Page 92 of Through the Water

17

Killian

“We have two lives... the life we learn with and the life we live after that. Suffering is what brings us towards happiness.”

-Bernard Malamud, The Natural

I’d been home for all of an hour when someone leaked the details of my record-breaking contract to ESPN. From there, news spread like wildfire to every major outlet in the country. My phone had been ringing off the hook ever since.

During the day, the endless interviews and promotional shoots were enough to keep me from fixating on the way I’d left things with Ari. But at night, I wasn’t as successful.

It had been seven days since I’d held her. A week spent putting one foot in front of the other, inhaling, exhaling, and dealing with the nagging sense that I’d lost something that couldn’t be recovered. Like maybe I hadn’t just left her, but a piece of myself back at True North.

No matter what I did, the hole in my chest refused to scab over, constantly reopening over the smallest things. Just yesterday, someone had gotten onto the elevator in my condo with a puppy, and I swore I could feel the blood gushing down my chest and soaking through my shirt.

Clearly, I wasn’t going to last much longer and, in desperation, had asked Bailey to meet for a drink. As he was now over twenty minutes late, perhaps I hadn’t fully conveyed the severity of my situation.

“Excuse me, are you Killian Reed?” A feminine voice purred in my ear.

I turned toward the blonde with a forced smile, keeping my eyes on her face and not the tits that were dangerously close to falling out of her dress. “Yep.”

“Would you sign this for me?” She slid the napkin in front of me with a pout. “Pretty please? It’s Marissa.”

I scrawled my signature across the napkin and handed it back to her, mustering up enough enthusiasm to drawl, “Here you are, Marissa. Hope to see you at a game.”

Her eyes flashed with lust as she dropped another napkin into my lap. “I hope to see much more of you at my place later.”

“That’s flattering, but I’m good,” I said tightly, handing it back to her with another fake smile. I didn’t need to see it to know she’d given me her phone number. It made the tenth one in the last five minutes.

“I bet you are.” She winked and placed it on the bar in front of me. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

Fuck.

My hand was starting to cramp from all the autographs I’d given. I hadn’t really considered how my contract was going to impact my ability to enjoy a beer in peace. If I had, I would have had Bailey come to my place.

A blast of cold air from the front door announced someone’s arrival. I glanced up at the mirror above the bar, just as Bailey ducked inside.

The weekend crowd parted easily around the third baseman, but it had nothing to do with his size or celebrity. Bailey just had one of those faces. The looks of confusion followed him damn near everywhere he went, with people actively trying to work out how it was they knew him.

A few patrons would assume he was just another regular and go back to their conversations, but others would become convinced they’d seen him in a movie—you know, the one with that guy who gets the girl.

Before the end of the night, some brave soul would likely come up to ask if he was in ‘that Vikings show’ on TV. When it was all said and done, though, only three or four people would leave here tonight, having correctly guessed his identity.

I envied his ability to live in disguise.

“Sorry, I’m late. I didn’t want to come,” Bailey joked as he slid onto the empty barstool beside me. The humor in his eyes fled when he caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. “Christ, Reed. What the fuck happened to you?”

I raised my pint glass, signaling the bartender for another round. “You were right—about all of it.”

He didn’t crack another joke or make some reference to me seeing the light. Instead, Bailey ordered a whiskey and demanded I tell him everything.

“Wow,” he stated once I’d finished, staring down a bottle of absinthe on the back of the bar. “So, you just bailed?”

“What was I supposed to do—stick around when it was obvious I was taking advantage of her injury?”

“Hey, could we get your autograph?”

“Not right now,” I barked at the trio of women lingering behind my bar stool. After offering some very colorful assessments of my anatomy, they stomped back to their table.

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