by Ginger Scott
“That looked good,” I say, throwing the ball back to him. His lips twist into a crooked grin, and he tugs his hat low again before winding up for another pitch. I praised him, and he liked it.
I liked that.
He throws twenty more, and somewhere in the middle of it all, Taryn walks down to the dugout to watch us. I saw her coming, but Wes doesn’t notice her until he finishes his last pitch. He seems to retreat into his shell when she claps at his final throw.
“Thanks for helping me out, Joss. Sorry, I didn’t mean to keep her,” he says, pulling the hat from his head with one hand and running his other arm over his forehead and hair, wiping away the sweat. I get a little lost in watching it and don’t notice Taryn step next to my side.
“So you’re a catcher now, huh?” There’s a gleam in her eye and an inflection in her voice that’s teasing me.
“He was working on some stuff. I saw my dad helping him,” I say, shrugging. I don’t lie to Taryn well, so I swallow slowly and busy myself with my own bag, zipping my glove away and looping it over my shoulder.
“You know, I could maybe have some place I need to go. In fact, I think maybe I do. Ugh, that’s right. I just remembered…I can’t give you a ride home,” she says as my back is to her. I twist up to look her in the eye, ready to argue with her for ditching me or being impatient because I wasn’t ready and waiting for her outside the locker room. When my eyes hit hers, though, I catch the soft hint of a smile on her tight lips just as she winks.
“It’s not like that,” I sigh, standing and urging her to walk away with me.
“Sure it’s not,” she says. “Hey, Wes? I have somewhere I need to go, and I’m late. Think you can take Joss home?”
My eyes are wide on her as my back is to him. I mouth the word “bitch” and she winks at me again.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” he says. My eyes flutter closed because his response couldn’t possibly have sounded less excited.
“Thanks,” Taryn says, holding her phone out toward me and whispering for me to text her later. I flip her off, and Wes catches me, which makes my body rush with a mortifying heat.
I watch Taryn walk away, and Wes gets a few steps ahead of me before pausing and looking back. “You ready? I have to take my brothers, but I’ll make them ride in the back,” he says. He’s talking logistics. Taryn was playing matchmaker.
“You know what, it’s okay. My house is close. I’ll just walk,” I say. His brow pulls in as his head jerks back a little in response. A second later, he steps back the few paces to me and tugs my bag from my shoulder. I hold the straps tightly in protest, but he jerks them free, throwing my bag on top of his as he walks toward his truck, leaving me behind.
“Quit being stubborn,” he says. “Just come on.”
I let him get a few more steps ahead before I follow. His back muscles could not be more perfect—the way they curve and dip and flex with every motion he makes. His arm is bent through the straps of both of our bags, and his hand is gripping them at his shoulder. He’s godlike. And I’m in a pair of cutoff sweatpants, the legs different lengths, and my shirt is two sizes two big. The longer I walk behind him, the more ridiculous I feel being paired with him, and the less I think he could possibly be the scrawny kid from my youth.
As we step into the parking lot, his brothers are already waiting in the cab of the truck. Seeing me, they both climb out, but I hold up my hands and yell before they step into the bed.
“Seriously, I can ride in the back. It’s fine,” I say. I don’t give them a choice, instead just lifting my leg over one side and sliding my back against the glass, getting comfortable.
Wes pauses at the back of the truck, sighing with a slight shake of his head. He lifts our bags over the tailgate and pushes them to one corner before walking to the driver’s side. I cross my legs and fold the bottom of my T-shirt around my cold hands, readying myself as the truck rumbles to a start. I hear both doors close, and I start to shut my eyes, embarrassed and angry at Taryn for putting me in this spot. Before I shut down completely, though, I see Wes step from the other side of the bed, climbing in to the space next to me. He turns to face the glass behind us and knocks twice, letting his brothers know he’s in. As he twists back around, he stops to look me in the eye, his eyebrows high on his forehead.
“Stub-born,” he says, punctuating both parts of the word. I shrug, and wrap my hands tighter in my shirt.
