Moving into my apartment, I toss my bag onto the couch and let my hair down, sighing as the weight releases at the back of my head. “I need you to check Jessie’s feed right now.”
“What? Why?”
Making my way into my bedroom, I switch her to speakerphone and slide out of my work clothes, adding the pieces to the pile for dry cleaning and pulling on a pair of cotton shorts and that t-shirt I borrowed from Charlie, the cotton still holding on to that clean scent of his, mixing just a little with my own perfume and shampoo.
Yeah, I don’t want to think too hard about the implications of why breathing it in makes my shoulders relax and simultaneously sends a zing of lightning over my skin.
“Just look and tell me what you see.”
“Moving to New York, but we knew that . . .” she trails off. “There’s a ‘Stay with us while we find our new home’ post. There’s . . . okay, it looks like they found a house. Uh, I’m sorry . . . is that your street?”
“Not just my street. Downstairs. Literally below my feet right now, moving in.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“I very much amnotkidding you. They’re moving in.”
“Shit. There’s nothing you can do?”
“What can I do? Call the co-op board and say what? They don’t care. And besides that, there is no way this is a coincidence. They would have had to apply for the space months ago. This was planned, from start to finish. Hell, I half think they staged running into me at the airport.”
“That’s some real psychopath behavior,” she says. “Sounds like Shane. What are you gonna do?”
“I . . . I don’t . . .” I trail off. “I don’t know.”
“Well, there are two choices right now: stay or go?”
That’s Bianca, always getting right to the heart of a problem and, even if she doesn’t have a solution for you, helping you get there on your own.
And leaving? That sounds kind of nice right now.
“I could go to Florida, work from there for a while.”
I have a condo down there, that oddly reminds me of theone Charlie has in Arizona, a lot of tile and white paint and bland furniture that’s just a place to crash after long days at the ballpark. Though it does have the added bonus of being at the beach.
There’s a lot of appeal to the idea.
“You could,” Bianca says, but even though her tone is absolutely neutral, I know exactly what my best friend since childhood is thinking because it’s exactly what I’m thinking too.
“Wouldn’t that be running away?”
“Maybe a little bit,” she allows, “but you work from down there after the holidays anyway. You’d just be moving it up a little.”
That’s true, but that’s when everyone from the organization starts to shift down to our spring training home, when the early bird players start showing up, when our efforts this time of year start to become real. But it’s not time for that yet. There’s still work to be done up north.
“But no, I can’t. Stew’s here and recovering. I don’t know when or if he’s going to be able to make the trip down. And then, when they post Nakamura, I want to be here to roll out the red carpet, I don’t want to be scrambling back to Brooklyn and . . .’
“And you don’t want to run away.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, then you won’t, but you’ll still come out for Thanksgiving, right? Xavier and I would love to have you. The family is going all out.”
Thanksgiving inLA, with my best friend. Sounds perfect.
“I’m there.”
“And if that guy you keep jet setting across the country with on hisprivate jetdoesn’t have anywhere to go, let him know he’s welcome too.”
