Page 183 of Scoring the Player
His eyes crack open when I don’t respond.
“Hey.” I try for calm, but my throat’s too tight.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
I shuffle to sit up. “I’m sure it’s nothing but, you, uhm…” I take a deep breath to steady my voice. “You and your coach from college. I saw him on the bench at one of your games. Have you two, uh, dated?”
He blinks rapidly. “Wh-what?”
For all that he tries to hide, his face conceals very little.
Huh.“You’re seeing us both?”
“What? No.” He sits up. “’Cause he joined my team?”
I unlock my phone and pass it to him.
He scrolls up to the headline, and his eyes narrow. “This isn’t true.” He thumbs through the article. “I’m not into him like that.”
“Were you ever?”
He stills. “This isn’t true.”
“Answer the question.”
He blows out a breath. I see the wheels spinning as he averts his gaze to the curtained window.
“We were close back in college. Nothing happened, though. I was messed up back then, and…” He crosses his arms over his chest. “I did try to make a move, but he…” He shakes his head. “Nothing happened.”
“Okay—”
“Hold on. Let me finish. I got drafted a few weeks later, and I put it behind me. But then he showed up.”
“To the Royals?”
He nods. “I didn’t think I’d see him again, and there he was. It messed me up.”
The low-scoring games, the tired eyes…It’s all snapping into place.
The damn-near ghosting me.
The spasms in my gut intensify. “Because you’re still in love with him?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I’m not.”
“Then what about him returning messed you up?”
“The practice after he joined the team, he, uh, told me he felt the same for me back then.”
A sharp chill spreads across my back. “Why would he tell you that all these years later?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, and I honestly don’t care.”
“Just like that?”
He squints. “What do you mean?”
“I’m missing something. You went from being ‘messed up’ to being plastered together yesterday. How?”
