Reckless

by Stella Rhys

  “Look at me, Adam.”

  I held my fiery stare on Josh for two more seconds, hoping he understood my wordless promise to beat his ass into the ground. Then I tore my eyes off him and looked at her, expecting to see fury.

  But instead, I saw her eyes pleading with me. And when I blinked once more, I realized I’d crossed the line. Forced her to put her hands on my chest at the office and stop me from kicking Josh’s ass on her behalf.

  It had all happened in a matter of seconds, and on paper, I could very well be just a friend defending a friend. Even if this was months ago, I would’ve done the same.

  But that wasn’t how it looked. And it shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks, right? I remembered AJ’s words the night she told me about what happened to her in college. But you know how it is in this town. This industry. It shouldn’t matter.

  But it does.

  We had been quiet in the past few weeks at home. When we spoke, we spoke in quiet voices. Even when we managed to laugh or joke around, it was as if we didn’t have the energy to get past a certain volume.

  Probably because we both knew what was going on.

  There was an unspoken hunch going on between us, and it became inevitable after the Josh MacMillan incident at the office.

  I was pissed at him. Engelman. Everyone. She was too.

  And I knew she was a little pissed at me, though she said it was irrational.

  “I know everything you did was with the best intentions,” she said, squeezing my hand as we lay in bed at night.

  We still kissed. Still had sex. Still fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  But on a random Friday night, I felt something different. The way we’d felt a gradual shift in the air at Engelman over the course of the week following her promotion, I felt a shift in AJ. It was just that it happened all in one day, and I was unsettled by the fact that she denied anything was different.

  I knew she was lying to me. I felt it as we walked around each other in the house, as we made dinner and as I followed her into the shower that night.

  The fog of the hot shower only thickened the tension as she glanced over her shoulder, saying nothing as she saw me peel my shirt over my head, push my sweats down and get in after her. She faced forward again, staying silent even as my arm circled her waist, bending her over just enough for me to enter her.

  There were no words spoken. It was only panting, angry breaths that grew hotter and harsher as I fucked her like I wasn’t going to get to again.

  At night, she still slept in my arms, but I couldn’t ignore the feeling anymore. Something was off, and if that weren’t obvious on its own, it was in the fact that we’d both been lying still for an hour, but neither one of us was asleep. I knew she was staring out my window into the dark of the sky, and suddenly, I couldn’t take the quiet anymore.

  “Talk to me,” I murmured.

  She stayed completely still in my arms. But she talked.

  “I reached out to Ace Sports in New York,” she said.

  I didn’t try swallowing the knot in my throat.

  I didn’t try to ask if they’d replied either. If she had interviewed. If they had offered and if she’d accepted. I already knew.

  I almost asked why she didn’t go with Thorn Sports. With Iain.

  But I didn’t, because I knew.

  She didn’t want it to look like her boyfriend’s best friend took her in. She knew she’d have earned a job there on merit alone--that Iain would have hired her in a heartbeat based purely on skill.

  But that wouldn’t be how it looked.

  Stay, I urged her in my head. Stay or let me come.

  I wanted to tell her that I’d go work at Thorn while she worked at Ace. But I knew she didn’t suggest this because it was obvious what would happen if I moved to New York. It was already Iain’s town. If I went to work alongside him at Thorn, we would be kings in Manhattan. The spotlight would shine constantly on us. AJ would work in my shadow. And she already said it herself.

  She needed to distinguish her career from mine.

  I knew she’d worked hard for it. Busted her ass for it before she ever even met me. I knew she wanted to give herself a chance to stand on her own, and as much as I wanted to ask her not to—to stand beside me instead—I couldn’t do that to her.

  I loved her entirely too much for that.

  So with that knot in my throat, I kissed her shoulder, and I pretended I didn’t ask what I just did, or hear what she just said. I closed my eyes and as I felt her nestle back against my chest, I pretended that this night was like any other. I treasured it somewhere deep in my heart.

  But I didn’t tuck the memory safely away in my head.

  This one I wanted to let go of.

  37

  AJ

  Two Months Later

  The trip to Rhode Island wasn’t short—a three-hour drive from my apartment in Brooklyn Heights to the stadium in Pawtucket.

  But I didn’t mind it at all.

  For one, I wasn’t driving, which was something I was still getting used to but definitely enjoying at the moment. Also, the company was paying for the ride and beyond that, I’d never ridden along the East Coast before.

  Back when I worked at Engelman, all our East Coast trips involved flying everywhere, so it was kind of fun to just gaze out the window, passing through Connecticut on the way up and driving through all the quaint beach towns with their tall grasses, white fences and cute little houses on stilts. The ocean was a moodier blue on the East Coast too, and that was something I needed lately.

  The first two weeks without Adam had been hard. Impossible, even.

  I knew we were close. Even before we were together, I knew we had a friendship so close it was hard to define. But I hadn’t even realized the true level of our bond till I was without him.

