Color flooded her face. Ha—something must have finally happened with her and the shortstop. Dwight glanced over at Maggie and caught her smothering a laugh.
“Well, well,” he said.
“What?” Nina batted her eyelashes over those big blue eyes of hers.
“I was right about you two. You finally have something going on. About time.”
“Don’t be silly,” she sniffed. “He’s in San Diego.”
A sharp pang hit him at the mention of Lieberman’s suddenly bright future. That was him, a mere week ago. How quickly things changed.
Then he glanced over at Maggie. Two weeks ago, he hadn’t even known her. Now she was looking at him with an expression that promised all sorts of magic. Sometimes, change was good.
He turned back to Nina. “Honey, if you think Jim Lieberman is going to let a little thing like the time-space vortex get in his way, you don’t know that dude. How many times has he texted you since he left Kilby?”
Nina pointedly brought her bottle of beer to her lips and refused to answer his question.
Message received. Trevor’s little sister was all grown up and he should mind his own business.
10
The next day, Dwight showed up at Maggie and Nina’s apartment with a bag of muffins from a local bakery. Nina was still shut up in her room, although Maggie caught the murmur of a phone call. Ever since Lieberman had left for San Diego, they’d been FaceTiming and Skyping and chatting on the phone at all hours of the day and night.
Maggie had dressed extra carefully for this excursion. She wore a sleeveless pink top that showed just the tiniest bit of her tummy and a pair of hip-hugger shorts that ended just above her knees. Clothes weren’t generally her area of expertise, but Dwight always dressed so well. Not in a flashy way, but he had an easy, casual style that just somehow always worked.
Her efforts paid off when she let him into the apartment. Appreciation gleamed in his eyes and tugged up one corner of his mouth. He wore baggy dark denim shorts and an open-collared shirt in a shade of purple few men would attempt.
She set a few muffins on the kitchen counter for Nina. “Let’s eat these on the way. I don’t want to be late.”
“Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?”
“You’ll see. It’s sort of like a pep talk.” She smiled at him, happy to see the shadows from last night gone from his face. “Are you feeling better?”
“I am now.” He grinned back, and a sense of mutual delight hummed between them. “Let me ask you something before we go.”
She slipped on her sunglasses and looked around for her shoulder bag.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
Her head whipped around in surprise. “What? Why? No. I don’t. Why?”
“Because I like you. But I don’t want to like you too much if you’re involved with someone.”
She felt heat rise in her face. “Are you always this direct?”
“Yes, ma’am.” He cocked his head at her. “Are you always this easily embarrassed?”
Now her cheeks were positively burning. “Probably. And no, I don’t have a boyfriend.”
He held out his hand. “Come on. Let’s get outside before you set this place on fire with that blush.”
But when she took his hand, she decided that contact would be more likely to set the place on fire than her blush. Prickles of awareness ran up her arm and skittered right to her nipples.
They walked to his car. “What about you, do you have a girlfriend?”
“That would be pretty low if I did, coming over here to take you out.”
“But this isn’t …” She hadn’t been thinking of it as a date—or had she? She’d certainly put plenty of thought into her outfit.
“I’m single, you’re single, I like you…I guess the ball’s in your court. It’s a date if you want it to be.” He opened the passenger door of his Audi with a flourish. “If you don’t, that’s cool. I’ll try again some other time. Unless you say drop it, dude. Then I’ll wait a little longer.”
His smile flashed bright in his dark face, completely irresistible. “It’s a date, then. But it’s probably not the kind of date you usually go on.” She slid into the passenger seat. He closed the door and loped around to the other side.
“What kind of date do you think I usually go on?” he asked as he started the Audi.
She squinted at him. “Dancing, maybe? Parties with lots of supermodels. Clubs with laser-light shows.”
The rich sound of his laughter filled the car. “Okay, you got me. I’ve been to a few of those. I am a ballplayer, after all. But that’s not my favorite kind of date. I like to play it out of the box. Like, there’s a performance tonight at the Kilby Playhouse that sounds good. As You Like It, one of my favorite plays. Would you like to go with me?”
“I would.” A tingling anticipation filled her. “I guess it’s another date then.”
“Two dates in one day. I like the pace we’re setting here.” He winked at her. “Okay, where are we headed for date number one?”
“The hospital.”
She took him right to the Children’s Wing, to a teenage support group she’d visited over the past few days. Having spent so much time in hospitals as a kid, she made it a point to volunteer as an adult. Dwight hesitated when she ushered him into the solarium, which was filled with kids lounging on couches and folding chairs.
“They don’t want me,” he whispered. “I just face-planted on national TV.”
“They do want you,” she told him firmly. To prove it, she introduced him to the facilitator of the group, Michelle, a wonderful social worker she’d gotten to know. An older black woman, Michelle gave him a hug then pulled him to the center of the room.
“Kids, this is Dwight Conner. Remember how we were talking about him yesterday?”
The teenagers nodded and mumbled a chorus of “yeses.”
“Who wants to tell him what we were saying? What we wanted to say to him?”
