“Easy,” he repeated. “You don’t want to kill the Yankee’s newest star.”
“Step forward again, and he’ll rip out your throat,” she called. Beside her, the dog snarled, his teeth bared, every muscle ready.
He stopped, holding up his hands, warily eyeing the German Shepard. “I surrender.” He surrendered everything to her. She’d destroyed him once before. And here, a fool three times over for nights wasted on this field, he could already smell his demise in the crisp night air. Just as before, she held all the power in those little hands. No longer a girl’s hands, they were older, wiser. A married woman’s hands. Ones that could crush him. Ones that could ruin him. Their time in that bathroom hadn’t shown him anything other than her weakness for his touch. He’d wasted that opportunity, going after low-hanging fruit and not the important things. Did she still love him? How could he have not asked that question? Would she leave Tobey? A scarier question, one that he was afraid to know the answer to.
She was loyal. He knew nothing if not that.
But would she be loyal to their love? It was a love that hadn’t been touched in the last four years. Or would she be loyal to her husband? That question, he was terrified of. That question he could barely form in his mind, much less off his lips.
“Platz,” she said, and every muscle in the dog’s body relaxed as he looked up at her with a disappointed expression, a low whine coming out. “Platz.” He laid down on the dirt, his eyes on Chase. She took one step forward and stopped. “What are you doing here?” Her voice was guarded but not angry.
“Are you alone?” Do you still love me? He couldn’t ask it. The words just wouldn’t leave his mouth.
“Yes.” Her eyes darted to the stands. “But there are security guards here. So don’t—”
“I’m not here for that.” And he wasn’t, but it didn’t stop him from wanting to pull her into his chest. To lay her onto the grass and make her whisper his name into the night.
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Working out. My hotel’s gym sucks.” He tested the dog and stepped forward, smiling at her, the lie rolling convincingly out.
“Security can get you a key to the gym. It’s on the third floor. I can have them open it for you—” she stopped talking, his head shaking.
“I don’t want a gym. I like the field.” His fingers tightened on the ball and he forced his feet to stop moving, a few steps of separation between them. This close he could see her eyes. This close, he could almost smell her. This close, if she wanted to, she could crush him.
77
God, I love him. The truth that I’d run from every day of my new life smashed into me like a fastball into a mitt, stinging in its impact, radiating through my bones. I love him. Before, in my heels, wearing my ring, my husband standing beside me, it’d been easier to lie. To protect. But now, on our field, I felt naked, nothing between him and I but the truth. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy to destroy your life. There were supposed to be moments where you could divert, could pick new paths that would lead back to success. But in this, there was only one path, a giant vacuum that sucked me in, the end hitting my heart with a resounding thud that shook everything, down to my soul. I love him. Still. More. Impossible, yet true. Whatever asshole said that absence made the heart grow fonder was right. Before, I fell for him with a teenager’s love, bold and passionate, no real obstacles to overcome, no real consequences to consider. Now, the wind tickling past my legs, I could see the full path of destruction this would cause. I saw it, and in that moment, I didn’t care. I couldn’t care. There was right, there was wrong, and there was love. And love trumped it all.
I said nothing, my silence a waste of space on a blackboard crowded with possibilities. Take me from this life. I’ll always be yours. “Did you know I’d be here?”
He didn’t answer, and I could see more of him now, my eyes getting used to the dark. He was in workout pants and a long-sleeved shirt, it fitting snug across his chest, his shoulders, his arms. A glove on one hand, no cap. He lifted his chin and met my eyes. God, those eyes. I saw in them a hundred secret moments, moments out of jerseys and away from spotlights, moments where he had just been Chase and not The Chase Stern. Moments where he had been all mine.
I love you because when I see you, I can’t stop staring at you.
I blinked away the memory. “Did you?” I swallowed. “Did you know I’d be here?”
“I hoped.” He shrugged, reaching down, the eye contact broken, his hand grabbing a ball from the bucket by his feet. “You didn’t show the other nights.”
“We’ve been out of town.” The words shouldn’t have been said. He didn’t deserve an explanation. I wished I could take them back. I wished I could take this night back, put myself at home, before I realized that I was done for, that my world was over, that my heart was still his. I wished I could take it all back, yet I didn’t wish that at all. The other nights, he’d said. He’d been waiting for me.
He tossed the ball toward me, and I caught it. He stepped back. “Got a glove, Little League?”
“You can’t call me that anymore.”
He punched the glove. “Do you?”
I dropped my bag on the ground. “Maybe.”
“Still got that arm on you?”
I reached down, slowly pulling out my glove and working it on. It slid easily over my bare hand, my ring at home, in the safe. I flexed the leather and looked up at him. “Are you wanting to find out?”
He grinned at me, holding up his glove and asking for the ball. I tossed it toward him, and then, despite my better judgment, jogged out onto the field, Titan breaking into a run beside me, my heart beating louder than it had in years.
I love you because right now, there’s nothing more tempting in life than to pull you on top of me and push inside of you.
We said little for the next hour, falling into an easy rhythm of catching, the ball arching through the air between us, lost in the night, then found again when it connected with the leather of a glove. I caught grounders for the first time in years, my movements rusty at first, then smoothing out, the flex of an old muscle enjoyable.
It was, out of all of my nights on that field, the most painful of them all.
“It was crazy, with the whole city involved—picketers at the game, media crowding the press box, every fan demanding Chase Stern’s return—there were only two people, in that entire city who really knew what was happening.