Chapter 57
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Asher
It’s Wednesday, I think. Thursday? Possibly Friday. I check my phone, note the day of the week listed. Immediately forget it. I’ve been inside since Coach benched me, long enough my mom texted to ask why my location hadn’t moved.
Concussion headache. That’s a lie. My head’s fine. I just can’t escape this feeling in my chest like I’m being slowly crushed by an impossible weight.
I should get up. Run. Do my meditation app. Lift something heavy until my muscles burn. I thought about going downtown to an art museum, losing myself for a while in the galleries. More beautiful things just out of reach.
Savannah hasn’t called. I texted her once: not delivered, not read. She must have blocked my number. A clean break like a surgical cut, opening something deep inside me I thought was long since healed.
Brayden texted a bunch of times. Called a few times after that. I didn’t answer. I didn’t know what to say.
I’m in love with your wife. What I knew from the moment I met Savannah. I’m in love with you too. Something that took much longer to admit but isn’t any less true.
But I can’t have them and play ball. The team made that clear when Coach threw me out of the clubhouse. I have no idea if they’ll even put me on the roster for the postseason. Bench me, trade me, fucking cut me. It doesn’t matter.
I have the curtains drawn in my room. Around their edges, I can just make out the fading sunlight.
Midafternoon. Almost game time. I should be getting amped up to go out on the field.
Instead, it feels like I can barely move my limbs.
I’m about to roll over, to go back to sleep, even if I barely woke up, when there’s a noise from the hallway. Someone pounding on the door.
I don’t get up. Just stuff the pillow over my head to smother the sound.
I spent my first day benched, pacing in the apartment, livid that Coach did this.
Rage took over my body—a wave, followed by the adrenaline crash that I’m now in.
A false sort of peace before it builds up and the same thing happens again.
And if that happens…
I’m a danger to whoever’s banging on my door. I can’t be around people like this—not anyone I care about. Not anyone who might get caught in my blast radius. I shut my eyes, try to shut out the noise. They’ll go away soon enough.
“Asher, get the fuck out of bed.” My comforter gets torn off, the pillow over my ear picked up and flung across the room. Brayden is standing in my bedroom, looking at me in outrage.
I check my phone for the time. “You’re supposed to be playing.”
“You’re supposed to be—” He gestures around, the light gleaming off his metal wedding band. “Not whatever this is.”
Which doesn’t explain what the fuck he’s doing here. “How’d you know where to find me?”
“You have location sharing on. And your landlord let me in. Turns out she’s a big fan of Blake Forsyth, and I didn’t correct her when she thought that’s who I was.
” He says it without his usual flinch at being mistaken for Blake.
Huh. “Now get the fuck out of bed.” He doesn’t give me time to object, just grabs me by my ankle like he’s gonna drag me out of here.
I kick at his hand. “Stop.”
“You need to get up.” He takes a sniff of the stagnant air in the room. “You need to shower. We gotta go.”
“I’m benched. Didn’t Coach tell you?”
“Yeah, right before I told him to do the same thing to me.”
“What’d he say to that?”
“That I shouldn’t make hollow threats.” Brayden grins. “I think he expected me to fold.”
“They’re gonna fine you for walking out.”
“Yeah, probably,” Brayden says. “So don’t waste my money. Get up. We need to go get her.”
Oh, so that’s what this is about. “Did Savannah call you?”
Brayden shakes his head. “I think she has my number blocked.”
“She definitely has my number blocked.” It’s hard to argue with someone when you’re lying down and they’re standing. I swing my legs around, ignore Brayden’s pleased look when I actually rise. “That’s probably a hint we should leave her alone.”
“Didn’t think you were such a quitter, A—” He cuts himself off, but I could hear what he was going to say. Not Asher, but Adler.
My pulse ticks up, my body awake for the first time in days.
That anger I felt after Coach benched me didn’t actually leave—it just went to sleep.
Now it’s waking up too. My hands curl themselves into fists.
I don’t bother to stop them. “I’m not a quitter.
I’m just not her husband.” I practically spit the word. “I’m not anything to her.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is.” I tap the words out on Brayden’s chest with the tip of my finger, hoping to back him out of the room—out of my life. He doesn’t budge. “You need to get out of here.”
“No,” he says, “I’m not leaving without you.”
Another wave of anger goes through me: at Brayden for being here and seeing how miserable I’ve been. At Savannah for being somewhere else. At myself—for wanting something I knew I couldn’t really have. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be unclear. Get the fuck out.”
