Chapter 24 #2
“It wasn’t, uh, out of unending, unyielding pride or anything like that.
” I snort. “We had a bet. That’s why they’re both framed.
They’re from the first print of both of our cards .
. . and, uh, we kept them untouched like that because we wanted to see .
. . whose would be worth more when we both retired.
” I flinch, pressing a fist to my mouth.
“But, uh, I don’t think mine’s going to be worth as much as his now.
Limited number of cards with the best pitcher who ever played floating around. ”
Ren lifts our joined hands when she shrugs. “Feels a bit like he cheated.”
“By dying?” I ask flatly.
“Yes,” she says, tipping her chin up with this sort of stubborn set to her mouth that does something to me.
But mostly, it makes me feel like laughing. “You might be onto something, Ren.”
“I can have Imani come up with some sort of statistical modelling to figure out what would have happened?” she offers, and even though it’s a joke, I can tell by the way her eyes soften that she’d actually do it, if she thought it would help me.
“Nah. We can let that one stay a mystery.” I jerk my head towards the sliding doors along the back wall, leading towards the yard. “Come on, let’s see if we can find a glove that fits your tiny, fossil-brush-holding hands.”
“Hey!” she says, indignant, when she follows me out back. “I’ll have you know, these hands can also hold a ZOIC PalaeoTech Bronto.”
“No clue what that is.”
Ren snatches her hand back from mine with exaggerated, pursed lips, and she folds her arms across her chest with narrowed eyes. “It’s only the most powerful air scribe in the game. Really great for heavy-duty matrix removal.”
“And it’s—big?”
The taut line of her mouth dips into a pout, and she gives me a flat look before she laughs, wrinkling her nose. “No. It’s not that much bigger than any other air scribe. It just has more pressure.”
“Okay, well, uh, let’s see if we’ve got a glove that fits your still tiny, but more impressive, ZOIC-PalaeoTech-Bronto-holding hands.”
She gives a nod of approval, trailing behind me towards the shed at the back of the yard where we kept the pitching net and all our old gloves hang from the wall.
It’s a bit like swinging open a door to a crypt, when the wood creaks ominously, and the sunlight stretches across the floor of the shed for the first time in almost a year.
Ren comes to stand beside me, and her hand slips into mine again, flexing uselessly at my side.
“What’s all this?” she asks gently.
My fingers squeeze hers. “Our old gloves.” I tip my chin towards the wall.
“All from different seasons . . . important games. And uh, random balls, the pitching net. An old speedometer that worked about half the time.” The corners of my mouth tilt.
“One time, uh, Matty had a bad week—pretty rare for him—and when we came here for dinner, he didn’t want to play, he was just trying to figure out what went wrong.
We dragged out the net and hooked that piece of shit up, and it kept telling him he was pitching at like, 70 miles per hour. He was so mad.”
She looks up at me. “That’s slow?”
“Yeah, that’s slow.” I laugh. “Matty threw fastballs anywhere between 95 and 100 miles per hour pretty consistently. His record was 105 when he died.”
“What’s your record?” she asks, fingers skating along the back of my hand, but I can feel them moving down my spine.
I give a jerky shake of my head. “It’s not really the same. There’re similarities, sure. Both positions need strong arms. But one’s precision and the other’s a quick release time. I throw for speed and accuracy. Motions are different.”
But Ren widens her eyes, expectant and waiting.
Exhaling, I shrug. “Clocked me at 98.3 miles per hour last year on an infield assist.”
“Is that . . . good?”
“Yeah.”
“Record-setting good?”
I rub the back of my neck. “Uh, yeah. Fastest throw by a shortstop so far.”
“Oh, good hands and a fast arm,” Ren laughs, squeezing my hand once more before letting go again. “What can’t he do?”
“Lots of things,” I mutter.
Her shoulder whispers against mine, and her words echo through the home she made in my chest. “Thanks for telling me that story about him. And for indulging me when I was trying to get you to say something nice about yourself.”
“That what you were doing?” I ask over my shoulder, taking my first steps into the shed.
“Yes,” she answers, all resolute. “And for the record, I think it’s something you should do more.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.” I avoid my glove from last season and the World Series, picking one off the wall at random that I stopped using after spring training a few years back because it felt too tight. It’s still going to be too big, but it’s the closest to one that might fit Ren.
“Here.” I offer her the glove. “You can wear one of mine.”
