Chapter 15 #2
It wasn’t worth arguing with her or trying to explain away the past, not with her like this. I made what I thought was the right decision in high school. We both got hurt. There was no going back. “Stay here. I’m going to get you some water.”
She leaned against the wall just outside the kitchen.
I brought her a bottled water from the refrigerator. She struggled with the top, so I unscrewed it for her. “Drink. It might help you sober up and avoid the hangover. I’ll get Vinny in bed.”
“His room’s upstairs.” She waved at the stairs while she gulped down water.
“Got it.” I scooped up Vinny and huffed my way upstairs. The kid wasn’t light.
When I arrived back downstairs, Erika danced around to the Cars theme. She grabbed my arms. “Dance with me.”
“No. You’re wasted.”
“Nah.” She flicked her hand in a loose, floppy wave. “I barely ever drink, so my tolerance is trash. I’m not drunk. Just, you know, a little tipsy.” She held her fingers an inch apart to illustrate, then promptly bumped into the coffee table and burst into giggles.
I sat on the sofa wondering if I could leave her this way. Probably best if I waited until she passed out.
What if Vinny needed something in the night? Looks like I was stuck here for a while.
She collapsed next to me on the sofa. The areas where her thigh touched mine ignited a fire I knew it best to ignore.
Her head rolled my way. “Losing Dad sucks. I didn’t know Hope well.”
“She was a nice lady.” I dropped my chin. “Everything is so messed up now that they’re gone.”
“I don’t get it,” she murmured, blinking hard. “Why they died. Why now?” She reached out and brushed a strand of hair off my forehead, sending a bolt of tingles down my face. I jerked back on instinct. She leaned away a little too far, squinting at me like she was trying to refocus.
“Tonya said my father helped you when you…you know, crashed and burned in undergrad.” Her words wobbled together, not slurred but definitely loosened. “So, what happened with baseball? Why’d you quit? It was your love… Your life. It mattered more to you than anything.”
“It gave up on me. Sophomore year in college, I hurt my arm after a game. I had to have Tommy Johns surgery.” I pulled up my sleeve to show her the scar. “The coach cut me after that even though I swore I could be back after physical therapy.”
“Why didn’t you fight to play?”
“I screwed up in my personal life at school. Not with women, but with partying. That played a big part in Coach’s decision.
” I sagged to rest my head on the back of the sofa and stared at the ceiling.
Maybe I should’ve fought harder. No one had cared if I kept playing, not my parents or friends.
No one who mattered showed up to my games in college anyway.
“The team had other catchers to take my spot. They cut my scholarship.” I sighed and threw an arm across my eyes.
“Coach said they didn’t need me on the team. It was a pretty solid boot in the ass.”
“You could’ve transformed…transferred schools. Something like that, right?”
“I spent the summer after I got cut in a dark place. I ended up in jail twice for starting bar fights. Then I crashed my car. The day I got out of the hospital, your dad showed up, believe it or not. He sat with me in his truck, talking. Said that if I wanted baseball, I should go after it. Then he pulled out some proverb from the Dad Handbook: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars could ride.’ Still not totally sure what it means, but it sounded wise.”
A loud laugh shook her body. “Dad loved to spew stupid sayings.”
I chuckled more at her laugh than the fact her dad said stupid things like that.
“He gave me a job as a kennel hand with a promise I’d always have a job waiting for me.
A month of working at his clinic made me realize that was what I wanted to do.
I got my school loans figured out and went back in the fall. I gave up baseball.”
“How great of him to help you.” A huge bite of sarcasm tinged her words. Softly she said, “He never believed in me like that.”
“He didn’t have to.”
“He gave up on me when he found Hope.” She waved an overzealous hand-chop gesture. “More like gave me the cut. I was old news and outta his life.”
I caught my breath when she traced the muscles in my arm.
She asked, “Don’t you miss baseball?”
I miss it like an open wound in my soul. I gazed sightlessly above her head. “I go down to Independence Park at night sometimes and throw a few pitches.” I’d also built my own batting cage in my backyard where I hit every night, not that I’d admit that out loud.
“Maybe you can join a league for old men?”
“I’m not old.”
“You are now.” She wagged a finger that didn’t quite stay steady.
“We’re just a few sneezes shy of thirty.
Practically over the hill and already rolling down the other side.
” She gave a dramatic sigh. “There’s gotta be some grown-up baseball team you can join.
Or you could still try out for the pros. ”
“I’m not that good anymore. I’m not even sure my knees would let me do it.”
“Such a whiny baby,” she said, then immediately dropped into a dramatic, nasally impersonation.
“My knees hurt. My arm had surgery.” She rolled her eyes and slipped back into her normal voice.
Well, as normal as she got when she was buzzed.
“If it’s your dream and you want it in here…
” She poked a finger over my heart, a little harder than necessary.
“Then fight for it. Fight for your passion before you can’t do it for real anymore.
We both have to. ’Cause if we don’t what do we even have? ”
My passions…
“Dreams change.” I stared at her lips. “What passion are you fighting for?”
But she didn’t answer. Instead, she murmured, almost to herself, “Does Milly kiss as good as me?” Her eyes slid down, slow and deliberate, landing exactly where she wanted them to. “Is she as good as me when her mouth’s on you?”
The words hit like a punch.
Two thoughts crashed into me at once.
First, would Erika remember this conversation tomorrow? And if she didn’t, could I finally be truthful with her? Second, she still thought about kissing me. About having me.
And God help me, I thought about her kissing me and doing far more. I thought about it much more often than I’d ever admit to a sober version of her.
This was trouble. Big, blazing, unstoppable trouble.
I needed to leave. Before I couldn’t.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Why should it matter to you?”
