Page 16 of The Third Baseman

Only one woman would ever change my mind, and it was the one who currently wanted nothing to do with me.

But… I couldn’t deny that after last week, something was officially going on between us, even if it lived solely in the slap she’d delivered, and it meant I actually did know that relationships were hard.

“Tell me about it.”

“You got a girl?” He stopped, his face filled with questions, like this was news he should have known.

“Working on it. But she doesn’t want to know right now.”

Stone’s head fell back with a loud guffaw, and from the way he was looking at me I think he expected me to continue, but that was all I had. I also didn’t want to divulge anything about Marnie until I had an actual plan. I’d seen plenty of players make moves on club staff and have it blow up in their faces. Granted this wasn’t the same type of situation, but I still wasn’t going to talk.

“That’s all I got, sorry.”

“Well, if you need help, you come to me,” he thumbed his chest.

“You just said you were about to break up with your girl,” I scoffed, pushing open the swing doors that led down to the training facility.

I’d played against The Lions plenty in my career, but never thought much of the stadium. Coming from The Dodgers’, it always seemed a bit run down. All that changed, however, when Penn Shepherd took over. Even I didn’t know how he’d managed to make it all happen in the five short months between seasons, but he’d transformed this place into a palace.

For starters, we had two locker rooms – one purely for game day, the one we began and finished each game in, then a second for every day. An everyday locker room – or Locker Room One, as it was known. That was where we were headed now.

The game day one was sleek, but Locker Room One was incredible; like a five-star hotel. Given we spent the majority of our time at the club when we weren’t traveling, the boss made sure we had every comfort imaginable; and a locker room staff ready to serve us however we needed.

Locker Room, however, was slightly redundant, and a little misleading. It was more like a locker suite, spread across five thousand square feet. The entrance hallway we were walking down was lined with fridges, all filled with any approved drink we could want, plus shelves of snacks if we were ever hungry, which was all the time for some of the boys, including my current locker room pal.

Big screen televisions, huge couches for any downtime we were allowed, plus Xbox and PlayStation was neatly tucked away in one corner of the space, along with board games, playing cards, a fully stacked poker table, and bocce ball. On the other side of the playroom was a quiet space, with little bunkbeds if we had time for a nap.

And I hadn’t yet asked, but I swear it had its own smell; calming like massage oil, but not the stinging, painful massage kind. More like the kind you got on vacation.

It was clever, too. We were a brand-new team, coming together almost like an expansion, and this place was designed for us to socialize, get to know each other on a personal level, become buddies.

Doors off the locker room lead to the team dining room, the gym, the pool, the rehab and conditioning suites, the executives’ floor, and the only place in the entire complex I remotely cared about – Marnie’s office.

I’d walked past it more times than I wanted to admit over the last month as I waited for her to arrive.

Fuck. What was I going to do?

Sometimes it felt like my chest was about to cave in, I was so desperate to see her again. I’d even settle to just be in the same room in silence, but right now, it felt like she was behind a massive brick wall that I couldn’t punch my way through.

I opened my locker, the one with my name on it, and threw my bag inside. Pulling my hoodie over my head, I fished around my pockets for my earbuds then shucked out of my track pants. “Fields, you working out first?”

He sat in front of his locker, pondering my question with a long stroke of his thick beard. “Yeah, I guess I can wait a bit longer for hash browns. I can even have an extra one if I burn it off first.”

“Great, move your ass then.” I waved over my shoulder as I headed out.

A little over an hour later, after a gentle six-mile run, some conditioning exercises, and a scalding shower, I sat down opposite Stone, and watched while he inhaled two of his beloved hash browns in less than thirty seconds.

I wasn’t even sure he chewed them.

“You’re going to give yourself a hernia if you eat any quicker – or at the very least, a nasty case of heartburn.”

“I have to eat them like this.” He took note of my raised eyebrow and continued, “If I eat them quickly, I can pretend I didn’t eat them at all; that I did, in fact, stick to my nutritionist approved breakfast.”

You had to admire the logic.

“Right, but all the food here is nutritionist approved.” I pointed my fork toward his mouth. “It’s not like they came from Mickey-D’s. I think they’re made with sweet potato.”

His giant shoulder heaved upwards. “Same diff. I need to shed fifteen pounds this season, but I can’t quit the browns.”

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