Page 80 of Hard to Lose

“Says the sexy grad student who lives in New York and is researching a topic I’ve lived, but who I don’t know much else about.”

“Yes, you do. You know I have three sisters and that my mom died. You know I have an affinity for Converse, dancing in the rain, putting things in order, and can’t paint for shit.”

“Any dislikes?”

“Beside bed bugs, men whose biceps are bigger than my thighs, and Neapolitan ice cream? No, none that I can think of.”

Gunner barks out a laugh. “You’re something else, you know that?”

“Who me?” I look up at him and bat my lashes, once again struck by just how damn handsome he is. And the more I get to know him, my attraction seems to grow stronger. “I’m known for being the picky one.”

“Apparently not too picky seeing as you’re here with me.”

I desperately want to kiss him but don’t want to get him sick, so I do the next best thing and press my lips to the underside of his jaw, close my eyes, and savor him. The scent of his soap. The strong rhythm of his heart beneath my hand. The warmth of his hand as it runs up and down the length of my back.

I’m uncertain how long we sit like this, simply drinking each other in with the warmth of the fire in front of us and the quiet presence of each other.

“I was a good kid growing up,” Gunner says and breaks the comfortable silence. “Then I wasn’t.” His chuckle is self-deprecating. “My dad left for deployment when I was ten. I remember giving him hugs outside the depot, him making me promise to take care of my mom while he was gone, and then . . . then the car pulling up to our driveway. The knock on the door. My mom’s shrieks as she fell to the floor.”

“Gunner.” His name is a mixture of apology and understanding. I squeeze him tighter but don’t say anything else.

“I was ten without a dad and around kids who picked on me. I turned to baseball and who knew? I was really good at it. At that age, it was easier to be at the field than at home watching my mom grieve. That and it was the place where kids started to respect me instead of tease me.”

“You found your coping mechanism. Your thing,” I say gently, earning a look from him as if he’s not used to someone understanding that concept.

“Yes. Little did I know how important that would be to me later in life.”

I want to ask what he means but just nod and snuggle back into him, ready to hear his story.

“My mom remarried twice. None of them were nice to her, and the promise I made to my father to take care of her always weighed heavy on me. No matter how many times I tried to get her to see it as abuse, she refused to. And then Sal came along,” he says with a foreboding sigh that has me closing my eyes and picturing a younger version of him trying unsuccessfully to be the man of the house. “He was stepdad number two, lover of alcohol, keen on control, and prone to use his fists to make sure his stepson knew his place in the pecking order.”

Oh God. It’s one thing to lose your dad, but to be hit by a man who should care for you? Why didn’t his mom do more? How could she?

“I’m afraid to even hear more.”

He shrugs with an indifference only someone who has been through something like this can. “Baseball was my escape. I spent more and more time on the mound—”

“You were a pitcher?” I ask, feeling like a hypocrite.

“Mm-hmm. A decent one or so I was told, but that only comes from the fact that I basically lived at the field.” He reaches over and takes a sip of his water, as I try to fathom the notion of not wanting to be at home or that home isn’t a safe space. “Sal had a son. He played baseball too. He was mediocre in talent but Sal wasn’t having any part of that, especially when I was getting attention from four-year colleges and MLB scouts.”

“You must have been good.”

“I was decent,” he says and sighs. The agent in me wants to shake him senseless and tell him for MLB scouts to be looking at him, for my dad to be interested in representing him, he was more than decent.

A one-hundred-mile-per-hour arm that has command of five pitches is not decent.

It’s utterly, freaking phenomenal.

But I can’t say a word, and I think, of all of this charade, that’s the toughest part. I want to tell him he was incredible. I want to tell him that a team would have taken him and signed him for a one-year contract just to see if he could hack it. I want to tell him that regardless of what was his perceived lack of control, teams would have still been interested. That they overlook things like that when you have a one-hundred-mile-per-hour arm.

But that’s where part of my dilemma comes in. The part where I can’t be honest with him and tell him that even though Sal was a raging asshole who discredited him out of jealousy, Gunner really was quite incredible.

I try in the most muted sense possible.

“If major league teams were looking at you, I’m pretty sure you were more than decent.”

He shrugs. “It’s all relative. I truly loved the game and the escape it provided me from the toxicity of my house. I stayed home longer than I should have because I was trying to fulfill that promise to my dad to take care of my mom. I was trying to do what was right and make sure she was okay. I don’t know . . . Shit got bad. I didn’t care that I was acting out—hell, maybe I was acting out hoping she’d notice and pick me over him. Whatever it was, I thought I could help get her out of the situation with my stepfather, but I learned you can’t change people or make them see things differently. That realization came at a brutal cost to myself.”