Stealing Home

by Nicole Williams

  I had to lean into the counter for support. “Oh my god.”

  “It crushed him, Allie,” she said. “Can you imagine thinking a child was yours, only to find out he wasn’t and that the woman you loved had been going behind your back for months?”

  “No, I can’t imagine that.” My mind was still reeling, trying to catch up, but then I realized Luke had been burned in the same way I had. Except Luke had it worse. “But I do know what it feels like to be cheated on.”

  Like she could feel my pain flooding my system, she dug out another Twix bar for me. “That little boy might be someone else’s son, but Luke made sure he’s taken care of. Owen has a nice college fund that’ll pay for the best school in the country. And med school if he wants. And a starter home after.”

  My eyes were reaching max glassy levels before spillage ensued. If Alex shed a tear, I was a goner. “Does he get to see Owen very much anymore?”

  She exhaled. “He hasn’t gotten to see him in over two years. That woman and her asshole cut Luke out of the picture entirely. And since he had no legal rights to Owen, there was nothing Luke could do.”

  “Couldn’t he have done something?”

  “What? No judge is going to grant visitation rights to some guy who thought he was a kid’s dad.”

  My shoulders slumped. “I guess not.”

  “Plus Luke came to realize that Owen’s life would probably be more peaceful if he wasn’t in it. It’s not like the kid’ll remember him, so it was really only for Luke’s benefit that we wanted to keep seeing Owen. Not for Owen’s.”

  I turned the Twix bar over in my hand, my appetite for chocolate gone. “He said that?”

  “Of course he said that. It’s Luke. He couldn’t not do the right thing if someone threatened to end his baseball career.”

  I didn’t know what to say. So much had just come at me that I couldn’t remember why I had been so mad at him in the first place.

  “I wish I would have known,” I whispered. “What an awful thing to happen.”

  Alex’s eyes met mine, the faintest glimmer of hope in hers. “Then you’ll give him another chance?”

  Another chance. If it had just been this coming between us, of course. If it had just been this, I probably wouldn’t have called it quits. He couldn’t control what others did to him any more than I could. We’d been burned, and we both had the scars to prove it.

  Luke’s and my issues ran deeper.

  “This—Owen, Callie—they weren’t the main reason we didn’t work out.”

  She groaned. “Then what was?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Then let’s uncomplicate it because I haven’t seen Luke this happy in years. Not even with Callie before he figured out what a cheating whore she was.”

  “Wow. Fond memories?”

  “Luke doesn’t know I call her that. He wouldn’t like it if he did.” Her nose creased.

  “Then we’ll keep that our secret,” I said, trying to figure out what was happening. Trying to figure out how it changed things, if it changed them at all.

  “You’ve really never seen him so happy?”

  Alex shook her head slowly. “Never.”

  “What about the other women after Callie?” I tried not to think about them—their pictures and their names—but I knew I’d never forget them.

  Her forehead creased. “There haven’t been any other women after Callie.”

  “That you know of.”

  She blinked at me. “That I know of for sure.”

  I glanced at her, trying to phrase this gently. “You just said Luke wouldn’t introduce his sisters to someone unless they were serious. How do you know he hasn’t had a mess of casual relationships?”

  She made a face at me like she was questioning if I was serious. “Because Luke doesn’t do casual relationships. And if he was, he would have told me. He wouldn’t have introduced us, but he would have told me he was seeing someone.”

  My eyebrow peaked. “Because twenty-five-year-old brothers share all of their love life and interests with their little sisters?”

  Rolling her eyes, she leaned up enough to pull her cell phone out of her back pocket. “This one does.” Scrolling through her and Luke’s texts, she stopped when she presumably found what she was looking for. “Read for yourself.”

  When I stalled before taking it, she set the phone in my hand and waved at it.

  The date of the first one I saw was from a couple months ago.

  Alex: How’s it going?

  Luke: Great.

  Great? Alex sent first, followed by: Who is she?

  Luke: Am I that obvious?

  Alex: Yes. Sooooo? Who is she?

  Luke: Someone who doesn’t know I exist. I felt a ball form in my throat when I read his reply back to her. I knew he existed—I just hadn’t known he’d acknowledged I did.

  Alex: You’re Luke Archer. She knows you exist.

  Luke: No, not this one.

  Alex: Then let her know you exist.

  Luke: How?

  Alex: I don’t know. What’s she like?

  Luke: Amazing.

  And now I was smiling. I kept scrolling through the conversation while Alex tore into a couple more chocolates.

  Alex: Amazing details?

  Luke: She loves baseball.

  Alex: Score.

  Luke: She works harder than I do.

  Alex: Impossible.

  Luke: When she smiles, I can’t breathe.

  Alex: Better figure that out. Can’t have you passing out from lack of oxygen. Won’t impress her.

  Luke: Good point.

  Alex: Ok, so trouble breathing.

  Luke: Check.

  Alex: Heart palpitations?

  Luke: Check.

  Alex: Interruptions in sleep?

  Luke: Check.

  Alex: Smiling like an idiot?

  Luke: Double check.

