Chapter 37
AJ
Two Months Later
The trip to Rhode Island wasn’t short—a three-hour drive from my apartment in Brooklyn Heights to the stadium in Pawtucket.
But I didn’t mind it at all.
For one, I wasn’t driving, which was something I was still getting used to but definitely enjoying at the moment. Also, the company was paying for the ride and beyond that, I’d never ridden along the East Coast before.
Back when I worked at Engelman, all our East Coast trips involved flying everywhere, so it was kind of fun to just gaze out the window, passing through Connecticut on the way up and driving through all the quaint beach towns with their tall grasses, white fences and cute little houses on stilts.
The ocean was a moodier blue on the East Coast too, and that was something I needed lately.
The first two weeks without Adam had been hard. Impossible, even.
I knew we were close. Even before we were together, I knew we had a friendship so close it was hard to define. But I hadn’t even realized the true level of our bond till I was without him.
At least a dozen times a day, I itched to tell him something.
Sometimes the most trivial, silly, inconsequential things.
I saw the New York J-Mac on the train one morning and couldn’t believe I couldn’t tell Adam.
The guy was literally a fratty, thirty-something-year-old Josh MacMillan type carrying a basketball, wearing a backwards cap and a hoody that had The J-Mac emblazoned on the back, which was technically worse actually, because even Josh didn’t use “the” before “J-Mac.”
Stupid things like that made me miss him, as did legit things, like craving advice or conversation. Or a laugh.
He was my person for so many more things than I had ever even realized.
Just meeting the new characters at Ace Sports felt like something I should naturally be discussing with Adam—even more so than Georgia or Emily.
But then I remembered that he was the reason for my new office. My new coworkers. My new state.
It was hard—feeling some days like I was angry at him and other days like I’d completely overreacted. Like I’d punished him for something he barely did. He’d said the wrong thing, yes, but it was only a passing sentence. A fleeting moment. And he’d had the best of intentions.
But his intentions didn’t change the way I was perceived at Engelman, and as much as I’d wanted to power through it—through the judgment, the assumptions, the talking—I couldn’t.
If I stayed, I’d want to be with Adam, but if I was his girlfriend, I’d be seen only as that. AJ, Adam’s girlfriend. The one who got promoted because he threatened to quit if she wasn’t.
The short of it was that I wanted to give myself a shot. To prove myself and have my accomplishments stand alone. I’d worked long and hard enough, and I owed it to myself, so whether or not Adam was my soul mate or my “twin flame,” according to Georgia, it didn’t matter.
I had to give myself an honest chance at my dream. It was as simple as that.
“Don’t second guess yourself. You’ll hit your stride eventually,” Emily told me on the days that were hard, when I’d go back and forth between wondering if I could keep in contact with Adam because I missed him so much, and reminding myself that my heart could never handle that.
“Just keep your chin up. There’s going to be a turning point for you, AJ.
And after that, everything’s going to make sense. ”
Like so many other pieces of her advice, I’d held all that close to my heart.
I let myself be sad if I had to. But I was patient.
And things did feel better when I started getting to those firsts-as-an-agent milestones, in particular, when I signed my first client, whose first minor league start I was now on my way to seeing.
He was an eighth round draft pick out of LSU and a kid I’d actually been scouting for ages, before I even arrived at Ace, so I was beyond excited to have front row seats to witness his first ever pitch as a pro.
It wasn’t quite work—it was celebratory.
The very start of my working relationship with my first ever client.
I’d desperately needed something to be excited about, and it was like a true breath of spring to feel a real smile finally spread on my face when the car pulled up to the stadium.
Alright. This is it, I told myself as I got out. This is going to be your turning point.
I was convinced it was going to my first perfect, seamless day on the East Coast.
But like an idiot, I hadn’t even checked who my client was facing up against.
The opposing team today was the Carolina Redwolves. Visiting from Asheville, North Carolina.
Cole’s team.
I realized only as I got into the stadium to see them leaning against the dugout in their uniforms—red lettering emblazoned across a grey jersey and white pants with a single red pinstripe down the side.
