Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lucas
The camp ends Friday, and after everyone leaves, Logan helps me put all the equipment away.
“Why are we doing this when it’s Facilities’ job?”
“Sam told me he didn’t have the manpower to accommodate us using the practice facility, so I told him I’d take care of it.”
“Why is it when you say ‘I,’ you always seem to include me?”
“Twin code?” I ask, putting a stack of cones on the back of one of the beat-up utility carts I nabbed the keys to before Sam could yell at me.
“Funny how ‘twin code’ extends to cleaning up training camps but not doing the dishes,” Logan grumbles.
“Oh, stop, you big baby. I’ll let you drive, okay?”
Logan pushes me to the other side of the utility cart, and we zip from the practice facility back to the stadium. Logan drives just slowly enough that I can grab the cones we laid yesterday, erasing the path the camp kids followed. Returning everything back to normal for Sam’s sake.
And, yeah, for Scottie’s.
Sam’s a tough SOB, and he has a way of making his problems feel like everyone’s problems. Even if the camp wasn’t my responsibility, the idea of Sam adding anything to Scottie’s plate would rub me wrong.
But the camp was my responsibility.
We return everything to the equipment cage beneath the stadium and park the utility cart, putting the keys back on the right ring so Sam will never suspect a thing.
We cut through the concrete service tunnels toward the locker room—Logan to lift, me to change—passing the row of battered mailboxes along the way.
I grab my stack of fan letters without thinking, the envelopes bending slightly under the weight, already feeling more than a few bead necklaces in here. Logan takes his stack, too. It’s thinner, neater.
He always reads his twice before answering. The guy agonizes over the wording in letters to people he’ll never meet, using words I’ll never even know.
I think it; I write it; I mail it.
In case you’re wondering how to tell us apart.
“You know, if you got in front of the camera, you’d get a lot more fan mail,” I tell him.
“I don’t want more fan mail,” he says as we head into the locker room.
Logan changes out of his turf-stained cleats and practice hoodie, tugging on training shorts and a dry T-shirt while I get into old jeans and a Firebirds tee.
And I grab my loudest hoodie for fun—one with neon stitching that Logan hates.
“I’m content to let people think I’m you everywhere I go. You’re the better pitcher, anyway.”
“Because you don’t know how to get out of your head,” I say, throwing my hoodie at him in more annoyance than he knows. “If you could shut your brain off for five innings, your knuckleball would have you on the first plane to Chicago.”
He throws it back. “Is that a nice way of saying I’m smarter than you? Thanks, bro.”
It’s a nice way of saying you need to talk to someone about your anxiety, I think, as he ties his shoes a little too tight. But I don’t say that, because that’s not one of those things you go around telling people, even your twin brother.
What I don’t say—what I never say—is that he’s right about the pitching too.
Right now, today, I’m the more consistent arm.
We both know it and neither of us touches it, because touching it means saying the rest: that I’m going to get the call before he does.
That one day soon I’ll walk into a clubhouse in Chicago and he’ll stay here, and the thing we’ve built together since we were old enough to throw a baseball splits down the middle.
Logan has the higher ceiling. His knuckleball is genuinely dangerous when it’s on—the kind of stuff that makes scouts go quiet and start doing math. But right now it’s not always on, and I am. And that gap is the thing we’re both pretending not to see.
So I throw ninety-eight. I even throw the occasional hundred. Good enough to get noticed and not so good that I have to think too hard about what getting noticed actually leads to.
We part in the hallway—Logan heading toward the weight room, me pushing through the door toward the players’ lot.
The February air hits cold and clean, the sky streaked in the deep purples and bright oranges that means the setting sun hasn’t fully surrendered yet. Stadium lights hum to life overhead.
I spot her before she spots me, and it’s a moment that belongs in a movie: her looking gorgeous with the final rays of sunset making her pale blonde hair look like it’s been dipped in honey and hot sauce—all soft glow and sharp edges at once.
And I’m the idiot who can’t look away.
The idiot who glanced at her texts, saw “Scottie’s Boyfriend” show up on her screen, and watched her drop the phone back into her pocket like it was spam.
I’m the idiot who thinks that means something.
Like maybe they’re on the rocks.
Maybe she doesn’t care about him.
Maybe I have a chance.
And it’s that stupid, undying hope that makes me smile when I see her. “Fancy meeting you here,” I say.
She only slows for a second. Just long enough to register me. “Oh, hey. You’re out early, huh?”
