Page 50 of Nothing Like the Movies

I’d been a foolish, silly-hearted little love lover back then.

But now I am not.

My brain hit reset when I showered, thank God, and I spent the rest of the day focused on my classes. I had two tests—aced one and struggled with the other—before lunch, and then a guest speaker in my last lecture gave me a hand cramp from all the copious note-taking.

By the time Clark pulled up so we could go to Jackie, I was exhausted.

My phone buzzed.

Lilith: Can you post another Reel today?

I got into the truck and replied:After practice?

She texted back:That’s perfect. It’s been a couple days, and with the exhibition game around the corner, we need to be pushing out a lot more.

I shot off a quickof course, thrilled that she trusted me to post content without running it past her first. I was excited about that as we drove toward the field, and when “Supermassive Black Hole” came up on Clark’s playlist, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

I loved Muse—especially theResistancealbum—but it was impossible for me not to picture theTwilightbaseball scene when that song was playing.

Which cracked my brain wide open when we got to Jackie and the team was already on the field, practicing.

I swapped equipment with Clark because I needed a lot of hitting and running footage, which would be perfect to set with the song and do a spin-off take of the iconic (in my opinion) vampire baseball scene.

So he was taking stills, and I was on video.

And honestly, it was clicking so well, and I was so into it, that I didn’t even notice Wes.

I dove in the second we got there, thrumming with the buzz of freshly sparked creativity. I focused first on hitting drills, getting as many long-ball shots as I could from every batter. After that, I switched to base running, really zooming in to capture the snap of the ball as it landed in the glove.

It wasn’t until I decided to get pitching shots, really wanting the long extensions that accompanied the release of the ball, that I actually noticed Wes.

Of course, he was on the mound, so he didn’t even know I was there.

He’d always been hyperfocused when it came to baseball. His entire demeanor changed when he jogged out of the bullpen, the easygoing attitude replaced with an intensity that burned white-hot in the darkness of his brown eyes. Like a match had been tossed directly into the fuel of his passion.

That jarring contradiction, the crackling electrical undercurrent juxtaposed over his quick-to-laugh carelessness, was a powerful thing to behold.

He was that way—zero-to-one-hundred intensity—with acouple other things as well, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to let my mind wander in that direction.

Ahem.

Focus, Liz.

Film, Liz.

And film I did.

The more I filmed, the more I noticed the tiny details.

Like the way he still flipped the ball and trailed the seam with two fingers before every throw. And the way he still squeezed the ball and took a big, deep breath before every pitch.

Something about those things felt romantic, the ritual and habit of his hands on the ball. It was almost as if his fingertips and those stitches were a comfortable old couple, intimately familiar with every inch of each other after a lifetime of shared touches.

I need to get some up-close shots of his hands on the ball.

I kept filming.

And God—he was an artist with the ball.

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