Winning With Him (Men of Summer #2) - Lauren Blakely Page 0,46
him as he goes through his divorce—Crosby, Sullivan, Miguel, and me. We take him out after games when we can. Now that my sister has opened a hipster bar in Hayes Valley, we have a place to go that feels like home. Sierra slings trendy cocktails at the Spotted Zebra, rocking a pink streak in her hair now. But she still wears Dragons earrings to taunt us.
Sometimes I think Chance likes to go there to talk to her as much as drink. Well, she is chatty, like a good bartender, and he seems to need it.
Later that year, the Cougars do make it to the World Series.
It’s more than a dream come true. More fantastic than every boyhood wish, beyond any cliché.
It’s utterly exhilarating, and it’s the most thrilling moment of my life when game six rolls around and I catch all nine innings and every pitch.
I’m behind the plate when Chance Ashford throws a ninety-eight-mile-an-hour fastball and the Miami Ace batter swings through it—
And misses.
I am fireworks.
I am a parade.
I wrap my glove around the ball so tight, shout to the heavens, then run out to the mound, tackling my teammate. The rest of the guys join us, as we win the World Series.
It feels like the greatest night of my life, and then, somehow, it’s even better when Declan calls me the next day, congratulating me. We spend an hour talking on the phone about the series, recounting every pitch, every inning. I relive each moment as I share it with him. He listens to me tell the story, and it feels right.
Just right.
I don’t know what to make of that, especially when something like a butterfly has the audacity to land on my chest.
It reappears, bigger and faster, over Christmas when I call to wish him a happy holiday. Then, on a Thursday morning in February, it shows up again, accompanying a text from Declan Steele.
21
Declan
Then
* * *
The first few months after Grant leaves New York are the hardest.
I’ve never really known what that’s like—getting over someone. Everyone else has been a clean break.
This is the opposite of a clean break. It’s a messy ending, one that keeps spilling over into my life, but at least there is baseball at the end of a cold winter.
The sport has gotten me through hard times before and it does it again as I learn how to hit a slider well, improve my fielding more, and drive up my consistency at the plate even higher.
I spend time with Emma, Fitz and Dean, Tucker and Marissa, and Brady and Greer. Over the next few years, the latter two couples get married a month apart and I go to their weddings.
Tucker ties the knot first, and I attend his wedding stag. I go to Brady’s February wedding alone.
And life goes on like that.
I develop new interests. I find new bands to listen to, I play paintball with Fitz, I scour stores and libraries for new books to try out. Dean and I become closer, and the brainiac in him keeps pumping recommendations at me—non-fiction stories of scandals and racy tales of business upheavals.
I eat them all up.
Those books are my gateway drug, and I go down the rabbit hole into memoirs, starting with comedians for laughs, then moving to harder-hitting tales. Stories of men and women bucking their upbringing, battling addiction, and most of all, struggling to understand what it means to love an addict.
And how loving an addict has made it hard, for some, to love themselves.
I bristle a bit as I read, since sometimes it feels like these stories are mirrors, and I’m not sure I want to see the reflection.
But I don’t stop. I keep reading. I keep learning.
I see my dad a few times. He asks to come to a game in San Francisco when I play the Cougars, but that feels like the worst idea in the world. I convince him to come to Los Angeles instead, buying him first-class tickets, several nights at a swank hotel, and all the Hollywood star tours he and his girlfriend could want, since he’s found a new lady now. Her name is Jackie.
At the ballpark in Los Angeles, he’s up to his usual shenanigans. Meeting the guys on the field, doling out hitting tips, talking up the game.
“You should do batting practice with us tomorrow, Jon,” Tucker suggests before our Bandits game. “It’ll be fun.”
I don’t think Tucker and I have the same definition of that word.