Chapter 30
Jordan
My duffle bag is barely shoved in the door before I turn from my apartment and jog down the hall to Shelley’s door.
As soon as she opens it, I wrap my arms around her waist. She smells faintly of coffee from the part-time summer gig she picked up at Brew-Ha-Ha.
She squeals when I lift her two inches in the air and spin her around before setting her feet on the ground and squeezing her in a tight hug.
It’s been four weeks since she moved in, and I love that she was waiting here for me to get home from our stretch of away games.
“Welcome home.” Her words are muffled because her mouth is pressing into the collar of my shirt.
“Miss me?”
“Maybe.” Shelley laughs. “I have a confession.” She pulls away just enough to look into my face, which I’m sure is now laced with curiosity. I let go reluctantly, and I already miss her warmth. I raise a curious brow and wait for her to continue.
“I bought you food while you weren’t here to argue.
We’re having chicken wings. A lot of them.
” She grabs a white paper bag dotted with spots of grease, then she points to a shipping box on the counter.
“And I ordered four different kinds of sauce. I thought we could taste test them like that show. You know, see who can handle the heat. Are you hungry?”
I chuckle. “Are you going to make me answer really personal questions while I’m sweating out of my eyes, like they do?”
“Well, I wasn’t. But you’ve gone and put the idea in my head, so now it has to happen.”
“Obviously.” I nod and head over to her cabinets to pull down two plates and glasses. “Water or milk? How hot are we talking?”
“Both. The answer is always both.”
“A woman after my own heart.”
I set the dishes down on the counter and go back to take the milk jug from the fridge.
I hand a glass to Shelley and she smiles at me while I pour for her.
Then she puts her drink on the breakfast bar and situates herself on a stool, dividing the wings between our plates.
When she’s satisfied that the plates are even, she moves on to opening each bottle of hot sauce and lining them up according to their Scoville scale ratings.
I love how seriously she’s taking this. She looks at me and smirks while she arches an eyebrow. “Laugh it up now. My prediction is you’ll be crying by wing three.”
“Oh, probably sooner than that,” I confirm. “I didn’t grow up with a lot of exposure to spicy foods.”
“Right. Whereas in rural Idaho I developed a well-rounded palate by sampling the world’s most unique cuisine.” She rolls her eyes. “We’ll be fine. I only got mild, medium, and hot. Nothing super crazy.”
“Okay, but if I puke up hot sauce while we’re running sprints at practice tomorrow, I’m telling Coach it was your fault.”
“I can live with that.” Her bubbly excitement is contagious as I pull up the stool next to hers. She pours the first sauce onto a wing on my plate, then one of her own. “All right. One. Two. Three.”
We each take a bite at the same time.
“Okay, I can handle this one. Can we stop now? Call it a success.”
“You wish.” She swivels her stool to face me, and when she giggles, I immediately know I would do anything to hear that sound again. I don’t care how many Scovilles I need to consume.
She raises her eyebrows. “I was told you would be answering personal questions. We can take turns to keep it fair. Tit for tat and all.”
“Tit for tat, huh?” My eyes start to travel down her body on their own accord. She tisks and wags a finger, so I have to pull my focus back to her face. “Hit me. What do you want to know now?”
Shelley taps her chin dramatically, which causes a little bit of sauce to rub off on her face.
“Oh, you have…” I reach out to take it off with my thumb, but she’s starting to ask her question, so her mouth is open, and somehow my finger brushes her tongue.
“Sorry. I was trying to do, uh…that.” I quickly wipe the smudge of red sauce.
Her eyes lock with mine, and she holds my wrist and brings my thumb back to her lips so she can suck it clean. I think my brain has short-circuited.
“Wouldn’t want to waste it now, would we?” She turns and picks up her second wing, adding the next sauce like nothing happened.
Like I’m not sitting here realizing I’m falling in love with my best friend’s little sister.
I clear my throat to remove the lump now lodged in it and say, “You were about to ask me something?”
“Oh, right. I was thinking. I still don’t know much about your life before North Bay. Tell me everything. What was little Jordan like before he was a big, bad baseball player?”
