Wild Pitch (Dominating the Diamond Book 1)

CHAPTER 14

“What exactly do you have in mind?” She speaks easily as we ramp the treadmills up to an easy jog.

I keep my eyes forward, staring at her in reflection only, but she turns to face me as she waits for my answer. Our feet smack the rubber in a steady rhythm, a thudding heartbeat pounding between us. I nod to the circuit workout written on the whiteboard then bump the speed up to a slow run.

“First one to tap out has to let the other choose the music for that workout.” I’m not thrilled that I already have to think twice about keeping my breathing steady.

I have regrets—even before her sharp jaw jerks and she tells me it’s on. I’m faster than anyone ever expects—between my build, my age, and the inevitable jokes about baseball players’ athleticism. But I know better than to race another athlete twelve years my junior, especially in anything other than a dead sprint.

“Better idea,” I say as I become hyper aware of her long legs stretching out for days beside me. “First one to a half-mile picks the music.”

She laughs. “Already realized you don’t have a chance, viejito?”

“I’m just saying.” Deep breath. “We could keep this up forever—”

“Could we? One of us is looking a little flushed already.”

“Are we racing or not?” I ask, trying to sound irritated instead of winded.

She doesn’t answer. She grins at me broader than anyone should ever be able to smile while running as fast as she suddenly is.

I pump my arms and open up my strides, sprinting for all I’ve got. The treadmill may as well disappear beneath me. Black rubber, mirrors, and unkind reflections of my aging body fade into impossibly green grass, smooth dirt, and the distance between bases. Tens of thousands of cheering fans replace the bright pop pumping from Ramirez’s speaker.

If the slap of her hands against the bars and the smack of her feet as she jumps them to the sides of the lurching belt didn’t snap me back to reality, her triumphant whooping would have.

“You did not run a half-mile already.”

“See for yourself.” She shrugs and reaches for her water while both of our treadmills shudder to a halt. “I hope you’re ready to listen to me hum Latin pop as out of tune as a pod of seals.”

She tosses my insult back at me, and I can’t hide my grin.

“Don’t insult the seals.”

Her hand finds her hip, and she looks over her shoulder to level me with a glare that would be far more effective if she wasn’t wearing an answering grin on her pouty bow of a mouth. By the time I hop off my treadmill and down as much of my water as I can without cramping, a new playlist blares from the speaker. True to her word, it’s Latin pop, but it isn’t anything as contemporary as I’d expected.

“Maybe your taste isn’t so bad.”

I watch her in my peripheral vision while I grab a barbell from the rack. Her shoes tap on the wood of the platform next to me, moving to the rhythm of the music. She bends at the waist with flexibility I would have envied my entire career, but her hips don’t stop swaying while she loads rubber plates onto matte steel.

She plants her hands on those fluid hips again, narrowing her eyes like she isn’t sure whether I’m being sarcastic or not. I pretend I’m not watching her and start singing along with the chorus, not quite under my breath.

“You know this song?” she asks, stopping completely in her tracks, as if she’s too incredulous to move.

“A ball player in Southern California with a name like Mateo Reyes, and you think I wouldn’t recognize one of the queens of Latin pop?”

“I mean, aren’t you Filipino?”

“My mom was a musician in the Philippines.” I steer the conversation to more comfortable ground. “There’s not a lot of Filipino pop music here, and when she first moved, there was even less. I guess she latched onto Latin pop as a stand-in and never let it go.”

“So much for my music choice punishing you for losing.”

“Don’t worry. The second you start singing along, I’m sure it will be punishment enough.”

She chucks a medicine ball at me as the song changes to something much more recent. Her body moves to the beats of Colombian hip-hop as the wooden box vibrating beneath her speaker amplifies “Que Me Baile,” by ChocQuibTown.

I was wrong.

Listening to her sing isn’t the punishment. Watching her body move like that—smoother than liquid honey and more sensual than melting wax—when I can’t do anything about it, is torture. As long and muscular as they are, her thighs still jiggle with every move, and she steals the air from the room. Steals the air from my lungs and leaves me rubbing my eyes to wipe away images of her hard-earned muscles meeting soft edges.

