Page 40 of The Art of Catching Feelings

And there it was. A moment that he could watch happen in front of his eyes, and still feel in his body as though he were right back there on that field. That Chris hadn’t known he would lose his brother months later, hadn’t held a single molecule of fear. That Chris had lived in a completely different world, one that was captured there on that little screen for posterity, one that he could never go back to.

She was watching him watch himself, and for a moment therewas such compassion in her brown eyes that he almost thought sheknew. But that was impossible. He was just paranoid, after that weird meeting with his agent only hours before.

“Did you need something?” she asked softly, almost tentatively, like the room had come under a spell and she was afraid to break it. It felt like it had.

Hehadsought her out for a reason, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.

“Uh,” he said, scrambling to think. “Just that I wanted to let you know that I’m available.”

Her eyes widened a little, and he realized what that had sounded like. That conversation with his agent must’vereallyfucked with his head.

“I mean for another interview, if you needed one,” he hastened to add. “Or to give you background on matchups, tips on how to approach some of the guys…whatever would be helpful.”

On the screen, Last Year Chris was standing with Layla, his face covered in a sheen of sweat, still a little out of breath not from the home run but from the celebration afterward. Layla was turning to him and asking him if he knew when he saw that pitch that he was going to send it to the cheap seats, and he was grinning and starting to say something aboutI had a pretty good idea, because…

He’d been the one to tell her to go ahead and play the footage, but suddenly he didn’t want to be in the same room as Last Year Chris anymore.

“So, yeah,” he said, slapping the doorframe with the flat of his hand. “Let me know.”

He turned to head back down the hallway, but then one last impulse had him turning back around.

“Oh, and one more thing,” he said.

She still looked slightly shell-shocked. “Yeah?”

“What’s your name? Sorry, I didn’t catch it.”

He could’ve asked around—someonehad to know. Marv or other players who’d already talked to her at yesterday’s game. Greg, the executive producer, if he could stomach the interaction. But for whatever reason he wanted to hear it directly from her.

“Daphne,” she said finally, lifting her gaze to his.

“Daphne,” he repeated. It was a pretty name. It suited her. “Nice to meet you. I’m Chris.”

SEVENTEEN

It was almost a full week before Daphne had any chance to take Chris up on his offer. The days passed in a blur of prep work with Layla, more prep with the rest of the broadcast team, getting used to where to stand and how to dress and what to say. The Battery were playing a relatively uneventful afternoon game against the Rangers, and Chris was up to bat. Daphne paused in looking over her notes just because she always tried to catch his at-bats. If she could.

She still had to glance up at the scoreboard sometimes to confirm how many balls and strikes had been called, but at least she knew what to look for now. She was just glancing back to Chris when she saw the ball fly out of the pitcher’s hand and hit Chris squarely in the side of the ribs.

He was on the ground so fast she barely had time to think about what she was doing. All she knew was that he wasn’t getting up right away, and she couldn’t stand to see him like that, clutching his side, twisting his body as he braced one leg against the dirt. She was halfway to home plate when she felt the cameraman’s touch at the back of her elbow.

“If they want you to do an injury report, they’ll tell you,” he said. “For now, let the medical staff take a look.”

“Right,” she said. “I was just—”

But she realized there wasn’t any explanation that would make more sense than the conclusion the cameraman had already jumped to, so she stopped herself before she made it worse. She watched as Chris got up under his own power—which she took as a good sign—and disappeared into the clubhouse for some imaging. It was another full inning before she got the report in her earpiece that he was fine, that he’d been pulled from the game as a precaution but was expected to be cleared to travel to Pittsburgh with the rest of the team. She hoped she delivered the news in a calm, matter-of-fact manner, but she supposed Layla would tell her later when she gave Daphne the rundown of her performance.

Of course, Chris coming out of the game had the side effect of putting him in the dugout for the rest of it, just watching. He spent some time leaning against the rail with a couple of the pitchers, but then eventually she looked up and saw that he’d taken a spot at the corner nearest the photographer’s well where she normally stood. If she took two steps backward, his sleeve would brush her arm.

She leaned back a little. “Everything okay?”

He looked at her for a second, almost like he’d completely forgotten that only forty-five minutes before, he’d been hit by a baseball traveling over a hundred miles an hour.

“Your—” She made an awkward gesture toward her own rib area, and his gaze dropped for just a moment to where her hand lingered, then slid back up over her chest, her throat, her mouth, before landing somewhere near her ear.

A muscle in his jaw ticked. “Yeah,” he said. “Just a bruise.”

“It looked bad.”

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