Insley #2
Kate laughed, lightening Abby’s chest. It was enough to encourage her to stagger through the gate.
Kate removed her sunglasses, revealing baby blues that glowed just as gentle and intelligent as when they first met.
Perhaps one of the few things that remained while the rest of her had aged, growing from an angel into a goddess.
Faded freckles, firmer cheeks, and a sharper jaw that poked out from her heart-shaped face.
Her hair was longer, darker lashes, more makeup than Abby recalled, but it was fitting, natural.
She smelled richer, but Abby still detected that fresh, cotton scent beneath it.
She wore nicer clothes, a silk blouse and tapered trousers with a clearly tailored jacket that screamed subtle success, and jewelry too.
“Hey,” Kate said.
“Hi.” She chewed her lip as they stood across from each other. It’d only been a few years, but her nerves surged with greater potency. Abby pushed through the awkwardness. She had lost Kate enough times to not embrace her now. She opened her arms and Kate nestled into them. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too,” Kate said, but drew away quickly, taking a step back to restore space. “Did Mick tell you I was going to be here?”
“What do you think?”
“Right.” Kate sighed. “I hope this is okay with you then. I can always meet up with her later or—”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s fine with me if it’s okay with you.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it’s okay.”
They watched practice for a beat, not daring to speak to each other. Abby discreetly fidgeted with her fingers, heat rising across her cheeks when she glanced back at her. “Well, uh. This is your first time back here?”
“Yeah, kind of crazy,” Kate said, her throat bobbing. She kept staring at the field, but Abby couldn’t stop looking at her. “It really hasn’t changed.”
“No.” Abby shook her head. “Hasn’t changed at all.”
Kate cleared her throat, arms still crossed in front of her chest as she glanced around. “Should we sit?”
“Yeah.” Abby gestured to the bleachers. She tried to remember her own advice. Just breathe. But it didn’t stand a chance.
Kate accepted Mick’s invitation as a sign that it was time.
She was stronger, confident, maybe even close to healed, with the case a year behind her.
She didn’t ask if Abby was coming, but she never once doubted it.
Just like when they turned double plays together, throwing into emptiness, certain that the other would appear.
While she had prepared for the possibility of their reunion, she wasn’t ready to see her like this.
Coasting across the dirt, flawless but free in form, shoulders and thighs still strong, the rest of her agile, casual but so certain it was as though she had sprung from the earth beneath the field.
It transported Kate back to twenty, discovering Abby at shortstop, but now she could feel all of what she knew back then but didn’t fully understand: she was watching something special.
Sitting next to her on the bleachers, breathing her sweat, aware of her subtle warmth, Kate struggled to ground herself.
She’d grown more self-assured since Las Vegas and Mick’s wedding, both in the courtroom and outside it, but now worried she’d stammer, blush, or go mute if she basked too long in Abby.
Because while she was eager to see her, she was determined to not lose herself either.
“They seem so young,” Abby said while they observed practice.
The game’s soundtrack filled the wistful, not quite comfortable quiet between them.
A steady rhythm of the ball dinging off the bat, sliding through the dirt, popping into a leather glove.
“You sure you don’t want to get out there for a few before tomorrow? ”
“Not after watching you take one off the leg.” Kate smirked but kept her stare trained on the action. “I’ve never seen you miss a routine grounder.”
“Maybe I’ve lost my touch.”
Kate couldn’t resist her gaze, that self-deprecating, rocky chuckle, like another tug of gravity. When she scanned her face more fully, a little dust on her forehead, Kate detected something new. An unfamiliar lightness in her copper gaze.
“What?” Abby asked.
She was too entranced to shift away. “Your eyes are just so clear.”
A sheepish smile lifted Abby’s face. “Two years clean.”
She pulled out the plastic chip commemorating the milestone and offered it to her.
Their fingers brushed together for a fraction of a second, but the heaviness in her stomach overpowered the flutter.
Kate frowned as she ran a thumb over the token embossed with two. “I’m sorry I never wrote you back.”
“Don’t be. You didn’t need to.” Abby stared at her feet, letting practice fill the quiet for a beat. “I’m sorry I called you.”
Kate had deleted the voicemail, but the pain had never left her. “Don’t be. It broke my heart to hear you like that, but—” She steadied herself with a breath. “But I understand why you called. I’m just glad to see you healthy. Two years sober is amazing.”
