Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Lucas
Isee Scottie before she sees me.
She’s on her laptop working from the lobby when we arrive at the Cruz Desert Oasis Resort in Scottsdale.
Her glasses have slid halfway down her nose, but she’s too busy frowning at something on the screen to notice.
Considering she doesn’t need them to see, they could probably slide all the way off and she wouldn’t have a clue.
She has her hair pulled into a short ponytail, but a few wisps in the front have fallen out and are framing her face. When she stops and pinches her pursed lips, my body reacts before my brain can catch up, making me bounce on my heels.
“Why are you so fidgety?” Logan says when we reach the short line.
I rip my attention from Scottie. “I’ve been cooped up in a car with you for three days. How could I not be?”
“You’re sure it’s not because you’re excited to see someone?”
“Who?” I ask innocently, as if my body isn’t perfectly in tune with her presence, as if I couldn’t find her in the room blindfolded.
“brOTHERS!” a voice calls, and we both spin around to see our sister’s boyfriend and the undisputed best player in Major League Baseball.
Cooper Freaking Kellogg.
He holds out his arms, like he’s waiting for us to run to him.
So I do.
“Coop!” I sprint toward him and jump into his outstretched arms like I’m his bride.
He spins me around and then drops me to give Logan a hug.
Logan quickly returns to the checkout counter—he’s probably worried about the front desk clerk giving our room away and that somehow leading to Doug canceling our spots on the 40-man. Because, you know, anxiety.
“Took you dorks long enough,” Coop says. “I’ve been waiting all day!”
“Why? What are you doing here so early?” I ask him. Pitchers and catchers always arrive earlier than other players. Coop doesn’t need to be here for days still.
Coop looks away, scanning the lobby of the lux resort, and my eyes follow his, an easy excuse to check on Scottie. She’s still at the table, fingers flying across the keyboard, but her face is tilted toward me, and I get the sense she’s been checking on me like I’ve been checking on her.
The problem is that I can sense Logan checking on me, too. His eyes don’t miss much. Especially not when I’m suddenly allergic to standing still. I force my eyes off Scottie, hoping it looks like I’m trying to absorb all the class in the joint.
As if I care.
The only thing in this entire building that matters is currently typing furiously on a laptop.
“I’m here early,” Coop is saying, “because I was a little distracted during the offseason, and the training equipment here is better than what I’ve got at home.”
“You moved to Chicago during the offseason,” Logan points out.
“Oh, I didn’t mean the equipment at the Firebirds’ stadium. I meant at my actual home.”
“Liesel asked you to come keep an eye on us, didn’t she?” Logan accuses with a shake of his head. “We’re six years older than you were when you got called up.”
“In fairness, Coop was a child,” I say. He was barely twenty. “Still is.”
“I’m three years older than you tweebs,” Coop says, using Liesel’s word for us—twin dweebs.
But Logan’s too annoyed to tease back. He hates when Liesel feels like she has to mother us. I’m usually too used to my family thinking I’m a dummy to get worked up over it, but right now, I kind of get where he’s coming from.
The idea of having two brothers keeping tabs on me in Arizona is even worse than one.
“Man, she really can’t stop micromanaging our lives,” Logan grumbles.
“Can you give her a bit more credit than that?” Coop asks, always defensive on our sister’s behalf. “I came early because the team has a new hitting coach, okay? You’re both big boys, and we’re very proud of you.”
Logan punches Coop’s shoulder. “Shut up.” But he’s smiling, at least.
Normally I like being around Coop, but with Scottie and me being in the same place at the same time, I would gladly punt him and my brother into space and not look back if it could give me ten uninterrupted minutes with her.
I feel my phone vibrate in my pocket, and I can’t help glancing at Scottie, hoping it’s from her.
She’s looking down at her screen. Her lips are pressed together, like she knows exactly what she’s done to me with one text.
I want to check my phone so badly, I have to ball my hand into a fist. It wouldn’t matter to anyone in here except Logan, who has a habit of reading my texts or using his face to unlock my phone and go through my stuff.
If Logan finds out about me and Scottie, about Scottie and Jake …
I’ve never been so annoyed to be on a team with my brother.
“Uh, hey, why don’t we drop our stuff in the room so we can move this night along?” I tell Logan and Coop.
They both nod, and we walk over to the elevators, Logan and Coop talking about some training program or something I don’t care about when Scottie has texted me and I can’t check my phone.
It’s a relief that Coop is asking Logan so many questions instead of talking to me. I’m too distracted to care what they’re saying. All I can feel is the weight of my phone against my thigh, like it’s searing through the denim.
“How’s the knuckleball coming along?” Coop asks Logan when we get to the sixth floor.
“Better. I’m working on my arm speed,” Logan says. “It’s helping a lot.”
“Glad to hear it,” Coop says.
As soon as we step out onto the sixth floor, I speed walk to our room. I unlock the door and have already dropped off my bags in front of the bed closest to the wall and unlocked my phone before Coop and Logan enter.
My pulse triples when I see her name, like my heart’s been holding back beats all day.
Scottie
I’m in meetings from 8 till 10 tonight.
Reminder: Curfew is at ten.
Welcome to Arizona. :)
“So Lukie,” Coop says when they enter the room. “What about you? Anything new to report?”
“Not since we saw you a couple weeks ago,” I say, sliding my phone into my front pocket. “Anyway, I’m gonna leave you two here and hit the gym.”
“What?” Coop asks. “No way, man. I’m taking you guys to my favorite restaurant in town tonight. My treat.”
“Sorry, but if I have to sit for another minute, I’m going to explode. Bring me some back,” I tell them, walking backward to the door. “Logan, I’ll see you at curfew. Coop, see you tomorrow.”
