The Ninth Inning (The Boys of Baseball #1) - J. Sterling Page 0,11

the last. It wasn’t that Cole wanted to be with me, but he didn’t want anyone else to.

Cole loved that I’d always been there for him. Everything had always been on his terms. He called; I answered. He texted; I responded. I had been at his beck and call for years. The only one who could break this vicious cycle and get off the merry-go-round once and for all was me.

“You can’t let go of something you never had in the first place.” I glared at him before stalking toward Lauren and telling her I wanted to go home.

She pressed some buttons on her phone before reaching for the hem of my shirt and pulling me out the front door and into the darkness.

During the ride back to our apartment, I oscillated between being so mad that it scared me and so hurt that I thought I might shatter to pieces in some stranger’s car. My bones were crushing me from the inside out, leaving nothing but a pile of dust and skin.

“He’s such an asshole,” Lauren said from the passenger seat.

She always insisted on sitting up front when we drove in a ride-share car. She claimed she got car sick if she sat in the back, but I knew that was a lie. It was some weird safety precaution she had made up in her mind or seen on TV one time and adopted it as her own belief. If Lauren was up front, she considered us safer, less likely to be taken advantage of or caught off guard.

She hadn’t only been paranoid about her roommate getting kidnapped freshman year. No, I learned soon after that Lauren was paranoid about us being kidnapped.

“Or sold into sex slavery or disappearing without a trace, never to be found again,” she’d confessed to me one night.

She said it happened all the time. That college girls all over the United States went missing, but no one ever seemed to talk about it.

She claimed it was an epidemic. I thought it stemmed from the fact that she was obsessed with the Investigation Discovery channel and watched every show there was to watch about missing persons, murders, and lies told online. Lauren said it made her more knowledgeable and aware. I thought it made her more paranoid.

“I can’t believe he said those things to you,” she added.

“I can.” I wanted to argue but couldn’t.

This was what Cole mastered in—absolute confusion. His words and actions never seemed to add up or match. It was why I was always so damn confused whenever the topic of us came up. I could never truly figure him out.

“I mean, I can’t believe he said them out loud. For everyone to hear,” she said.

I winced with the realization that we had had an audience back at the party. I’d been so caught up in what was happening between us that I had forgotten other people were around.

“Yeah. That was a bit out of character. Even for him.”

Cole never created a scene. At least, not when it came to women. It wasn’t his style.

“I can’t believe you slapped him. That was some seriously awesome shit!” She laughed before telling our driver all about what had happened.

He pretended to laugh in all the right places, but I could tell he was annoyed. Or bored. Probably both. I convinced myself that he hated driving drunk college kids around late at night. Even though we weren’t technically drunk.

My mind raced back to the slap.

I couldn’t believe I’d done it either. I’d never hit a person in my life, and there I had been, slapping Cole Anders, the baseball player, at his very own baseball party.

“He deserved it,” I said, but the words came out far less angry than I’d wanted them to.

The car rolled to a slow stop, and Lauren told the driver we’d get out here, in front of the security gates of our apartment complex. He nodded his head and unlocked the doors before pulling away. We typed in the code and walked through the gates. The night air was tolerable since there was no wind, and I was grateful. I knew I wouldn’t have been able to handle it being as cold outside as I currently felt inside. I needed the contrast to keep me grounded.

Lauren looped an arm through mine as we walked to our building in silence, but I knew her wheels were spinning the same way that mine were. She pulled out her key fob and waited for