Chapter 5 Jari
FIVE
Jari
“Cheese?” Mules snorted, shaking his head. “That guy’s had one too many balls to the head.”
I didn’t laugh.
It wasn’t even that the joke bothered me—it was the way something tight and uncomfortable pulled low in my chest at the sound of it.
As if they were talking about someone I…
cared about. Which was ridiculous. I didn’t know Cam.
Not really. He was just a baseball player who talked too much and forgot he was standing around in a towel.
Still, the way he’d flushed. The way he’d tripped over his own words as if he was trying too hard not to mess up. The way he’d looked at me—actually looked, not scanning, not judging—stuck with me longer than it should have.
I told myself it was nothing.
People didn’t usually try that hard around me, or maybe I didn’t give them the chance because it was safer. Cam had done the opposite without seeming to notice, and that made me uneasy in a way I didn’t have the words for.
I followed Becks and Mules toward the hydro area, but my focus lagged, snagged on the space where Cam had been. My chest felt oddly hollow, as though I’d stepped out of somewhere warm into a draft.
That bothered me.
I rubbed at my sternum and forced my attention back to the room—the tiled floors, the hiss of water, the low echo of voices. Normal things. Grounding things. Cam wasn’t part of my life. He wasn’t part of my team. He wasn’t someone I needed to factor in.
And yet, the thought landed anyway, quiet and unwelcome:
I hoped he wasn’t embarrassed.
The realization made my stomach drop with secondhand mortification. I shut it down immediately, jaw clenching as I bent to retie my laces harder than necessary. Feeling things for people was dangerous. Caring how they felt was worse. It blurred the lines I relied on to stay upright.
I squared my shoulders. It would pass.
It had to.
“We shouldn’t joke about head injuries,” I said quickly, the words coming out sharper than I’d meant.
It wasn’t about being thin-skinned—it just wasn’t funny to me, and the silence that followed made that clear enough.
“I mean—” I started, then stopped, already regretting opening my mouth.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to… I just—yeah. Never mind. ”
The words tangled on the way out, clumsy and unnecessary. I rubbed a hand over the back of my neck, heat creeping up under my collar. I’d wanted to explain myself, to make it sound reasonable instead of uptight, but the urge faded as fast as it had come.
No one wanted to hear my opinions anyway. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.
Becks slapped Mules on the back. “Ignore this asshole,” he said easily, shooting Mules a look that shut him up mid-smirk.
“He thinks chirping is a personality trait. You good?” Then, he waited a beat, as if he cared about the answer, and something in that—casual, steady—took a little of the edge off my reaction.
“Yeah, I just… yeah.”
“Anyway, so this is hydro, and down here…” Becks started walking away, Mules wrinkling his nose at me.
“My bad,” he said, and held out a fist, which I bumped.
“All good,” I said.
Then we joined Becks, who was heading toward the hydrotherapy area—rows of stainless-steel cold plunges sunk into tiled wells, a pair of bubbling hot pools steaming gently, and a long resistance channel where jets churned the water into a constant push.
Beyond that sat the underwater treadmills behind glass, PT rails bolted along the sides, and a stretch zone lined with foam rollers, massage guns, and compression sleeves warming on a rack.
The air smelled faintly of chlorine and eucalyptus, all low light and quiet hums, built for recovery rather than comfort.
I saw the sign for meditation rooms, but there was no sign of Cam.
I rubbed at my chest without really meaning to, as though I could ease whatever had opened there.
It didn’t make sense. Cam had been… cute and focused on me.
Asking questions as if he wanted the answers.
And the realization left me off-balance, caught between wanting more of that attention and wondering why it mattered at all. It felt odd. Unsettling.
And there was no way I was eating freaking hot dogs at a baseball game.
Even if it meant seeing Cam from a distance.
Whatever was going on in my head, I didn’t have time for it because now that we’d done the tour, we were heading straight into practice.
I was slotted again with Becks and Mules.
Same line, same expectations. Becks barked a quick call as we lined up for drills.
Mules was already bouncing on his toes, eager to hit something.
We ran breakout reps, repeatedly—wall pass, middle support, net drive.