A girl with a shaved head spoke. “That it’s okay to suck sometimes.”
Michelle laughed. “That pretty much says it. What else?”
“Don’t let it keep you down,” a boy in a wheelchair added. “It’s gonna get you down. But it don’t have to keep you down.”
“Right. Bad things happen, we all know that. What matters is what you do next.” She turned to Dwight, whose jaw was flexing with some kind of emotion. “They watched your interview after the last game,” she explained. “They thought it was very classy. They were inspired by you. Well done, child.”
Dwight’s mouth twisted in a kind of wince. Maybe he didn’t want to be known for his failure. But that was the whole point—he didn’t have to see it as failure.
“Anything you want to say to these kids?” Michelle prompted him.
“Sure.” His throat worked for a moment, and Maggie fought the urge to take his hand. Dwight was the most outwardly expressive man she’d ever known. Watching him struggle to speak through his obvious emotion made her heart swell.
“Here’s the thing about baseball,” he finally said. “The best player in the game fails over half the time. Strikes out, flies out, ends up on their ass in the dirt, what have you.” That reference to one of his disasters made the kids laugh. “It’s a humbling thing, because it sucks to strike out. But you figure, every single baseball player, even the greats, the legends, they all have one thing in common. They failed more than half the time. So what does that tell you?”
The kids were listening with full attention, even those with earbuds dangling around their necks.
“It means that Dwight Conner is more than a record bad start. Dwight Conner is more than that one time a fly ball bounced off my head.” He pointed to the boy in the wheelchair. “You are more than your wheelchair, even though that’s one of the slickest I’ve seen. You are more than your cast. All of you are more than this time in your life that you’re going through right now. Not to say it doesn’t matter. It still ma
tters. Because why?”
The kids were now sitting straight upright, totally energized by his passionate presentation. Chills went up and down Maggie’s arms as she listened.
“Because we’re going to take these bad times and they’re going to make us stronger and wiser. Because we, all of us here, know something important. Something not everyone gets. Anyone want to finish that thought for me?”
The boy in the wheelchair raised his hand. “We know how to be sad?”
“My man.” Dwight stepped forward to give him a high-five. “Life is easy when everything’s going your way, right? When it isn’t, when you strike out or you’re stuck in the hospital, that’s when it’s hard. That’s when you dig deep and get strong and when you come out the other side, you might find that things look a little different. That it’s not always about winning or losing, but how you hold your head up.”
He shifted his tone to his more familiar joking one, the one everyone associated with Dwight Conner. “And you know how I hold my head up—right where a ball can bounce off it.”
The spellbound kids burst into laughter. The atmosphere in the room was electric, as if those kids were ready to get up and dance, illnesses be damned. Dwight crouched down to talk more with the wheelchair boy.
Tingling from head to toe, Maggie wiped a tear from her eye. Michelle gave her a friendly one-armed hug.
“He is something else, that one,” the social worker said. “He comes in here a lot, and the kids get so inspired. Sometimes I think he missed his calling.”
Maggie wondered the same, but she would never say such a thing out loud. Especially because she still hadn’t run Dwight through her program again. All the data from San Diego would affect the new outcome, but she really wasn’t sure how. And she didn’t want to know, because then that information would be hanging over every exchange she had with Dwight.
They didn’t leave until Dwight had talked to each teenager one on one and signed whatever they wanted signed. After they left the hospital, as the overheated outside air enveloped them, Dwight asked quietly, “How did you know?”
“Know what?”
“That talking to those kids was what I needed?”
She shrugged one shoulder, a little embarrassed. “You told me before that you like brightening a kid’s day. And they’ve been talking about you. I knew it would mean a lot to them. Ten years ago, I was one of those kids. I know how it feels when someone really cool talks to you like you matter.”
Surprising her, he reached out and ran a hand down her back. The strong, knowing touch made her tremble. “Thank you, Maggie. I needed that. Now I’m all revved up and ready to slap some balls around.” His forehead creased. “That really didn’t sound right, did it?”
At the Audi, he opened the car door for her. “Where to now, Miss Maggie?”
“I have to get to work. Can you drop me at the stadium?”
“Sure. I might as well get there early and get the lecture from Duke out of the way. ‘I told you not to come back here.’ Date number two tonight, right? And this time, I’m in charge.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise.”
When Dwight made a promise, he delivered. After the game, during which he hit a homer and didn’t let a single fly ball bounce off his head, he took her to dinner at the Playhouse. They took in As You Like It, then went for coffee afterwards at the Sacred Grounds. The degree to which they clicked blew him away. They never seemed to run out of things to talk about.
Two nights later, they went to hear a local Zydeco band play. The night after that, he took her to his favorite jazz club. They went to Scoop for ice cream, and took in a lecture on the history of Kilby at the museum.
Even though a magnetic field of attraction buzzed between them, amplified every time he touched her arm or smelled her hair, Dwight kept things on the level of conversation. She told him she hadn’t socialized much in either college or grad school. He wanted her to enjoy the process, not rush through it. Maggie was different from the other women he’d been with. She had a core of strength to her, but the quiet kind. She didn’t talk a lot, but he loved listening to what she did say. She spoke with so much intelligence, and so few “ums” and “ers.”
