“Let me guess: someone’s eavesdropping. Yeah, well next time, be this guyin the moment,will you?”
“You got it, babe. Miss you! Talk soon!”
I have to force myself to keep the smile on my face, to pretend I’m wistful about how much I miss my boyfriend. I’m not going to say it’s torture, only because I’d hate to minimize the experience of anyone who’s actually been tortured.
It’s simply vile.
And when my eyes turn to Lucas, I realize I’m exactly like the other women here: staring at a hot baseball player like I haven’t spent my whole life knowing better.
I look anyway.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lucas
The camp ends Friday, and after everyone leaves, Logan helps me put all the equipment away.
“Why are we doing this when it’s Facilities’ job?”
“Sam told me he didn’t have the manpower to accommodate us using the practice facility, so I told him I’d take care of it.”
“Why is it when you say ‘I,’ you always seem to include me?”
“Twin code?” I ask, putting a stack of cones on the back of one of the beat-up utility carts I nabbed the keys to before Sam could yell at me.
“Funny how ‘twin code’ extends to cleaning up training camps but not doing the dishes,” Logan grumbles.
“Oh, stop, you big baby. I’ll let you drive, okay?”
Logan pushes me to the other side of the utility cart, and we zip from the practice facility back to the stadium. Logan drives just slowly enough that I can grab the cones we laid yesterday, erasing the path the camp kids followed. Returning everything back to normal for Sam’s sake.
And, yeah, for Scottie’s.
Sam’s a tough SOB, and he has a way of making his problems feel like everyone’s problems. Even if the camp wasn’t my responsibility, the idea of Sam adding anything to Scottie’s plate would rub me wrong.
But the camp was my responsibility.
We return everything to the equipment cage beneath the stadium and park the utility cart, putting the keys back on the right ring so Sam will never suspect a thing. We cut through the concrete service tunnels toward the locker room—Logan to lift, me to change—passing the row of battered mailboxes along the way.
I grab my stack of fan letters without thinking, the envelopes bending slightly under the weight, already feeling more than a few bead necklaces in here. Logan takes his stack, too. It’s thinner, neater.
He always reads his twice before answering. The guy agonizes over the wording in letters to people he’ll never meet, using words I’ll never even know.
I think it; I write it; I mail it.
In case you’re wondering how to tell us apart.
“You know, if you got in front of the camera, you’d get a lot more fan mail,” I tell him.
“I don’t want more fan mail,” he says as we head into the locker room. Logan changes out of his turf-stained cleats and practice hoodie, tugging on training shorts and a dry T-shirt while I get into old jeans and a Firebirds tee. And I grab my loudest hoodie for fun—one with neon stitching that Logan hates. “I’m content to let people think I’m you everywhere I go. You’re the better pitcher, anyway.”
“Because you don’t know how to get out of your head,” I say, throwing my hoodie at him in more annoyance than heknows. “If you could shut your brain off for five innings, your knuckleball would have you on the first plane to Chicago.”
He throws it back. “Is that a nice way of saying I’m smarter than you? Thanks, bro.”
It’s a nice way of saying you need to talk to someone about your anxiety,I think, as he ties his shoes a little too tight. But I don’t say that, because that’s not one of those things you go around telling people, even your twin brother.
What I don’t say—what I never say—is that he’s right about the pitching too. Right now, today, I’m the more consistent arm. We both know it and neither of us touches it, because touching it means saying the rest: that I’m going to get the call before he does. That one day soon I’ll walk into a clubhouse in Chicago and he’ll stay here, and the thing we’ve built together since we were old enough to throw a baseball splits down the middle.
