by Beth Bolden
“You okay?” he couldn’t help but ask, even as he was smarting from how quickly she’d extricated herself from his touch.
“I’m fine,” she retorted, as if it was Jack Bennett and not some unexpected dirt that had caused her to stumble.
“Good. The ground on the field can be uncertain.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t that make your job a lot more difficult?”
He’d been mostly lying for her benefit. The ground wasn’t uncertain for him at all; he practically had every dirt clod and blade of grass categorized and filed away in his brain for when he might need to deal with them in the middle of a game. But he couldn’t exactly come clean now. “The dirt in the infield can be tricky,” he improvised. “Especially when the ball hits it. Hard to say how it’ll react when someone hits a grounder.”
“How do you know how to play the ball, then?” She seemed genuinely interested. She was either a better actress than he’d given her credit for, or he was a lot more fascinating than he’d given himself credit for.
“Practice. Experience. And sometimes, it’s just luck,” he admitted.
“I thought you didn’t believe in luck,” she accused him playfully.
He remembered pretty much every word she’d ever said to him; Jack supposed he couldn’t exactly hold it against her if she did the same when it came to him.
“Superstitions are crap,” he corrected. “But luck, that’s different. Sometimes you’re lucky and you’re in the right position to play the ball. Sometimes you’re not.”
She nodded with understanding, though he wasn’t sure he’d even made much sense. Izzy tended to fry most of his brain cells just with her presence. He wasn’t certain if it was because she was too pretty or too smart. Or maybe it was the lethal combination of both.
“I’d better be getting back to Toby,” she said, and it almost hurt that she seemed so eager to say it. Toby was a world-class prick; she’d rather be talking to that instead of him?
“Any quotes?” she asked with a curve of her lips.
“Best day of the year,” he said with a knowing grin of his own. “All the potential, none of the disappointment.”
She shot him a reprimanding look.
“Think about that,” he smirked, and added, “then think about having dinner with me.”
Her smile turned chilly. “I already told you, Jack. I can’t.”
“I didn’t ask,” he corrected. “I just said think about it.”
“All the potential, none of the disappointment?”
Jack grinned. “Exactly.”
It was the top of the ninth, and the Pioneers were only one out away from winning the first game of the year. Obviously, with 161 games left to play, winning today didn’t mean much in the bigger picture, but Jack liked the optimistic breeze that was currently blowing through Pioneer Park.
The game had been a gritty pitcher’s battle, with the score only 1-0, and even though there was still an out left to get, Jack felt his tense neck muscles begin to relax a little—but he didn’t relax anything else. He still had to be vigilant, still had to make sure the Pioneers closed this game and actually got the win. He’d seen too many leads blown in the ninth to truly rest easy. Jack shifted his feet in the dirt, and squinted at the batter next to home plate.
The de facto closer for the Pioneers this year was theoretically good, if not a little untested. From deep in the heart of Texas, Monroe Gilmore was a young twenty one, and hadn’t done enough pitching to convince anyone that he was the right answer during the ninth inning. But, as Foxy had pointed out the other night, the rest of the relief staff had proved over the last two years they were definitely the wrong answer. Better the unknown, Jack guessed, but having a wild-card guy up on the mound didn’t exactly relieve the tense ache in his back as Gilmore wound up to throw.
The pitch didn’t have enough curve, or enough dip or as far as Jack could figure, enough of anything, because it floated right down the middle of the plate, and the batter just smiled and punched a shot out toward the left-field fence. Jack watched in mute horror as the ball hit the fence and ricocheted around the left corner of the park before finally getting picked up and thrown to third base.
Jack lifted his face toward the sky, readjusted his cap and swore under his breath. A triple. It could have been worse—a game-tying home run—but it also could have been a hell of a lot better.
He heard Foxy behind him, shouting the two outs to the other fielders, even though they both knew perfectly well where they were in the inning. The message was really for Gilmore, whose movements at the back of the mound had become jerky and erratic.
A few years ago, Jack might have felt a pang of sympathy for the pressure Gilmore was under, but this was the majors—this was his future. If Gilmore couldn’t take the pressure cooker that passed for the closing role, then the team needed to know.
Jack dropped into his pre-pitch crouch, glove extended in front of him and didn’t blink as Gilmore wound up and pitched to the fourth batter of the inning.
Hit it to me, he found himself chanting internally, hit it right to me.
Strike one. Maybe Gilmore wasn’t as thrown as he looked. Curving wickedly, the pitch had just grazed the lower inside corner of the strike zone.
A bead of sweat trickled down his back, despite the compression shirt Jack wore under his uniform, and he readjusted his stance, his glove, even the angle of his head, making sure his positioning was as flawless as he could make it.
But as he’d just said to Izzy earlier this afternoon, sometimes it wasn’t about the perfect angle of his glove, or a fast reaction time. Sometimes, the game of baseball came down to luck, plain and simple.