Simple stuff. The kind that only worked if everyone trusted everyone else to be exactly where they were supposed to be.
I focused on that. On timing. On not forcing the play.
It didn't always click, but I stayed out after we were done, taking out my irritation on pucks to the back of an empty net before finally getting off the ice and stopping outside the locker room to brace myself.
The place was mostly empty, and I showered and headed to my cubby, knowing instinctively that two of the team in the corner were discussing me.
I heard my name, which made me stop and backtrack around the corner.
They weren't even trying to be quiet, even if it was apparent to anyone who looked that I wasn't gone yet, given my bag was in the cubby.
“—just saying, his dad was a disaster,” one of them said.
“Yeah,” the other answered. “Guy like that, you gotta watch him. Blood doesn’t just… change.”
My stomach tightened.
“What ya talking about?”
Oh god, I recognized that voice dripping with anger. Fuck. Noah was getting involved. I didn’t want to hear him agree with whatever the other two were saying, and I should go out and face this—Noah had every right to be furious with me, wary of me… I couldn't move.
But then his voice cut clean through the noise. Calm, but flat in a way that made people pay attention, it seemed that he was defending me.
“… give the guy a chance.”
“How can you be so chill about it?” one of the other two shot back, defensive now. “After what his dad did to Ten?”
Noah didn’t raise his voice. “My Uncle Ten isn’t writing off the son because the father was an asshole,” he said. “Neither am I, and neither should you.”
The other guy scoffed. “Still. Jari’s not all that.”
Noah's response was slow and deliberate. “He’s fast. He’s got potential. And maybe—just maybe—you let him show us before you decide who he is.”
The silence that followed felt heavier than any hit. I didn't expect that from Noah, not from someone who called Tennant Rowe uncle. Had Ten actually said that about me? I flushed warm, but it didn't last long, lost in the twist in my chest. I hid back there until I was sure everyone was gone.
The tension didn't leave me when I was in the cab, being stared at in the mirror by the driver who wore a Railers shirt and sported an angry expression. It didn't leave me when the hotel door shut behind me.
I'm not sure the stress will ever ease. So now what?
Call it boredom, or because I was, or fuck knows what—but with a ballcap pulled low and not one stitch of Railers merch on the outside, and with my team ID in my pocket, I found myself at the ball game.
Railers credentials got me closer than most—down near the dugout, low enough to hear the crack of the bat and the clipped calls between infielders.
Close enough to really see Cam. The way his shoulders set before a pitch.
The flex in his forearms as he came forward, then the reset—calm, deliberate, as though the rest of the stadium faded away when he focused.
When he and the team walked out, the crowd whooped and yelled, a wall of sound that hit him like a hug.
Watching that from a few rows up did something strange to my chest. Not jealousy.
Not really. More like recognition that he'd done nothing for anyone to hate.
He belonged here without having to prove who he was shift by shift, night after night.
That was the part that unsettled me. Attraction, I could compartmentalize.
Acceptance by the fans was harder to look at.
I'd had three different teams I'd played for to get used to being booed, and I should imagine our first time in the Railers barn would be the same—the media had gotten wind of me making the pre-season team, and boy, people didn't hold back.
I made the mistake of checking my phone once the lineup news broke.
Three comments were enough.
Seen this movie before. His dad was a locker-room cancer. Keep an eye on this one.
Railers really traded for THAT name? Hard pass. Bad blood doesn’t disappear just because the jersey changes.
If he’s anything like his father, this is going to end badly. Should never have made that deal.
Now my phone was on silent, and I'd deleted all the apps I'd been following. People could hate me. Whatever. I was used to it. I rubbed my aching chest and swallowed to ease the tension in my throat. Fucking concentrate.
I forced myself to watch the field the way I watched hockey, losing myself in the rhythm of it all.
Patterns first. Pitch sequences. Defensive shifts.
The quiet, precise rituals players used to steady themselves.
Different sport, same language. Pressure.
Failure. Reset. But mostly I watched Cam, who looked good out there.
Not flashy. Efficient. Locked in. And my brain, traitor that it was, noticed exactly how his pants fit—tight in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with baseball mechanics.
