Chapter 3
OFF THE RECORD
I stared out at a sea of wedding proposals. White signs with messages begging Cash, Sawyer, or both, to marry them flashed bright in the crowded baseball stadium — which was filled almost to capacity.
The night air was warm, almost heavy with humidity. I pressed my icy cup of lemonade to the side of my neck and shivered. Thought about nights like this when I played ball in the streets as a kid — that freewheeling high of running the bases as the sky turned to twilight.
It was one of my earliest memories.
The Philadelphia Revolution had a home game against Detroit and fans were eagerly awaiting their first glimpse of Cash and Sawyer’s talent.
My first feature article on the two of them — which had gone to print only yesterday — had greatly stirred the public interest. In the corresponding photograph, they were disarmingly handsome. In text, they were sweet and charming.
My editor thought it was my best work yet. And we’d barely brushed the surface of things to talk about in the interview, focusing mostly on their time in the minors and what it felt like when they got the call asking them to play in the majors.
But I could feel them holding back and hated to admit how curious I was about whatever happened to them in Hart’s Island. The rumors, the nosy neighbors, the trouble they’d faced there. My dad. Cash’s family.
The pair had no social media presence, which was odd for professional athletes but not entirely unheard of.
With some online sleuthing, I’d pinpointed them in pictures of the high school’s baseball team.
In the picture, they’re a couple of tall and lanky teens — although they’re grinning at each other in the shot, instead of out at the camera.
I thought back to Sawyer and Cash roughhousing on the field the other day. Sawyer dragging him close, whatever words he’d muttered turning Cash’s cheeks a fire-engine red.
An ambient cheer flew up around me and my gaze snapped back to the crisp, green field. Cash and Sawyer were taking their places. They didn’t look at each other but I still sensed their connection in those opening moments, how they moved almost as one.
Over the next nine innings, they annihilated their competition.
Sawyer’s reflexes at first base were fast and nimble, his fingers striking like heat lightning.
He hit two doubles and a triple — the latter ending on a long slide that sent dirt flying around him.
He was easy-going and confident on the field, joking with the other players on base and whistling as he practiced his swings.
Cash, meanwhile, didn’t bat an eye as he struck out batters like it was the easiest thing in the world. He stared them down from the pitcher’s mound like the simple act of their existence was disrespectful to him.
As the game closed in on the ninth inning, there was a sudden, sharp crack as a bat connected with a ball, aimed straight for Cash’s head. I gasped loudly, but Cash merely held up his glove and scooped it from the air, as gently as you might scoop up a newborn kitten from the ground.
In the end, the Revolution won, 6-2, making Cash and Sawyer’s first major league game a resounding victory.
After the game, I took notes as Cash and Sawyer answered reporters’ questions in the bustling locker room. Both were still in uniform, flushed and grass-stained and dusty.
Sawyer was rubbing what was likely a giant bruise on his thigh from where he’d slid to third. Cash’s hair was damp with sweat. Other players stood around in various stages of undress while cameras flashed.
“This team has become the most important thing in my life,” Cash was saying to one reporter, those Southern vowels like a lazy Sunday. “I had a good first game today, which I’m grateful for, and my performance is a direct result of the hard work of everyone in this room.”
“And you?” another reporter called out to Sawyer.
“I’m not as humble as Cash here,” he said with a grin. “I don’t think he’s taken a compliment in all the years I’ve known him. But I can say that he’s the best fucking pitcher in the league and he proved that today.”
Next to him, Cash dropped his gaze to the floor. But he was fighting a tiny smile.
“Of course, he’ll never be as good as me on that field,” he added. The reporters chuckled. One of his teammates smacked him with a towel. When Sawyer’s dark eyes found mine in the small crowd, he winked.
Cash and I are good at everything we do, ace.
“Is there a Mrs. Cash at home?” someone asked from the back. “Or a Mrs. Sawyer?”
This elicited another round of good-natured ribbing and I despised how much I wanted to know the answer. The real answer.
“No comment,” Sawyer said, quick and easy. “But there’s plenty of hot single guys standing behind me who probably do have somethin’ to say to that question.”
This dissolved into a rowdy question-and-answer session about who was dating whom, who’d been dumped, who was on the dating apps. Cash and Sawyer laughed along with their teammates and offered up no additional information.
Eventually, the journalists filed out, leaving the remaining players to shower and meet with their coaches. When it was just the three of us, I held up my tape recorder and stepped forward.
