Page 117 of Wild Catch
“Excuse me,” I whisper, squeezing my arms between people and trying to make way as gently as I can. “Sorry about that. Coming through. Careful with that arm—excuse me.”
Shockingly, they do let me through. I make my way into the clubhouse and the scene there is not at all what I expect.
Rather than angry men still raring for a fight, there’s an eerie silence around the whole team, coaching staff, and support. They all stand in an odd kind of circle around something.
I find the nearest player, Mike Brown, our third baseman. “Mike, what’s happening?” I ask in as low a voice as I can muster.
He does a double take that ends with his eyebrows twisting in worry. “It’s Kim. He collapsed.”
The air leaves my lungs.
My limbs turn to ice and I can’t move them.
“B-But I—I saw him w-walk, he—he—” My teeth chitter like I’m naked in sub zero temperature.
Mike presses his lips together and shakes his head.
I claw at his arm. “What the hell does that mean? So help me if?—”
“No, no. I think he’s going to be okay, it’s just… I’m debating whether it’s best if you don’t see him.”
“Take me to him.Now,” I order through gritted teeth.
Finally, Mike nods and grabs my arm. He parts the crowd, towing me to the front before letting me go.
As he steps away, I can finally see what he was debating whether to hide or not.
Logan sits on the floor, his knees up and face buried between them. His arms are braced so tight around his legs that he’s probably cutting off blood flow. His shoulders rise and fall too fast for his breathing to be any healthy.
“Slower, man,” Miguel instructs, kneeling right next to Logan with a hand on his shoulder. “That’s it. In through your nose, out through your mouth.”
“Wh—What is happening?” my voice is a trembly squeak.
“Panic attack,” Lucky responds, his face a solemn mask.
I gasp softly, my eyes returning to the hunched over figure of the larger-than-life man who leads this team, who is capable of jumping into action in the most unbelievable circumstances, who has saved my life, defended me, teased me, annoyed me, kissed me. The man who walks through life with his head held high every day.
And right now it’s bowed to whatever monster Ben Williams unleashed in his mind.
“Logan,” I sob his name. I crash on my knees before him, not really knowing what to do but doing something. I meet Miguel’s eyes with my desperate ones. “What can I do?”
“Touch him. Talk to him. Whatever it takes to ground him,” he says.
I slide to the opposite side, stretching my arm around Logan’s back to rub circles on it, and bury my face in the space between his arm and face. “Logan,” I whisper into his ear. “Come back to us, babe. Come back to me.”
His breath hitches and I wait, but no other reaction comes. I set my other arm over his, holding his knees up, and start whispering nonsense about how good he smells, about my knees smarting, about the fact that he most likely broke Ben’s nose, and that I must be a savage because I liked that. Miguel murmurs more encouragements for breathing deeper and it almost seems to be working.
Until suddenly, Logan starts tilting—toward me. His arms slacken and he melts against me. I brace myself as his weight threatens to topple me over, but then suddenly someone is behind me.
“I got you,” Hope says in my ear, holding me from behind.
Logan fully collapses against me, unconscious. My heart beats like a rabbit as I try to shield him from all the attention, guiding his face against my neck. “Um, doctor?” I ask.
“We got him,” the head of the medical team says at last. He takes Miguel’s place and approaches with an oxygen mask.
I recognize that it means I’ll have to let Logan go. Squeezing my arms around him one last time, I let the doctor and his team take him from me.
It takes four grown men to drag an unconscious Logan Kim on a stretcher. They pause to slide an oxygen mask around his head and I don’t know—I don’t know. It strikes me as too drastic.