I told myself firmly to knock it off and then ignored the thought as if it hadn’t just happened.
When the hotdog vendor came past, I barely glanced up. I dug into my backpack instead, pulling out a protein bar, a banana, and a small bag of salty almonds. Fuel, not comfort. I ate slowly, methodically, brushing salt from my fingers onto my jeans without taking my eyes off the field.
The crowd surged and groaned around me—beer sloshing, someone yelling advice that would never be followed. I smiled faintly at that, then leaned forward again, elbows on my knees. Different arena. Grass instead of ice. Same edge. I wondered if Cam felt it too.
Bottom of the ninth, and the place was on its feet.
Chicago had runners on, two outs, and the count full.
Cam took his time on the mound, rubbing the ball between his fingers, eyes flicking once to first, then back to the plate.
He shook off the catcher. Once. Twice. On the third sign, he nodded. He went with the changeup.
Not the obvious call—not with that count, not with that hitter—but he sold it perfectly.
Same arm speed as the fastball, same release point, the pitch dropping out of the zone at the last second.
The batter committed, swung through empty air, and the sound of it—the miss, the umpire’s call, the collective intake of breath before the roar—hit a half-second later.
Strike three.
The dugout exploded. The crowd did too, a wall of noise crashing down as Cam walked off the mound as if he’d known all along how it would end. I was on my feet with the rest of them before I realized it, heart pounding, adrenaline buzzing under my skin.
And he saw me.
Or at least he was staring in my direction, and I got stuck there, caught in his gaze.
He lifted a hand and waved, and it took me a beat too long to respond.
What if the gesture wasn’t meant for me?
I fought the urge to turn around and check, then waved back anyway, probably not subtle at all, heat flooding my face.
Did anyone else see me do that? Christ.
I dropped back into my seat and waited while the people around me filtered out, suddenly very interested in my phone. I clicked my watch strap open and shut, open and shut, until the spike of embarrassment dulled enough for me to breathe through.
My phone vibrated with a message, which flashed up in my notifications. Unknown.
Unknown: Coffee? I’ll be done in an hour. There’s a quiet place on Ashbury—Low Tide Coffee, the back room is usually empty. Or, if you didn’t drive, meet me at the player parking lot. I’ll tell security to let you through.
Unknown: Was the hotdog good?
Unknown: This is Cam, BTW, sorry
Unknown: Got your number from the charity paperwork, not a stalker, promise.
I stared at the messages longer than I meant to, added his name to the number, and saved it to my contacts.
I hadn’t driven. I didn’t have a car here yet, or a real place of my own.
Everything I owned fit into two suitcases and a stick bag, with anything else in whatever storage locker I could find, and I’d never bothered fixing that.
Temporary was safer. Temporary meant I couldn’t lose anything for a fourth time.
On my salary, permanence wasn’t even realistic. Not yet. Maybe never.
My thumb hovered over the screen. Coffee felt loaded. Player parking felt worse. Private. Intentional. The kind of thing you didn’t agree to unless you were ready to follow through.
I wasn’t sure I was.
I could ignore it. Pretend I hadn’t seen it. Let the moment pass the way everything else always did.
But I was tired of shrinking. Tired of hiding in hotel rooms and pretending emptiness was the same thing as peace.
Maybe Cam saw something in me and wanted to be a friend, and perhaps I should let him.
Someone who didn’t know much about my dad, someone who could learn about me without all the baggage I carried.
I exhaled slowly, squared my shoulders, and typed before I could overthink it.
Jari: Yes.
Jari: I’ll meet you in the parking lot.
Jari: Thank you
He sent me a thumbs-up, and I killed some more time where I was, then finally made my way to the first of many security doors, hoping that with my Railers ID and his putting my name on some random security list, I could get through.
It was easy, and all too soon I was standing in player parking, leaning against the wall, back in the shadows, cap down, hands in my pockets.
He wasn't the first person out, but when he and his catcher, Yanni Kallias, stepped into the parking space, he was glancing around searching for me, and when he saw me…
Fuck.
He smiled.