Never had he imagined that brilliance would be such a turn-on.
They had conversations about things he never talked about with the Catfish players. Politics, history, books, ideas. The more they talked, the more he realized he’d been hiding that part of himself behind a joking, lovable facade. People liked to laugh, and he liked making them laugh. People liked to watch talented ballplayers too, and he liked to oblige. That didn’t mean he didn’t have a brain. With Maggie, he got to exercise his brain, and damn if that didn’t feel incredibly empowering.
It made him want her even more.
But he didn’t act on that lust, just let it build between them. He wanted it to be right. He didn’t want her to have any reservations about him. About black and white, ballplayer and computer nerd, experienced and innocent.
The perfect moment would come, and when it did, he’d be ready. He wouldn’t screw it up the way he’d torpedoed his shot at the Big Leagues.
The Bigs…where, to everyone’s amazement, Jim Lieberman was taking San Diego by storm.
In the clubhouse, the TV was always tuned to the cable channel that showed the Friars’ games. So Dwight got a front row seat to his impressive performances. After five games, his average was a healthy .290, pretty freaking good for a shortstop without much power. He’d been perfect at shortstop so far, without a single error. And he’d actually stolen a base off the league’s top pitcher.
But mostly, the San Diego fans loved his spirit. He got so caught up in the games, air-punching and jumping up and down from the dugout. He was the ultimate team player, just as excited for his teammates as for himself.
And during his post-game interviews, San Diego got a taste of his scientific side. For instance… “If you look at the numbers, baseball is like the Higgs boson field theory, meaning a unified web of energy that proves everything is interconnected.”
“Uh…” The interviewer gaped at him. “So what are you saying about the Friars’ chances to move up in the standings?”
“That’s the question? Didn’t I just answer it?”
“No?”
“Oh. Well, I’d say our chances are pretty good as long as Trevor Stark stays healthy and Caleb keeps his fastball down.”
Dwight couldn’t stop grinning every time he watched one of those interviews. Jim Lieberman—he was an awesome dude and he deserved his moment in the sun.
With the groupies.
Every game, a group of young female fans filled one of the lower sections of the park and held up signs that said, “Marry Me, Bieberman.” At the end of the game, they’d hang over the railings to get his autograph and take selfies with him. With his fresh-faced energy and good looks, he had the girls of Southern California drooling.
Watching Lieberman—along with Mike Solo, Caleb, Eli and Trevor—do so well in the majors could be difficult sometimes. But being back in Kilby had its advantages.
Scratch that. It had one advantage.
And every night they went out, every conversation they had, every time Maggie’s face lit up with passion about statistics or baseball or strawberry cheesecake or any of the things she loved, he fell for her more.
If he didn’t make a move soon, he might be too scared to. Because if she said no, he’d be in big trouble. With a capital M for Maggie.
11
“If he doesn’t make some kind of move soon, I’m going back to Boston.” Maggie and Nina were “jogging,” which meant fast-walking around the lake trail while sweating by the gallon.
“Don’t say that. You can’t leave me now. Not when I need you most,” said Nina tragically.
“First of all, you don’t need me. You and Jim will be fine. Second, I’m being somewhat facetious. It’s an exaggeration to make a point.”
“It’s just a matter of time. He’s nuts about you. Everyone says so. They’ve never seen Dwight Conner so caught up with a girl, and that’s a direct quote.”
“From Jim?”
“No. From Paige. She’s back in town so she can help Crush and Wendy with the wedding.” She swiped a handful of sweat away from her eyes. “Which I will be attending alone, as I expected.”
“Well,” Maggie said reasonably. “Jim can’t very well skip a game to come to a wedding.”
“Nope.” Nina held up a hand. “No logic, please. I can pout if I want to, especially because he’s so busy with his little fan club that he never has time to Skype me anymore.”
“That’s not true. I hear you in there all the time. It’s like—sex-Skyping. You should really keep it down, it’s just not fair to those of us who have barely experienced so much as a kiss after umpteen dates.”
Nina flushed—then again, her face was already red as a beet from “jogging.”
“Why don’t you stop complaining and do something about it? He’s probably waiting for a signal.”
“I don’t know how to do that sort of thing. I don’t have signals.”
“Well, get some,” Nina panted irritably as they rounded the far corner of the park. “Or you could just come out and say something.”
“Like what?”
“Like ‘throw me down and have your way with me.’ Or maybe, ‘I want you more than I want to breathe.’ ‘You’re my everything, my sun and stars, my moon and tides.’ Haven’t you ever read a romance novel?”
“That would have gotten me banned from the Blythe household,” said Maggie wryly. “But obviously my education has suffered.”
Nina skipped ahead of her, then jogged backwards, facing her. “I know you were in the hospital a lot and had a weird childhood, but this is the first time I actually feel sorry for you. No romance novels? What did you do when things looked bleak and you needed a smile?”
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