  Alex: Yeah. You’ve got it bad.

  Luke: I can’t figure out a way to say hi to her without sounding like a moron.

  When I chuckled reading his text, Alex leaned over to see which one I was reading. She snorted. “It’s a good thing he’s so good at baseball, because that’s the only game Luke’s got.”

  Alex: When you do say hi, make sure to invite me. I want to be there with popcorn.

  Luke: She’s an athletic trainer on the team.

  Alex: Yikes.

  Luke: I know.

  When I got to this last text, Alex scrolled through a bunch more, craning her neck until she found what she had in mind.

  I think I blew it. was Luke’s text to her.

  Alex: Impossible. But how?

  Luke: My opening line. I bombed it.

  Alex: Oh god. What did you say?

  Luke: Whose ass do I need to kick, Doc.

  Alex: This confirms it. You really are a moron.

  She shook her head with me as we shared another laugh. Then she scrolled down to almost the end of this seemingly endless stream of texts between Luke and her. Tapping the line she wanted me to start at, she leaned back into the stool again and waited.

  Alex: Thanks for the fun trip. We all approve of Allie.

  Luke: Glad to hear it.

  Alex: We like her.

  Luke: Good. Because I love her.

  “And in case you think that’s complicated, it isn’t. It’s pretty simple actually.” Alex tapped the phone where his message was staring at me. “He loves you. If you feel the same way, whatever it is, you guys can figure it out.”

  I couldn’t look away from the words on the screen. I couldn’t stop thinking about what they meant. If that was true—if what Alex was saying was true—none of what Shepherd had said could be. Who did I trust? Luke and Alex? Or Shepherd? That was an answer that didn’t require any contemplation.

  What had I done? Why had I believed it so easily?

  It didn’t take long to realize why. Believing in the bad was so much easier than clinging to the good. My past had r
eared its ugly head and sabotaged a great relationship because of a failed one. I’d let my fear feed my insecurities until all it had taken was one drunken lie from one spineless man to ruin it all.

  Up until this moment, I’d never realized how truly scared I was. Of not being taken seriously in my job. Of being cheated on again. Of being hurt and left again. Of being alone.

  “Alex?” My voice was trembling from revelation overload.

  “Yeah?”

  “I made a mistake. A massive, colossal, unforgivable mistake.”

  She shoved over a few pieces of chocolate. “What do you think I’m here for?”

  “To make me answer for hurting your brother?”

  She grabbed my hands and gave me a shake. “To help you fix it.”

  IF I SPENT all of my time worrying about finding the worst in a person, I’d never be able to see the best. That was one of the hundred things that had been floating through my mind after dropping Alex back off at Luke’s apartment. He wasn’t there, but Alex had told me where he would be. Where he liked to go when he had things to work out.

  I’d been standing in the parking lot and watching him for a while. My sedan was parked next to his tank as I searched for the right thing to say to him. There were a million right things to say to him, a few things I should, and one thing I had to. I only hoped he’d be more receptive to having a conversation than I had been when he tried.

  He was hovering at home plate of the field he’d played on in college. Luke had been one of the few players to earn a spot in the pros in the same city where he’d gone to college. I knew that had to do with him wanting to stay close to his family.

  He’s a good man. That phrase kept echoing through my head, a reminder of how many people had described Luke as such. Not just as a good baseball player or a decent guy, but as a good man. He’d lived up to that title again and again. From doing right by his sisters after their parents’ death, to the whole ordeal with Owen, to the way he’d handled me even when I was being psycho.

  The one in a million. He was standing right in front of me.

  The bucket of balls he was hitting was getting low, and I couldn’t miss my chance. I couldn’t let fear mess things up one more time. I might have felt like I wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it, but really, I knew. Alex had been right about life and love being simple. It was only when we tried to make things what they weren’t, and morph them into something they couldn’t be, that life got messy.

  Shoving off from the front bumper of the same vehicle Luke had driven when he’d been a student here, I started for the field. The man made millions of dollars a year and he still drove that thing, not because it was what people expected of him but because it made him happy. I couldn’t help comparing myself to that. Luke could have had his pick of millions of girls, but he’d chosen me. Not because of what the public would expect, but because it was what made him happy.

  I was choosing what made me happy too. No more setting booby traps and guillotines to sabotage that.

  The parking lot was a long way from the field, so he couldn’t have seen me pull up. From way back there, it would have been impossible to tell it was Luke Archer on that field, hitting ball after ball, the crack of his bat echoing into the night.

  When the next ball sailed over the back fence, landing with a mess of others, I realized that maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard to figure out it was Luke Archer after all.

  For as hard of a time as he’d had connecting with the ball during the past two games, he was tearing it apart out here. Practically every ball he tossed into the air, his bat sent whizzing over the back fence.

  Alex had said he’d spent a lot of time here after their parents died, that this was his way of working out problems and anger. I could see why. All of the lights stationed around the field were on, but no one was in the stands, no announcer was talking in the background, no ballpark smells filled the air. It was so quiet, just the crack of Luke’s bat and his sharp grunt after each swing.

