Off Base

Chapter 1

Ren

There aren’t many things worse than being forced to spend an afternoon under the beating June sun at a baseball game, a sport you know next to nothing about, while the backs of your legs stick to the plastic blue seat and squeak with every move.

Except that there are worse things. Because it’s hot and the seats are sticky, but worse than that, you’re there with all your colleagues for a work event.

It doesn’t matter that the seats are great—the best infield wall seats in the stadium, whatever that means—because those same colleagues are the ones who just passed you over for a promotion.

And the entirely too successful, entirely too irresistible, couldn’t-say-no-to external candidate who got the position is here too.

Those two horrible things are overruled by the fact that the entirely too successful, entirely too irresistible, couldn’t-say-no-to external candidate who got the position is your ex.

That would be the worst thing, if it weren’t for the fact that your best friend just dropped their hot dog and what looks like it was a fruit punch margarita in a former life down the front of your shirt.

“Oh my god, Ren, I’m so sorry.” Imani claps a hand to her mouth.

“It’s totally, totally fine. It was only an accident.

” Plucking my sticky shirt away from my chest, I try to fan it with my other hand, like that could somehow will the spreading red stain to cease and desist. But when I pull my hand away with an errant wave, my fingers catch a glob of mustard and send it flying into my hair.

Imani groans, wire-rimmed glasses slipping down the slope of her nose, drawing a line across her umber skin. “Now you’ve got mustard in your hair!”

She starts pulling at wisps of red hair flying free of my ponytail, but all I can feel is her squashing the condiment into my scalp.

“Imani.” Hissing out of the side of my mouth, I swat at her hand. “Sit down. It’s fine.”

It’s not fine. It’s a sensory nightmare.

All I can smell is mustard and tequila. The syrup might be fusing my shirt to my skin, everyone from the Paleontology Department has stopped what they’re doing to stare at us, and Imani’s hot dog sits abandoned on the baking concrete floor of the Toronto Major League Baseball stadium.

“Ren? Imani?” Graham Billings, head of the department and the world’s foremost expert on the brontosaurus, finally breaks away from what must have been a riveting conversation with his newly minted assistant curator.

A wave of pale hair sweeps forward onto Graham’s face, and he blinks expectantly at us from behind horn-rimmed glasses, fingers drumming along the back of the empty seat in front of him.

“Is everything okay? It looks as though the game is about to start.”

His fingers lift from the blue plastic to the field and towards players clad in white and black, with shimmering gold accents along their shoulders, finishing their stretches.

“Fine.” I try to flash a smile and a thumbs-up, but Dr. Scott Saunders, the entirely too successful, entirely too irresistible, couldn’t-say-no-to external candidate, leans around Graham from down the row.

One brow flicks up his forehead as he surveys the general mess of his ex-girlfriend and almost assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Royal Museum, and my thumb starts to wobble with my mouth.

“Sorry,” Imani squeaks, hurriedly settling into her seat, acting like she’s laser focused on the field.

But her eyes flit to me and the corner of her lips tilt down.

“Sorry, Ren. This is so embarrassing—the brontosaurus inhabited the Morrison Formation, which was all full of terrestrial invertebrates!” she mutters, like this isn’t information I already possess.

“They’re even found in the same geological layers.

What’s Graham going to think next time we’re examining a fossil together?

That I have butter fingers? He probably won’t let me so much as touch a brush! ”

“At least you’re not covered in margarita and mustard.” I huff, folding my arms across my chest to try and cover up the spreading stain. My hair’s a lost cause. “In front of your ex. And the person you lost your dream job to.”

Imani’s hand finds my shoulder in a gentle sweep. Her fingers try to spell out reassurances as she fusses with the sleeve of my T-shirt. “I’m sorry about that, too. It’s not fair. He shouldn’t have gotten the job as an outside candidate. Just because he has a PhD from KU—”

“And I don’t?” I finish, the words sour on my tongue, a bit like the tequila staining my shirt, and the back of my eyes starting to burn with my failures too.

