The Curve Ball - Samantha Lind Page 0,68
then.”
“Me too,” I tell her, smiling slightly at how well things have worked out.
Evie starts crying, I think she’s tired of swinging, for now. I pull her out of the swing, holding her up as if she’s an airplane, bringing her down so I can blow a raspberry on her chubby cheek, then back up again. We repeat this a few times until I’ve got her laughing hard.
“It was nice talking to you, Brooke; maybe we’ll see you and Benjamin down here again.”
“Nice to meet you, Riley! Would you like to exchange numbers? We could make a plan to meet up sometime?”
“Sure,” I tell her, grabbing my phone from my back pocket as I place Evie on my hip. I enter Brooke’s number then shoot her a text, so she has mine. “Evie and I look forward to it!” I tell her before I walk off to find Jillian and the girls. I take Evie down the slide a couple of times, then head for the stroller and pull out a blanket to spread out on the grass so we can sit down. I pull out a few of her toys, and she happily plays in the shade.
“Ugh. Don’t ever get pregnant at the beginning of the year,” Jillian says as she lowers herself to the ground. “Being as large as a house in the middle of summer is miserable.”
“No plans of getting pregnant anytime soon,” I tell her, holding back a laugh.
“I’m serious. When you are ready for a baby of your own, not that Evie isn’t basically yours already, try to plan to get pregnant during the summer. That way, you're big when it’s wintertime and not so godforsaken hot outside. The only nice thing about being pregnant during the summer is the baby will be born towards the end of the season, hopefully, so Derek will be home a lot while he’s little, and I’ll need the most help.”
“I’ll try and keep that in mind,” I tell her, just to appease her.
“You and JJ going to be okay?” she asks quietly.
“I think so. I promised him that I wouldn’t jump to conclusions if it happens again. It was just hard to see and read.”
“It is. Hopefully, they’ll get over making him into a headline. But from experience, it still hurts every time it happens. Even when you know that not one ounce of it is the truth. Derek has had his fair share of headlines, and so many of them were completely made up shit just to make him look bad and for them to get clicks to their website. The best advice that I can give you is to stop looking at them. Don’t go searching for what they’re posting. If it isn’t in the forefront of your mind, then it can’t put that little bit of doubt there, either. You either have to trust him one thousand percent, or not. There isn’t any place for doubt of that kind if you want things to work between the two of you.”
“I know. I like your advice to not go looking for articles. It's just hard sometimes, ya know,” I tell her as I hand a toy back to Evie.
“Oh, do I ever,” she says, laughing. “When Derek first started playing here, I had a Google alert set to send me anything his name was mentioned in. I had to turn it off within the first week. At that point, he wasn’t making the news for anything scandalous, but I realized even then that people would write whatever they wanted to, no matter how true it was or how far they were bending that truth.”
“That’s so shitty. Why is it that they can post complete crap and get away with it?”
“Free speech and all that jazz. Things like this morning's post, JJ’s PR company can get taken down and, in some instances, get them to issue an apology stating that it was incorrect information yada, yada, yada. While I appreciate those kinds of statements, it doesn’t change the fact that they released that out there, and people aren’t just going to forget about it. And nothing ever fully goes away once it’s on the internet. And these shitty tabloids know that and bank on that for future articles. They want people to believe that these guys are just out partying it up while they’re on the road, and it isn’t like that doesn’t happen. But they want to make it appear that everyone on the team is