The Ninth Inning (The Boys of Baseball #1) - J. Sterling Page 0,67

a good way, if there were such a thing.

“I’m pretty sure I did too. Sorry it took me so long to realize it.”

“It’s okay.” She smiled and kissed my bare chest.

“Is it?” I asked with a laugh because okay was the fishiest word in the female vocabulary, and even a relationship rookie like me knew that.

“Yes. Because we’re here now. Together. And it was worth the wait.”

Forget playing it cool or trying to act like her words hadn’t fazed me. I was all in. “I’m never letting you go,” I said as I ran my fingers through her hair.

“Good,” was all she said. Then, she shot up from my chest, looked me in the eyes, and shouted, “Pizza!” and my stomach instantly grumbled in response.

I’d forgotten all about the food. Can you blame me?

Road Trips

Four Weeks Later

Christina

Being a couple with Cole had become as natural as breathing. It was almost like we’d always been together. Sometimes, it surprised me how considerate he could be—which I knew sounded bad, but it was just that, for someone who had never been in a real relationship before, he sure was good at it.

He texted all the time, never making me wonder or guess where he was. It wasn’t that I wanted to control his every move or needed to know his whereabouts twenty-four hours a day, but there was something extremely comforting in the fact that he kept me in the loop.

It was especially helpful when a girl I’d never met before tried to tell me that Cole was currently at her house, in bed with one of her sorority sisters, because I knew that he was at a training facility with Chance, working on his bat speed. He’d sent me two videos of him hitting in the previous ten minutes.

I remembered smiling at her and thanking her for the info before walking away while she screamed that she wasn’t lying. And to be fair, maybe she wasn’t. Her sorority sister probably had been in bed with someone at that very moment … but that someone wasn’t Cole, and I had known it.

We’d even survived our first road trip apart.

I had been more nervous than I had anticipated the night before Cole left my apartment and boarded the team bus, heading to the airport.

“How does this work?” I asked.

We were lying on my bed with my head pressed against his body.

“How does what work?” His abs tightened, and I knew he was straining to look at me.

I tried to dig and maneuver my head into his hard muscles like they were a fluffy pillow that might move around for me.

“What are you doing?” He laughed as he wormed out from underneath me.

“It’s not really that comfortable, lying on your rock-hard chest, to be honest. Can’t you make it smooshier?”

“Smooshier?” he repeated before grabbing a pillow and placing it on his stomach and pulling my head back down. “There. Better?”

“Actually, yes,” I said because it was.

“Now, what were you asking?”

“How this works. While you’re away.” I swallowed around the insecure lump in my throat, hating that it even existed in the first place. But I would have hated myself more if I’d never asked him and let him leave while I sat at home with a million questions in my head. It wouldn’t have been fair to either of us.

“The same way it works when we’re here. I’ll text and call you and FaceTime you before I go to sleep. And I’ll be back before you know it.” He sounded so confident. Like he hadn’t even realized that I was starting to spin out in my own head.

“Okay,” I said, but it wasn’t believable. It was the least believable okay in the history of okays.

“What are you thinking in that head of yours?” He tapped the top of my head with one of his fingers.

“Don’t think I’m crazy, but I just got kind of nervous out of nowhere.”

“Christina.” His voice was so soft and comforting, like thinking I was crazy was the last thing that would ever enter his mind. He pushed up to a sitting position and lifted me off of him at the same time so that we could face each other. “You can tell me anything. What’s going on?”

I blew out a breath, squeezed my eyes shut, reopened them, and then dived right into his sea of blue. “It’s our first road trip as a couple. And I’m sure that, over the years, there have been girls in other places. I