I glare right back at him. “I had to call in a favor from you to get security on her and I feel like an inept asshole for not being able to take care of her myself, and I feel like the four other favors I’m calling in so I can call off the favor I called in from you won’t be enough either. So yeah. Go on. Murder me, but before you do, promise me you’ll take care of Waverly when I’m gone.”
He leans back and rubs his chin, still glaring at me. “I’m really fucking pissed that I believe you.”
“We’ve been tabloid official for two months. Where the fuck have you been?”
“I thought Tripp was going along with shit her team was making up to piss me off, and there’s this code,” he mutters. “You don’t ask your friends if it’s fake. They’ll tell you if they want you to know.”
I barely stop myself from slugging him. “You fucking knew they did that?”
Giselle looks at the bathroom door, takes two steps toward me, then stops when Levi jerks his head back toward the women’s bathroom door.
Swear to fuck, Dad’s place is getting an upgrade this winter. No more of this one-seater, locked bathroom shit. When Waverly’s in Shipwreck, she’s using any bathroom she wants with a guard standing in the same room but not in the actual stall.
“Everyone knew Zinnia did that,” Levi tells me. “Maybe not to the extent she’s apparently pushed it, but sometimes, you have to take advantage of the press the same way they take advantage of our privacy.”
I scrub a hand over my face. “Jesus.”
“So what’s the end game here?” he asks. “How are you even seeing each other?”
And isn’t that the question? “Season’s over in another seven weeks or so.”
He stares at me without blinking.
Doesn’t have to say what he’s thinking next.
And what happens when you leave for spring training in February?
We go all the way, the team gets about three months off.
And if wedon’tgo all the way—
Jesus.
My nuts just shriveled and every part of me answered that for me.If you don’t go all the way, you keep playing baseball until you do.
No pausing.
No hesitation.
And the play-offs?
We’re in them, butnothingis guaranteed. This is when shit gets real. When three of us having alternate off-nights can sink us in the first round of the play-offs, before we even get close to the World Series.
And if we still go all the way?
I’m not done.I’m not done. I canfeelit, and the one thing I’ve never questioned in my career is how I feel.
So my three months with Waverly will pass in the blink of an eye, and then we’re right back where we started with her on the road, me on the road, and maybe our schedules will cross once or twice a month until we get a couple months together all over again at the end of the season.
We can’t keep doing this.
We can’t.
One of us has to give something up, and that someone’s gonna have to be me.
“I’m gonna deal with that when I have to deal with it,” I tell him.
The bathroom door opens. Waverly steps out in short jean shorts, a Shipwreck shirt she stole out of my closet in Copper Valley this morning, no make-up, and a ponytail, and my heart rolls over and asks her to rub its belly.