Cole was leaning right at the end, by the stairs.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t Googled him before. I’d actually done it the day after Adam told me about him. Stats and scouting reports had come up along with one official portrait of him that was used across every website.
He’d looked young in the picture, and not much like Adam.
But even from a distance, in person, the resemblance was striking. So much so that it made my heart sharply twist in my chest, because I’d done well all day not missing Adam.
But as I watched his brother lean against a railing with his tanned arm dangling loosely over the side, I felt a knot rise in my throat.
One that only grew as the game started, because as proud as I was watching my client—watching him hurl fastball after fastball with his velocity inching toward the mid-nineties—half the energy and attention in my body was tuned into Cole in the dugout.
More than half, really.
Even during the stretches of the inning where I forced myself to pay full attention to the game, when I clapped and cheered like everyone around me, my pulse was still hammering, refusing to let me even fake normal with myself for a second.
One second, I breathed almost steadily.
The next, it felt like I had no air in my lungs.
Especially when the bottom half of the inning came and I watched Cole jog to take his position at third base. My palms were sweaty as I wrung my hands in my lap, feeling as completely enthralled as I did guilty.
Because I knew how much Adam missed him.
How long it’d been since he’d seen him in person. I knew he wished he could just sit at one of his games unnoticed and just watch him play. But he couldn’t.
Yet here I was. Just stumbling into the opportunity he’d dreamt about every day for the past many years.
I can’t believe that’s really him.
Versions of that sentence ricocheted through my mind as I stole glances at Cole between every pitch.
He had black hair and olive skin, which made him look strikingly different from Adam, yet so damned similar at the same time.
The shape of his jaw was just like his brother’s.
Same with his sculpted cheekbones. His long, straight nose.
From where I sat, I couldn’t tell his eye color, but I could see that he looked about the same height as Adam, with a build that was slightly leaner, and a gait that was…
actually so different it made me want to smile.
Maybe I was projecting, but it just felt like the gait of a little brother.
It was boyish. Almost surly. He stood tall—he didn’t slouch by any means—but he had a way of leaning to the side, tipping his chin up and looking bored as hell as he surveyed the infield.
Like he was waiting for someone to impress him. To give him something to do.
Unfortunately for the Wolves, that happened in the bottom of the fourth when their pitcher gave up a triple that put a man on third right where Cole was.
He’d had his stoic game face on as he waited to make the out, but once it was ruled a triple, I watched in awe as he nodded a hello to the runner, who said something or another to make Cole laugh.
And… there it is.
That smile.
It was Adam’s. The same boyish grin with the dimple that transformed Cole’s face completely. Suddenly, I could imagine the little boy who worshipped his brother. The kid who was still the baby of the family before Adam left.
I stared so hard I was briefly convinced that from third base, he looked in my direction and saw how hard I was staring.
But that would be impossible. He’s more than an infield away and he’s focused on the game, I told myself.
So I let myself keep staring and in the fifth inning, when he hit a single and made it to first, I found myself staring at him from a distance so short I for some reason held my breath. He can’t hear you, idiot, I thought.
Just as he looked directly at me.
Fuck.
I shifted my eyes immediately to the batter, telling myself it was a coincidence. That my seat was front row right behind first. Of course we’d make eye contact at some point.
For God’s sake, get a hit or strike out, I urged the batter, just so we could get Cole off first.
Because now he was occasionally eyeing me while chatting up with the first baseman.
Except he’s really not, I told myself even the second time. The third too. But then his teammate struck out, the inning ended and he jogged off first and headed toward the dugout.
But not before fully turning his head and looking at me with a completely unreadable face.
Uhhhh.
“You know number twenty-four?” the older man next to me asked. My eyes shifted.
“No,” I said.
“Well, he just looked right at ya.”
“Oh?”
“Dead in the eye.”
Okay, yeah. Thanks, guy.
I spent the rest of the game trying to not look at Cole at all, but that was actually pretty hard because he kept frickin’ getting to first. Another single a few innings later. Then a walk in the eighth.
I avoided looking anywhere but the batter after his single, but then my old man friend nudged me. “Twenty four’s lookin’ at ya.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, you ain’t lookin’. I am.”
Cool.