21. Jake #3
I let out an incredulous laugh, but do exactly what she says. I shed my shirt, grab the bag of hotel ice, and lie on my side on the king-sized bed, propping the phone on a spare pillow.
The screen splits, and suddenly I’m looking at a slick, professional presentation titled: JAKE MCKINNEY: THE IL STRATEGY I reframe.”
Her face appears in a small bubble in the corner. She clicks to the first slide, which features a bulleted list under the heading: THE VALUE OF INTEGRITY.
“Highlight number one: personal integrity. By coming clean about the injury instead of trying to play through it and hurting the team, you are demonstrating long-term asset management and high organizational leadership.”
I let out a loud scoff, staring at the ceiling. “Asset management? Campbell, I’m a baseball player, not a tech startup. The scouts don’t give a shit about my leadership if I can’t throw a guy out at second.”
“They care about your longevity, Jake,” she fires back, her tone shifting to the stubborn woman who stood up to my aunt over a plate of brisket.
“A player who knows his limits and protects his body has a ten-year career. A player who hides a torn bursa because he’s too proud to sit down gets released before his twenty-sixth birthday.
This is part of your brand now. The honest, hard-working, gritty McKinney legacy.
We feed this to the local reporters tomorrow.
‘Jake McKinney prioritizes team success over personal stats.’ It’s a gold mine. ”
I look back at the screen, watching her eyes spark with that rebellious fire that got me in trouble in the first place.
She’s something special when she gets like this.
The sheer absurdity of it—she’s using her multi-thousand-dollar corporate brain to protect my stupid minor-league contract—makes the pulsing ache in my temples subside completely.
“Next slide,” she continues, her voice dropping into a softer, lower register that makes my chest tighten in a completely different way.
“The rehabilitation phase includes daily targeted physical therapy, an optimized nutritional profile, and . . . mandatory nightly massages the second you get back home.”
My eyes lock onto her image on the screen, and her words echo in the quiet hotel room.
Home.
She used the word without thinking, without filtering it through her legal brain or her professional boundaries.
She didn’t say my apartment or Sweetwater.
She said home, like the small, brick-walled studio with the sliding barn door and the socks in the protein tub is an established, undeniable reality for both of us.
I lie there on the bed, the ice pack freezing my skin, staring at her through the lens of the phone.
Campbell stops talking, her fingers freezing over her keyboard as she realizes what she said.
Her cheeks flush a deep, beautiful pink under the glow of her monitor, her bottom lip caught between her teeth as she stares back at me through the camera.
The silence between us stretches over the three hundred miles of highway separating Nashville from Sweetwater, but it’s entirely different from the silence with my father. It’s warm, full, a little electric.
“Home,” I repeat, my voice a whisper.
Campbell swallows hard, her eyes blinking rapidly as she looks at me through the screen. She drops her hands from the keyboard, leaning her chin on her palm, her gaze softening until the PR strategist completely disappears. Now it’s just her.
“We’re each other’s home now, Jake,” she utters quietly, her voice steady but laced with a vulnerability that cuts right through my chest.
My heart hits my ribs, a massive, triumphant thud that has nothing to do with baseball. I look at her beautiful, exhausted face, at the way she’s holding her breath waiting for my response, looking just as terrified as I was on that couch the other night.
“I know,” I say.
We stay like that for a long time, neither of us speaking, just staring at one another through the small glowing rectangles of our phones.
I watch her bite her lip, her blush deepening, her eyes searching mine for the words we aren’t officially allowed to say yet for no other reason than we’re scared shitless.
The words are hanging in the space between us, mighty and true.
I love you.
She doesn’t say it out loud, and neither do I, but it’s there. It’s in the slide deck, in the oversized collection of T-shirts, and in the ice pack on my shoulder.
“Me too, Campbell,” I whisper, answering the silent confession she’s hiding behind her teeth. “Me too.”
A wide, relieved smile breaks across her face, her eyes shining in the dark. She clicks her laptop shut, her face once again taking up all of the real estate on my phone screen as she settles down into her own pillow.
“Go to sleep, McKinney,” she whispers. “You have rehab at eight.”
“Good night, Hines,” I say, closing my eyes as the soothing lull of her voice finally puts the fire in my shoulder to rest.