Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Brayden
July
This whole hallway feels…empty. Like it’s missing something. What do hallways usually have? Probably not just blank walls, but I can’t quite think of what should be there instead.
I have one picture, somewhere: me and Blake, arms around each other.
We told each other that we were gonna spend our whole careers in Atlanta.
Look how that turned out. He smiled that high school player of the year, high draft selection, top one hundred prospect, multi-time All-Star smile at me—then got the fuck out.
My parents never even saw it coming. Neither did you.
I pull my phone from my pocket and dial his number so I can tell him what an asshole he is for leaving, and that I never want to speak to him again. He picks up—I can hear him fumbling for the phone—then asks, “Is everything all right?”
“I’m fine,” I snap.
“It’s two in the morning, Bray.”
Obviously. I’m looking at my phone. I can see what time it is. “Did I wake up your girlfriend?” I don’t bother keeping the sneer out of my voice.
“Shira says hi, yeah.”
So I did wake her up. He should be mad at me. Yell at me. Something. I don’t know what.
“Are you at home?” he asks when I don’t say anything for a minute.
“I’m in the hallway.” I can’t remember if I locked the front door, and I don’t want to drag myself back down the stairs to check. I should go to bed, but my body is heavy. I sink to the floor. The walls tilt closer, stare back at me like blank eyes.
Blake hums. “You have a game today?”
Something about the question makes anger crawl up the back of my neck. Of course I have a game. “Don’t know if you forgot, I play for the big club now. There’s a game every day.” You’d know if you were here. You were supposed to be here. I swallow that down.
“It must not be that much fun playing, uh, fatigued.” And his voice trips on fatigued like he means fucked up. “If you ever want to talk to someone about that…” he begins.
I can fill in the rest of that sentence for myself—counseling, therapy, rehab—so I don’t bother listening.
Just click the phone to hang up. Settle against the cool flat surface of the paint.
I can sleep out here. It’s my house. I could sleep on the kitchen counter if I wanted.
The floor is fine. Wherever is fine. It doesn’t fucking matter. None of it does.
I’ll just pass out here. In the morning, I’ll wake up and go to the park and play and be absolutely fine.
I’m almost asleep when I hear a noise from up the hall. The sound of water rushing in the pipes.
Who else is here? Savannah, right. Did she go out too?
I pull myself up, drag myself to her room.
The door is closed. I shouldn’t open it.
It’s her room. She’s probably up studying…
whatever it was she was talking about before.
Bioinformatics. She said the word like it was obvious.
I go to look it up…but it’s already pulled up as a search on my phone.
Vaguely, I remember being at the bar, trying to get another drink from the bartender who, for whatever fucking reason, was telling me that I’d had enough. I’m smart enough to know my limits, I told him. Smart enough to have a wife who’s studying…whatever bioinformatics is.
A scientific discipline that uses computer tools to analyze large sets of biological data.
Sure. Of course. Smart people stuff. If she’s so smart, why the hell did she marry me?
I touch the door handle, expecting to find it locked. It isn’t, and I turn it, slowly, waiting for her to yell at me to get out. She isn’t in her bedroom. A bar of light emanates from under the en suite bathroom, nauseatingly bright.
Water’s rushing—not the shower, the toilet.
And the sound of someone throwing up. I didn’t think women who got master’s degrees got drunk, but she must really be wasted.
Is she on the other side of that door with all her hair hanging down?
Girls hate that—having hair in their face when they’re sick.
A pile of hair elastics sits on her dresser. She might want one. I could give her that. Gather back the dark waves of her hair… Like she’d let you touch it. She could barely pretend not to recoil at me holding her waist earlier. I let her go before she could tell me to keep my damn hands to myself.
Still…
I grab one of the elastics, pop it around the doorknob to the bathroom. My fingers rattle the knob.
“Brayden, is that you?” Savannah calls through the door.
And I don’t want her to catch me. Don’t want to hear her tell me to let her alone. So I do what she says—what she’s about to say—and leave her there. No matter how much I don’t want to.
I told Blake I’d be fine today, so that’s what I am—fine. I wake up still in last night’s clothes. I need to strip them off, go for an early run, get ready to go to the park. I lay here instead. My head is fine. The lights aren’t even too bright.
