Page 68 of Nothing Like the Movies

He was looking at me as he said it, and I wasn’t sure why it felt like something was hovering between us.

“Okay,” I said abruptly, inhaling through my nose and looking down at Lilith’s notes. “Are we ready?”

Clark hit record on both cameras. “Ready.”

I cleared my throat and said, “Start off by telling me some of the things that made you fall in love with baseball as a kid.”

His eyebrows furrowed together, like he didn’t understand the question, and for a second I wondered if I’d asked it wrong somehow.

God, I don’t want to screw this up.I was so worried Lilith was going to watch the interview and regret sending me. My eyes were frozen on Wes, my brain begging him to give more than a two-word answer.

“Uh… it was easy for me, I guess,” he said, seeming relieved that the first question wasn’t more difficult. He looked into the stationary camera, not at me, when he said, “Hitting the ball was fun, catching the ball was fun, and it felt like I’d always been doing it. I’d go out and swing the bat at my Little League games, not really even trying that hard, and the people in the stands would go crazy because I crushed the ball every time I was up. But it just happened for me, you know? I fell in love because I was doing what everyone else was doing—having fun trying to hit the ball—but for me, it was as natural as breathing.”

Thank you for giving a good answer,I thought, relief spilling through me as I nodded. I could still remember the way he’d run around the neighborhood like he owned it, always laughing. It seemed like life had come easily for him back then.

“So how did those specific things push you to get where you were?” I continued, looking down at the paper as I read Lilith’s question. “Coming out of high school with nearly every school in the country taking their shot at you?”

I could still remember the first time I learned he was that good. We were in the Secret Area, before we ever dated, and he offhandedly mentioned that he wasn’t sure which school’s offer he was going to take.

Was that the night we smoked Swishers together?

He made a noise in the back of his throat, like a sarcastic laugh, and said, “It was all my dad. He pushed me to not just be satisfied with what came easy, but to chase what was hard.”

“And what was hard?” I asked, mostly because Lilith hadmentioned multiple times that I should follow his responses and not just stick to her questions.

“Pitching,” he said without a second of consideration. “He pushed me to pitch, pushed me to learn more pitches, pushed me to throw more pitches, pushed me to attend every pitching clinic on our side of the country—he was the driving force that led to it all.”

If I hadn’t known his dad, this would’ve seemed like a sweet father/son sports story. But I remembered how hard his dad had pushed, and I knew how much that pressure had weighed down on Wes when he started at UCLA.

“So it must’ve been huge when you got the offer to come here,” I said. “To play for one of the best baseball schools in the country.”

“We were pretty pumped, especially after I tore out my shoulder.” He nodded and started talking about his senior season, but I got temporarily distracted by his mouth. By his entire face, actually. It was an interesting situation to be sitting across from your ex and allowed to stare at the details of them.

Wes had changed, but it was impossible to put my finger on a specific thing.

He’d just become the man version of the boy that he’d been. It was like everything had been photoshopped to be slightly bigger, slightly harder.

“So we were definitely thrilled with the offer,” he finished, his eyes still on the stationary camera.

“I bet.” I looked back down at Lilith’s questions and wanted to do just about anything other than ask the next one. I was tryingmy hardest to listen to his story like he was a stranger who I knew nothing about, but the next question—and his answer—was going to ruin that.

There was no way it couldn’t.

I kept my eyes on the paper, my pulse pounding in my ears as I asked, “When you initially got to UCLA the first time, walk me through some of the feelings early on—especially those first few days.”

As the words left my mouth, my brain played an unwelcome montage of our road trip out to California. The world had been ours as we’d laughed through the mountains and kissed through the desert, and neither one of us would’ve ever guessed how close we were to the end.

Wes made that noise again, the one that sounded like I was asking him about something ridiculous. He looked down at his hands and said, “I mean, it was everything an eighteen-year-old baseball player dreams about. I was at this big-time campus and everyone was treating me like I was the man. It was exciting and it felt like I was on top of the world with a shiny new life. It was literal perfection, every single piece of it.”

It was, I thought, remembering the day we moved Wes into his dorm. There were baseball players all over the place, laughing and trash-talking, and I don’t think either of us stopped smiling the entire afternoon. We walked to In-N-Out for lunch and lost our minds over how cool LA was, over the surreal amazingness that we were both there, together.

Itwasliteral perfection.

For two weeks.

“I mean, there was baseball hell week, and I kept getting lost on campus,” he said with a little smirk, and it felt like I couldn’t breathe as I remembered teasing him about his terrible sense of direction.

It kind of felt like yesterday.

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