“While I appreciate the sentiment, let’s refrain from saying the words ‘bad baseball player’ in the same sentence as my name. That has to be bad luck.”
“Ah, finally. The superstitious side everyone is always telling me about makes an appearance. Okay. Let’s go with big, strong baseball player,” she corrects herself. “Does that work for you?”
“Much better, thank you.” I nod. “I’m from Baltimore.
Just outside the city. It’s not a terribly original story.
Single mom. She tried, but my mom is not what I would call naturally maternal.
She did what she could to support us, so she wasn’t around a lot.
My dad wasn’t around either, but that was for a different reason.
He was locked up when I was pretty young.
He got out for a while, but then was in and out of prison for stuff like parole violations.
Last I heard, he was in again.” I take a sip of the milk before going on.
“He was nice enough the few times I got to hang out with him. We would watch TV together if he was there. I remember he liked the Ninja Turtles. But I hardly know the guy, if I’m being honest.” I sigh.
Maybe I should feel more toward my old man, one way or another, but I don’t.
“My mom tried her best, but motherhood was more than she bargained for. Once I was old enough to be on my own, she seemed relieved to be rid of the burden.”
Shelley listens to me intently, the hot sauce bottle in her hand suspended in mid-air.
“I remember when Danielle gave you that Ninja Turtle last year. I could tell it meant something to you, but I wasn’t sure why. You could never be a burden, Jordan.”
I shrug, not wanting to dwell on unpleasant memories. “That sounds like something the Carvers would say. My high school coach and his wife really stepped up for me.”
“Can you tell me about them?” she asks, setting down the bottle.
“When I met Coach Carver, my mom and I were having a rough go of it. By then my dad was locked up for the long haul. My mom and I bounced around a lot between relatives and subsidized housing. Sometimes Coach would bring clothes to practice and tell me they were hand-me-downs his son had outgrown. He’d ask if I could do him a favor and take them off his hands.
I think the Carvers bought them new for me, though, because everything was always in really good condition, and once or twice the tags were still attached.
They had me over to their house for dinner a lot. ”
“Mrs. Carver is the one who taught you how to cook, right?”
“Yep. I call her Ms. Ruth. And that’s pretty much my entire life story. Now you.” I reach for the medium bottle and put a dab on my next wing.
“You already know my story. You’ve met all the key players. The truth is, when school is in session, I don’t have much of a life outside of it.”
“That makes sense. Law school must be hard.”
“It’s a lot of work,” she admits.
“Understandable. But if we’re really doing tit for tat here, you’re going to need to give me more than ‘law school is work.’ I showed you my frayed edges. Now I get to see a little bit more of yours.”
“You’ve already seen those, and yet you’re still here,” Shelley muses.
“Not all of them. I know you’re still angry with your brother. Can you tell me more of that story? I’ve only heard it from him.”
“Well, Mike’s story is my story, too, in a way. Addiction affects the whole family. We had the whole white picket fence thing down pat, right up until we didn’t. I got dragged along for the ride while my brother did his best to tear the Miller family apart.”
It’s hard to hear her talk about Mike this way. I didn’t know him then, but I see how hard he works now, not only to better himself, but to help other people do the same. But I keep my thoughts to myself and only offer a sympathetic hum.
“I know it wasn’t intentional,” she assures me. “Addiction is a real disease. I shouldn’t complain. My sisters and I always had what we needed.” The way her face pinches tells me she feels guilty about this after what I just shared about my home life.
“It’s okay to complain, Shelley. If it still hurts, it sounds like you didn’t actually have what you needed.”
She lets out a long, slow breath. “My job was to lay low and not cause any trouble. I ran track and got good grades. Tried to stay out of everyone’s way.
It wasn’t hard because no one was paying attention anyway.
When you have a sibling in crisis, all the resources are thrown that way, and you get whatever scraps of attention are left. ”
“So, you were taking care of yourself and your sisters?” I prompt. From what I know of the Millers, it’s hard to imagine there was a time when their parents weren’t doting on all their daughters.