Chapter 5
“Do we really have to watch this?”
Eli crushes a handful of chips between his teeth before speaking, the words hard to understand. “Yes. This is when it gets really good.”
“You’re disgusting,” Callie scolds him. She blows the crumbs off her shoulder that flew out of his mouth. “Have some water or something.”
I focus on the words Eli just spoke, tapping my fingers where they lie interlocked on my stomach. “How do you know that this is the good part if you haven’t watched it yet?”
“What?” He doesn’t look away from the TV.
Glowering at him, I shove at his shoulder. “Did you watch the game last night?”
“A bit of it, maybe.”
Callie groans under her breath and leans away from him to rest her cheek on the arm of the couch. She’s feeling the effects of her night out behind her eyes right about now. It’s rare that she goes out drinking, but apparently, her friends wore her out and convinced her.
It’s a miracle she’s even awake this early, let alone with a working brain. Despite my warnings all throughout her teen years, tequila is her drink of choice.
“I could have been sleeping right now,” she whines.
Eli shrugs. “Did either of you watch it?”
“You know we didn’t.” I sink deeper into the worn leather couch.
“Exactly. And that is just pathetic. Where’s your hometown pride?”
Callie tucks her knees beneath her and shuts her eyes. “Don’t start, Eli.”
“Does your head hurt that bad?” he asks, turning from the game for the first time since he forced us to turn it on.
We always open later on Wednesday mornings, but that never stops either of them from coming in at the same time they normally would on any other day. I think it’s their way of making sure I’m not working when I don’t need to be, like I need a pair of busybody chaperones.
Usually, I can get away with making the two of them breakfast upstairs or bossing them around the café as punishment for putting their noses where they don’t need to be. This morning, the only thing Eli wanted to do was watch the replay of the Vancouver Havoc game last night.
I’d have preferred just about anything else.
And now that I know he’s already watched it? I’m debating drowning him with coffee beans.
My irritation dies a bit when I watch him make his way over to the cupboard above the small counter with our mini-fridge.
He pulls our basket of meds out from the bottom shelf and starts rooting through the various bottles.
Callie shifts on the couch, and we both watch him pop the cap on the painkillers and drop two into his hand.
The bottle of water he takes for her from the mini-fridge is so chilled it’s nearly frozen. He crouches in front of her and hands everything over, concern flooding his gaze. My sister doesn’t balk at it and, instead, smiles for the first time today.
Intrigue sparks in my chest before I set it aside and reluctantly focus on the game. Callie has made it obvious over the last couple of years that she has no interest in dating anyone until after she’s finished with school. If Eli doesn’t want to heed her warning, then good luck to him.
I’m not going to meddle, I promise myself.
“And here comes Beckett Rourke out of the bullpen. It’s no surprise to anyone watching here today that he’s the guy Roman Shore’s trusting to secure the win tonight.
With Kamron O’Neill having a three-up, three-down inning in the top of the eighth, you’d have hoped the offense would have been able to deliver a couple of runs, but we’ll see if that’s going to cost them. ”
The guy talking sounds confident enough.
I don’t know who he is or why he’s speaking, but it doesn’t matter.
As often as I can, I avoid all things sports.
I’ve never been interested in watching men skate around and bodycheck each other or hit tiny white balls across fake grass.
I hardly have the time to do the things I do like.
Eli sits back down between us and kicks his feet up on the bean bag chair we use as a stool. “You know that’s the same guy who comes here almost every morning, right?”
“Woah, actually?”
“Okay, so you’re being sarcastic. That’s nice,” he mutters.
Callie blows out a soft laugh. “Clearly, she knows he’s been coming. It’s been months.”
“Exactly. Months! And not once have you asked him if he could get me a signed ball or jersey. It’s like you don’t even like me, Quinn.”
I lift a brow, unable to mask my reaction. “You’re kidding, right?”
“It’s easy to tell that he’s got a thing for you. The coffee here is good, but not that good.” He folds his arms across his chest and stares pointedly at me.
Ignoring him, I put all my focus on the TV and immediately wish I hadn’t.
Beck is jogging across the turf now. His dark hair is smashed beneath a green hat that’s facing forward instead of flipped the other way like he has it every time he comes here.
I spy the arms of a pair of sunglasses above his ears, but the lenses don’t rest on the brim of his hat like I expected.
He doesn’t have a long-sleeve beneath his jersey like most of the other players do, and there’s a silver chain tucked beneath the collar.
It flashes every few seconds, holding my attention longer than necessary.
