove them down, climb in the shower. The water burns, hot enough to wash the taste of iron from my mouth. Outside the curtain, there’s a faint rustling—clothes being pulled off—and Brayden gets in. We shower together at the ballpark—the whole team does in huge communal showers that mostly make it normal to see everyone you work with bare-assed. Completely different from how he pulls me against him, my back to his chest, his lips brushing my neck and shoulders.
I don’t know how long we stand there for, only that by the time I blink back to consciousness, the light outside my tiny, high-up bathroom window has mostly faded.
“Better?” Brayden asks.
I nod, feeling like all the words have drained from me. There’s one I can manage. “Sorry.”
Brayden shrugs. “Shit happens.” As if that’s all this is. “I should know.” He says that one more quietly and holds me closer.
When we started this, I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to overcome his jealousy, and all his other internalized bullshit about being with a man. About being withme. He should be playing a game right now—we both should, a hundred feet apart in the outfield together, but still attentive to each other’s every movement. But he drags his nose over the back of my neck, kissing me briefly, like there’s nowhere on earth he’d rather be than right here.
And that’s enough to make me roll my body closer to his. To lean my head back on his shoulder. To say, “So what’s our plan to get Savannah back?”
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Savannah
Midway through class,Dr. Ghorbani drops a note on my desk. “Ms. Burke, please see me after.”
My stomach drops. We just got our papers back, mine delivered with red ink covering it—and a grudging B+ at the top. “Forrest, we’re putting this on the fridge,” I joke.If I’m doing better, why does she need to see me?
I turn my attention to the lecture, a graph up on screen that we’re analyzing. I process it for a minute in pieces—axes, unit labels, data patterns—then turn to Katia and whisper, “She finally gave us an easy one.”
“Easy for you.” Even if Katia’s already jotting down notes.
I laugh and tap various components of the graph on the printouts that Dr. Ghorbani provided. She’s a good teacher, I realize: the kind who doesn’t compromise her standards but pulls you up to them. I’m writing differently. Thinking differently.I could actually make it in this program. For the first time since I got to Atlanta, I actually believe that.
It hits me all at once.I’m gonna miss this.I’ll miss Forrest and Katia and Dr. Ghorbani and the feeling like I’m throwingmyself against a wall—but somehow good. I’ll miss having things expected of me: not just being someone’s daughter or someone’s wife. Even if I take a year off—it takes six months to process a divorce in Georgia, apparently—and reapply for the program, by that time my friends will have moved on. Something else I didn’t know I was losing.
Next to me, Katia is decorating her graph in neat annotations and little figures of fighter jets. On my other side, Forrest is blinking like he’s fighting off sleep. “Hey,” I whisper to him, “if she asks us to share, I got this one.”
And for the first time since I started this program, I actually mean it.
After class,I cautiously approach the lectern where Dr. Ghorbani is stacking various papers and shoving them into a beat-up leather briefcase. “Ms. Burke,” she says, “this conversation will be better in my office.”
We don’t talk as we walk together through a narrow, poorly lit hallway, up several winding flights of stairs. The building we’re in is painted white that’s gone slightly tan with age.A literal ivory tower.Her office is at the end of a long hallway. She unlocks the door.
