The Ninth Inning (The Boys of Baseball #1) - J. Sterling Page 0,105
had to pack up and go.
“As long as I’m with you, I don’t care where we are,” I told him before he rolled on top of me and made me forget about everything else in the world, except the way he felt when he was inside of me.
Even though we paid for this apartment in Iowa year-round, we didn’t live here during the off-season. As soon as his season had ended last year, we’d headed back home to Southern California, where we bought a small but relatively affordable townhouse in Huntington Beach, not far from the pier. Cole considered it an investment and reassured me that real estate was a good way to save for the future. To be honest, I couldn’t complain about having a home near our family and friends. It made being away from them during half of the year easier.
“So we’ll always have a place to come back to,” Cole said when he gave me the key.
Our apartment door flew open, and Cole walked through it, looking sweaty, gorgeous, and tired. He’d been on a four-day road trip. His T-shirt was tight around his shoulders, his biceps flexing as he dropped his bat bag to the floor.
“Honey, I’m home!” he shouted, and I walked around the corner, so he could see me.
I was wearing an apron and nothing else. It was Cole’s favorite outfit of mine. “Hello, dear,” I said with a smile. “How was your day?”
Somewhere in our first year here, we’d fallen into this 1950s role-play routine. It had started as a joke one night, with me pretending to be the perfect stay-at-home wife, but when it’d led to some of the hottest sex we’d ever had before, we’d kept it up. It was sort of our thing now.
“Work was awful, my boss is the worst, and I ran out of gas on the way home.” He stalked toward me, hunger in his eyes.
“Did you really run out of gas?” I asked because I wasn’t sure if this was part of the role-play or not.
“No,” he whispered with a laugh as his eyes ran the length of my body.
I glanced down at his pants, noticing the bulge growing there. It was empowering to know that him seeing me did that to him.
“I missed you,” I said, staring straight at his crotch.
He cleared his throat. “My eyes are up here.”
“I missed you too,” I said into his baby blues before hopping into his arms and wrapping my legs around his middle.
“To the shower,” he said before kissing me senseless, his fingers kneading into my bare ass, and I knew it was going to be a good night. Every night spent with Cole was a good night.
I remembered back to when we’d first gotten together, wondering how things could ever get better than they were. But this—living together, making love, and planning a future that included each other—this was definitely better.
And it was easy.
It sounded so cliché, but it was true. Things had fallen into place naturally, without being forced. And it wasn’t that there weren’t ever any hard times because there definitely were; it was just that they felt almost painless to work through.
Maybe it was the promises we had made to each other when we first got here. How we promised to not take one another for granted, to always be honest and open, and to remember what it’d felt like when we thought we’d lost our chance at forever. Those promises kept us grounded. And they took work to honor, but we still tried.
Cole was still kissing me after the shower, his hands roaming every inch of my body like he couldn’t get enough. “I’ll never get tired of touching you,” he breathed against me, and I knew exactly how he felt because I felt the same way.
“Me either,” I said, running my fingertips along the curves of his muscles. His shoulders and arms still did something to me. I knew they always would.
His phone started ringing. I growled before telling it to shut up, and Cole laughed.
“You’re so feisty when you’ve missed your man,” he teased before making it stop.
He picked me up and tossed me on top of our bed, and a shriek escaped from my mouth when I landed on it, my body bouncing with the impact. Cole smirked and jumped on top of me, his body covering mine, and my fingers instantly dug into his back, signaling to him what I wanted.
But his phone started ringing again.
I was about to tell him to throw it against the wall, but he looked at me and said, “It might be an emergency. Who calls two times in a row? Don’t move.” He reached for the electronic cockblocker. “It’s Bobby,” he said. His team manager.
He answered, stood up, and immediately started pacing. I got nervous and sat up, too, pulling a blanket around me as I watched him.
I started thinking that it might be bad news, but Cole had been playing great all season. Then again, I wasn’t up to speed on the actual business side of baseball and how it all worked, so maybe Cole’s stats didn’t mean what I thought they meant when it came to the front office.
When the call ended, he looked at me and said, “Looks like we’re moving to Texas,” before giving me that smile that I loved.
“You got moved up to Double-A?” I asked, just to clarify.
“Double-A,” he said before kissing me hard. “Now, where were we?”
He tossed the blanket covering me to the floor, and we celebrated.
We celebrated five times.
And we would have made it six, but the neighbors knocked on our wall and begged for us to please stop. They said they needed their sleep.
Freaking Iowa.
Hope our Texas neighbors didn’t plan on getting any sleep.