“Nah. It’s nothing.” Abby shook her head. “Especially compared to what you’ve done. American Bar Association Top Young Lawyers Award. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals win. What’s next, the Supreme Court? Showing up here looking like a badass, no bullshit attorney.”
“I had a meeting in Portland. And look at you…all covered in dirt.” Kate dampened the pad of her thumb without thinking and rubbed dust from Abby’s chin. “I take it you and Mick made up?”
Abby’s eyes widened. “She told you?”
“Well, not what it was about.” Kate blushed and pulled back from fussing over Abby’s mess. Old habits never died. “What was it about?”
She grimaced. “You.”
“Over me?”
“I said about, not over.” Abby winked. Kate stayed rigid, only to keep herself from smiling, which wouldn’t have lasted long anyway when Abby continued.
“She wanted me to get my shit together and stop you from marrying Ryan.” Her gaze shifted to Kate’s left hand.
She reflexively grabbed her naked ring finger, though there was really no reason to hide it.
“Apparently, you didn’t need my help. Unless… ”
Kate shook her head. “You had nothing to do with it.”
“Good.”
“Yeah, good.”
They both turned to the field, shoulders inching back up to ears, identical sighs puffing into the pine-laced air. Kate clasped her hands together and squeezed in the silence, willing herself to keep going. To find out if they could pretend to be two people without history tangled between them.
“So, you’re scouting now?” Kate asked. “I saw the Sports Illustrated article.”
Abby threw her head back. A glimpse of old that Kate grinned at. “Well, that was just bullshit. You can’t believe everything you read.”
Kate, of course, hadn’t just read the article, but memorized it.
It highlighted Abby as one of just two female scouts in Major League Baseball and half of the first father-daughter duo in MLB history.
Not just that, but her and Audie’s humanitarian work in Puerto Rico.
Kate had lost herself in the photos. The one of Abby absorbed in a game, jaw hard as though back on the diamond, not just watching but hearing.
“Do you like it?” Kate asked.
“Scouting? Yeah.” Abby nodded. “A lot of traveling, but it’s good for me. Keeps me out of trouble. I never stopped needing the game, I guess.”
Kate nodded, a happy skip unhitching her chest. “And you like San Diego?”
“Yeah. I’m crashing at Isla’s pool house, but I’m gone half the year anyway.
It’s good though. And I get to see the boys.
” Abby grinned and pulled out her phone.
“They’re obsessed with baseball.” She leaned closer to share pictures of her dark-haired, amber-eyed nephews.
“Leo’s grown like three inches, and he really understands the game.
He’ll watch for hours with me. But this little guy, Milo, is an absolute rascal. Always wiggling and on the move.”
Kate laughed. “Sounds like someone else I know.”
“Poor Isla’s going to have her hands full.” Abby chuckled. “She says hi by the way. She’s proud of you.” She tilted her head. “And I am too.”
“Thank you.” Kate gulped through the weight of the day. Of reuniting. Of taking in the new pieces against the old. She didn’t know if how far they’d come and how much they’d changed left her pining for the past or relieved of it. “You seem really happy.”
“I think I am,” Abby said. Her eyes, glowing with a purity Kate was still getting used to, flashed into hers. “What about you? Are you happy?”
Kate nodded. “Yeah,” she said, unable to put her full voice behind it.
“Okay, okay!” Mick skipped up the bleacher steps. “I’ve heard no crying, no thrown drinks, not even a raised voice?”
“On our best behavior.” Abby chuckled.
“Well, let’s get out of here and eat,” Mick said. “Haley’s waiting.”
Kate, while intrigued by the years and feelings yet to be explored, happily accepted the distraction. She used catching up with Mick on the drive from the field as a chance to regain her breath, though her friend didn’t hide her mischievous twinkle. “Cruz looks good, huh?”
“Yeah.” She shrugged nonchalantly but then peered in the rearview mirror for a glimpse of Abby’s car trailing behind theirs as if scared it might disappear.
Mick and Haley lived on the ridge in a two-bedroom house plopped on a few acres, with their five children: two German shepherds, a senile Labrador, a snipping Chihuahua that led the pack, and an angry cat that kept the Chihuahua’s power in check.
Mick had big plans to start a fruit orchard, much like the other properties in the vicinity, and Haley maintained an overflowing garden with sunflowers and roses in every color, bright tomatoes pulling down their vines.
Each breath arrived thick with wildflowers in the dry heat.
Large birds circled and chattered overhead, but all other motion ceased.
Even the road and river waned like an afterthought.