Page 16 of Hot Shot

I could sleep for a fucking year, curl up right here on the bench and wake up with a full beard like Rip Van Winkle. At the station last night, I didn’t sleep for shit after the call at Cass’s house, unable to get her off my mind. Once the crew was asleep and I had a little privacy, I couldn’t get her out of myotherbrain either, despite my best and most valiant efforts.

By the time my alarm went off at six, I don’t think I’d managed much more than a couple of solid dozes. When my shift ended at seven, I went straight back over to her place to clean up, then to practice, and now here. I’m not worth a damn.

At least we aren’t losing.

My mouth stretches in another yawn, my eyelids blinking slow. Surely it’d be fine if I close them for just a second. Couldn’t hurt.

Cass is on my mind still, running me in circles. The sight of her in that pink sundress today is driving me wild, the top all ruffly and cinched up like a milk maid, the fabric cradling her tits in a way that oughta be illegal. The way I want her certainly is. Pretty sure I’d get arrested in at least two states if she’d let me do what I want to her.

You know, when I was at Auburn and she was half a world away at Oxford, I missed her like a limb, but everybody said that was normal. At eighteen, your life experiences are laid out in front of you, waiting to happen. Like heartache, which I had in spades. First love, I’d already done, hence the heartache. But that’s life, right? It didn’t work out, but I got to love her while I could.

That was the kind of bullshit I told myself to convince my heart that I was fine.Just fine.

There was nothing to do but move on.

Move on. That’s what I called throwing myself into baseball with a level of obsession I’d never experienced. In my free time, I did what every star pitcher at one of the most prestigious colleges in the country did—I fucked around. Date? Nah, no time. But I often had a night. Maybe two. Never more.

Anybody could see I’d moved on. It wasn’t that I couldn’t find a girl who made me feel like she did. Made me laugh like she could. Made me hope and dream and wish. I was just busy. I was good. Unaffected.Fine.I was unserious about girls because I wasn’t ready to settle down, that’s all.

When I graduated and was drafted to the Dodgers, it was the same old line. A pretty girl on my arm for awards nights and banquets, never the same one twice. There was never a shortage. But I was never satisfied.And that’s okay,I told myself. I was young. It didn’t matter. Someday, I’d find somebody who affected me like she did.

I thought she just set the bar high.

Turns out, no one could clear it but her.

Maybe my denial back then was becauseshemoved on. She had a rich as fuck boyfriend, and she was happy, Remy said. I figured our relationship must not have meant to her what it meant to me. We were just kids, after all. We grew up.

Moved on.

It wasfine.

When I tore my rotator cuff, the devastation was absolute. For the first time, I felt her absence like a physical thing, the truth of my feelings for her laid bare by my pain. There was no one I wanted at my bedside, save her. Not that I could have told her that. Not that I could’ve even fully admitted it to myself. When I was all healed up and we learned I couldn’t pitch over eighty-five, my career was over, and I wished she’d been there too.

But whatever. No big deal. Peachy keen, jelly bean.

When I moved back to Roseville afterward, I missed her with a deep ache, like a part of me had been scooped out and left hollow. It’d always been that way, I think, but I didn’t know until I was back here and she wasn’t. I’d never been here without her, and I fucking hated it. But I told myself I was just being sentimental. I even dated around to prove it, becauseit didn’t matter.I wasn’t supposed to settle down yet. Nobody else had.

And then Cass came home for her wedding.

The moment I saw her for the first time after all these years, I learned with the certainty of a freight train to the chest that I was absolutelynotfine and never had been. There was nothing left on the tracks but guts.

All those years, I wasn’t just young and sewing my oats.

I was waiting for her.

I still marvel over how blind I was to the fact that part of my heart had been unknowingly, eternally locked up because it was hers, the padlock welded shut the second we saidI do. Before that, even…long before I had the words or the experience to understand the feeling. I was kidding myself to think that anybody else in the big, wide world could have gotten through it. Imagine my surprise when a couple days after she hit town, my wife smiled at me from across Main Street, and that padlockedmotherfucker flew open like a jack-in-the-box. I haven’t been on a date or hooked up with anybody since.

Scared the shit out of me.

My wife.

Gooseflesh breaks out across my arms even in the dead heat of the dugout.

Never have I wanted anything so fucking bad as I want her. Not in my whole entire life. In the dead of night, I decided to say yes to any opportunities that present themselves with her, whether it be telling her we’re married, or kissing her or…whatever. I’ll figure out how to tell her the secret. It’ll work itself out. I’ll just put it in the hands of the divine, since they’ve taken such good care of me so far. They dropped her in my lap after all this time, and not even God himself can convince me to ignore the gift.

That gift is mine, and I’m making my move.

My head lolls, and I jerk awake with a sharp inhale.

---