“Stop stalling.” She claps her hands together before running through a few warm-up reps of each movement. “Loser buys breakfast. Or do you have excuses about eating breakfast, too?”

“Countdown already started,” I say calmly from behind my barbell while she’s halfway across the gym fiddling with equipment we aren’t even going to use today. “Eight—seven—six—”

“Pendejo,” she hisses while she moves across that room in that awkward, gangly movement that isn’t quite a run and isn’t quite a walk either. The limp-armed shuffle that makes even her look as unathletic as possible, especially since she’s laughing as she moves.

Three high-pitched beeps silence her laughter. Her game face slides into place. Her chalk-covered hands dive for the bar.

There’s nothing unathletic about her as the sound of banging plates and muffled grunts obscures lyrics from before Shakira went blonde. I lose myself in the movement—in the sweat dripping into my eyes and the burning muscles—in tight lungs and the stitch forming in my side.

Ramirez is always in my orbit, but I am too busy thinking about where I can pace myself and where I need to push to think about her laugh, how her hips move, or the way she smells like wholesome afternoons and devilish temptation in equal measure. My thoughts about her now are singular. Analyze how she moves and where she struggles. For the duration of the workout, she isn’t one of the most beautiful people I have ever seen; she’s neither frustrating nor endearing. She isn’t my friend, my teammate, or off-limits for ninety-nine reasons.

As long as my heart is sprinting after the running clock, she’s just my competition.

I collapse the moment the timer screams. First to a hunched over squat—elbows on my knees and head hanging over the puddle of sweat on the high-density rubber floor. A few heaving breaths later, I watch the puddle grow through half-closed eyes. I drop back onto my ass, not worrying about hitting the floor too hard and roll onto my back. Sprawling my arms and legs out, I make a sweat angel on the speckled, black flooring.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you, only surrendering animals lie on their backs like that?” she asks.

She may be sitting on a box instead of sprawled on the floor, but she is every bit as winded as I am. Win or lose, I delight in her shaky breathing and the number of times she clears her throat. Without sitting up, I wave her toward the little whiteboard keeping track of my rounds.

“Fine,” I grunt. “If you’re doing so well, you figure out who’s paying for breakfast.”

Every inch of my body aches—from the toe that got stepped on to the fingers I nearly jammed on an ugly slide. Then there’s the pain in my back and knees that goes without saying. Changing out of my dirt and grass-stained uniform into my favorite gray joggers and a hoodie is a soul-crushing endeavor. There is no way I’m bending over to get my shoes on standing up, and I know that I’ll be stuck in the chair with a spasming back if I sit.

I leave my sneakers in my bag and drop my spare pair of dry, black slides onto the floor. Socks and slides aren’t my usual look, at least not in public, but at least I can get out of this locker room before one of my teammates takes a break from their celebrations over another close win long enough to notice the grimace on my face or my stiff-bodied movements that would better belong in a haunted mansion.

Every step sends pain from my knees shooting up my sciatic nerve. Alone on the dark and silent bus, I sink down into my usual seat with a groan. I have time to pop the highest strength pain reliever I can buy in bulk over-the-counter and wash it down with a concoction of tart cherry juice, magnesium, powdered collagen, liquid fish oil, and a pinch of salt before I hear the first of my teammates kicking up a racket in the parking lot.

Tonight, I use the noise-cancelling headphones. If Yo-Yo Ma’s smooth bow strokes and Bach’s unaccompanied cello solos can’t lull me to sleep while my teammates make entirely too much noise, nothing can.

I don’t think twice about leaving my bag on the seat next to me. There’s no room in my pain-hazed brain for Ramirez, and there’s no way in hell I’m bending down any more times than necessary.

“Is he seriously asleep already?” Dante asks, earning himself a giggle from Ramirez. They’re both loud enough that it’s clearly for my benefit, but I keep my eyes closed and my breathing steady.