Today, it seemed, was going to be one of those days. The batter jumped all over Gilmore’s second pitch, and during the next handful of seconds, it felt to Jack like time didn’t exactly stop, but it certainly crawled. He saw the ball, hit choppy and nearly to where he’d asked for it. The only problem was it was hit short and like he’d stupidly announced to Izzy before the game started, it hit the dirt literally two feet in front of him—too far for him to reach it in time, and on exactly the wrong surface to guarantee he could play it well enough to throw the batter out.
It was one of Jack’s nightmares. No matter how intensely you practiced, how many grounders you took, how many analysts went over your game play and coached all your bad habits out of you, the element of surprise couldn’t be eliminated. It was moments like this one, Jack thought, that made baseball as popular as it was.
The ball hit a dirt clod straight on, maybe one of half a dozen the grounds crew hadn’t managed to smooth out during the course of the game, and bounced in an ungainly spiral toward him.
Of all the ways the ball could have hit the dirt, it hit that way, and suddenly, though he’d been sure not even a second before that he’d never get to it in time, like a gift from an angel, the ball fell into his glove. He turned and tossed an easy throw to first base and suddenly, the threat and the game were over.
The Pioneers had won.
The words he’d spoken with so much certainty seemed to haunt him in that moment.
Sometimes you’re lucky and you’re in the right position to play the ball.
The entire process had taken maybe five seconds, but Jack felt like time still hadn’t moved, that maybe he was stuck in this alternate universe forever.
Noah broke the spell as he jogged past him, smacking him on the butt with his glove. “Great catch,” he tossed over his shoulder as he and the rest of the team made their way into the dugout.
The thing was, it hadn’t been a great catch. A catch implied that Jack had had something to do with it, but he hadn’t. The ball had found his glove through almost no skill of his own.
It hadn’t been a great catch; it had been a lucky catch.
The bases had been loaded, thanks to a horrible and uneven performance from the Pioneers’ third starting pitcher, and the fifth batter up that inning hit an absolute shot through what should have been the second base gap.
But there hadn’t been a gap. In one of the few times of his career, Jack hadn’t been aligned appropriately, and he’d just happened to be in that particular gap. He’d lunged, pure instinctual movement, and snagged the ball in the air. At least two runs, but probably more like three, were saved, and the Pioneers managed to get out of the inning unscathed.
The weirdest part of it all, weirder even than him being in the wrong position defensively and still managing to hook the ball, was that only the evening before, he’d run into Izzy in the clubhouse and they’d somehow gotten into talking about defensive arrangements on the field. She was studying them, and trying to understand why Hector, the manager, sometimes called for a defensive shift.
He’d explained, leaning over the pile of papers on her lap, and using her pen to explain the basic foundation of a shift. She’d made a crack at him then, teasing him about being out of position, and he’d been able to answer her honestly—then. He was never out of position. He knew them all, backward and forward and in his sleep. He studied them relentlessly. The charts felt like the air he breathed.
Until that afternoon, when he’d been caught out of position and still managed to save a handful of runs.
And then it happened again, in the second series of the year, when he should have been caught stealing, but the opposing second basemen literally dropped the ball. Then again, when he reached first on an infield single.
And again.
And again.
After the in-park home run, Foxy had turned to him in the dugout and said he was the luckiest son of a bitch he’d ever seen play the game.
That was when Jack felt the chill of something turn his spine into pure ice.
In the clubhouse after the game, with reporters thronging around his locker, questions falling right and left about the home run, one in particular had caught his attention.
“Jack, what’s different this year? New bat? New gloves? New helmet?”
That was why he’d always believed superstition was total bullshit. It drove men to do ridiculous things, like not take a shower for an entire season, or wear the same pair of ratty boxers, and that somehow this would help them win games. It didn’t; it only guaranteed they’d smell pretty damn bad.
But now, Jack couldn’t really discount the entire phenomenon. Not when it was happening to him.
And the biggest thing that was different about this year was over by Foxy’s locker, legs a mile long in another one of those devilish skirts, flipping a long strand of dark hair over her shoulder as she resolutely didn’t look in his direction.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The bar was definitely more his scene than Foxy’s, and so Jack ignored his best friend’s grimace as he gingerly slid into the booth. The already cracked vinyl screeched in protest as he settled into the seat opposite him.
“Not this dive again,” Noah said under his breath as he leaned forward, his forearms resting on the stained wood table top. “I don’t know why we couldn’t go somewhere decent.”
“Because I asked you and this is my neighborhood bar,” Jack ground out. “You know I’ve been coming here for years.”
“You’d think they would have figured out how to make money off that fact by now.” Noah paused, his face twisting at the brown walls, brown booths, brown floor. “So what’s up? Why’d you call me?”
“How would you describe my game so far this season?”
Noah frowned; it was an odd question. Jack had never asked for an ego boost before. He’d never needed one before.
“You know you’re playing great. Practically fucking inspired. That inside-park home run…man, that was something special.”