Before we get to the main road away from campus, Wes leans forward and tugs the thin long-sleeved shirt from over his head, turns to the side, not giving me much choice as he pushes the fabric over my head. He rests back against the window, crossing his arms at his chest after tugging his hat low on his head.
I sit there looking ridiculous for a few seconds with a scarf made of his shirt looped around my throat. I give in quickly though as the wind picks up, pushing my arms through. There are holes at the ends of both sleeves, and I slide my thumbs through, making fists of what’s left of the material. As thin as it is, it’s surprisingly warm. And it smells exactly like him.
“Thank you,” I squeak out, inhaling slowly so he doesn’t catch me. I pull my knees in and rest my head on them along with my folded arms. Wes doesn’t look at me, but he smirks and leans into my side.
“You’re welcome,” he says.
We ride in silence most of the way, and with every shift and adjustment Wes makes of his body, he moves fractions of inches closer to me. At one point, both of our hands are flat along the bed of the truck, bracing our bodies for the impact of a bumpy road, and the jostling forces his pinky finger to loop over mine. We both look down at the feel of our touch and pull our hands away when we realize we’re both aware.
There’s a block left to go before we turn down my street, so I reach up and tug the band from my hair, letting it come down in waves and blow in the wind as we ride. I usually hate the way riding in a truck makes my hair knotted and dry, but the urge to let it down in front of Wes was stronger. I want to look soft for him—not the abrasive…stubborn girl he’s only gotten so far. It’s a desperate move, though, and the second I feel my hair fly loose in the breeze, I regret it, and pull it into my hand, holding it at the base of my neck. I’m not the pretty girl. I’m not ribbons and bows. I’m being stupid.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he says, pulling me out of my own head. “Would it be okay if maybe I called you sometime?”
My gut reaction is to tell him to grow a pair, to ask him why he’d want to do that? My instincts are to shut down and ward him off because I’m messy, and I have miles of issues, and I don’t want to let myself like him like that. But I’m holding my arms near my face, and his shirt is warm and soft, and it smells nice, and as much as I shouldn’t fall for fleeting things like that, I can’t help myself.
“I would probably answer,” I say.
Fuck, it sounds flirty. I sound flirty, and I’m smiling and trying to hide it behind my arms. I’m actually hiding my face. We’re at my house, and I know I should just give him his shirt back, but I don’t want to do that either. I want to keep it. I want to keep it forever, so I step out of the truck quickly, grabbing my own bag and waving to his brothers, careful not to look him in the eye. I walk fast, opening and shutting my front door behind me, and then I let myself breathe.
“Was that Wes?” my father says, stepping out of the darkened kitchen area, a cup in his hand that I’ve long learned is not coffee.
I nod, but look away, instead carrying my things past him toward my room. He stops me before I can get far, though, lightly pressing his hand on my shoulder and leaving it there until I meet his eyes.
“Leave that boy alone,” he says before bringing his cup to his lips for a taste. I watch him swallow, and I wait for his eyes to relax and soften, but they never do. He lets me by and moves into the living room, to the chair he likes to sit in at night to watch TV until he passes out. He’s not watching pitching videos tonight, it seems.
I stand still, and bring my
wrist to my nose slowly, breathing in Wes’s scent. I think about Taryn’s father, and how he warns her away from boys constantly, because he never thinks any guy is good enough. That’s not what my dad was doing though. He was looking out for Wes—because I am nothing but trouble. He’s probably right, but he made me this way. And I don’t think I can stay away from Wes Stokes even if I tried.
Five
I wore Wes’s shirt to bed last night. When I woke up this morning, I took it off quickly, folded it, and tucked it underneath my blanket, pillow, and piles of clothes on my bed. I’m not sure if I was hiding it to keep it or just felt foolish that I wanted to keep it so badly.
What really felt humiliating was the way I kept checking my phone for a text message from him all night and again this morning. I’m one step away from putting bows and glitter in my hair.