His glove is the same deep green as his jersey and hat, but there’s white stitching that offsets it a bit.
I pay a bit too much attention to the way he keeps using his other hand to flex the leather.
It’s a fidgety movement, though I doubt he’s nervous.
A guy like him? I doubt he’s ever been nervous a day in his life.
He certainly never was when I knew him.
“You can’t just ignore me, Quinn,” Eli muses beside me. “I’m right.”
He is not.
Beck has reached the small hill I know he’ll pitch from. His grin is wide and bright and so perfect it’s almost painful to look at. The dual rows of perfectly straight, white teeth seem to glow in the sunlight as he lets a guy dressed in black check his hands and glove.
Even his scruffy jaw is sexy, and I’ve never been a huge fan of facial hair. I find it scratchy and lazy when it’s not well-kept. And that’s exactly what his is. Lazy. Like he doesn’t care to shave it because he knows how good he looks with it just like that.
“If he wants to keep coming here to get his coffee, then so be it. It’s been good for business to have him do so,” I say.
Callie adds, “It’s true. Everyone knows which players get their coffee here and now come all the time when the team is playing at home.”
“I don’t want customers to come only so they can have a shot at seeing some baseball player. I want them to come for the coffee, and the food, and the environment,” I snap.
A thick silence follows my words. Reaching behind me, I gather my hair into a big, messy ball and exhale, guilt chewing a hole through me.
“I’m sorry. That was . . . I didn’t mean to sound so harsh.”
Callie reaches behind Eli, sliding a hand over the back of the couch to touch my wrist. “You don’t have to apologize. I get it. You’ve worked hard for this. A group of men don’t get to come in and take credit for the success you gained all on your own.”
Pressure lifts from my chest as I take her fingers and squeeze them. “I have no interest in getting mixed up with a professional athlete. It would be easier if they stopped coming, but at the same time, I’m not too stubborn to admit that the boom in business is great in the long haul.”
“So, does that mean you give me permission to ask one of them to sign something for me the next time they come?” Eli asks.
My sister slips her hand from mine and uses it to tug on a blue-painted stripe of his messy blond hair in punishment, making him cry out. I grin at that and settle into the couch, willing myself to relax. We’ve still got an hour before we open, and from the look of the game, it’s nearly over.
The numbers on the screen are easy enough to understand. Beck is close to striking out his third consecutive player, which sounds like it should be an accomplishment of some sort. If he were a stranger, I might have even been happy for him.
Instead, I’m annoyed because I know that this game is only going to increase his confidence, which will make him even more obnoxious the next time he’s here. God knows why he’s even grown so interested in this place, especially when I know that he can’t stand coffee.
At first, I thought maybe he just didn’t know what he liked to drink, but the more he came, the more options I gave him.
Each different variation of coffee—whether hot, cold, espresso, cold brew—had him struggling to hide the visceral disgust that would follow each testing sip.
After the third week of him coming by, he’d tried almost everything on the menu.
One after the other, he’d force himself to drink every sip and come back again ready to punish himself.
I don’t understand it now any more than I did then.
Only now, I’ve stopped trying to find something that he will like and have begun tweaking each drink to make them even worse for him.
Day after day, I wait to see if he’ll finally admit that he hates coffee, but he doesn’t.
He still forces them down and gives me that ridiculously attractive grin that pisses me off more than it should.
I’ve considered banning him from entering the café, but again, that would only hurt business, not him.
Forcing my shoulders back, I lean my head against the couch. Back in high school, I remember watching a much younger Beckett Rourke throw a ball just like this one; only he was a few inches shorter and a lot more dramatic when he struck a batter out.
That feels like a lifetime ago now. I’m far from the teenage girl who’d hide in the stands with her nerdy friends while his much cooler ones would holler at us and make sure we knew how out of place we were.
It wasn’t often that we attended those games, and it wasn’t because we would have rather been studying.
Beck and his posse were assholes. The type of cool kids you see on TV and read about in books, wondering if they actually exist outside of fiction.
For the longest time, I’d convinced myself that just because Beck didn’t jeer at us the way some of the other guys on the team did, that made him nicer than them.
It was the na?ve, hopeful version of me that had placed him on a pedestal because I thought he was the hottest guy in school.
My pathetic crush kept me blind to the fact that he never once stood up for me or any of my friends when his tore them down. Publicly and privately.
So yeah, he can keep coming into my coffee shop and forcing himself to pretend he doesn’t hate the drinks I make him. But it won’t change the past.
Especially when he doesn’t remember it.
Or me.