“You’re supposed to at least pretend to celebrate when we win,” Ramirez says. Her scent hovers over me, but still, I ignore them. “Wow. Okay.”

“Give him a break,” Dante tells her. “Can’t teach an old dog new tricks, you know.”

He drops down into the seat in front of Ramirez hard enough for the chair to rattle, and there’s no doubt he did it on purpose. Dante may be relatively older than our other teammates, but moments like these, he feels more like a little brother than my best teammate. As much as I want to snap at him, I keep my eyes and mouth shut.

Until my bag lands on my foot on its way to the floor—tossed down by someone who is not me. Ramirez leans over me to tuck it under the seat, suffocating me in a cloud of strawberries that I am in no mood to appreciate. Suddenly she smells too sweet. Cloying. She is too much, too close, too loud. Her perfume mixes with my pain-induced nausea like oil and water, and I’m a second away from getting off the bus and booking a hotel to stay the night, a deep-tissue massage, and a car with heated seats to drive back in the morning.

At least, it would have been a split-second decision if I could grab my bag and stand up without a herculean effort. Instead, I bend forward to grab my bag and try to hide my body’s response by leaning against the window with my face in my hand. The bus rumbles to life beneath me before I can recover, resigning me to ninety minutes cramped in a bus seat. I kick my bag in frustration, and swear under my breath when even the small movement reverberates in my low back.

“Fool me fucking once.” Ramirez says it quietly enough to make it clear she isn’t trying to draw attention from our other teammates and loud enough to make it clear she wants me to respond.

A month into having her on the team, our teammates have taken to her surprisingly well. She makes it easy, which just confirms my suspicions that her old teammates were the ones icing her out and instigating her worst performances. She’s humble and hardworking. She knows her place–not because she’s a woman but because she’s a rookie who’s probably still a season or two too green to have been pulled up to the league.

The last thing she needs is to be perceived as making a scene, and I should feel bad about tempting her to start something. After an ice bath, a gallon of topical analgesic, and a torture session with Alejandro, the guilt will probably hit me in full ex-Catholic force. For now? All I can do is keep from matching her tone and muttering back that she doesn’t need to sit next to me at all.

“I should know better than to even try with you by now, shouldn’t I?” She keeps that tone, measured to incite me without interrupting the mixture of post-game celebrations, naps, and good-natured teammate ribbing around us. “I always assumed the gossip about you was just that, but you really are a miserable player who refuses to have any life off the field that might distract him from that precious Series ring.” She taps my empty finger while I’m too stunned to respond. “How’s that working out for you?”

She can’t possibly know how close to home she just hit.

“No one asked you to sit by me, you know.” I can’t swallow the words this time. “Talk all the shit you want about my social life, but I’m not the one who needed someone to take pity on me, just to have a place to sit.”

I know I went too far before I’ve even finished speaking. It’s as if my pain and my baggage have teamed up with my mouth, and my brain and heart can’t keep up.

“Dick,” Dante says from the seat in front of me, while Ramirez moves up to sit with Skip and leaves me to ride back alone with my own misery.

My phone buzzes. I should ignore it. I need to apologize. Even if I weren’t team captain, and even if she weren’t my newest pitcher who’s clearly so spooked from her last team that she’s a few bad innings from throwing away her own career. But the bus starts moving, and my niece’s face lights up my screen.

They’re excuses, but I take them.

“What’s up, favorite niece?” I answer. I make a half-assed effort to hold my phone at a good angle, but I’m too distracted to care what I look like on a video call, even if my seventeen-year-old niece loves making jokes about how old I am.

“Did you find a date for my debut yet, Tito?” Leila cuts right to the point, so much like her mother.

“I already told you I don’t need one–”

“Yes, you do,” she says with a mouth full of ube ice cream. “Otherwise, who are you going to dance with?”

She says it with the matter-of-factness that belongs solely to those who haven’t had to grow up yet. I’m beyond grateful that I was in a financial position to help Nessa provide for her without dropping out of nursing school herself after her deadbeat boyfriend fucked off into the night without leaving so much as a phone number or forwarding address for his mail. That Nessa got to finish nursing school and Leila gets to act her own age is a blessing even when my patience wears thin.