“I could say the same thing about you.”
She opens her mouth like she’s about to answer, but then she pauses, her eyes close, and she sneezes.
“Bless you,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says, rubbing the tip of her nose with a sniff.
“So what are you doing leaving so early? I didn’t know you were allowed out before midnight.”
“Well, I tried to go to my office to sneak in some work, and Kayla saw me and sort of … yelled.” She rolls her shoulders, like she’s physically shaking it off.
“Apparently she thinks I lack ‘work-life balance,’ and she didn’t think me calling her a hypocrite was appropriate, because, ‘she got here at noon and needs something to take her mind off the fact that her husband’s out of town with gorgeous women asking him to sign their chests while her stomach keeps getting bigger’—it was a little much, honestly.
I think she has some misplaced rage right now. ”
My eyes widen. “Whoa. Sounds like it.”
Neither of us is walking to our cars.
“So, you got any big plans for the night?” I ask.
“I’m training Pinto to fetch.”
“Cat tricks? Tone it down there, Party Animal.”
“That’s not all. I’m also planning to read. All night.”
I slowly let my head droop and then snap it back up. “What was that? Sorry, I must have dozed off, because that sounds so boring.”
“Shut up,” she says, laughing, and the sound almost steals my breath.
Scottie almost never laughs. She snorts. She smirks. She breathes in slowly or exhales quickly.
But she doesn’t laugh, especially like this, and now I’m glad I’ve never really heard it, because her laugh is torture. The kind that drops men to their knees and makes them beg.
With the dying sunlight and an unselfconscious smile on her face, Scottie Quinn has never been more beautiful.
And I’ve never been more smitten.
“Books aren’t boring—they’re the literal best,” she says. “Does reading skip a … triplet? Logan always has a book in the dugout, and I’ve met your sister. She seems highly literate.”
The pain in my chest shifts from longing to embarrassment. She doesn’t know I’m the only one of us who struggled in school or that we were constantly being compared and I was just as constantly falling short.
I swallow. Give a smile I don’t feel. “Yeah, they got the brains. No question.”
Her expression shifts in a flash. “I didn’t mean that.”
“It’s fine.”
“No, it’s not. It was a stupid joke.”
“It was a pretty good joke, actually.”
“No, it wasn’t,” she says, getting madder, her hands curling into the straps of her bag.
“I’m sorry, Lucas. You’re very smart. Your intelligence doesn’t have to look like theirs for it to count.
They don’t have your people skills or your savvy.
Or your strength. They don’t have your way of making people feel like they’re the only one in the room.
It’s not a failing on them, and it’s definitely not one on you. ”
“You don’t need to say this,” I protest, scratching the back of my neck, embarrassed and flattered. The flattery hurts worse.
“Yeah, I do. I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t matter in your own family. To feel like there’s always something louder, needier, more urgent than you. Or something better and brighter. You don’t deserve that.”
The idea of Scottie knowing this feeling doesn’t compute. “I’m pretty sure my dad felt like Liesel was God’s way of making up for giving him me and Logan. In a house with two boys, you’re saying they mattered more than you?”
“It was two boys, a girl, and a Jake,” she corrects me. And then her face goes pale. Her mouth presses into a thin line. “I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean that.”
My brain snags on this like a sweater on a nail. But the way she’s clammed up tells me we aren’t talking about it. “Honestly, I think I’m too dumb to follow half of what’s going on here right now.”
She lets out a soft laugh that sounds almost nervous.
“That’s probably for the best. I’m too tired to be trusted to talk.”
“You and me both,” I say.
I’m mad at myself for being too open. She may think I’ve got people skills, but what I really have is too much energy and a broken filter. It’s easy to mistake those for confidence.
Especially when I’ve got a lot of unearned confidence.
And she might not have the confidence she’s actually earned.
The thought sits there, and something breaks open inside me—the urge to just tell her. Not to make a move, not while Jake’s in the picture. Just to say I see you. I’ve been seeing you for a long time. You’re not invisible to me.
A second passes. Two.
I could still say it. Could still offer something real—
I look away, and when I look back up, I’m already smiling. “So how’s the coffee situation when you’re not at the stadium? Because I gotta be honest: you seem pretty incapable of keeping yourself caffeinated.”
She blinks—just once, just enough that I know she felt the shift—and then her mouth curves. “I think I can manage my own coffee, Fischer.”