  At least a dozen times a day, I itched to tell him something. Sometimes the most trivial, silly, inconsequential things. I saw the New York J-Mac on the train one morning and couldn’t believe I couldn’t tell Adam. The guy was literally a fratty, thirty-something-year-old Josh MacMillan type carrying a basketball, wearing a backwards cap and a hoody that had The J-Mac emblazoned on the back, which was technically worse actually, because even Josh didn’t use “the” before “J-Mac.”

  Stupid things like that made me miss him, as did legit things, like craving advice or conversation. Or a laugh.

  He was my person for so many more things than I had ever even realized.

  Just meeting the new characters at Ace Sports felt like something I should naturally be discussing with Adam—even more so than Georgia or Emily.

  But then I remembered that he was the reason for my new office. My new coworkers. My new state.

  It was hard—feeling some days like I was angry at him and other days like I’d completely overreacted. Like I’d punished him for something he barely did. He’d said the wrong thing, yes, but it was only a passing sentence. A fleeting moment. And he’d had the best of intentions.

  But his intentions didn’t change the way I was perceived at Engelman, and as much as I’d wanted to power through it—through the judgment, the assumptions, the talking—I couldn’t.

  If I stayed, I’d want to be with Adam, but if I was his girlfriend, I’d be seen only as that. AJ, Adam’s girlfriend. The one who got promoted because he threatened to quit if she wasn’t.

  The short of it was that I wanted to give myself a shot. To prove myself and have my accomplishments stand alone. I’d worked long and hard enough, and I owed it to myself, so whether or not Adam was my soul mate or my “twin flame,” according to Georgia, it didn’t matter.

  I had to give myself an honest chance at my dream. It was as simple as that.

  “Don’t second guess yourself. You’ll hit your stride eventually,” Emily told me on the days that were hard, when I’d go back and forth between wondering if I could keep in contact with Adam because I missed him so much, and reminding myself that my heart could never handle th
at. “Just keep your chin up. There’s going to be a turning point for you, AJ. And after that, everything’s going to make sense.”

  Like so many other pieces of her advice, I’d held all that close to my heart. I let myself be sad if I had to. But I was patient. And things did feel better when I started getting to those firsts-as-an-agent milestones, in particular, when I signed my first client, whose first minor league start I was now on my way to seeing.

  He was an eighth round draft pick out of LSU and a kid I’d actually been scouting for ages, before I even arrived at Ace, so I was beyond excited to have front row seats to witness his first ever pitch as a pro. It wasn’t quite work—it was celebratory. The very start of my working relationship with my first ever client.

  I’d desperately needed something to be excited about, and it was like a true breath of spring to feel a real smile finally spread on my face when the car pulled up to the stadium.

  Alright. This is it, I told myself as I got out. This is going to be your turning point.

  I was convinced it was going to my first perfect, seamless day on the East Coast.

  But like an idiot, I hadn’t even checked who my client was facing up against.

  The opposing team today was the Carolina Redwolves. Visiting from Asheville, North Carolina.

  Cole’s team.

  I realized only as I got into the stadium to see them leaning against the dugout in their uniforms—red lettering emblazoned across a grey jersey and white pants with a single red pinstripe down the side.

  Cole was leaning right at the end, by the stairs.

  I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t Googled him before. I’d actually done it the day after Adam told me about him. Stats and scouting reports had come up along with one official portrait of him that was used across every website.

  He’d looked young in the picture, and not much like Adam.

  But even from a distance, in person, the resemblance was striking. So much so that it made my heart sharply twist in my chest, because I’d done well all day not missing Adam.

  But as I watched his brother lean against a railing with his tanned arm dangling loosely over the side, I felt a knot rise in my throat. One that only grew as the game started, because as proud as I was watching my client—watching him hurl fastball after fastball with his velocity inching toward the mid-nineties—half the energy and attention in my body was tuned into Cole in the dugout.

  More than half, really.

  Even during the stretches of the inning where I forced myself to pay full attention to the game, when I clapped and cheered like everyone around me, my pulse was still hammering, refusing to let me even fake normal with myself for a second.

  One second, I breathed almost steadily.

  The next, it felt like I had no air in my lungs.

  Especially when the bottom half of the inning came and I watched Cole jog to take his position at third base. My palms were sweaty as I wrung my hands in my lap, feeling as completely enthralled as I did guilty.

  Because I knew how much Adam missed him.

  How long it’d been since he’d seen him in person. I knew he wished he could just sit at one of his games unnoticed and just watch him play. But he couldn’t.

  Yet here I was. Just stumbling into the opportunity he’d dreamt about every day for the past many years.

  I can’t believe that’s really him.

  Versions of that sentence ricocheted through my mind as I stole glances at Cole between every pitch.

  He had black hair and olive skin, which made him look strikingly different from Adam, yet so damned similar at the same time. The shape of his jaw was just like his brother’s. Same with his sculpted cheekbones. His long, straight nose. From where I sat, I couldn’t tell his eye color, but I could see that he looked about the same height as Adam, with a build that was slightly leaner, and a gait that was… actually so different it made me want to smile.