“Do you have time for a few extra questions?” I asked. “Promise to keep them interesting.”
Cash’s face brightened. “We always have time for you, Darcy.”
There went those flutters again.
The two walked me through the noisy, steamy locker room and into a tiny back area with more privacy. The lockers here appeared dusty and unused but there were three chairs to perch on. They sprawled as they sat, still guzzling Gatorade and rubbing towels through their sweaty hair.
“How’d we do out there, ace?” Sawyer asked.
I arched an eyebrow. “With the reporters? Or the game?”
“Both.”
I shot them a look. “You’re a natural with the reporters, even with that giant ego. And you had an incredible first game and you know it. The whole crowd knows it.”
His lips twitched. “Yeah, but I wanted to hear it from you first.”
My pulse quickened.
Cash dropped his elbows onto his knees, something mischievous in his eyes. “Sawyer’s rarely nervous but I swear to god he was all jittery just knowing you were watching.”
Sawyer shrugged, gave me a goofy grin. “Wish I could say he was lying.”
“You are so full of shit, Sawyer Knight."
“I was shakin’ in my cleats. Scout’s honor.” Sawyer held up two fingers then frowned. “Well, I was never a Scout and I’m not really that honorable —”
“Take it from me, Darcy,” Cash said. “He was shaking.”
I couldn’t look directly at them. Couldn’t be on the receiving end of Cash and Sawyer, in rumpled baseball uniforms, dirt-streaked and scruffy, flirting with me so easily.
When I finally managed to swallow, I said, “Were you shaking too, Cash?”
“No. But only because I’m never nervous out there.” His cool gaze drilled into mine. “Being on the pitcher’s mound feels as easy to me as breathing. The very thing that keeps me alive.”
I hit my tape recorder on just in time to capture that statement in its entirety.
“You’ll, uh…have to get used to me watching you all of the time. After a while, you’ll barely notice me.”
“That is highly, highly unlikely,” Sawyer murmured. “Not when you’re writing beautiful articles about me and my best friend.”
“It’s a pleasure,” I said — and meant it. “But the readers want more. Within reason, of course. So tell me how you first met.”
A long pause followed as they exchanged a conspiratorial look. Sawyer shifted in his chair, rubbing the bruise on his thigh.
“I spent the first sixteen years of my life in a town even smaller than Hart’s Island, a few counties over. But we moved there so my dad could work on Cash’s family farm -“
“We grew peaches,” Cash added. “Contrary to its name, Hart’s Island is landlocked -“
“-and they were kind enough to let us live in a trailer on their property.” Sawyer cocked his thumb at Cash. “The only thing I cared about in my life at that time was baseball. I found Cash one night, throwing practice pitches against a net, and I knew it the second I laid eyes on him.”
“Knew what?” I asked, scribbling away in my notebook. I glanced up to find Sawyer tapping his foot to Cash’s with a smile of sweet affection. A smile I hadn’t seen him wear yet. Witnessing this small act made me feel like a voyeur, like I was doing something obscene.
Cash snatched his foot away as soon as he noticed me staring.
“Sawyer…he swears he knew I was the best pitcher he’d ever seen, just from one pitch,” Cash said, clearing his throat. “I called bullshit —”
“It’s not bullshit. It’s the truth.” Sawyer’s voice was firm. “I’ll never forget that night.”
“It sounds —” I hesitated, almost saying romantic. “Memorable. So you’ve been inseparable ever since?”
“Yep. Much as I tried to get him to leave me alone,” Cash continued. “We’re stuck together forever now.”
“Yeah, he loves to pretend that he hates it,” Sawyer teased. “But everyone in this room knows you fucking love it.”
Cash smacked him in the chest with a towel. Sawyer yanked it from his grasp, tossed it over his shoulder.
“Anyway,” Sawyer said, “I moved in with Cash and his family, just before the start of our senior year. We lived-breathed-ate baseball. Played for the school. Practiced at night. Stayed up late researching player stats.”
“We got caught in a summer storm once, near an old barn at the back of our land, when we were running drills. The kind of storm that should have sent us home, but we just…” Cash trailed off, sounding wistful.
Sawyer, meanwhile, was blushing a bright red.
“Well, we ended up staying in that barn all night, using the old farm equipment to train on. It made us feel so alive, so free. You couldn’t have gotten us to quit for all the money in the world.
Couldn’t get us to quit now for twice that amount. ”
“Your parents certainly wished we would,” Sawyer muttered. “They thought we were abnormal.”