Her fingers tap against my shoulder. “No. I was going to say just because he’s done his doctorate, in this case, he’s not more qualified than you.

It was an asset for the job, not a requirement.

You’ll go back to school eventually, and you’ve been the collections manager for the better part of four years.

You have a double master’s, and you know more about—”

It’s not me that cuts her off this time, even though more sour words were readying themselves on the tip of my tongue.

It’s the dull thud against the infield wall in front of us.

Imani’s fingers still and she clasps her hands together with a barely audible gasp, shoulders straightening to attention like she’s been reprimanded by a professor in lecture.

But it’s not a professor waiting to dole out a punishment.

It’s a player.

He grins, lazy, with each clap of his leather glove against the wall. Mahogany waves curl out from underneath his baseball hat, two streaks of black drawn haphazardly under deep blue eyes, full lips set off by facial hair dusting his jaw and the planes of his face.

“Sorry to interrupt.” His voice lilts like the tip of his smile. He brings his glove to his mouth, teeth tugging at the leather ties to pull it off his hand. He lets it drop to the ground, and his chin tips towards the bloom of red spreading across my shirt. “Looks a bit sticky.”

“It is,” I squeak, shoving my hands under my thighs.

“Here,” he offers, broad hands and deft fingers working along the buttons of his jersey until it falls open, revealing a white, sweat-wicking Lycra shirt that leaves nothing to the imagination, stacks and ridges of abdominal muscles straining against it.

They all ripple when he shrugs out of his jersey, reaching across the wall to hand it to me.

“I’ve got extras. Not sure I can fix the mustard in your hair, but this might help with the stain. ”

I reach out on a reflex, fingers brushing the calloused tips of his when my shaking hand finds the jersey. I swallow, trying for my voice to sound stronger this time. “Thank you.”

“Anytime.” His grin slips back into place, and he claps his hand against the wall. Without the glove, I notice the stretch of stark black ink across the back, forming a singular letter. M.

He nods a final time before bending to pick up his glove, turning, and jogging back towards the dugout.

“Oh my god. You’re on the camera.” Imani smacks my shoulder before pointing towards the stretching screen broadcasting the field to the whole stadium.

My fingers prod at the stitching of the shirt, the embroidered T that starts the word Toronto, but my eyes lift to the screen where I can see myself, blush painted across my cheeks like the wisps of red hair flying free from my ponytail, and I give a tiny, nervous wave before ducking my head and focusing on the lettering again.

Cheering and screaming vibrate against my eardrums, but the whispers from my colleagues sound the loudest. One in particular.

“She was always a bit of a mess,” Scott mutters to Graham, who breathes a laugh of agreement through his nose.

His words might seem like a joke, lighthearted and reminiscent of the way we knew each other for years.

But I hear them for what they are—bags of the burden of me he carried until he got too tired of it.

My eyes prickle, fingers stumbling over the shirt when I flip it over to the back.

A giant seven stretches under a last name. My lips move with the letters just as the commentator moves through announcing the lineup.

Miller Colson-Burke

# 7

Shortstop

My eyes find the field again as he runs out, hand back in his glove, a wave to all the fans in the stadium, a fresh jersey stretching across broad shoulders, almost identical to the one in my hands, save for the tiny embroidered ten now stitched over his heart.

I watch as he comes to a stop beside his teammates, stomping each foot into the ground once, tapping his glove against each shoulder before it comes to rest over the ten.

“Here,” Imani reaches out, palm open for the jersey. “I’ll help you. You can go get changed after the first pitch.”

“Oh.” I nod through a mumble, handing the jersey to her and shifting in my seat so she can help me slide it on. “Thanks.”

It hangs large over my shoulders, heavier than I would have thought.

But his name, across the back, feels like a brush of reassurance from someone who, maybe, even though I don’t know him, didn’t seem to mind a bit of mess.