Instead of waiting for nothing to happen, I put on my running pants and push my earbuds in, letting my latest playlist fuel me for a run. I used to run every morning my freshman year. That was when I was still under the illusion that if I tried hard enough, I’d impress my father. He never noticed, though. He called me lazy no matter how hard I worked, how early I rose, or how many miles I trod. So I quit.
I’m not sure what’s pushing me to go this morning, but when my eyes opened and saw the sun barely up, something felt different. My dad’s door is open as I pass it, his bed made. I shake my head because he probably left after I walked away from him last night and just never made it home from wherever he went. If he ran into…trouble…he didn’t call, so that’s on him—not me.
I lock our door and shove the house key into the small pocket on the side of my pants along with my iPod, then stretch for a few minutes before testing out my legs in a jog. The burn comes faster than I remember. This is what happens when I haven’t run like this in months.
My pace is slow, but I refuse to stop, and I make it six or seven blocks before I turn back into the neighborhood. I’m winding through streets aimlessly, but I’m on a constant watch for Wes’s truck, wondering which house is his. My curiosity keeps driving me forward, pushing me for one more block, one more quarter mile, until before too long, I find myself at my high school’s football field. The track is empty and the center covered with weeds—because our football team is an afterthought. We’re a baseball school. My breathing is so heavy I feel like I can’t catch up, so I slow to a fast walk and eventually come to rest in front of the bleachers with my hands clasped over my head.
This used to be so easy. All of it—easy. It seems impossible now. My lungs feel as if they’ve been punctured by millions of staples, and my sides ache with cramps. I look up at the stands and see flashes of my youth. My dad liked to run. He said just because he was too old to play ball didn’t mean he couldn’t run faster than other men, so when he’d run on weekends, I’d join him here. My legs were always too small to tackle the steps of the bleachers, but I’d still try. My hand instinctively goes to the tiny line that measures about an inch at the bottom of my chin, a decade-old scar from a missed step that brought my face down hard into the metal. My dad carried me home, his shirt pressed on my chin to stop the bleeding, then he drove me to the ER for stitches. My first of many.
My chest still working in and out, my shoulders tight and my legs pleading for me to quit, I reach into my pocket for my iPod, crank the volume up, and begin to climb. It takes me a dozen or so steps before I find an easy rhythm, but I run up and touch the bar at the top, turning around and letting my weight carry me back down the sixty steps to the bottom. I do it again, only this time faster, and I slow when I take the steps down so I can feel the sting of my muscles working hard. I repeat the pattern six more times, until my final sprint up the stairs ends in a trip on the last step. I lunge forward and catch my body on the top seat, my iPod slipping from my pocket and sliding along the metal and over the edge. I grab the cord with my fingers, but not before the weight of my device breaks it loose, and I hear it careen off the metal support beams until it busts to pieces forty feet below.
Fuck.
I let my head fall to the cold step beneath me and roll onto my back, pulling my legs into my chest with one arm and tugging my useless headphones from my ears with my other hand. Balling the cord up in my palm, I let my fist come down next to me a few times, vibrating the metal. I hate running without music. I have no idea how I’ll be able to do this again tomorrow.
Maybe I’ll just quit.
“That’s it! Yes, do that again. Just like that.”
My dad’s voice echoes off the gym wall, and I stand quickly to see where it’s coming from. I lean over the back of the bleachers and scan the parking lot and tennis courts behind me, but the grounds are just as empty as they were when I ran through them. I step up on one of the bars, locking my knees in place for balance and scan the rest of the area, looking out at the ball field on the other side of campus, and just as I see him, I hear his voice again.
“Yes!”
His words are faint, and I only hear them because he’s yelling and it echoes. He’s catching for Wes. It’s maybe seven thirty in the morning, on a Saturday, and my father is crouched down in the dirt just like he use to do with me. The vision hits my already-exhausted chest hard, and I kneel down, letting my face rest against the metal handrail while I watch something amazing happen—without me.
My father praises him after every single throw. It’s as if I’m watching a stranger the way he’s excited, positive, and full of vigor. He throws his glove down and jogs over to Wes several times, both of them facing each other, the intricacies of what they’re working on with grip and fingers too fine for me to see from here. The longer I watch, the more it hurts.
