Chapter 34
Chapter Thirty-Four
Savannah
A minute after Brayden leaves, the door in the next room opens and closes: Asher, possibly waiting for Brayden to clear out, before he leaves as well.
I’m still in bed. I consider the disaster of the room—the disaster I’ve made of this marriage—then, with only a second’s hesitation, begin throwing things into my suitcase.
If I book a flight now, I can be in Atlanta by mid-afternoon.
I can be at the house soon after that. I’m not sure if I want to collapse face first into my bed with Baby by my side or if I should be putting my stuff in boxes to move… somewhere.
I open the airline app. Find a ticket, the one remaining seat on a flight, a middle seat in the back of a plane so I’ll be both cramped and nauseated. I go through various screens: yes, I’m checking a bag, no, I’m not bringing anything hazardous. Except maybe myself.
But on the final screen, just before I’m about to hit purchase, I pause. Toggle from there to FaceTime and call Victoria. It’s two hours earlier in California, but Victoria has always been a morning person.
She answers sitting on a pool deck, the straps of her bikini hanging down her arms, a smear of sunscreen along her nose.
“I have two men competing over me and I’m not sure what to do,” I blurt, instead of something normal like Hello. Or How’s California? Or I miss you.
Her eyes widen for a second before she throws her head back and laughs. “Have you tried sleeping with both of them?” she jokes. A few months ago, she’d been nervous to even dance with Mike at a party. Now, here she is, casually mentioning threesomes.
Instantly, I feel as if something heavy’s been lifted from my shoulders. I can’t tell her the whole tale; I don’t think Victoria would purposefully let something slip to Jonathan, but I also don’t trust the baseball gossip network. Maybe I can tell her some small piece of the truth.
I’m not sure where to start: the party? No.
The wedding? Absolutely not. When did this all begin?
My gut answers for me. “So, funny story, right after Brayden and I got married, I went back to San Diego to pack up, then flew out to Atlanta. At the airport, I thought Brayden—the team, really—had sent a car, so I sat in the back seat and—”
I explain the rest of it. Another player getting in. Our argument over who the car was for. How he’d helped with my luggage and we’d become something like friends. Emphasis on the like. “Asher and Brayden don’t, uh, exactly get along, though.”
Victoria holds up a hand. “Asher, as in Asher Adler?”
“Yeah—do you know him?”
“He called Jon a few weeks after Jon got drafted.” Victoria considers. “Jonathan says they have a lot in common.”
I make a mental list of what that could possibly be. Jonathan—prep school graduate and future superstar, the kind of man my father wanted me to marry. Asher—who mentioned that he got free school lunch, who’d had exactly one team even let him try out. “Did Jon say what that was?”
Victoria shakes her head. “It was after he put that post up on Instagram about us. A couple players reached out to show their support. Asher, I guess. And Forsyth—not Brayden. Blake? Does that sound right?”
“That’s Brayden’s brother.” I’d only met him briefly at the wedding party.
Blake had seemed polite, personable, and like he was crawling out of his skin to get away from Brad and Barb.
I can’t say I blame him for that. “I didn’t realize he was—” Not a total homophobe like his parents. “He and Brayden grew up in the church.”
Victoria winds a strand of blond hair around her finger. “It was nice of him to call. Most people wouldn’t.”
Asher did. Which brings me back to my current situation.
“I’m on a road trip with the team.” I scan the phone around the room so that Victoria can see the view, the various pieces of luggage, but carefully skip over the bed with its rumpled—wrecked, really—bedspread.
“Things are kinda tense between Asher and Brayden.” In that they might be fighting right at this moment. “I was thinking about going home.”
“You want to come back to San Diego?” Victoria asks.
Of course she thinks I mean San Diego. I should mean San Diego. It’s where I grew up. Where my memories are, even if my childhood home has been stripped for parts and sold. A place that was home but doesn’t feel like it any longer. “No, I was gonna go back to Atlanta.”
“You like it there?” Victoria asks.
“It’s too hot, the traffic is bad, I think I’m going to fail out of my program…
” I think about Baby, climbing up my leg, Forrest and Katia helping me out when they had no real reason to.
Asher, coming over with a baseball bat to make sure I was safe.
Dancing with Brayden in the candlelight at our wedding party. “Yeah, I guess I kind of do.”
“You wanna know what I think?” Victoria asks, and she waits for me to nod before she continues. “I think you’ve never run away from anything in your entire life.”
I snort. “I moved across the country, like, two months ago.”
“There’s a difference between running toward something and running away from something. How many times have you told me that I should stop being scared of the things that I want?”
That was different. Because when I said that, I was sure of my place in the world. I was going to be the person I’d been raised to become: a country club princess with an inevitably rich husband and a degree that I’d never use. Now I have that rich husband—who’s not my real husband.
Isn’t he? Brayden acts like he is—including getting jealous of someone he thinks is trying to steal me away.
“Maybe you’re right,” I tell Victoria. “I might stick around here for another few days. See how this whole thing plays out.”
Victoria grins. “See, that’s the spirit.”
“When did you get to be so bad?” I tease.
“Right about when I realized there were better things than being afraid.”
“Like getting dicked down by two baseball players?”
She cocks an eyebrow. “Try it. You might find out you like it.”
That’s the problem. I like them both. “I’ll consider it,” I say, evenly, and Victoria laughs.
After we get off the phone, I pull myself up, shower myself off.
There’s a bite mark on my shoulder. I can’t tell which one of them left it.
And as I soap it up and rinse off, the reality of the situation hits me.
I’ve spent so long thinking about this as a competition—but what if none of us has to lose?