9. Killian #3
I debate whether to push it, or maybe even ask our waiter for a different chair for her, but something in her expression tells me she doesn't want to talk about it and certainly doesn’t want it to be the center of attention.
So, I let it go. I pick up my fork and say nothing, and we eat in comfortable silence for a moment that somehow doesn't feel uncomfortable at all.
"Can I ask you something?" Isla finally asks, swirling her wine slowly.
"Yeah. Shoot."
"Why aren't you with anyone?" She says it simply, like it's not the kind of question that could detonate something. "Like, actually with someone. Not for the front office. Not for optics. Just...why aren't you?"
I set my fork down. "That's a loaded question for a fake first date, Coach."
She smiles softly and lifts her shoulder. "We have to be convincing, don’t we? I feel like I should know these things, so humor me…if you don’t mind."
I lean back in my chair, considering how honest I want to be.
The candlelight is doing something soft to her face and it's making it harder than usual to keep my guard up.
"I don't know how to be with someone without baseball getting in the way," I finally say.
"Every relationship I've had, and I use that word loosely, has eventually come down to the same thing.
She wants more of me than what's left over after baseball takes its cut. "
Isla is quiet for a moment. "And what's left over?"
"Not much," I admit. “I’m rarely home for seven to eight months out of the year. And when I am home, I’m at the gym or I’m doing charity work or I’m training. Sure, I get days off but there’s also this thing called sleep and honestly, I don’t hate that part.”
She smiles and I consider myself lucky that I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not around her.
Because none of this is real anyway.
"Have you ever tried?" she asks, her voice soft. "Giving more than what's left over, I mean."
I take a sip of my whiskey, letting it burn on the way down. "No," I admit. "I've never really wanted to. If I’m being honest, on a good night, I have enough in me at the end of a game to give a woman a good time in bed, and then I’m gone before the morning. Rinse and repeat."
“I guess that’s fair,” she says, though something about her expression tells me she doesn’t love my answer.
“What about you? Why the commitment issues?”
She sets her fork down carefully and dabs at the corner of her mouth with her napkin. "I don't have commitment issues."
"You don't stay in one place very long."
"That's different. My job, like yours, has me traveling all the time. I’m not scheduled to be home for long stretches of time."
"When's the last time you actually dated someone?"
She goes very still and reaches for her wine, her thumb tracing the stem of her glass.
"College. Before the accident." She pauses.
"There was a guy. We were together for almost two years.
After everything happened, he stuck around for about six months and then...
" She lifts one shoulder. "Couldn't handle it.
The surgeries, the recovery, watching me learn to walk again. It was too much for him."
"He left?" Why is this fact pissing me off?
"He left," she confirms, no bitterness in her voice. Just the flat, settled weight of something she obviously made peace with a long time ago.
“What an asshole,” I tell her. “I’m sorry he treated you like that.”
She shrugs like she's shaking off something light instead of something that clearly rewired how she moved through the world.
"It was a long time ago. And honestly, I don't blame him.
I was a lot to handle back then." She picks up her fork again, stabbing a piece of roasted potato with precision. "I think it just taught me that it's easier not to put people in that position, you know? To put them through something like that and then watch them realize they can’t handle it. It’s easier to just…” She gestures loosely with her free hand.
"Keep moving," I finish.
"Keep moving," she echoes.
The words hang between us for a moment, and I realize I'm staring at her mouth. At the way the candlelight catches the curve of her lower lip. At the small, almost invisible scar at the corner that I've only just noticed.
Something shifts in my chest. Something that feels a little like the first time I threw a curveball and it actually broke the way it was supposed to, that moment of surprise when something you've been trying to do for so long suddenly just...works.
"So that's why," I say, not quite a question.
"That's why." She takes a sip of wine, and I watch the way her throat moves when she swallows. "I don't do big relationships. I don't stay in one place. And I definitely don't let people get close enough to see the parts of me that are still a little broken."
The honesty of her words hit me harder than I expect. I'm used to women telling me what they think I want to hear. Isla just...tells me. There’s no performance. No angle. Just the truth, laid out between the wine glasses and the candlelight like it's nothing special.
But I think it might be the most special thing anyone has ever given me.