by Julie Kriss
“It isn’t!” I said. “It’s just driving me crazy. Why do I care? I have no idea.” I slumped in my chair and sipped my coffee.
“You don’t have to do this, you know.” Mom stirred her latte again, which meant she was about to lecture me. “You could take some time off while you apply for better jobs. That’s what a trust fund is for.”
Yes, I had a trust fund. It wasn’t millions. In fact it was small, but it was enough for a while if I needed it. I’d had access to it since I was twenty-one, but I’d barely touched it. I wanted to make it on my own, doing whatever I hoped I would discover I loved. I had only dipped into the money when it looked like the rent wouldn’t get paid or I’d go hungry. Which was luxury enough. The rest of the time, I paid my own way.
Most people didn’t understand that, I knew. It wasn’t something I shared with many people, because people get jealous and resentful when they know that you’ve inherited money you didn’t earn. It was one of the reasons I wanted to figure out how to get by without it.
The problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Since graduating college I’d worked meaningless jobs here and there: hotel clerk, florist, pet sitter. And my parents, who had footed the bill for college, were unhappy about it. I couldn’t blame them, really. I was the definition of a bad investment, and as their only child I was the one they’d pinned their expectations on.
I just… couldn’t. I couldn’t pick a career and start a rise to the top. I wanted to explore, to wander. To find myself. The problem was, I’d been trying to find myself for four years now.
Don’t worry about it, Amanda had told me once. You’re a late bloomer, that’s all. Some people bloom early and some people bloom late.
How late was I, though? Should I start to wonder?
“Mom, we’ve been through this,” I said.
“I know, I know. But the pet sitting was bad enough. And now you’re a nanny for”—her expression went sour—“someone called The Bad Boy of Baseball.”
I gaped at her. “You looked him up?”
“Yes, I did. If you want to be a nanny, Kate, I’m sure there are respectable people I could find to refer you to. People who pay well. Couples, not single men. Did you know this man actually hit someone on the baseball field?”
I could feel the back of my neck tightening. And I could also feel, as I always did, the urge to do the exact opposite of what my parents wanted me to do. Something that would shock them and drive them crazy. I had spent my entire life behaving, being the only child, trying to please the two most important people in my life. I just wanted to be unexpected for once. A little like Ryan throwing that punch. That punch was nuts—right there in front of everyone, while the other man was mid-sentence. What must it feel like to not care like that?
I’d always cared, too much. And since I’d graduated college, I’d kept trying to care. But deep down, I’d stopped caring quite so much.
It was freeing.
I wanted to not care like Ryan Riggs did.
Suddenly I wasn’t so upset by this conversation anymore. I shrugged. “Ryan isn’t so bad,” I said to my mother. “He’s nice. And he’s really hot.” And I banged him five years ago, which I’m still not going to tell you.
Mom’s eyes widened, and then she closed them, as if fighting for control. “Oh, Kate, you can’t be serious. If only you had married Mark.”
“I am not marrying Mark,” I said.
“Well, certainly you’re not, since he’s married now with a baby and another on the way.” This was a fact she brought up frequently. Mark had been my boyfriend five years ago, back when he was a fellow student, getting a Ph.D in economics. He was nice, he was smart, and I’d really tried, but I just hadn’t cared. After I broke up with Mark, my parents had barely spoken to me for months. They only fully recovered after Mark got married and they could throw the “what could have been” in my face. Now it was all about Mark’s babies: See, you could have had a man who is not only stable and reliable, but potent. As if making babies was an achievement on Mark’s part.
Making babies was hardly a sign of a man’s virtue. After all, Ryan Riggs could make them as easily as Mark could.
“You know,” Mom said, “I’m still in touch with Mark’s parents. I could ask if Mark and his wife need any help.”
And that was it, really. That was what it came down to. The suggestion that Kate, the loser, could work as a nanny for her successful ex and his two babies.
“Mom, you have got to be kidding me.”