  I’d never been on a baseball field like this, and somehow, it was even more magical than it was when it was brimming with players and fans, noises and smells.

  Coming up to one of the entrance gates, I paused. It was locked. I wasn’t sure how Luke had gotten in, but I wasn’t going to let one locked gate stop me from doing what I had to. It had been a while since I’d climbed a cyclone fence, and it had been never since I’d climbed one this tall, but it only was ten feet of holey metal. If I couldn’t tackle this, I had no right to assume I could tackle all of the other hurdles that would come in this kind of a relationship.

  Slipping out of my shoes to make the journey easier, I tucked my shirt into my shorts and started climbing. The up was easy, the over scary, the down tricky, but I didn’t try to make it something it wasn’t. I was climbing a fence. That was all. I didn’t need to think about the possibility of falling, of breaking my neck, of spending the rest of my life paralyzed, of any of the crap that would have kept me from doing it before.

  Fear bled the love out of life. When there was an abundance of fear, there wasn’t room for love to grow.

  Fear had no place in my life anymore.

  After hopping down on the other side of the fence, now barefoot, I jogged through the maze of concessions booths until I’d reached the stands. I walked up the third base line. His back was to me, his focus on nothing but the ball and his bat’s connection with it. As another ball cleared the back fence by a large margin, it was impossible not to wonder if I was watching a legend in the making—one that would be remembered by generations.

  Luke was in his standard jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt, his Shock ball cap settled into place. Watching him, feeling him close, made the ache start to spread inside me. It only grew the closer I moved.

  I was passing third base when he froze just as he was about to toss another ball into the air. He didn’t turn around; he didn’t speak. He just stood there, rigid and with his back to me, waiting.

  Say something, Allie. But don’t just say something, say what you came here to say.

  Before I could overthink it and second-guess what to say first, I shouted, “I’m sorry, Luke.” When his stance seemed to go even more rigid, I kept going. If he planned on dealing with this the way I’d dealt with him when he’d tried talking to me, I didn’t have much time to say what I needed to. “I messed up. So, so much, and I’m sorry.”

  I was halfway to home when Luke’s bat lowered. “Sorry for what? That list could be pretty long from where I’m standing.”

  There was a sharpness in his words I wasn’t used to, and he still refused to look back at me. That was fine, but I wasn’t going to leave here before he knew. “For not communicating with you, for starters. I should have told you why I was so upset and given you the chance to explain.”

  Luke tapped the bat against home plate. “So you were upset about something? It wasn’t just about our fuck-buddy shelf life expiring?”

  My eyes closed. I’d made a mess by letting my fear drive me. “No, it wasn’t about that. I had you paying for someone else’s mistakes, just like you warned me not to do. I let my fears come between us.”

  Luke shook his head. “You let a lot of things come between us.”

  “I know.” I stopped when I was still a ways back from where he was. To give him the space I could see he needed.

  “You’ve been talking to Alex.” He didn’t voice it as a question.

  “You knew?”

  Alex had been so proud of herself, thinking she’d given everyone the slip. The first time a seventeen-year-old had sneaked out of the house had been to go talk to her big brother’s girlfriend to talk some sense into her. The “good” gene ran in the Archer family.

  “I guessed where she’d run off to when I got the call from Cameron.” For the first time, he glanced back to look at me. It was brief and there was no fondness in his expression, but it somehow managed to make me feel like nothing could really ever be wrong if I could just wake up to
Luke’s face every day. “I’m surprised you still have your hair. She wasn’t very happy when she found out you broke up with me.”

  “I am too.” I gave my ponytail a little pull. “But she gave me a second chance.”

  Throwing the ball still in his hand into the air, the empty ballpark echoed with the sound of his bat connecting with the ball. This one flew over the center field fence.

  “She’s always been the generous one in the family.” He reached deep into the bucket for another ball.

  “Will you do the same?” I asked, moving a step closer. “Give me a second chance?”

  He was quiet for a minute, tossing the ball in the air and catching it. “Did she tell you about Owen?” He was trying to mask it, but the pain in his voice when he said his name was evident. “About what happened?”

  I nodded, padding closer. The fine dirt of the diamond felt like cool silk beneath my bare feet. “Yes.”

  Luke stared at the center field fence, his eyes narrowing like he was somewhere else. Then his face cleared. “I was going to tell you,” he said, turning so he was almost facing me. “I should have told you sooner, but it’s a complicated story I don’t share freely.” As soon as his eyes lifted to mine, they flitted away. “I want you to know all of me, Allie, but I didn’t want you to know all of me all at once. I wanted the good parts to shine first before the skeletons came falling out of the closet.”

  My chest ached, but it wasn’t for me—it was for him. For everything he’d been through and everything he’d risen from. Losing both parents in one tragic night would have ended the careers of most players. Instead, he’d applied for guardianship of his three sisters and made his name a permanent fixture in professional baseball. And then that woman, the baby he’d thought was his—my heart didn’t possess enough beats to throb for him. He could have smeared her name through the mud and cut the little boy off for good. Instead, he’d let the woman be and set up a college fund for the child.