I don’t really have any opinions about wedding stuff or patience at all with Barb’s binders. Blake did, or he used to. He’d sit next to her and listen, and she’d call him afine young manhe was—always with the implication that I wasn’t. That was until Brad started calling himmama’s boy, then Blake got shipped off to whatever baseball camp would toughen him up the most.
Me: Do whatever makes you happy
There’s a pause as Savannah types more. Adler is finally, finally moving, rolling up his yoga mat. I absolutely don’t watch his obliques ripple in his sides. Someone should tell him that having a little meat on you is good for playing baseball.
Savannah: Great, a Frozen-themed wedding it is
She attaches severalpictures. There are illuminated ice sculptures and a shit ton of glitter. So she doesn’t have patiencefor my mother’s binders either, but she’s putting up with them anyway.Because you’re paying her to.
Me: Barb’ll hate it
Me: It’s perfect
Savannah: (halo emoji)
When I look up from my phone, Adler has his mat scrolled under one arm. He’s staring at me again.
Savannah: Your mom says to invite the whole team to the party
Savannah: Well, she said it like I don’t have any friends or family
Fuck, should I offer to fly Savannah’s friends out here? Who knows how any of this stuff is supposed to work?
Me: Do you want your friends to come?
Savannah: It’s kinda last minute. And they’ll be able to tell that we’re…you know…
She actually types that.You knowlike she doesn’t want to put it in text. Fake. Or worse than fake. Convenient. Using each other. I’m a bank account and she’s a smile for the public. That’s all we are to each other—at least until she gets her smart-person degree and does the smart thing and leaves me behind.
Savannah: Invite the team so I don’t have to.
Savannah: Oh and tell Asher thanks again for the ride.
Asher. I didn’t realize they’d gotten friendly over the course of a drive. Fine, he can come to a party—there’ll be more than a hundred people there and an open bar. We don’t have to interact. I can be the bigger person because, clearly, he can’t. Even if I’m not going to say shit to him about Savannah, not about the ride.
And I definitely won’t let it bother me that she’s been in Atlanta for all of a day and she’s already found someone she’d rather talk to than me.
Chapter Nine
Asher
So this is Brayden Forsyth.
If I really thought about it—which I did, in between watching Savannah fix her lip gloss and re-mascara her eyelashes and joke with me and fill out a crossword puzzle in exactly three minutes while fanning herself in the humidity—Brayden is pretty much what I would have pictured. A man who let his new wife swelter in the Georgia heat lecturing me onteam culture.Well, buddy, your culture is garbage if you think some on-field stretching is worse than not even coming to meet your wife at the door.
What does she see in him? His face is passable, if you like that smug jock look—straight nose, strong chin, eyes the color of an angry ocean. The kind of dime-a-dozen straight guys clubhouse houses are full of and who I make it a point never to notice. He’d be tall if I wasn’t slightly taller. He’d be in shape if I didn’t lift heavy and run far. He swaggered out onto the field like he’s never had anyone tell him that he didn’t belong there: that he wasn’t too gangly, toocerebralto be a ballplayer. I bet he never drove all night to do a showcase for the only team that gave him a chance to play—the bottom-scraping Chicago teamthat could barely cobble together fifty wins. I bet he’s never had totry.
The only thing that makes him not a total fucking asshole—so only ninety-nine percent of one—is how he’s smiling as he’s answering texts on his phone, laughing to himself so quietly, I’m not even sure he’s aware he’s doing it.
Some part of me hopes he’s texting someone else so that Savannah has an excuse to dump his ass. But she moved across the country. She doesn’t deserve to have her heart broken if she really loves him. He must have good qualities buried under all that bravado and hair gel.
He looks up from his phone, a curl to his lip. “You need something?” As if he didn’t come out on this field to specifically fuck with me.
That decides that. “Not anything from you.” And I don’t bother to wait for his reply—not his sneer, not his fist—before I carry my yoga mat off the field. Well, I don’t need a warm welcome from him. After all, I already have one from the wife he’s so fond of ignoring.
For the restof the day before our game, every time I look up, there’s Brayden. In the dressing room, yanking his shirt over his head. In the weight room, lifting a comically heavy set as if he’s trying to prove a point. Midway through his workout, he goes over to the aux where music is being piped in through the communal speaker.
“Whoever picked this—your taste in music sucks,” he declares to the room.
