I try not to feel hurt or get defensive. I did just ask him a really hard question, so I approach my response carefully. “I just mean, with your injury and everything, do you think maybe you’d ever consider retiring before your contract is up?”
“No. Nola, they need me,” he says matter-of-factly. It takes me a long second to understand who thetheyare in his statement, but when it does, I rub my temples and count to five.
“Seattle.” It’s a sarcastic and petty response but it’s been a long day. “The city of Seattle needs you? Your throng of adoring fans?”
He opens his mouth in retort but he’s been standing too long and sags to the couch. Nothing has gone like either of us planned and there are palpable, heightened emotions from both of us. I help him with his shirt and then pace the room while he wiggles out of his pants and into joggers.
When he’s finished, he lowers himself back onto the couch and closes his eyes. “Theteamneeds me, Nola.”
I push the coffee table out of the way and kneel in front of him on the floor. “Really? What does baseball offer you, Max? What does it give you that you can’t get anywhere else?”
It takes him no time to spit out, “A family. A sense of belonging.”
This stabs me in the gut. It erases everything that has happened between us since Christmas. It deletes his declaration from seconds ago that he wants forever with me. Low blow, Hutchings. I throw him a softball as a chance to repent. “You have a family. You have Stella and Madelyn and Violet.”
“Try as she might, Stella isn’t going to live forever. And I love my sisters, I do, but they’ve got their own lives.” He pauses, losing all bravado, and I find that stabs even worse than his biting comment. “I already lost my parents, Nola. Then I lost my grandpa. I know I’m going to lose Stella even before she’s physically gone. I get that what I’m saying doesn’t make any sense, but in my head, I’ve always told myself it’s easier to let my sisters move on without me and find a family within my team.”
“Nobody wants to be hurt, Max,” I say quietly. “It’s the worst feeling to throw yourself out there and let the world chew you up and spit you back out. But not everybody will do that to you.”
“I know,” he tells me, and I’m about to grab his hand and tell him we’ve got this—together—when he adds, “Baseball doesn’t do that to you.”
“You’re an absolute idiot.”I roll my eyes good. I always tell Emma it’s one of the rudest gestures you can do when you’retrying to be a good communicator and heard in a conversation, but that was a stupid comment.
“Excuse me?”It’s low and drawn out. I’ve definitely frustrated him to the same degree he’s frustrated me.
“You’re loyal to a career and a league that all too easily let you go, but you’re not willing to fight for relationships that actually matter? Fine. You don’t want to be attached to Madelyn and Violet, be my guest. But I thoughtwewere a family—a dysfunctional one sure, but a family nonetheless.”
He runs his hand through his hair like I’m not listening to anything he’s saying. “I am fighting for you.”
“Bull crap.” That came out louder than I intended and I glance over my shoulder to see if Emma’s come back down the stairs. She doesn’t need to overhear this argument. I take a breath and quiet myself. “You just said that your whole focus is yourself so you can’t get hurt. I thought you’d changed the last few months. But you’re still the ego-driven man-child I met at the bar. You think baseball is the only thing that can’t hurt you even though it is the whole reason you hit rock bottom in the first place?”
“Hey. If anybody understands rock bottom, I would think it’d be you. You lost your husband.”He says this softly.
“Exactly, Maxford. I have.” I reach out and lay my hand on his chest. “I lost my husband and the father of my child. And you know what? It nearly killed me. But after a rough year of barely surviving, I started over. I stopped blaming Elliott’s choices and the art world and my string of bad luck for the way life turned out. I chose to move forward.”
“Things were going smoothly because I spent so long protecting Emma and me from being hurt again—in any way—that I stopped taking risks. And then you came along. Youmade me realize life isn’t worth living if I don’t put myself out there and get out of my comfort zone.”
There’s a pregnant pause when I finish, and Max pinches the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes.“Even after the world’s biggest fight, can you believe I still want forever with you?”
“You’re concussed and talking crazy,” I tell him as I cover him up with the throw blanket. “And you clearly have never fought with a woman before because this was nothing. And it isn’t over, by the way.”
Just then, Emma bounds down the stairs singing, “Pool time!” over and over again, oblivious to the tension in the room. The quasi-proposal. The fallout. She slides open the living room door that leads to the pool deck and lets me know she’ll be waiting for me on the pool steps.
Max opens his mouth to say something but I put my finger to my lips and check that Em is distracted by the water. Once I have visual confirmation, I turn to him and say, “We can’t finish this discussion right now. It’s too important and we need to have it when you’re not spiraling from your injury and my kid, with hearing like a bat, isn’t ten feet away.”
“Okay.” He settles. “I don’t want us miscommunicating, Nola.”
The comment makes me grin. “Oh yeah, why’s that?”
“Because when my sisters used to hold me hostage and force me to watch those romcoms, that was the worst part of the movie—I swear everything can be solved with talking.”
I pick up his discarded uniform and give him a single shoulder shrug. “If they made it that easy in the movies, they’d only be five minutes long.”
“And what a pity that would be.” I laugh and he reachesout to take my hand. “But you get what I’m saying, right? We’re adults. We need to be able to talk everything out.”
“I agree, Maxford.”
He opens one eye and looks at me, giving me the half smile I have come to call the one that’s just for me. “Now was that so hard? Geez. Cut a poor man some slack. Okay, okay. Go swim with the kid. I am going to sleep for a while.”