But the walls are thin: from my bedroom, I feel like I can hear Savannah’s every breath next door.
I fell asleep last night lying on top of the covers, listening for—I don’t know what. If she needed anything. But of course, she didn’t.
Now, I can hear her moving around, can smell whatever body wash she uses in the shower and the faint aroma of her perfume.
She smells like roses, like something fresh and fragrant.
That scent I caught when I slid the necklace around her neck, the locket that’s been passed down through my family.
The one I always imagined giving my real wife someday.
She got married in that dress—the green one that made her eyes glow, that exposed the creamy tops of her shoulders. The one that made me want to shove the straps down, to scrape my teeth across the back of her neck so there’d be no question of who she belonged to.
I settled for a necklace instead.
Was she wearing it now?
Was she wearing only it?
I woke up hard. Usually, I’d ignore it. Now, I spit on my hand, shove my fist into my shorts.
Jerk myself with the sudden wetness leaking from the tip.
I imagine Savannah in the shower, water sluicing down the generous curves of her ass, over the points of her nipples.
I imagine going in there and asking…for what?
A hundred fantasies, none of which has any chance of actually happening.
Maybe she’d let me taste her. Maybe she’d use a toy on herself and make me watch until I couldn’t take it anymore, then she’d drop to her knees.
Wrap her pretty pink mouth around my cock, her green eyes staring up at me as she sucks.
A word slips past my lips without my permission, followed by a moan. I increase my speed, stroking myself meanly, but there’s a block there, a barrier and I just need—
The door between our rooms opens suddenly. Frantic, I withdraw my hand from my boxer briefs, roll over, mash my face against the pillow. Pretend she hasn’t caught me jerking it while still wearing last night’s clothes.
After a moment, I look up to find Savannah standing there in a short silky bathrobe with a low vee that dips between her breasts, hair a wet tangle on her head. “Good morning,” she says.
I barely manage a sound. My cock throbs between my legs.
“Oh, you’re—” she begins, and a wave of shame comes over me to be caught like this, practically humping a pillow, ready to come in my pants. Then she adds, “hungover.” She huffs in exasperation and closes the door.
I lie there for another minute. Her hair dryer comes on, the noise blowing all my other thoughts away. Eventually, my cock softens, and my alarm goes off. This time, I get up for real.
My head pounds for the first block of my run, but after that I feel better.
Despite what Blake thinks, I don’t party harder than I can handle.
Everything out here is clean and clear and easy to understand.
Nothing smells like roses, just the odor of lawns cut by men on riding mowers, all of whom look like my father.
Back at the house, I shower, then send Blake a chipper Good morning text just to prove my point.
Blake: Did you eat breakfast?
After my run, I considered and rejected the idea of breakfast. You can douse a hangover—not that I’m hungover—in cold-brew and Liquid I.V.
Me: I’m fine
Blake: That’s not an answer, Bray.
I type out a response—if you wanted to make sure I was eating, you shouldn’t have moved to Boston—erase it, then head to the ballpark.
When I get to the clubhouse, I change at my stall into workout clothes, then start to pull off my wedding ring. Working out in metal rings is dangerous. You can lose blood flow to that finger.
It’s not real. Our marriage is just on paper, just for show.
I yank the ring off. My hand looks strangely bare without it, a paler strip of white surrounded by my tan.
I take another swig of cold brew and shove down that thought.
I don’t know why I can’t shake this fatigue as Blake calls it.
Maybe I should’ve put something in my coffee to take the edge off.
No, I don’t need that. I’m here, proving to everyone how much I don’t need that.
I can raw-dog my way through this, no problem, because I don’t have a problem.
I’m about to head to the weight room when one of our catchers, LeBlanc, comes in. His black hair is plastered to his forehead. Grass shavings are stuck to his solid catcher’s ankles. “Forsyth”—his thick Louisiana accent drags the word out—“you gotta come check this out.”
The last remnants of my fatigue throbs. “I gotta lift.”
“Nah, man, Adler’s on the field and—” LeBlanc catches himself, practically giggling. “Well, go see for yourself.”