Brayden darts his eyes down to where my left hand has reformed into a fist. “Your knuckles are bruised.”
“Yeah, well, punching a wall will do that.”
Brayden scans around the room until he finds the dent right next to the doorway, one that I put there sometime on Monday. “Asher…” He says my name softly.
“Yeah, my landlord’s gonna be pissed.”
“That’s not what I meant.” He reaches for my hand like that’s going to fix anything between us. Like there’s anything between me and him and Sav left to be fixed.
I shake my hand, step back until the backs of my knees hit my bedframe. Brayden takes a step forward. I’m fenced here, trapped. Every muscle in my body tenses, my heart hammering against my ribs, hands clenching. “Get back,” I tell him.
He doesn’t come any closer, but he doesn’t move away. Just shakes his head like he’s not going to move unless I move him.
I suck a breath in, try to blow it out through my mouth, get only a hot, angry huff of air like a laugh.
Red encroaches on my vision, a slight splash of it, then a haze.
Blood in my head, unignorable. There’s only so much of this I can take, only so long I can put this off before something inside me breaks.
No, something inside me is already broken and the least Brayden can do is leave me alone.
I take a step toward him, another. Back him up further and further until he’s against my bedroom wall. “You are not entitled to be here,” I say. “Or to tell me what to do. You have Savannah. She’s still your wife. That’s what you wanted all along, right? You’ve won.”
I cock back my arm. The same surge I felt in Coach’s office, now hotter, brighter, clearer. It’d be so easy to hit him, to make him feel just as bruised as I do inside. It’d be so easy. My hand is shaking, my body surging with adrenaline.
Brayden’s looking at me, gray eyes stormy, body alert like he’s ready to absorb a punch. He reaches up, clamps over my bruised knuckles with his palm. “Hey, easy.” His voice is low; his fingertips rub the back of my hand in tiny circles.
“Don’t,” I choke out. I don’t want his pity. I don’t want him to see me like this at all. My arm is still shaking. It spreads to the rest of me, my teeth chattering like I’ve suddenly gone cold.
“Don’t what?” Brayden asks.
“Don’t do this. I could…” I flex my hand in his grip.
“But you won’t. You won’t because you’re not him.”
Brayden doesn’t say who him is, because I know. Know it as much as I carry half his DNA, in the letters of my name stitched to the jersey I wear every day. A reminder of who I am, even if I hate the name. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.” Brayden adjusts his hand, fingers settling in the valleys between my knuckles. “You’re a good man.”
I shake my head. Distantly, my face feels wet. It’s possible that I’m crying, like all the anger inside me is overflowing onto my cheeks. “I’m not, I’m not.”
“You are. And you made me realize that’s who I wanted to be too—for Savannah. For you.”
That gets my attention. I freeze just long enough for Brayden to drop my hand, to extend his arms and wrap them around me, hard.
“Hey.” He breathes it in my ear a few more times. “Hey, that’s it.”
Eventually, my heart rate settles. My hands unfurl.
Brayden places his hand gently over my wrist, and we walk like that, slowly, out of my room, down the hallway and into my bathroom. Brayden runs the shower, fiddling with the water until the showerhead is pouring out steam.
“You taking these off?” he asks, tugging at the waistband of my joggers.
I shove them down, climb in the shower. The water burns, hot enough to wash the taste of iron from my mouth.
Outside the curtain, there’s a faint rustling—clothes being pulled off—and Brayden gets in.
We shower together at the ballpark—the whole team does in huge communal showers that mostly make it normal to see everyone you work with bare-assed.
Completely different from how he pulls me against him, my back to his chest, his lips brushing my neck and shoulders.
I don’t know how long we stand there for, only that by the time I blink back to consciousness, the light outside my tiny, high-up bathroom window has mostly faded.
“Better?” Brayden asks.
I nod, feeling like all the words have drained from me. There’s one I can manage. “Sorry.”
Brayden shrugs. “Shit happens.” As if that’s all this is. “I should know.” He says that one more quietly and holds me closer.
When we started this, I wasn’t sure if he’d be able to overcome his jealousy, and all his other internalized bullshit about being with a man.
About being with me. He should be playing a game right now—we both should, a hundred feet apart in the outfield together, but still attentive to each other’s every movement.
But he drags his nose over the back of my neck, kissing me briefly, like there’s nowhere on earth he’d rather be than right here.
And that’s enough to make me roll my body closer to his. To lean my head back on his shoulder. To say, “So what’s our plan to get Savannah back?”