Out of My League - Sarah Sutton Page 0,69

landing around us.

“I don’t know.” His voice was as rough as the gravel in the diamond. “I think I like calling you something no one else calls you. It makes it feel like I know you in a way no one else does, which sounds strange. It makes it feel…makes this feel real.”

I closed my eyes, squeezed them tight. Real. It was a fake word between us, a lie.

“Do you want me to stop?”

“No.” The word came out of my mouth before I even realized it, and there was no taking it back. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. “It’s okay.”

Walsh lifted his hand to run a single finger down the length of my cheek, tracing to my jawline. His fingerprint drew a tiny shock along my skin, making the goosebumps worse. “I needed this, you know. Thank you.”

I tried to go back to the joy I’d been experiencing moments ago, pushing all thoughts of baseball and articles and guilt down. “I needed chocolate chip cookies, but I’m here for you.”

The bright moonlight shined down on his face, reflecting off his cheeks and igniting his hair. He’d never looked so beautiful. “You’re a good girlfriend.” He lifted his eyebrows. “A good fake one.”

“Who would’ve thought?”

Lying next to him in the scratchy grass of the baseball field, I thought about how I would never do this for Scott. I wouldn’t have helped him haul out the pitching machine, I wouldn’t have let him put a helmet on me and make me swing at a baseball. I don’t know why I wouldn’t have; I just knew that there would’ve been no way.

But for Walsh, without question.

“I don’t have a good relationship with my parents,” I admitted quietly, suddenly, the words pulled out of me before I could think twice. He’d shared something personal with me—his mother—and now it was my turn. “I think they just want to give me space, but they gave me too much. We used to bake together, have movie nights. Now, I’m just…lonely. And they’re getting a divorce—did I tell you that? I don’t think I did.” I took a breath, closing my eyes. “I thought I was glad about it, thought things would change, but now…I don’t know.”

The memory of the way I’d left my parents this afternoon came back to me, but this time, I wasn’t angry. The pain I’d been stuffing down rose to the surface, making everything in my body feel like it was tearing apart, nerve by nerve.

“What kind of kid is happy that their parents are splitting up?” I asked him. “That makes me the worst kind of daughter ever. But they just bicker all the time, like they’re teenagers or an old couple who argue just to keep things interesting. And then I’m there, a little girl in a dollhouse, waiting to be picked up and played with. And that’s…” My breathlessness caught up to me, my voice catching abruptly, like I’d swallowed a bug or something embarrassingly close to crying. “…sad.”

I wanted to just sink into the rough grass, blend into the soil and disappear beneath the earth. A few crickets chirped in the distance, filling the silence between Walsh and me.

Like the brush of the breeze, gentle and tender, Walsh’s fingertips ghosted across my cheekbone again. I fought a shiver at the touch. When his knee shifted against my leg, he kept it there, a comforting pressure.

I couldn’t believe I was being so emotional in front of him. I couldn’t even imagine what Scott would’ve said if he were here instead. Or if he would’ve even listened. “I didn’t mean to make this about me.”

Walsh’s voice was as soft as whisper, raspy, like he’d been silent for years. “I love listening to you talk.”

“Even though I’m a selfish spoiled brat? The one who is so consumed by her own joy in her parents’ separation?”

“Look at me, Sophia.”

It was because he said my name right—my stupid name—that I listened to him. Compelled, I turned my head and blinked my eyes open. All the crickets stopped chirping, and my heart stopped beating, and Walsh’s leg touching mine became a much more prominent pressure.

Walsh’s eyes were liquid pools of night, reflecting the moon, focused solely on me. “You aren’t selfish for wanting to be in a home, not an empty house. Where your parents check up on you, bake cookies, have movie nights. Where you’re loved, appreciated, and cared for. It’s not selfish for wanting things to be different. It’s your