Coop and Logan both give me weird looks, but I’m too wound up to care.
The second I’m out the door, I run for the stairs at the end of the hall.
It’s 7:51 p.m.
Scottie’s text taunts me with every step.
I’m in meetings from 8 till 10 …
I rush down the stairs at lightning speed, jumping the last four of every flight until I’ve hit the bottom floor. Then I sprint down the hallway until I reach the lobby, where I slow just enough not to look crazy.
I rake a hand through my hair, forcing my breathing steady. No one can know I ran here for her.
Scottie’s standing up from the table with her laptop bag and her onyx tumbler in the crook of her arm, looking around the room casually, pretending she’s not looking for me, but I know she is.
When our eyes connect, something tight snaps into alignment inside me, like I’ve been off-kilter all day and just found my balance.
I cross the lobby, and the space dissolves into background noise the second she looks up. I could trip over a marble column and not notice. Everything fades away until it’s just the sound of my own breathing …
And her.
I catch the way she breathes in fully when she sees me, like it’s her body’s way of registering excitement she’s not allowed to admit.
Her throat moves when she swallows. Her fingers tighten on the strap of her bag.
She’s not as steady as she wants everyone to believe, but no one has paid enough attention to her to notice what I notice.
After an eternity that’s probably more like twenty seconds, I reach her, and we instantly fall into step, like it’s inevitable: where she goes, I go.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she answers.
That’s it. That’s the greeting. Two words standing in for everything we can’t say.
“How was the drive?” she asks.
I say something about speed limits and hotels, maybe. I’m too busy staring at her mouth to pay attention to what comes out of mine. We walk slowly, close but not touching, and then she starts laying out our schedule like it’s small talk, not something for me to memorize.
“Breakfast is at seven,” she says, code for see you there.
“Okay. And the shuttle takes us to the stadium at eight?”
“Players, yes. Ops is meeting at Doug’s house tomorrow morning, but I’ll be at the stadium for lunch.”
“You’ll be eating with us?”
“Yep. After you finish morning workouts. After lunch, you and I will meet for fifteen minutes at the stadium to go over tomorrow’s media schedule and make sure nothing going live paints you as cocky.”
“Come now. I’m only cocky in private. But we’ll probably need twenty, just in case.”
“Fifteen minutes,” she repeats.
Every word is doing double duty, helping us map each other’s schedules like they’re emergency escape routes.
She's running the map, like always. And I'm following it, like always. Because if she's drawing the lines, I don't have to decide where they go.
I’m being considerate. Respectful, I tell myself.
I'm not entirely sure that's all it is.
We turn down one long hallway and then another, the carpet swallowing the sound of our steps. People move around us—comparing lanyards, rolling their suitcases, having too-loud conversations in too-public places—until we find a pocket of quiet in a small hallway just beyond the conference room.
Scottie slows. I slow with her.
For half a second, there’s no one close enough to see us.
“How are you?” I say, my hands itching to grab hers as I look down at her big blue eyes.
“Nervous,” she says. “This job feels too big for me.” She taps her fingers on the back of her phone case. “How do you handle so much pressure every game? You make it look easy.”
I step closer without meaning to, close enough to see the faint freckle near her left temple. Close enough that if I exhale, I’ll feel it bounce back.
If anyone turned the corner right now, there’d be no pretending this is professional …
I lean back for her sake, letting my thoughts drift as I try to put into words what happens to me on the mound.
“Maybe this sounds dumb, but it is easy. It’s baseball—not life or death. No one dies if I throw a bad pitch. The stakes just aren’t that high.” I look back down at her with a lump in my throat I can’t swallow.
“That’s a nice way of looking at it,” she says. Her eyebrows are tugging together, and I get the sense she wants to reach out to me.
Only in my dreams.
“It’s not universal, though,” she says. “Because for some people, baseball is life. Losing a game could mean losing the only thing that matters to them.”
“Then they need to step back. Maybe even get professional help. It’s great to care about doing your best at your job, but it’s still a job. Nothing without a heartbeat should matter more than someone who does.”
Scottie drops her head, clearly thinking about Jake and his career. How has this guy pulled her into this shared delusion that she’s responsible for his happiness?
“You’re so much more than you let people see.” She holds my gaze when she says it, like she’s making sure I actually hear her. “You’re kind of amazing.”
“You’re completely amazing,” I say quietly. Two people are coming down the hallway that runs perpendicular to this one, heading for the conference room Scottie’s due in any minute. If anyone saw us standing like this, they wouldn’t ask questions. They’d assume answers.
Correct answers.
“If we were anywhere else, I’d think about kissing you right now,” I say.
She breathes in sharply. “We can’t.”
“I know. But I can still think about it.”
“Me too.”
“Good. That means we have a new line, then,” I say, my hand lifting without my permission, hovering near her waist before I remember where we are. Her breath hitches when she notices, but she doesn’t step back.
“Talking about something we’re thinking of but not doing?” she asks, but she’s staring at my mouth, and it makes the heat between us feel like it could melt steel. “I guess so.”
More people are heading toward the conference room, and their laughter breaks the moment like glass. We’re far enough apart to look appropriate, but the space between us is so electric, it could surge at any moment.
If anyone stepped between us right now, they’d incinerate on the spot.
“Text me when you’re in your room,” she says. “So I know you’re behaving.”
“I always behave,” I tease. “If I text, will you text back?”
“Maybe.”
“You know that’s a yes.”
She narrows her eyes. “I should go. See you tomorrow.”
I watch her walk into the conference room, the door swallowing her whole.
When the hallway is clear, I head back through the lobby to the elevator, searching on my phone.
Before I’ve even reached my room, I’ve already found the highest-rated coffee shop in North Scottsdale.
And they deliver.