Page 73 of Wait For It

I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Six weeks ago, I was being carted off the field, convinced my career was over. Now, I had multiple offers to play damn near anywhere in the country. Life might have thrown me a curveball, but I’d still managed to crush it.

They still wanted me.

She wanted me.

I was on cloud nine.

Theo fidgeted with his eighteen karat gold baseball cufflinks; no doubt worn just for the occasion. “Tick tock, Reed. Let’s accept one of these, put some ink to paper, and get you the hell back in a uniform.”

“Now, wait a minute. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did you not say I’d have an offer before the end of the season? Hate to break it to you, but you missed your deadline.” I bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep a straight face.

His grin shifted from confident to irritated as he retrieved the papers from the table. “While you’ve been rehabbing, I’ve been guaranteeing your future on the field. You wanted offers. You’ve got offers. You don’t want offers, then don’t fucking call me to say you do.”

I dropped my hand onto the stack, sliding it back toward me. “Oh, I want all the offers.”

And then it hit me. There was one franchise missing from the list—Houston. Frankly, no one in their right mind had expected the team to make another offer after I’d rejected their first.

Well, no one except me.

Crazy: party of one.

Houston was my home. I’d built a life around cobalt blue and white—colors I’d hoped to be wearing until I took my last run around the bases. How was I supposed to make a choice when it would mean leaving the city I loved behind?

Not to mention Ari.

Christ, Ari.

I couldn’t ask her to uproot her entire life after just one kiss. Granted, it had been the best kiss of my life, but moving across the country together was not taking it slow. It was a recipe for disaster.

So, maybe we’d live in different cities, but with my parents and Bailey still around, it wasn’t as if I was leaving Houston forever. And whatever this was between us, it was still in the early stages.

Delicate.

I’d committed to doing right by Ari. Asking her to give up her life to follow me to a new city went against that. She had her own dreams—maybe even a musical career here in Houston. If I wanted it to last, then I was going to have to play the long game and take things slow.

We were living in an age of technology—I could video chat her every day if I wanted to—and when I was in town, we’d be together. Plus, if I kept my condo, we wouldn’t have to worry about roommates either.

This was a good thing.

Only, I couldn’t stand leaving her room at night. How in the hell was I supposed to manage living in another state?

“Is there a problem, Killian?” Theo broke into my thoughts. “You haven’t looked at a single one of those pages.”

“Sorry, got lost there for a second,” I mumbled distractedly before flipping through the stack.

As far as offers went, they were about what I expected, given my injury. They all came with an unspoken caveat in the form of options—optional assignment down in the minors, option to be placed on waivers, option to be released.

Clubs just weren’t willing to take a risk on a long-term, high salary contract without knowing how I was going to return next spring.

Philly and Anaheim were both offering a three-year contract at two hundred seventy-five million. Boston and DC had come in with a seven-year contract at three hundred while Tampa and Chicago had gone with an underwhelming three years at one hundred fifty.

Frankly, I wasn’t surprised.

Under normal circumstances, the two clubs wouldn’t have approached me at all, but my injury had leveled the playing field. Now, they were all banking on me being desperate enough to agree to their bargain-basement pricing. If I came back better than before, then it was a steal. On the off chance I didn’t—well, the cost wouldn’t sink their franchise.

It seemed I’d been stripped of my crown, my achievements and records reduced to a mere byline in the history of the game.

I wasn’t baseball royalty anymore.

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