“Wouldn’t you rather use the extra seat to invite another friend?” I ask, instead of saying something corny about the father-daughter waltz with her being plenty of dancing for one night.

“How many friends do you think I have?” She pouts at the bowl that’s empty except for a few melted streaks of purple. “The party is already huge.”

“Then you won’t miss my lack of a date, will you?” I mean for it to come out as a joke, but I hear the shortness in my voice.

“Lola said you have to bring someone.” She puts her hands on her hips and cocks her head to the right. I’d laugh at my sister’s little clone if her mention of my mother didn’t make me feel a twinge of guilt. “You know it doesn’t matter to her who you bring, right? She just doesn’t want you to be alone.”

“This is why I can’t leave you three alone. Always ganging up on me.” I sit up to gesture in front of the phone screen, but the movement makes me wince. “Give the phone to my mom.”

“Who says she’s here–” my niece tries to protest.

“You think I don’t recognize that blue lotus rice bowl you’re eating ice cream out of? And that ridiculous angle you’re holding your phone at shows the Last Supper painting on the wall.”

Leila grins sheepishly before someone out of frame distracts her. I don’t understand why she hesitates to hand over the phone until the face that stares back at me is neither Filipino nor my sixty-eight-year-old mother.

“Is your back acting up again?” Oliver asks. I just stare blankly and contemplate how much trouble I’d get in for hanging up right now. “Extra innings are so tough on you; I know you don’t want to play first, but you could at least let them take you out from behind the plate when the game runs long like that.”

“I have enough people trying to tell me what I can handle. I don’t need your advice on the field.” I refuse to let it get to me that he watched my game. Or that all he got out of it were notes on my health. It doesn’t matter that I know he doesn’t mean it the way my brain processes it; all I hear is, I told you so. Was giving everything else up worth it for this?

“No one was telling you what to do, Matty,” my sister says, and Oliver tilts the phone to pull her into the frame. All that keeps me from snapping something rude is the very real possibility that my mom is sitting there at the little table in the kitchen with them.

“I’m fine.” Two syllables. Strained as much by frustration as pain.

“Leila said you have a few days off before your next game.”

“Yeah. Plenty of time to recover just fine. Like I already said.”

“Let me come down. I’ll help you out for a few days. You don’t need to be doing projects around the house–”

“No.”

I don’t explain that there’s no projects for me to do around my new house. Nothing for me to work on in some misguided attempt to turn our place into the home of his dreams because it was the only way I could show him that I wanted him to stay. My new house has no lawn to mow, no bathroom to remodel, no rooms to convert into home offices.

“I’ll drive Leila, Vanessa, and your mom down to visit with you. You don’t even have to talk to me–just spend time with them, and let me handle everything else.”

“I have to go,” I say. “Tell my family I’ll see them in a few weeks up in the Bay.”

I hang up and press both hands to my eyes until I see sparks.

“You good, man?” The chair in front of me shifts, and I don’t need to open my eyes to know Dante is leaning over the back of the seat with his elbows splayed wide, his hands clasped, and one eyebrow raised toward his dark waves that are perfect despite hours in a sweaty baseball cap.

“I’m fine.” I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve said those words tonight.

“Oliver, huh?”

“It’s fine.” I sigh. “Turn around before the bus driver yells at you.”

Dante snorts, but he gives up on me when my phone buzzes again. He flops back into his seat heavily enough to make the springs creak and the tray table fall in front of the empty seat. It’s a reminder that my newest teammate is sitting with our coach a few seats away instead of next to me.

I flip the phone over and read Oliver’s text. Times like this, I almost wish he had never bonded with my family.

Oliver:

I didn’t mean to upset you, Matty. Just tell me how I can help

Me:

Don’t come to my house, Oliver.

I put my phone in airplane mode and try to avoid my reflection in the dark window.