“Books aren’t boring—they’re the literal best,” she says. “Does reading skip a … triplet? Logan always has a book in the dugout, and I’ve met your sister. She seems highly literate.”
The pain in my chest shifts from longing to embarrassment. She doesn’t know I’m the only one of us who struggled in school or that we were constantly being compared and I was just as constantly falling short.
I swallow. Give a smile I don’t feel. “Yeah, they got the brains. No question.”
Her expression shifts in a flash. “I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. It was a stupid joke.”
“It was a pretty good joke, actually.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she says, getting madder, her hands curling into the straps of her bag. “I’m sorry, Lucas. You’reverysmart. Your intelligence doesn’t have to look like theirs for it to count. They don’t have your people skills or your savvy. Or your strength. They don’t have your way of making people feel like they’re the only one in the room. It’s not a failing on them, and it’sdefinitelynot one on you.”
“You don’t need to say this,” I protest, scratching the back of my neck, embarrassed and flattered. The flattery hurts worse.
“Yeah, I do. I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t matter in your own family. To feel like there’s always something louder, needier, more urgent than you. Or something better and brighter. You don’t deserve that.”
The idea of Scottie knowing this feeling doesn’t compute. “I’m pretty sure my dad felt like Liesel was God’s way of making up for giving him me and Logan. In a house with two boys, you’re saying they mattered more thanyou?”
“It was two boys, a girl, and a Jake,” she corrects me. And then her face goes pale. Her mouth presses into a thin line. “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean that.”
My brain snags on this like a sweater on a nail. But the way she’s clammed up tells me we aren’t talking about it. “Honestly, I think I’m too dumb to follow half of what’s going on here right now.”
She lets out a soft laugh that sounds almost nervous.
“That’s probably for the best. I’m too tired to be trusted to talk.”
“You and me both,” I say.
I’m mad at myself for being too open. She may think I’ve got people skills, but what I really have is too much energy and a broken filter. It’s easy to mistake those for confidence.
Especially when I’ve got a lot of unearned confidence.
And she might not have the confidence she’s actually earned.
The thought sits there, and something breaks open inside me—the urge to justtell her. Not to make a move, not while Jake’s in the picture. Just to sayI see you. I’ve been seeing you for a long time. You’re not invisible to me.
A second passes. Two.
I could still say it. Could still offer something real?—
I look away, and when I look back up, I’m already smiling. “So how’s the coffee situation when you’re not at the stadium? Because I gotta be honest: you seem pretty incapable of keeping yourself caffeinated.”
She blinks—just once, just enough that I know she felt the shift—and then her mouth curves. “I think I can manage my own coffee, Fischer.”
“Bold claim. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
She rolls her eyes, and we’re back on safe ground, and I tell myself that’s fine. That’s the right call. Because here’s the thing about coffee, or any gesture, really: if she doesn’t want it, she can hand it back and we both pretend it never happened. No damage done.
I’m something of an expert at offering things that can be handed back. A cup left on her desk. A joke when the silence gets too real. A compliment wrapped in enough charm to pass as nothing.
But if I’d said what I almost said, and she’d looked at me the way people look at you when you’ve said too much—that’s not something I could get back. That would get parked in the lot forever.
So. Coffee it is, like it’s been for months.
“I should get going,” she says. “Pinto’s not going to train himself.”
