knowledge on what they looked for and who they were currently looking at.
Nodding, I decided that maybe talking to Dean would be the right move.
“I might take you up on that. Thanks, Coach.”
“I know it’s hard, Mac,” he started to say. “To be a senior and to feel like it’s your last chance. When Cole was here, he told me that he always felt like he was running out of time. He said every day was like racing against a ticking clock that he couldn’t stop. It haunted him. Just like I’m sure it’s haunting you. And every other senior on the team who wants to keep playing after this year ends.”
I felt instantly sick as my stomach churned.
The accuracy of what he’d said, of my old teammate Cole’s words, were too much. They were fucking debilitating.
“Yeah. I don’t know how to get that out of my head, and I’m afraid that if I play like I’m running out of time, I’ll play desperate. And that will lead to errors.”
“Desperation is the enemy of confidence,” he said, and I stayed quiet. “It eats away at it until there’s nothing left.”
I knew he was right. Baseball was a mental game, and if your head got messed with, it was hard to recover. Every single time you were up to bat, the pitcher was trying to crush your spirit. It was a silent battle between you and him with every pitch he threw. And only one of you won. You either hit his pitch or he struck you out.
And each time you stepped onto the field, the batter or the base runner was trying to mess with your head to get you to screw up. Bobble a ball, make a throwing error, read the play wrong—the game had multiple outcomes, and you had to know them all.
Basically, once someone was in your dome, it was really easy to let them stay there. Some lucky players had the ability to shake things off like they hadn’t even happened and move on. But most of us were affected by a bad at bat or an error on the field. We carried it with us into the following innings, like shoulder weights we couldn’t drop. Rattled was the term we ballplayers used.
And I’d been rattled on more than one occasion. I knew it was a negative attribute for me as a player, and I wished I could let things go when I screwed up, but it was hard. I spent my time replaying what I’d done wrong, overanalyzing it to the point of exhaustion, but I made sure I never repeated the same mistake twice. It was a shitshow inside my head, and that was a bad thing.
“You okay?” Coach Carter cut through my thoughts, and I realized I hadn’t heard anything he’d said.
“Just overthinking everything.” I tried to laugh, but it came out strangled, and he offered me a strained smile.
“There’s only so much you can control, Mac. There will always be a pitcher who wins the battle against you at the plate. Throws that curveball a little out of your reach and you go down swinging. And a hitter who slices it just right when you’re in the field and you miss making that great catch. All you can do is be the best player you’re capable of being. And be willing to get better.”
“Thank you,” I said, my head nodding in agreement even though my biggest takeaway from that entire conversation was, I was right.
There were no scouts asking or looking at me. If they were, Coach would know. And he would have told me. After the summer I’d had up in Washington, I’d figured I’d have at least one or two bites, but per usual, I was still hanging on to hopes and dreams that clearly weren’t fucking holding on to me.
And So It Begins
Sunny
I
eventually dragged myself out of bed, thankful that I could still smell Mac in the air around me. Leaning back down, I smashed my face into the pillow he’d slept on and breathed deep as the memories of last night crashing into me like a dream.
But it wasn’t a dream.
Mac had stayed the night. And it wasn’t just to get into my pants. He hadn’t even remotely gone there, and normally, I might have questioned what had gone wrong because guys usually at least TRIED to have sex with me but not this time.
Not with him.
Part of me wished instead of Mac leaving this morning, he’d stayed