The Ninth Inning (The Boys of Baseball #1) - J. Sterling Page 0,80
him everything that I remembered. Up until Logan had offered to drive me home. The hours between that moment and when I opened my eyes this morning were still a complete blank. Not a clip of a scene or a blip in my memory bank. It was all a bunch of … nothingness.
Cole stayed quiet. He looked at me before looking anywhere else. “God, Christina, I don’t want to believe Logan. I really, really don’t. But I can’t just …” He tugged at his hat, his fingers digging into it, and I could tell how torn up he was inside. “I can’t just pretend like it couldn’t have happened. Especially if you don’t remember. It’ll eat me up inside. It already is.”
His confession was like an arrow straight to my heart. It punctured, piercing me with its pointed tip.
“I know.” I knew that asking Cole to pretend it never happened wasn’t realistic and that this was exactly the sort of thing that came back up if you tried to bury it. The ugliness would rear its head in other ways until it left nothing in its wake but what once had been.
“Is it possible?” he asked, his voice sounding so pained. “That you fucked him?”
I visibly winced with his choice of words. I hated them but hated the answer I had to give to him even more. “I guess it’s possible. I really don’t remember, Cole, but I can’t imagine that I would ever let Logan touch me. Drunk or not.”
“But he did touch you. He had his arm around you,” Cole argued before pulling up the picture on his phone and showing it to me.
I never wanted to see that picture again.
“Maybe I lost my balance? Maybe I didn’t know it was him? I don’t know.” I knew I sounded insane, like a drowning person desperately searching for air to stay alive.
“What were you drinking anyway?” he asked, like the question had just popped into his mind and he needed to get it out before he forgot about it again. “How did you, of all people, get so drunk that you blacked out?”
I still hadn’t worked that part out yet in my own head. “I have no idea. I literally did one sake bomb with the band, and then I drank beer the rest of the night. The only thing I can reason out is that I must have had way more than I’d realized. I mean, way more. Because one second I was fine, and then the next, I could barely stand.”
“Do you think he drugged you?” Cole’s expression turned angry, his jaw tight, eyes narrowed as he held his breath and waited for my response.
“I didn’t even know he was there.”
Cole looked downright murderous as he worked out whatever was going on inside his head. “Where’d you get your drinks from? The bartender?”
“The server kept bringing them to me. I just assumed they were from the bartender because the guys in the band told him to take care of me earlier.”
“Anything could have been in that beer, and you wouldn’t know. How did you feel this morning when you woke up?”
Ashamed. Embarrassed. Mortified. “I felt like I had a hangover. My head hurt the most,” I said before adding, “until I read my texts.”
I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen next. Maybe Cole would tell me he had proof that Logan had drugged me and that was why I’d blacked out and that it wasn’t my fault and we could fix this and everything would be okay.
“Were you violently ill when you woke up? Like food-poisoning type of sick?” He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and I knew that he wanted my answer to be yes. That if I told him I was sick, then things would somehow make sense.
But I couldn’t lie to him. “No.” I had thrown up, but it wasn’t the kind of violent vomiting he was asking about. I’d thrown up because my actions had made me sick.
He didn’t say anything. He leaned away, his jaw unclenched and his fists unfurled, and I knew we were back to being in a situation that wasn’t fixable. A situation I had no excuse for.
I sniffed and reached for a tissue. “How did you find out what happened? What did Logan say to you?”
Cole frowned. “He sent me a text. He thanked me for leaving town.” He cleared his throat before continuing, “Then, he sent that picture of the two of you and said