It’d be easier to make up my mind if I’d let myself decide if I want to like him or not.
And possibly if one of us would actually talk about what happened in the elevator.
I haven’t. Not then, and not since.
Once I finished laughing my ass off, I told him I needed to get ready for work, including packing for a long road trip.
He checked the weather, said the thunder was past us and he was going to head home.
He didn’t even make it up to my apartment.
And now, I’m traveling with the team. We’re in LA, finishing the first three-game away series of our road trip tonight. We get a day off for travel tomorrow, then two more series to go after this one before we’re done and head home again.
Then I owe Duncan hisCroaking Creaturesdate.
I step out of the makeshift locker room set up for me in the visiting team’s quarters after a hard-fought win and find Dusty and Hugo, the team’s fielding and conditioning coaches, waiting for me.
“Cooper and Waverly invited us over for drinks,” Dusty says. “You in?”
Yes. “They’re home?”
“She’s got a show in Seattle this weekend, but they’re not leaving for it until tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I’m in. Thanks.”
One of Waverly’s security agents is waiting for us at the team entrance, and he hustles us into a black SUV. Despite the late hour, lights are ablaze at Waverly’s place when we arrive. The security guy shows us out back to the pool deck, where Cooper’s entertaining several of the older players and their wives and partners already.
And byentertaining, I mean he’s swaying back and forth, baby in a sling, while he chats with his former teammates and friends.
Dusty and Hugo head over to join them.
“Alcohol or not?” Waverly asks behind me.
I turn, finding exactly the woman I was looking for standing behind me with a can in each hand. Bubble water or hard cider.
I glance at the players again. “If I say alcohol, can we hide somewhere else for a while?”
She grins at me. “Girl talk?”
“You’ll think it’s dumb, but my sisters-in-law don’t get it, and I can’t talk to my ladies pro coach group because—just because.” Because the Thrusters just hired a woman conditioning coach who joined my professional group, and Icannottalk about Duncan in there now.
Not that I would’ve before, but I would’ve been tempted.
“I won’t think it’s dumb,” Waverly tells me. She hooks her head to the left. “They can’t hear a thing if we’re on the other side of the pool. I’ll turn on the hot tub jets.”
“You’re a goddess.”
“Aww, usually only my husband calls me that.”
I laugh. Half the world thinks Waverly Sweet is a goddess, and I have zero doubt she hears it regularly.
And that’s why I feel like a complete dumbass for wanting to talk to her over every other woman in my life.
She’s mountains more successful than I am.
But I’m as successful as I want to be, and I get more public attention than I would if I weren’t in pro baseball.
Also, that feeling is all on my side of our friendship, and I know it. She’s never treated me like anything other than an equal as a woman in a man’s world.