I don’t lie to myself. I’m jealous. This is envy, and I let the tear fall down my face while I hide up here like a frightened stray cat. My fucking iPod is broken beyond repair on the pavement below me, and I’m not even sure I’ll pick it up when I leave. I should care about that more, but I’m consumed with what’s happening hundreds of yards away.
When I can’t take it anymore, I fill my lungs with a cleansing breath and resolve not to look at them again. But I won’t leave. I won’t quit what I started. I put in ten more passes up and down the bleachers until my legs are jelly and I can barely feel my toes. My body is beating with heat, and I’m winded, but I did it. The only person I wanted to prove something to was me.
Before leaving, I pick up my cracked and jagged music player and hope by some miracle it still works after a little love and attention. I jog home, slower than I came here, and I shower and leave my house to spend the day at Kyle’s. No note left for my dad. No checking for messages from Wes. Nobody cares where I am, so whatever.
On a last-minute whim, I grab Wes’s shirt, mostly to torture myself later with thoughts of him, and stuff it in my backpack, under what’s left of the Jim Beam I take from my dad’s cabinet. He keeps it locked, but he also hangs the key about a foot away from the cabinet—apathy at its best.
Kyle is already in full slasher-mode by the time I get to his house. I arrive just in time for the classic Halloween showing, and in the middle of the movie, Conner sneaks in and jumps over the sofa, wedging himself between us, his arms slung over our shoulders. We both punch at him, and the scene turns into a wrestling brawl as Kyle lifts me over his back and starts to spin, trying to fling my wild legs at his brother.
“I am not your weapon! Put me down!” I scream. Kyle slaps my ass hard, and I hit him in the gut, sending him to his knees on the sofa. We’re laughing and rolling with each other when Taryn walks through the front door with TK, Levi, and Wes beside her.
“Always with you two,” she says.
“I didn’t know you were bringing anyone,” Kyle says, letting his hand roll down my arm and onto my leg slowly—affectionately. I look at it curiously then glance to Wes, who is also watching Kyle paint me with his touch. Irritated, I fling his hand from me and move from his lap, flipping him off as I storm out of the room.
&nb
sp; “What?” His question comes out so innocent, which only pisses me off more.
“You don’t fucking own me,” I say, turning and squinting my eyes so there’s no mistaking how I feel about what he just did. I glance to Wes again, who is pretending not to hear any of this, then I look to Taryn, who smirks. I flip her off too.
I escape to the kitchen, but Taryn follows. I ignore her at first, pulling the bottle from my backpack, and not bothering with a glass. I take a long drink, and the familiar warmth fills my chest and numbs my urge to care. I hold the bottle out for my friend, but she just twists her mouth in a half frown before backing up and pulling herself to sit up on the counter across from me.
“Suit yourself,” I shrug, taking one more, smaller drink before putting my bottle away.
“You’re going to have to tell one of those boys the truth tonight, you know?” I don’t respond, but only stare at her as if I have no clue what she means. “You like Wes, and you don’t feel that way about Kyle.”
“I’ve been through this with Kyle. He knows we’re just friends,” I say.
“Doesn’t mean he’s not going to put up a fight,” she says back quickly. Her words stress me out. I don’t want to deal with them. “And Wes…”
Before she gets a chance to finish, the door opens and everyone spills into the kitchen. Taryn keeps her eyes on me for a few seconds, leaning her head toward Wes as he walks by, letting her eyes follow him before coming back to me.
He could not possibly look any more perfect. Dark, loose jeans, a white T-shirt and a gray Y&R hat, always low on his brow. Every detail about him is simple, but in the perfect place: his hair poking from the back of his hat, the brown leather band of his watch on his bronzed arm, his Vans shoes, and damn, whatever the hell it is he wears for a cologne. I’m sporting my two-year-old state championship sweatshirt with torn cuffs and the smell of Jim Beam. My hair is pulled back tight, but when I run my fingers through the ends, they’re knotted from not drying my hair after my shower.