“I was just—”
“The answer is no.” I picked up my purse and pushed my chair back. “I’m not working for Mark. I’m fine where I am, actually. I’ve decided I like it.”
“Kate.”
“I’m not mad.” Well, I wasn’t that mad. “Just don’t suggest that again, okay? I’ll talk to you soon.”
I walked away, heading back to my car. Maybe I wasn’t on a great career track, but I realized that in a crazy way I was where I needed to be. I couldn’t let my parents dictate my life. They’d come so close to making all of my decisions for me, including who I married, for God’s sake.
Maybe I was a late bloomer, but it was time to be myself for a while.
Seven
Ryan
* * *
Week Five
* * *
Running at six o’clock in the morning does something to my mind, my mood. I have a busy, shitty brain that never shuts up, especially about stupid shit: things I’ve done wrong, things I probably missed, things that could go wrong today or tomorrow, things I’ve never done wrong but probably could have, given the chance. Just because I think a lot doesn’t mean I’m smart—I’m not. I just have a brain that never. Shuts. Up.
Running at dawn shuts it up. So does sex. But for the last five weeks there was only one woman who made me think about sex, and I still hadn’t gotten her naked again. So I ran my ass off.
It was just me and the pavement, my feet pounding, my breath in my lungs. One of my first coaches used to shout three words at us every time we started a warmup: Fire it up. Fire it up! he’d bark while we groaned through situps, pushups, squats, those devil moves called burpees. Fire it up! Years later I could still hear his voice in my head every time I started a run, every time I felt my legs start to move and my lungs start to burst. When I felt that resistance in the back of my brain telling me to stop, I always shouted it down: Fire it up! And I ran.
My muscles took over, and my brain shut up.
I pounded through my nice suburban neighborhood, the one I could no longer afford. I ate up the ground around the corner and across the path to the local high school, which had a track behind it. At six thirty it was deserted and I could get my laps in until sweat soaked my back. My shoulder ached, and then it screamed, and still I ran. Fuck you, shoulder. This is none of your business.
It was a damp, cool summer morning, which was perfect. When it’s cold, you keep running to keep warm. And right now I was so warm that sweat soaked through both of the shirts I wore. And still I kept going. I didn’t want to stop.
Kate Washington was driving me fucking crazy.
She shouldn’t. I knew that. Kate was nice and smart and good-hearted. She was responsible. She was good with Dylan. She worked for next to nothing, and—except for the constant rash of bossy Post-It notes all over my house—she didn’t complain. Any idiot would know they had a good thing going, and no idiot would mess it up. I should leave her alone. I shouldn’t touch her. Ever. At all.
I wanted to touch her everywhere.
I wanted her naked so I could lick every inch of her. I wanted to hear the sounds she made, because I had heard them before. I wanted to feel her body give the slow, hard little pulse it gave right before she came, because I’d felt it and I remembered every fucking second. I wanted to be inside her again, because when I was inside her five years ago it had been incredible. I got inside Kate and I forgot everything—baseball and money and whatever stupid things preoccupied
my mind. None of it mattered and I was just there, completely there, feeling her and tasting her. There was no awkwardness, no weirdness, it was just hot and easy and we both came, her knees wide and my face against her neck, both of us sweating and happy.
I wanted that again.
I was hard up for sex. It had been three long years of me trying to be Good Guy Ryan Riggs, the former player who was suddenly a dad. At first I was exhausted all the fucking time—having a toddler is no joke, and the last thing you feel is horny. Then, when Dylan got older, he got smart. I knew full well that he’d notice if I was off spending my nights screwing women, or if women were coming over to screw me. He’d know if I was going on dates or seeing someone, because I was the main thing in his life and he was an observant kid. He was also terrified that I would get a girlfriend and desert him. So the trend continued: no sex for me.
But that wasn’t the reason I wanted Kate. If I just wanted sex, I would feel horny for, say, the female fans who still came on to me, or any of the women who gave me the once-over in a given day. Opportunity wasn’t the problem. The willingness of the female sex wasn’t a problem. The problem was that, even when I considered it, I didn’t want to lick any of those women. I only wanted to lick Kate.
