“If Frankie has anything to say about it, we do.”
“Then it’s in the bag.”
She does inspire that kind of confidence.
“You just focus on making the team. No guarantees. Let me and Frankie take care of the rest.”
I’m way more anonymous in the stands without a gorgeous blonde sitting next to me biting her lip as she carefully keeps score, drawing extra attention with her on-the-money insights that the dudes sitting around us don’t expect from her. I like it that way. I can just watch the game, watch as Davis launchesanother homer and as Greene makes a diving catch in center before legging out a triple in the next inning.
These kids. They’re really something.
I leave before the game is over, a car picking me up just outside the ballpark, and everything about the flight home is better, that business-class seat without anyone next to me, the plane’s bathrooms nowhere near my row. Hell, there’s even complimentary alcohol and some decent food, but, shit, if I don’t miss that crappy coach seat with Frankie pressed up against me.
And that thought alone is enough to have me redirecting the driver that meets me at the airport from Javy’s address to Russell Field instead.
She’s there, exactly where I thought she’d be, at her desk, long after she should be gone for the day already, the sun setting across the window that overlooks the field.
Her office door is open, so I knock on the frame and lean against it when she raises a finger, eyes still focused on the computer screen in front of her while she furiously types away at the keyboard.
“Just let me . . .” she trails off, before finishing up and then sitting back in her chair and turning toward me.
Clearly, I wasn’t who she expected to be standing there. Her posture immediately straightens and she reaches up to fix the clear plastic glasses she’s got perched on her nose.
“I didn’t know you wore glasses.”
“Oh,” she says, touching them again. “Blue light glasses. For the screen glare. I was getting headaches.”
“They suit you,” I say, like I’m someone’s mother, and try not to actually cringe.
“You’re back,” she says.
“I’m back. Went to another Desert Dogs game to watch the kids. They looked good.”
“Yeah, I, uh, caught the live stream of it while I was working.”
“Of course you did.”
“What?”
“Nothing, I just . . . I think we need to clear the air.”
She looks at me intently before nodding. “I agree.”
“You do?”
Not gonna lie, I kind of thought she’d be cool with just ignoring what happened and continue pretending like nothing happened for the rest of our lives.
“Yeah, I think we might have gotten our wires crossed, when we called a truce.”
“I don’t recall any wires, but go on.”
“Charlie . . .” she trails off, a desperate note in her voice. My own name suddenly feels like a gut punch. It doesn’t sound like it did the other night in Arizona. There’s no yearning for my mouth or my fingers or my dick. She just wants me to stop.
“Sorry, you were saying – crossed wires?”
“I think, well, no, Iknowthat there’s always been some tension between us and it hasn’t always been good, but when we decided to actually work together, I feel like maybe that tension had nowhere to go, so it found a different outlet.”
She’s making it sound like the tension had a mind of its own. Like neither one of us were there, making choices, deciding that we wanted each other. But it’s a decent enough cop out, and lets us both off the hook, so I go with it.