  Maybe I was projecting, but it just felt like the gait of a little brother. It was boyish. Almost surly. He stood tall—he didn’t slouch by any means—but he had a way of leaning to the side, tipping his chin up and looking bored as hell as he surveyed the infield. Like he was waiting for someone to impress him. To give him something to do.

  Unfortunately for the Wolves, that happened in the bottom of the fourth when their pitcher gave up a triple that put a man on third right where Cole was.

  He’d had his stoic game face on as he waited to make the out, but once it was ruled a triple, I watched in awe as he nodded a hello to the runner, who said something or another to make Cole laugh.

  And… there it is.

  That smile.

  It was Adam’s. The same boyish grin with the dimple that transformed Cole’s face completely. Suddenly, I could imagine the little boy who worshipped his brother. The kid who was still the baby of the family before Adam left.

  I stared so hard I was briefly convinced that from third base, he looked in my direction and saw how hard I was staring.

  But that would be impossible. He’s more than an infield away and he’s focused on the game, I told myself.

  So I let myself keep staring and in the fifth inning, when he hit a single and made it to first, I found myself staring at him from a distance so short I for some reason held my breath. He can’t hear you, idiot, I thought.

  Just as he looked directly at me.

  Fuck.

  I shifted my eyes immediately to the batter, telling myself it was a coincidence. That my seat was front row right behind first. Of course we’d make eye contact at some point.

  For God’s sake, get a hit or strike out, I urged the batter, just so we could get Cole off first.

  Because now he was occasionally eyeing me while chatting up with the first baseman.

  Except he’s really not, I told myself even the second time. The third too. But then his teammate struck out, the inning ended and he jogged off first and headed toward the dugout.

  But not before fully turning his head and looking at me with a completely unreadable face.

  Uhhhh.

  “You know number twenty-four?” the older man next to me asked. My eyes shifted.

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, he just looked right at ya.”

  “Oh?”

  “Dead in the eye.”

  Okay, yeah. Thanks, guy.

  I spent the rest of the game trying to not look at Cole at all, but that was actually pretty hard because he kept frickin’ getting to first. Another single a few innings later. Then a walk in the eighth.

  I avoided looking anywhere but the batter after his single, but then my old man friend nudged me. “Twenty four’s lookin’ at ya.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, you ain’t lookin’. I am.”

  Cool.

  Well this is officially weird. I was at the game of my ex-boyfriend-boss’s estranged brother, having a weird stand-off with said brother whom I’d never actually met, and someone’s grandpa had elected to give me the play-by-play of his every look in my direction. He was actually having a grand ol’ time, giving that wheezy, old man laugh over my every look of visible discomfort.

  Thankfully, the old man left before the final out, volunteering his explanation to me on his way out. “Gotta beat the crowd. Good luck with twenty-four,” he said, clapping my shoulder before he walked off.

  I said goodbye to him and admittedly heaved a huge sigh of relief once he was gone, because it was easier to finish watching the game alone. Without a witness, I could go back to pretending Cole didn’t notice me staring, and wasn’t looking back as a way to basically tell me he could sense something fishy about me.

  See? You’re good. It’s all good, I told myself once the game was over. The Wolves had won 5-2 and my client hadn’t gotten the win, but that was okay, because everyone was starting to leave. The players were giving high fives on the field and I was on my feet, getting ready to go.

  But I had one foot on the steps when I heard
a whispery hush fall over the chatty women across the aisle from me. And when I looked at them, I saw them whispering furiously to each other while gawking at the field.

  Ah… shit.

  I turned around, both surprised and not when I saw Cole standing there at the edge of the field, those blue eyes locked unapologetically on me. His face was stoic, but I was sure I didn’t imagine the amusement in his eye as he got an up-close view of my not-fully-disguised awkwardness.

  “Hi,” he finally said.

  I noted that his voice didn’t sound like Adam’s. It was similarly low, but not as smooth.

  “Hi,” I said. My eyes shifted awkwardly as I turned fully around, because I was unsure exactly what Cole was doing here, and I didn’t want to presume that he wanted to talk to me, especially with how thoroughly blank and disinterested his expression was right now.

  But he was here. And he wasn’t moving.

  So…

  I headed over to the railing, glad that the stands were emptying despite the handsome third baseman standing right there. Maybe it was the fact that he was from the other team. Or the fact that he was chewing his gum and eyeing anyone trying to rubberneck with casual looks of disgust.

  Okay... I can see how he and Knox would get along, I thought with amusement.

  Even the whispering girls left after awhile—or at least they gave what Cole deemed enough space to start talking.

  “You were mad-dogging me the whole game, so figured I’d come say hi,” he said, so completely deadpan that I thought he was serious for a second. But then came that glimmer in his eye that I knew well.

  “I was not mad-dogging you,” I snorted.

  “You were staring into the dugout before the game even started.”

  Okay. Didn’t realize he saw that.

  When my mouth opened and closed a few times without a sentence happening, he smirked.

  “I know you’re Adam’s assistant.”

  I didn’t try to contain my surprise. “How… did you know that?”

  He snapped his gum then looked at some goings-on down the field before returning his attention to me. “I’ve Googled him,” he said.