Page 44 of Most Likely to Match
His cheeks turn pink. “I thought that’s what baseball people called it,” he mumbles.
I laugh behind my hand.
“Shut up.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
He rolls his eyes, but a smile tugs at the corners of his mouth. “Listen, do you want to know why I’m asking you about baseball or not?”
I hold out my hands like I’m rolling out a red carpet for him. “By all means, please continue to tell me about ball.”
Dean scratches his eyebrow with his middle finger. “What are you doing on Saturday?”
I don’t even have to look at my calendar because I know it says Long Run from nine a.m. to noon and then a whole lot of nothing. “Not much.”
“Remember my friends Ricky and Matty?”
“Yeah,” I say slowly. Though remember is a strong word. I know he had friends named Ricky and Matty and I know they all loved skateboarding. If I was given a photo line-up of Ricky and Matty at age seventeen, I am 85 percent confident I could pick them out. If that’s knowing, then, sure, I know them. And that’s pretty embarrassing. Our high school was large for a Canadian suburb. Over two thousand kids funneled from across one of the largest municipalities in the GTA; I couldn’t knoweveryonewe went to school with, but could Ihave paid a bit more attention to my high school secret friends with benefits’ best friends?
Probably.
“They’re both in town, and their wives were supposed to come with them, but now there’s some sort of girls’ trip happening, too,” he says, sounding vaguely confused about the concept. “But they had four tickets to theballgame, and now they need two butts to fill their seats.”
I stand up, the chair rolling behind me in a rush. “Are you asking me to go to a baseball game with you?” I ask, my stomach aflutter with anticipation for hot dogs and beer, my skin pre-tightening from the upcoming sun damage.
“Well…” He runs his hands through his hair, though when it flops back into his eyes, he does nothing to stop it. “With Ricky and Matty, too.”
“Yes.”
“Are you su —”
“Yes,” I say again, my voice echoing, and Dean laughs.
“Well, all right. I’ll let them know we’re in.”
8
CHLOE
Instead of using my early morning three-hour run to barely put a dent in my sixty-plus hour audiobook about the history of New York City, I raw dogged it, as Jasmine’s little sister, Jade, would say. Running is automatic, one foot in front of the other. “Controlled falling,” according to numerous running influencers. But my nerves and excitement for the day made concentration especially important.
The last thing I want to do is show up to the ball game with a crutch and scuffed knees because I was too distracted practicing conversation with Ricky and Matty to know where to put my feet.
Luckily, it works. I make it to the stadium with no open wounds or plaster casts, already decked out in my favorite denim shorts, my prized José Bautista jersey, a ball cap that’s so bleached from the sun its color probably couldn’t be called blue anymore, and my glove, the one I only use for the occasion of visiting the ballpark, stuffed into my bag.
I never bothered to ask Dean where our seats are since we could be sitting at the top of the 540s with the dome closed, and I’d still be there with my glove and a beer, ready to scream my voice hoarse. But when his text said to meet them at Gate 9A, I got pretty excited.
Surprisingly, it’s Matty I recognize first. He’s still as tall as he was in high school, which is to say, taller than almost everyone around him. He’s white and blond, and he’s filled out a little bit, but even with the trimmed facial hair— a feature I’m positive he did not enjoy as a teenager— he looks exactly the same.
Ricky is shorter than Matty but taller than Dean. He’s Filipino-Canadian, with black hair and tan skin and more visible tattoos than I was expecting for a boy who fully embraced the preppy style as a kid.
Neither of them is in the team’s paraphernalia and, of course, Dean isn’t; he’s wearing a vintage print tee of Van Gogh’sStarry Night, cut a bit higher than his hips, with old chinos and a camera around his neck.
All three turn as I approach, Dean smiling, but Matty turning slightly away and Ricky saying something over his shoulder to him. They don’t look displeased to see me, but I wouldn’t call them enthusiastic, either.
“Hey.” I wave my hand in an awkward arc in front of me. Dean leans in for a hug that I think for a moment might be a kiss, but no, it’s most definitely a hug. Ricky waves to me by keeping his hand stuffed in his pocket, freeing only his pinkie to middle finger to gesture at me with a tight-lipped smile.
“’Sup,” Matty says, using his height to his full advantage and looking over the top of my head, then directly at me. Any preplanned conversations, likehow’d you met your wife?orwhat do you do for work?, are flimsy in the face of this level of animosity.
