My bat connects with a sweet, sweetcrackthat my family can probably hear all the way up in Shipwreck.
And that ball goes sailing into the wind, higher and higher, deeper and deeper, until it bounces off the top of the goddamn scoreboard over center field.
Cooper Rock is fuckingback.
And Waverly Sweet is the goddess who made it happen.
22
Waverly
This has beenthe longest four days of my life.
It’s been all back-to-back meetings, photo shoots, promotional appearances, charity appearances, webcast recordings, and harried moments of scribbling lyrics and melodies any chance I can get during the days, plus a travel schedule for said meetings and photo shoots and appearances that have me wondering who on my scheduling team hates me. Which means it’s fourwhole daysafter I leave Cooper’s house before I get five minutes to myself to make the phone call I’ve been wanting to make since the moment I saw him hit his second home run of the night that first game after he tried to salvage prom for me.
And when I finally get him on the phone, he doesn’t tell me what I want to hear.
“I’m headed to the bus in ten.”
The apology in his voice helps. And it’s not like we haven’t communicated. We’ve had an ongoing, drawn-out, hours-between-replies text message conversation going for the past four days too, covering everything from the latestLove on Firefanfic episode to my fingernail malfunction in the middle of an interview.
Usually it’s me who can’t answer right away, which means I’ve gotten way more messages than he has.
And those messages?
Sometimes they’re normalhey, thinking about youmessages.
Saw you on the news. Who the fuck calls your outfit ugly while you’re reading stories to sick kids in a hospital?
Don’t watch Who’s Your Family? this week. No, really. Don’t do it. Not unless I’m there or Aspen’s there or one of us is on the phone. Trust me.
Hey, next time we get together, can you do that little dance that you’re doing in this GIF? I keep watching it because it makes me smile.
And sometimes, they’re something completely different.
He left me a voice message of himself singing a song he made up about wanting to see pop stars in baseball pants, and I’m still not sure if I was surprised or not to discover that Cooper can carry a tune and has a pretty great voice.
He sent me a photo of a drawing he made of Baby Ash during a Fireballs promotional visit to a local preschool, right next to a drawing one of the kids made that put his drawing to shame.
And then there was the selfie.
Selfies are normal, right?
So why did the one of him sitting by himself at the top of the bleachers, hat backward, sunglasses on,Shipwreck Pirate Festlogo on his black T-shirt, with the Blue Ridge Mountains peeking up over his shoulder, and the simpleWish we were watching a game together heremessage he attached to it send a shiver all over the most vulnerable parts of me?
Was he implying one day he’d be retired and I’d take some time off in the summer, where we’d both pretend we were normal people who liked to watch a game together?
And why do I think that I’d walk away from everything if we could do it tomorrow?
We can’t, of course, which is probably why I’ve convinced myself that we would if we could. It’s easy to say you’d do things that you obviously can’t.
He’s still under contract for another two years after this season, and my life is planned out for the next three years as well. Everything I give my fans, he gives to his fans too. And it’s well-documented that when he’s done playing, he has every intention of continuing to live and breathe Fireballs baseball. As a coach, a scout, an analyst, booth announcer, the weird guy who’s always running around the outside of the park with face paint and a megaphone yelling that the crowd isn’t loud enough for the team.
Any one of those. He’d do it.
It's as much a part of him as music is in me.
But that’s all a worry for another time, because right now, he’s on the phone and I’m hearing his voice and even my cat in my lap seems happy about it.
