“Yeah, I really do.”
“Then call the guys at the hotel, get them over here. I have a plane to reserve.”
Chapter 16
CHARLIE
She’s back in my house. Not just in it. She’s suddenly everywhere. Her luggage is in my bedroom, her makeup and perfume sitting on the dresser, and behind the door in the corner of the room, the shower is running and a warbly version of Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ is echoing out from the ensuite.
Not that I’m complaining.
Not at all.
When she waltzed in this morning, it was such a shock that I didn’t really get to process it, but now? Now, I don’t even want to consider a time when she doesn’t have free rein over my space. And I know if I say that to her, I’ll destroy the odd sort of tentative in-between space we’ve agreed to occupy while we work together.
Rapping two knuckles against the bathroom door, her song cuts off followed quickly by the sounds of the water. “Yeah?”
“I’ve got the flight ready and,” I hold out the towels in my arms, like she can see them through the door, “I grabbed you some clean towels. I’m going to leave them on the bed.”
The door creaks open a couple of inches and a manicured hand appears along with some tendrils of steam and I hand them over, determinedly looking away just in case.
But she doesn’t seem to care because, a couple of secondslater, she’s out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around her securely.
“Christ, Sullivan,” I mutter, and she shrugs.
“We don’t have time for your midwest sensibilities,” she says, blithely. “You said the plane is ready. Does the team know we’re coming?”
“They do, and we have a car waiting for us at the airport when we arrive.”
She moves over to her suitcase and carefully unzips a small bag, pulls free a scrap of black silky fabric and bends at the waist to pull them up under the towel while I do my best to keep my eyes focused up and over her head.
I’m only semi-successful, catching quick glimpses of silky thigh and the curve of her breast as my hands feel the phantom softness and weight of her in my palms. And a bed just a few feet away is not helping.
It’s too easy to imagine this is a normal morning, her getting ready while we run through the day ahead of us, back in Brooklyn, down in Clearwater or wherever the game takes us next, the one constant through our lives.
The one constant through all the years . . . has been baseball.
I’ve been in the game too long to not hear that sentence in James Earl Jones’s voice, talking to Kevin Costner about the game I’ve played since I was a little boy. But why couldn’t it also be about this, about the constants that baseball has brought me?
Francesca Sullivan has been a constant in my life for years and now she’s crept slowly but surely into nearly every other part of my life. She’s a necessity now, as much as the game is.
She pulls on one of her pencil skirts, slate blue like the lettering on the Eagles’ jerseys and drops the towel entirely, exposing the smooth length of her back to me as she fishes a bra out of her luggage, sliding it quickly into place – it’s not the onefrom that night in Arizona – nude colored this time, to remain hidden beneath the cream silk camisole she slips over her head.
“Charlie?” she asks, spinning around and raising an eyebrow at my slack-jawed gaping. “I’m going to need you to focus up, Avery.”
I snort and she has the self-awareness to smirk just a little bit, but then move on.
“What was the question?”
“The boys have been fully briefed?”
“Javy’s on the way there now. He’ll make it a couple of hours ahead of us and prep them.”
“Am I crazy, to put the fate of this team . . . my entire career really, in the hands on three twenty-one-year-old kids?”
Her voice is steady, but there’s an underlying waver in her voice, a ripple of nervous energy that I don’t recognize.
“Yeah, but it’s the right call.”