She eyes it curiously, like it’s a fossil buried in a slab of rock and needs her careful study. But then she blinks up at me, laughing. “I don’t think I’ve ever worn one of these.”
“You’ve never worn a baseball glove?”
She shakes her head, and her braid brushes across the hollow of her collarbone. “I don’t think so. I was too busy with my National Geographic to play catch on the schoolyard, remember?”
“Right.” I grin. “Well, hold your left hand up.”
“I’m right-handed.” Her brow knits, but she lifts her hand in the air, splaying her fingers wide enough to slide into the pocket of the glove.
“I throw with my right, so I catch with my left.” I poke my tongue into my cheek, stretching the heel a few times before I slide it gently down over her hand. It drops way lower than it should, a gap on either side of her wrist.
Ren shakes her hand, and the glove wobbles back and forth. “This seems unfair. You’ve got an advantage. I’m not left-handed, how am I supposed to be proficient at playing catch like this?”
“You think you were going to be proficient at playing catch?” I press my thumb to my bottom lip.
“No.” She snorts a laugh. “But I’d like to have at least tried to pretend.”
I angle my head closer to her. “I’ll go easy on you, I swear.”
Her breath catches, eyes sweeping across my face, and I don’t miss the way they carve across my mouth, just a bit longer than anywhere else, but she takes a step backwards, and whatever interest in me she had disappears as quickly as it came, and she points her gloved hand at me. “I’ll be watching you.”
Turning on her heel, she leaves me alone in the shed, wishing that when she packs up and leaves for that job out east, she’ll go easy on me, too.
She’s not proficient. It takes only a few throws to see that.
We try for overhand tosses at first, but she fumbles every single one.
“This isn’t a glove, it’s an overgrown crab claw.” She makes a pinching motion with the glove as it slips around her hand and the ball sits nestled in the grass at her feet. “Do you have overgrown crab claws for hands, Miller?”
“Uh, no. Not last time I checked.” I shake my head. “Here, toss it back to me. Underhand. We’ll start there.”
Ren lobs the ball back across the yard, and it lands in my right palm with a dull thud.
“Oh, come on!” She flings an arm towards my right hand. “You didn’t even use your glove for that. I am wildly outmatched.”
“Nah, you’ll get it.” I offer her a grin. “Try it this way.”
She pulls some sort of fake pout but rolls her eyes fondly in concession. “Alright, let’s see what you’ve got.”
We tell each other things with each throw.
On her first underhand catch, she tells me her favourite candy. Some sort of squishy British thing that Imani hates.
When she throws it back, I tell her that I smashed my knee open the first time I tried riding a bike and needed ten stitches.
She pauses the game so she can see the scar for herself, and she taps her index finger along each ridge where a stitch sat before she goes back to her side of the lawn.
She tells me she spent four weeks in Germany during her undergrad, taking a course on some fossil that finally linked dinosaurs to birds and proved ancient reptiles had feathers.
I tell her Matty and I spent our summers at a baseball camp down in Florida, and we ended up finishing high school there.
We trade pieces of ourselves for hours, tossing them across the yard with the ball, and I think, they all fall neatly into each other’s hands.
“Think you’re ready for an overhand now?” I throw the ball in the air a few times and she stares, concentration setting her mouth into the most beautiful frown on the planet, before I pull my arm back, lobbing it towards her.
She watches, practically cringing when she raises her hand in what looks like a half-hearted attempt to catch an overhand throw, but I hear the second the ball thumps against the leather.
Full lips part, surprise colours her cheeks, and crystalline eyes dart back and forth between me, halfway across the yard, and the ball, grass-stained and nestled in her glove.
“Oh my god, I did it,” she mumbles, offering me a surprised blink, and then she shrieks—all joy and happiness and excitement.
Probably one of the best sounds I’ve ever heard, actually. Second only to her laugh.
“You did it.” I smile, but I don’t have time to ask her to throw it back so we can go again—she ditches her too-big glove, sprints across the yard, and throws her arms around my neck.
Her fingertips ghost by the waves curling there, begging her to touch them. But her hands find my shoulder blades when she pulls back, and maybe that’s a good thing—I’m not sure I’d survive Ren Jacobs twirling her fingers through my hair.
Swallowing, I offer her a grin, letting my gloved hand rest against her waist. Feels safer than touching her with my bare hand.