“It just takes a second,” he says. I avert my eyes, swaying the fussy baby in my arms as I move away from him. He hands me a bottle a minute later, and I position it for Holly to take. She guzzles it immediately, and we both breathe out a soft laugh.
“Girl isn’t shy about asking for what she wants,” I say, realizing almost instantly the double entendre that sort of implies.
“Lindsey, I didn’t mean to . . .”
I squeeze my eyes shut as my back is to him. I don’t want to hear him apologize for taking advantage of me. He didn’t.
“I know. I was having a moment, and you were being nice. And we’re grown-ass adults. This doesn’t have to be an issue.” I turn around slowly, glancing up at him briefly before recentering my focus on Holly.
“I just don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. I swear, that was an aberration. Won’t happen again.” He crosses his chest with two fingers, blending the scout’s honor with the Holy Cross, and it makes me chuckle.
“I’m pretty sure you just prayed for Girl Scout cookies, but I get the point, and it’s fine.Weare fine.”
The crackle in the air when our eyes meet begs to differ. Thankfully, Brooks is stuck in a town without a lot of other nanny options, and I have a mountain’s worth of personal baggage to sort through to keep me focused on making smart choices.
His mouth quirks up with a slight smirk, and he nods.
“Like nothing happened. Good,” he says, his gaze lingering on mine for a tiny extra second before he heads back into his bedroom.
I memorize every flex of muscle on his back before he shuts the door behind him.
That was the bestnothingI’ve ever had happen.
FIVE
BROOKS
I get out of my apartment with record speed, but a part of me really wants to stay. My impulsive side. The same damn side of my personality that somehow lands in life-altering scenarios over and over again. And that’s why I raced out of there before I gave in to any more urges or whims.
Holly is my priority, even more than baseball at this point. That’s the way it’s supposed to be when you bring a child into this world—they become number one, and everything else falls to last place.
Baseball is the means to care for her. But it doesn’t mean I don’t still love it. This game has been my refuge for longer than I can remember.
The neighborhood kids took me in every time we bounced from apartment to apartment in Inglewood, and I was lucky to settle in with a group who liked to throw a ball around. If it weren’t for Little League and a sponsorship from the corner market that paid for our team, I’m not sure what trouble I could have fallen into.
As much as I hate the lifestyle my mom lived, high most of the time, I’m not naïve enough to believe that the older I got, I always would have been strong enough to say no. Sometimesdulling the disappointments life throws your way feels way too easy. Bad decisions don’t show how hard they are until you’re in too deep.
The locker room is busy with the infielders working out today. I’m running late, so I rush through my prep and wrap my own wrists before grabbing my batting gear and heading out to the cages. Jake’s already set up at one of the tees, so I drop my bag outside the net and nod when he sees me.
“Work in with you?” I ask.
“Sure.” He locks his sights back on the ball and rips through it with the kind of swing I’m trying to build.
I like Jake. He’s a bit grumpy, but so am I sometimes. We fit well together. Like misfits. Maybe I’m assuming a lot, but I get the feeling Jake’s relationship with his dad isn’t all golden gloves and silver sluggers. His old man is out here with him every day, too, and when the PR team pitched him on doing a story about the family legacy of the McKinney father-son duo, Jake looked them in the eyes and laughed.
Jake props another ball on the tee and adjusts the data device on the knob of his bat. He records everything—launch angle, bat speed, exit velocity. I don’t buy into that stuff like perhaps I should. I tend to believe it’s my performance in the game that matters most. What I do back here is more about the feel. Numbers can lie sometimes. I don’t want to make big changes to my swing only to find out none of the tweaks do shit for me when I’m staring down a starting pitcher on the mound.
“You should bring Holly around here more. She’s cute. We don’t have enough cute things in this place,” Jake says through a gravelly laugh as he nods toward Jayden in the cage next to us.
“Fuck you, cowboy. I’m plenty cute,” Jayden says, taking a hack at the ball tossed by our new hitting coach, Colby Kessler. She’s one of the first female coaches to break into Triple-A ball, and she’s a beast with the bat. She’s also dangerously hot. Thosetwo facts live separately, but it’s damn near impossible to be in the presence of one and not acknowledge the other.
“Mmm, jury’s out on that. What do you think, Coach? Is Jayden cute?” Jake’s teasing our teammate. He can play it off all he wants, but it’s pretty fucking obvious Jayden has a thing for Coach Kessler.
“He’s more of a pretty boy,” Coach answers. Jake and I spit out a hard laugh as Jayden flashes us his middle finger.
“Fuck y’all. You wish you could be pretty like me.” He rolls the bat over his wrist, then taps it to the plate before nodding for Coach to toss him another ball. She does, and he takes out his bruised ego on the ball, drilling it to the back of the tunnel where it ricochets off one of the iron posts.
“Okay, okay. You got me. I wanna be pretty like you,” I say, holding my hands up to my sides with my bat tucked between my thighs.