She shouldn’t want me to lick her. In fact, if she knew how badly I wanted to lick her, she should probably quit.
She had those big dark eyes. That red hair. The curls that sometimes lay against the line of her neck. The line of her mouth was fantastic—I had a lot of dirty fantasies about Kate’s mouth. Her lips. I had even more fantasies about the dip of her waist and the shadow of cleavage when she wore a V-neck T-shirt. I remembered those breasts: they were C cups, perfect in my hand, the nipples light rosy pink. I had fantasies about those too.
This wasn’t new. I thought Kate was smoking hot when I first met her five years ago. I still thought she was hot. The problem was, I couldn’t have her.
I slowed my run and stopped, putting my hands on my knees. My shoulder was screaming and sweat dripped from my forehead. Kate would be at my house by now, in my kitchen, helping Dylan make his breakfast before day camp. He preferred when she did it. I could stay out here and avoid her, like I’d been more or less doing for five weeks now, or I could go back and face her.
I straightened, heading back and taking deep breaths so I wouldn’t look gasping and pathetic when I walked through the door. In the pocket of my running shorts, my phone beeped a notification.
I took it out and looked at it. Meeting with the league rep, eleven o’clock.
My shoulder throbbed, and I pulled the small vial of pills from my pocket. The league rep had left me four messages yesterday, and when I hadn’t replied he’d simply scheduled a meeting and sent it to my phone, like he owned me. Which he did.
But not for much longer, most likely. I had no illusions as to what this meeting would be about: I couldn’t play baseball, the only thing the league paid me to do. I had taken too long, been a liability too long. My shoulder had been fucked for too long, therapists or no therapists. Pills or no pills, I still couldn’t pitch a single ball, let alone a nine-inning game.
The meeting would be to tell me I was off the roster. But they couldn’t tell me I was off the roster if I didn’t go.
I deleted the appointment and kept walking home, my muscles iced up now. Fuck the league and their appointment. They could shove it.
The Riggs boys have always had a problem following rules.
They tell us it’s part of our charm.
Eight
Kate
* * *
Week Seven
* * *
It was summer, and now instead of taking Dylan to school and back, we did other things. Day camp two days a week. His friends’ houses. The park. And, today, baseball.
Dylan played the outfield—a term I’d had to Google—and he was good at it. Today’s game was played in a field in Grosse Pointe Park. The grass was green, the breeze was hot, the sky was blue, and a bunch of seven-year-olds ran around the field. There were days this job really wasn’t so bad.
I was sitting in the bleachers, wearing a navy blue flowered shirtdress and tennis shoes. My hair was tied up and I was wearing my glasses, because I was in a hurry to get out the door this morning and I hadn’t had time to put my contacts in. Beside me on the seat were Dylan’s backpack, a bag of snacks, his sweatshirt, my sweatshirt, a bottle of sunscreen, and a rain jacket. Seven weeks as a nanny had taught me to come prepared.
My phone buzzed with a text. I checked and saw it was Ryan. Where are you? he wrote.
I blinked. He was supposed to be at another doctor’s appointment. At Dylan’s baseball game, I wrote back.
I know. But where?
Oh, shit. I looked around. Was he here? Tenth row by third base, I wrote.
Okay, Ryan wrote back. I’m getting to third base.
I bit my lip so I wouldn’t smile.
There weren’t all that many people at the game today—just parents watching their kids, some of them sitting in knots. I was sitting by myself. Then the row of seats shook and Ryan dropped down next to me, slumping like he’d been sprinting. “I fucking made it,” he declared.
He was wearing his usual jeans with a faded Tigers T-shirt. Today he had on a baseball cap, worn and pulled low on his forehead, the brim bent in that way of baseball caps that are well-loved. Dylan’s favorite ball cap looked like a truck had run over it a dozen times, and there was no way he would part with it.
