“What does that even mean?”
“It’s America’s pastime.”
“So because I’m American, baseball isinme?”
Liam nods, hands on his hips.
“I don’t even know the rules,” I warn him.
“Me either.” He grins. “I just stand on the pitcher’s mound and throw the ball in the same direction over and over until they tell me to start batting.”
I grab the ball out of my glove and toss it high into the humid air between us. I try to catch it, but the ball lands at my feet and bounces once. Liam snorts.
“There was a sun glare.”
He scoops up the ball in his glove and jogs several yards away. “I’ll face the sun.”
Underhanded, he tosses it. This time, the ball glides snugly into my glove.
“Ooh!” I exclaim, and Liam laughs outright this time.
I toss it back to him, underhanded as well. He catches it and takes a step backward. “Want to play a game?”
“Of baseball?” I ask. “America’s pastime?”
His eyes might have rolled, I can’t tell. “Every time we complete a pass, I’ll take a step backward. We try to see how far apart we can get before messing up.”
“Do you do this during practice with your teammates?” I ask.
More amusement. “No, Paige, I do this coaching peewee.”
“You coach peewee?”
“I did in high school. Less talking, more throwing.”
We play in silence for a few minutes, tossing the ball back andforth underhanded with success. But eventually, Liam starts having to step forward to catch my passes, which fall short due to my lack of arm power. That’s when I decide to switch to overhand.
I attempt a throw that goes forty-five degrees west of his body, which I am one hundred percent convinced is a goner. Somehow, though, Liam darts over—like a human magnet to the moving ball—and stoops low, catching it just milliseconds before the ball would’ve hit the ground.
“Wow,” I whisper under my breath. That was the grandest display of athleticism I’ve seen from him yet and he wasn’t even trying.
He jogs over. “Okay, let’s work on that.” His glove lands with a thud on the grass beside me. Liam circles behind my body. “Can I touch you a little bit?”
“Yes,” I say, embarrassingly quickly.
Two clicks of a metronome pass. “First of all,” he says, still not touching me, “you want the opposite foot forward of the arm you throw with.”
I swap out my stance, pushing my left foot forward and my right foot back.
Liam presses the ball into my right hand. “Raise your hand like you’re about to throw it,” he murmurs.
I do what he says, lifting my arm in an imitation of a pitch.
“The reason the ball went wide is because your elbow is out here.” Finally, he touches me. Liam’s fingers dance along my elbow, and he pulls it down a bit, then more in line with my back. The skin-to-skin contact feels shimmering and heavy, but it doesn’t last long enough to warrant the way my chest tightens.
“You have to think of your body like a windup toy,” he goes on. “There’s a string connecting your elbow to the back of your hip, and when that string loosens, your arm can only go up in a straight line, not out.”
I mimic the motion he’s describing, following through until my arm is in front of my body, pointed away from us.