“Bold claim. I’ll believe it when I see it.”
She rolls her eyes, and we’re back on safe ground, and I tell myself that’s fine. That’s the right call. Because here’s the thing about coffee, or any gesture, really: if she doesn’t want it, she can hand it back and we both pretend it never happened. No damage done.
I’m something of an expert at offering things that can be handed back. A cup left on her desk. A joke when the silence gets too real. A compliment wrapped in enough charm to pass as nothing.
But if I’d said what I almost said, and she’d looked at me the way people look at you when you’ve said too much—that’s not something I could get back. That would get parked in the lot forever.
So. Coffee it is, like it’s been for months.
“I should get going,” she says. “Pinto’s not going to train himself.”
“Yeah, I should go, too. Logan’s put me on dish duty until we leave for Arizona.”
“What? Why?” she asks, taking a couple of slow steps toward her car before stopping again. Almost like she forgot she’s the one who suggested we leave.
Almost like she doesn’t want to go at all.
“Turns out, he doesn’t like the setup and takedown part of pitching camp.”
“You guys shouldn’t have done that,” she says. “I’m the one who spotted the problem.”
I cock my head to look at her. “You gave us a solution to a problem we should never have created in the first place.”
“Well, thanks for saving me a conversation with Sam.”
“Why would you talk to Sam?” I ask, confused.
“I just assumed—”
“Why would you assume that? It was our camp, our problem to fix.”
She seems almost tongue-tied. She looks away. Sneezes again.
“Bless you,” I say. I pause. “Sorry, I know I should move on from this, but why would it be your job to talk to Sam?”
She looks like she’s been cornered. “It’s what I do.”
“For who? Kayla? That makes sense, I guess, but why would you need to do it for anyone else?”
“It’s just how I am, okay? Stop reading into it.”
“I’m not trying to read into anything. I’m trying to understand why you’d think you needed to fix someone else’s problem for them.”
Her eyes water, and she looks almost angry. Or defensive. Like a wounded animal ready to strike at anyone coming near.
But before she can say anything, we hear the unmistakable sound of a car pulling near—a low, aggressive rev followed by the smooth purr of an engine that costs more than my house.
A yellow Lamborghini screeches to a stop right in front of us, and a moment later, Jake Rodgers jumps out of his car with a bouquet of roses and bounds over to Scottie.
“Hot Stuff!” he says, picking her up, twirling her around, and kissing her on the mouth. For way too long.
When he lets go, Scottie is flushing. She takes the flowers from him—they’re so fresh, I can smell them from here.
“Hey, I didn’t realize you were coming into town,” she says.
“Thought I’d surprise you,” he says, holding her waist possessively, his eyes flicking to me like he’s assessing a potential threat.
“How did you know where I was?” she asks. “You don’t have a tracker on me, do you? Babe?” She’s laughing, which is how I know something’s off. I’ve seen a real laugh from her now, and that sound with this lip curl isn’t it.
“Your mom told me where to find you. We planned the whole thing.”
Her smile doesn’t look forced, but it still feels wrong. “That was sweet of you guys,” she says. “Uh, Jake, do you know Lucas Fischer? He’s on the 40-man, so you’ll see him and his brother at Spring Training.”
Jake reaches out a hand to shake mine. He squeezes so hard, I’m glad I’m a lefty. Then he loosens his grip. “Oh, wait, Fischer? My buddy Coop’s dating your sister, right? Yeah, I know about you guys.”
I nod. Cooper Kellogg is probably the best player in Major League Baseball, and he’s been dating my sister for over a year.
“We love Coop,” I say. “He faced down Bruce Fischer for an entire Christmas. It’s hard to hate a guy who’d do that for love.”
Jake snorts, giving me a glimpse of something real behind his “touch my girl, I kill you” tough guy act. “Yeah, he’s a good guy. Did he tell you we played High-A together?”
“Cool,” I say. I don’t want to connect with Jake over anything. Not my sister’s boyfriend. Not his girlfriend. Nothing. “Good meeting you, Jake. See you around, Scottie.”
“Bye, Lucas. Oh, and I’m emailing you three clips of player interviews from last season.
I want a one-page breakdown on my desk Monday morning of every time they diverted a question about their personal life.
” She holds my eye. “If you want to be a big leaguer, you need to learn to play the media like they do.”
I look at Jake, wondering if she’s ever seen the guy in interviews.
I nod anyway. “Whatever you say, Quinn.”