“Ha, all that cheese talk made me forget I was naked.”
Yanni snorted. The others stared. Could I fit my entire body into my locker if I tucked my knees under my chin? Right then, I’d been willing to try.
FIVE
Jari
“Cheese?”Mules snorted, shaking his head. “That guy’s had one too many balls to the head.”
I didn’t laugh.
It wasn’t even that the joke bothered me—it was the way something tight and uncomfortable pulled low in my chest at the sound of it. As if they were talking about someone I… cared about. Which was ridiculous. I didn’t know Cam. Not really. He was just a baseball player who talked too much and forgot he was standing around in a towel.
Still, the way he’d flushed. The way he’d tripped over his own words as if he was trying too hard not to mess up. The way he’d looked at me—actuallylooked, not scanning, not judging—stuck with me longer than it should have.
I told myself it was nothing.
People didn’t usually try that hard around me, or maybe I didn’t give them the chance because it was safer. Cam had done the opposite without seeming to notice, and that made me uneasy in a way I didn’t have the words for.
I followed Becks and Mules toward the hydro area, but my focus lagged, snagged on the space where Cam had been. Mychest felt oddly hollow, as though I’d stepped out of somewhere warm into a draft.
That bothered me.
I rubbed at my sternum and forced my attention back to the room—the tiled floors, the hiss of water, the low echo of voices. Normal things. Grounding things. Cam wasn’t part of my life. He wasn’t part of my team. He wasn’t someone I needed to factor in.
And yet, the thought landed anyway, quiet and unwelcome:
I hoped he wasn’t embarrassed.
The realization made my stomach drop with secondhand mortification. I shut it down immediately, jaw clenching as I bent to retie my laces harder than necessary. Feeling things for people was dangerous. Caring how they felt was worse. It blurred the lines I relied on to stay upright.
I squared my shoulders. It would pass.
It had to.
“We shouldn’t joke about head injuries,” I said quickly, the words coming out sharper than I’d meant. It wasn’t about being thin-skinned—it just wasn’t funny to me, and the silence that followed made that clear enough. “I mean—” I started, then stopped, already regretting opening my mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I just—yeah. Never mind.”
The words tangled on the way out, clumsy and unnecessary. I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck, heat creeping up under my collar. I’d wanted to explain myself, to make it sound reasonable instead of uptight, but the urge faded as fast as it had come.
No one wanted to hear my opinions anyway. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.
Becks slapped Mules on the back. “Ignore this asshole,” he said easily, shooting Mules a look that shut him up mid-smirk. “He thinks chirping is a personality trait. You good?” Then, hewaited a beat, as if he cared about the answer, and something in that—casual, steady—took a little of the edge off my reaction.
“Yeah, I just… yeah.”
“Anyway, so this is hydro, and down here…” Becks started walking away, Mules wrinkling his nose at me.
“My bad,” he said, and held out a fist, which I bumped.
“All good,” I said.
Then we joined Becks, who was heading toward the hydrotherapy area—rows of stainless-steel cold plunges sunk into tiled wells, a pair of bubbling hot pools steaming gently, and a long resistance channel where jets churned the water into a constant push. Beyond that sat the underwater treadmills behind glass, PT rails bolted along the sides, and a stretch zone lined with foam rollers, massage guns, and compression sleeves warming on a rack. The air smelled faintly of chlorine and eucalyptus, all low light and quiet hums, built for recovery rather than comfort.
I saw the sign for meditation rooms, but there was no sign of Cam.
I rubbed at my chest without really meaning to, as though I could ease whatever had opened there. It didn’t make sense. Cam had been… cute and focused on me. Asking questions as if he wanted the answers. And the realization left me off-balance, caught between wanting more of that attention and wondering why it mattered at all. It felt odd. Unsettling.
And there was no way I was eating freaking hot dogs at a baseball game.