“He’s going to be so happy you’re here,” I said. “He loves it when you come to his games.”
Ryan looked at me. “You’re wearing glasses.”
Oh. I tried not to adjust them self-consciously. They were nice glasses, I thought. Fashionable ones with black frames. “I didn’t have time to put my contacts in.”
He was still staring. “I’ve never seen you in glasses before.”
Now I could feel my face get warm. Was that good or bad? Why did I care? “Well, not everyone was born with perfect vision, the way you were,” I said.
Ryan narrowed his eyes, and for a second his expression did that smoldering thing that made me weak in the knees. Then he relaxed again. “They look nice,” he said. He looked past me at all the luggage on the seat next to me. “You have a lot of shit here.”
“It’s important shit,” I said. “Dylan might get cold, or it might rain. He’s always hungry after a game, so I bring snacks.”
“I don’t know how you remember all that.”
“I know. That’s why you hired me.” I pointed. “They moved him to center field.”
Ryan nodded. “That’s because he’s fast.” He frowned and looked at me again. “Hey. You just said something about baseball.”
“I know.” I smiled smugly. “I’m learning.”
We watched the game for a little while. It was oddly relaxed, sitting next to him, even though my skin was buzzing like someone had touched an electric current to it. A few of the women sitting close by did double takes, staring at Ryan. He didn’t seem to notice. Double takes were Ryan’s normal.
“You must be proud of him, playing baseball,” I said. “He’s taking after you.”
Ryan was quiet for so long I wondered if he hadn’t heard me, or if he had tuned me out. Finally he said, “Can I tell you something?”
“What?”
“I hate baseball.”
I stared at him in shock. He was looking straight ahead, at the field. As I watched, he winced as if his shoulder pained him and adjusted the brim of his baseball cap.
“You hate baseball?” I said.
He nodded. “Always have. I didn’t watch baseball growing up. I didn’t have any baseball heroes. I only tried out for it when I was thirteen because a girl said she’d kiss me if I’d do it. I play it, but I’ve never liked it.”
“If you didn’t like it, why did you play?”
“Because I was good,” he said without bragging. “Being good at it meant I could get out of
my house every day. Being good at it—at anything—meant I had a chance at something other than growing up to be the loser everyone expected me to be. Playing baseball was my only ticket out of Westlake.”
I had never thought of that. I’d always assumed that Ryan lived and breathed his sport, like every other athlete seemed to do. “So your home life wasn’t so good.”
That got the hint of a smile, like I’d made a good joke. “I didn’t have a home life. My mother left when I was two, and my father didn’t give a shit about my brothers and me. We had a roof and occasionally some food, and that was it. Have you ever been to Westlake?”
I shook my head.
Ryan glanced at me, then looked back at the field. “Westlake has a literal set of railroad tracks in it,” he said. “The Riggs boys were born on the wrong side of them. Everyone knew our father was trash, that we’d grow up to be the same. My brother Dex is only four months older than me because our father knocked up two different women. Dex’s mother had Jace and Luke, and then she left. So did mine.” He leaned back in his seat, stretching his long legs out in front of him. “When I started making money playing, I hired a detective to find my mother. She’d married some guy and was living in Florida. She was an addict with a record as long as your arm. She died of a fentanyl overdose two years ago.”
I put a hand to my mouth. “Oh, my God. Ryan, I’m so sorry.”
He turned to look at me. His dark brown eyes were unreadable. “It turns out she had a little bit of money, or her parents did. A trust fund that they’d locked her out of so she couldn’t use it to shoot up. They’d declared her legally incompetent or something. When she died, the money came to me. It wasn’t riches, but it’s floated us for a little while. If I’m smart with it, I might be able to send Dylan to college. No Riggs has ever gone to college.”
I looked out to the field and watched the small form of Dylan standing in the outfield, waiting for the batter to hit the ball. From here he looked almost comically small and vulnerable. “Can I ask you something?” I said to Ryan. “Where’s his mother?”