“I need to know if it’s the same for you as it is for me. That you can’t stop remembering. That you can’t stop wondering if it’s still that good.” The look in her eyes begged for an answer. “Tell me.” She leaned into me.
I checked my phone to see what time it was. “Erika…”
She slid a fingertip along my lower lip, barely there, but enough to steal every coherent thought I had. “I’ve done a lot of kissing since you,” she murmured. Her eyes locked on mine. I hoped to God she couldn’t read how much I wanted to obliterate every single person who ever dared to kiss her.
“But you know what?” She stopped. Just held me in that charged silence.
My breath hitched. “What?”
“None of them ever even got me off,” she said, blunt and unguarded in that tipsy way that left no room for lies.
“Never?” I asked, stunned.
She shook her head. “No one kisses like you.” On a hoarse whisper she added, “No one got me off like you used to. Mouth, fingers… Damn it, you could make it happen with a few nasty words and those magic fingers.”
A knot tightened low in my stomach. “Is—Is that a good thing?”
She giggled, soft and a little embarrassed. “When other guys kiss, they use way too much tongue. Or their hands go all octopus-grope. Or they just forget about me. Maybe I just chose the wrong guys. You… You figured it out early. Somehow you just knew.”
A compliment from Erika—real, raw, and years too late—hit harder than it should have. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
She hesitated, eyes flicking between my mouth and my eyes. “I don’t know yet.”
Thank God.
I’m not going to kiss her. I’m going to stop thinking about it.
Still, she hovered close, eyes drifting over my face and landing on my lips.
“You drive me absolutely nuts,” she said, poking my chest for emphasis.
“Half the time I wanna toss you to the bears. And I kinda wish we’d gone all the way at least once.
Just to get rid of the mystery. Now we’ll never know if we’d be amazing or totally suck at it. It’s tragic.”
She sighed dramatically. “It’s so unfair that you turned out this hot.
All these muscles...” She waved a hand up and down my torso.
“And you’re…ugh…actually good at adulting.
Better than me. I’m a hot mess twenty-four-seven.
” She pressed her forehead lightly to my chest. A beat passed before she mumbled, “How come you got better looking and I ended up with a potty mouth and a fat ass?”
“There’s nothing wrong with your ass. You said so yourself.”
“Too many cookies and fast food. Overnights and this residency have kicked my ass. I asked my doctor a few months ago why I always feel tired and about a minute away from a panic attack. She said I had to stop doing overnights. I need more sun. My body is in an adrenal crisis. Doctor said if I don’t stop overnights, I could die. ” She kissed up my neck.
“You’ve got to stop.” I craned my head away when her kisses reached my chin. If she touched her lips to mine, I was a goner.
She stopped kissing me to say, “I know I should stop the overnights, but I love emergency med so much. It’s my life.”
“You have to take care of yourself. You’re all Vinny has.”
“He’s a pretty cool kid.”
“He is.” I bit back a moan when she used her fingers to trace my ear.
She nuzzled my collarbone. “This doesn’t mean I want to sleep with you. Or maybe I do. Maybe we should. You went and screwed us up with Milly back then. Why?”
“It was a long time ago.”
“Can I see your abs?” Her hands were already pushing up my shirt.
I fought against her to push the shirt back down. “We’re not doing this, not with you like this.”
“You have like a twelve-pack. How’s that possible?” She traced a finger over the ridges through the shirt I’d gotten back in place. “You must work out hours and hours a day. I do ab work almost every day…well, a few sit-ups and some other stuff, but my belly doesn’t look like that.”
I grabbed both her hands and put them back in her lap. “You don’t want to do this. You’ll blame me and hate me worse than you already do.”
“I only hate you when you’re a jerk. Like when I did all that work on the cow, and you took all the credit. I was in a lot of pain and you didn’t say jack shit. I hadn’t touched a cow since vet school. Instead of being a douche canoe, you should’ve said I was amazeballs.”
“Is that even a word? You did do good. Why don’t we watch something?” I clicked through streaming movie options in search of something boring enough to make her fall asleep. A documentary on sea life should have a nice boring voice.
* * *
The narrator was far from dull. He was jacked up on too much caffeine and had a lot of arm tattoos. “I like your tattoos better.”
“I saw you checking them out while I was fleecing Drew. Pretty sure you had a semi the second you saw them.”
“You did not just say that.” I put a hand over my eyes. “You’re killing me. Why were you checking out my penis while fleecing Drew?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shoulders lifting in a loose, helpless shrug. “I just can’t stop.” Erika’s eyes unfocused for a second, then sharpened on mine. “Have you forgotten? When I had my mouth on you in the car that day?” She let out a breath and slumped back into the sofa. “Because I haven’t.”
No, I hadn’t forgotten. Not even close. I thought about it more than I’d ever admit. The memory hit me full-force, tightening my throat, heating my skin. I swallowed hard, because suddenly I knew that she’d be just as wild, just as consuming in bed as she was everywhere else.
“Erika, I—”
But she was gone.
Passed out mid-confession, leaving me with the ache of everything she said. And everything I didn’t get the chance to.
I carried her into the master bedroom where the covers were made. With a small tug, her hair tie came out of her bun. It didn’t seem comfortable to leave it up. Damn, she was beautiful…and smart. So smart. “It’s why I had to push you to go. You needed to use that big brain of yours and fly.”
I’d stay for a while tonight to make sure she was okay, but I’d leave before she got up. I didn’t envy the hangover she’d have.
I sank onto the edge of the bed, elbows on my knees, hands digging into my hair.
My chest felt too tight, the room too small, every breath scraping at my throat.
“This is a disaster,” I whispered. “Professionally, I’m screwed if you leave.
Personally,” I let out a broken laugh. “Personally, I’m screwed if you stay. ”