Noah was right. He was tearing it up, actually, batting north of four hundred and making plays in the field that had been mere pipe dreams in previous years. But it wasn’t just him. Everything kept falling his way, over and over again.
“Too special,” Jack argued. “It feels fucking unnatural. I don’t like it.”
Foxy leaned back and sipped his beer. “And?”
“And well, everyone keeps asking me what’s different. There’s only one thing that’s different, and I like that even less.”
It only took Foxy a moment to figure out where he was going. “Izzy. Izzy’s what’s different.”
“It’s worse than that, even. Izzy and I, we’ll talk about something, some part of the game, and suddenly it happens. Except usually better.”
Foxy shrugged. “None of this is a problem. You like a girl. Girl brings you luck. Because of luck, you play great baseball. How is that worse?”
“It’s all mixed up now. Yeah, I like Izzy. I liked her before all this. But how can I ever separate the two now?” Jack hated the desperate whine in his voice, but he couldn’t nix it. This whole situation had him so wound up, it was a miracle he wasn’t playing like crap.
Instead, he’d never had a better streak in his life. Batting, fielding, running the bases. It didn’t matter what aspect of his game one examined, Jack had turned to pure fucking gold.
“Who says you have to? Do I have to tell you again how great this actually is?” Foxy retorted in disbelief. “And after the game, why do you think she stayed to talk to me? She’s afraid to talk to you. She knows she’ll like it too much.”
“You’re imagining things. Maybe she just wants to talk to you, instead.”
“She likes you, I know she does. You’ve softened her up and she’s this close to giving in and going out with you. Are you going to blow that because you’re playing great baseball?”
Jack took a deep breath. “That does sound bad when you say it like that.”
“It sounds worse than bad. It sounds lame. It sounds like you traded your balls in for earrings. Get it together, man.” Noah shook his head in utter disbelief.
“You don’t think I should say anything to her, then.”
“If you tell her that it’s her, then it is her. Suddenly that’s all you or her can believe. On the other hand, you don’t tell her, and what happens? Nothing. You’ll go up, then you’ll go back down again, and neither of them had anything to do with Izzy Dalton. What I know for sure is you’re practically wringing out that glass like a dish rag. You’re hot, you’re frustrated, you want Izzy bad. You tell her, it’s just going to give her another reason not to sleep with you.”
Jack lifted his hand from the glass, the cool condensation leaving his palm damp. He reached down and wiped it on his jeans. “You’re right, I know you’re right. I just want…” There was so much he wanted, it was impossible to verbalize it sometimes. “I want to do right by her. I don’t want one to get confused with the other. But you’re right. This will pass.”
Noah nodded sharply, as if the conversation and the issue were totally settled, except there was still that molecule of doubt deep in Jack’s conscience. Foxy drank the rest of his beer in one swallow.
“I’m starving. Let’s go get a pizza. Every minute I sit in this hellhole, I think I’m getting uglier.”
“Did you hear back from Mr. President of the Shit Heights compound or whatever the hell he was called?”
Toby threw the question to Izzy out of nowhere, as they were sitting in the broadcast booth after an afternoon game, going over notes for the following week’s matchups.
“Corey Rood?” Izzy asked, flustered at his sudden interest in a situation that they hadn’t discussed since leaving Florida. It had been two weeks—admittedly insanely busy days, but fourteen
days, nonetheless. Izzy had kind of hoped that Toby had forgotten all about Corey Rood and his snotty email, but apparently not.
“Yeah. That guy. Did you keep him dangling after you and your highly desirable airtime?”
Izzy had written a perfunctory reply to the President of the West Barrington Heights Neighborhood Association, assuming that since it was a story she was dying to hear more about, Toby wouldn’t be interested. Then in the hectic days after the opening of the regular season, she hadn’t remembered to follow up.
Like all things associated with Jack Bennett, she should have expected the story wouldn’t leave her alone.
“I tried, sir. I think he really expected us to jump all over the story, and wasn’t thrilled that we didn’t.”
“Shit,” Toby swore, and Izzy couldn’t help but wonder if he was actually mentally unbalanced, because what he seemed to care about seemed to do a 180-degree turn every other day.
“Go out there tonight,” he continued. “Go see him, and check out the situation. I want to know every angle.”
“What should I tell Mr. Rood?”
“Tell him to be prepared for us to run the story.”
Izzy told herself that she should let his word be enough, but the conniving gleam in Toby’s eyes made her suspicious. “Are we?”
“Ratings are in the shitter, Dalton. We’ll run it if we have to.”
Corey Rood lived in an enormous house on a hill, surrounded by a number of other grand houses of equally disarming size. As she drove through the massive brick entryway that proclaimed “West Barrington Heights,” Izzy couldn’t help wondering why Jack had decided to buy in this neighborhood. The stately colonials and massive Mediterranean monstrosities, with a generous helping of porticoes and circular driveways didn’t really strike her as the style of a man who seemed most at home in jeans and a ball cap pulled low over his eyes.