“What? What were you going to say?” I frowned.
“I don’t know, Evie.” Aly wrinkled her nose, taking a second to carefully choose her words. “I don’t blame you for how things escalated the other night, but I personally don’t think it’s a good idea to sleep with him this early on. Like you’ve seen yourself, Drew can get… difficult sometimes. Emmett says he can just ‘flip a switch’ and ice people out like they never even mattered. I mean, he was trying to do it to Emmett over the whole trade rumor thing, but you know my man,” she smirked. “He’s persistent.”
“That he is,” I nodded, remembering the particular craziness of their courtship. “So what now? Strictly acting and friendship with him from here on out?”
“Just get to know him for now,” Aly said. “You’re both attracted to each other, obviously, but slow it down. Exercise self-control. You’re going to be stuck living with him for awhile, and he can be unpredictable, so do your best to keep things simple. You don’t want to risk making things awkward at home. Right?”
“Right,” I echoed, finally processing the severity of the situation.
It was all fun and games when I could go home to a hotel and be physically separated from Drew. But as of Monday, that would no longer be the case.
“So it’s settled,” Aly gave a clap of her hands. “You’re going to be fine living with him as long as you stick to your new rule. Which is?” she quizzed me.
“No more touching his body of any kind?”
“No, it’s not that extreme,” she snorted. “Just stop making contact with his penis, for God’s sake. You haven’t known him for that long, so if it’s already a necessity that you touch his dick every time you’re near him, you might actually be in love with him already.”
“Um, excuse you, and never,” I said indignantly.
“Atta girl.” She wheeled her chair over and ruffled my hair. “You got this. I believe in you,” she added, but she said it with such a funny, tight-lipped smile on her face that I knew she didn’t mean it completely.
And honest to God, I couldn’t blame her.
14
DREW
I eked out a win in Boston, but barely.
It came two days after my night in the backseat of the car with Evie, and it took every ounce of my focus to refrain from thinking about her. I had a precise physical regimen in the four days leading up to a start, and that wasn’t hard to follow.
But the mental game this week was a different story.
It was harder, more work to keep my mind on task, and I blamed it on the ritual. There were a ton of official rules in baseball, but a million more if you factored in all our pre-game rituals and superstitions. Some made more sense than others, but there was no questioning anyone’s routine. We all had our rules, which meant we respected everyone else’s.
For instance, Ty took the same route to work every day, even if it meant traffic up the ass. Watt had to have exactly twelve broccoli florets in his daily pregame meal. Brewer listened to the same Kendrick song at the same volume at the same time before every game, and Diaz tapped his heart twice with his right hand before every at-bat.
Everyone had their one rule and I was no different. In fact, I shared the same one as most pitchers on the team, and that was no sex on game day.
No jerking off either.
And while the no sex part was clearly no issue of late, the lack of the latter had me hurting today. I’d relied heavily on that relief the past few days. I needed it to get her off my mind. I hadn’t talked to her since that night in the back of my car, but that sure as shit didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking of her.
I was. Constantly.
And it wasn’t just the fact that I got to watch her come, it was the fact that she tested me. She tried my patience, got the better of me and she looked good doing it. I didn’t know if I loved it or hated it. All I knew was that it brought me right back to the cycle of doubting the contract, fighting the Nike brain, and reminding myself why I was doing this in the first place.
The game, this team, and a championship – my first one in a ten-year career.
I managed to get her out of my head the second my cleats hit the mound, and though I only pitched six innings, I got the win. So what little focus I had still managed to work.
But the case would definitely change once we touched down in Florida.
Contrary to what a few of my teammates liked to think, not every female baseball fan was a groupie. But the ones who hung in the lobby of our hotel after our games, when it was close to midnight?
Definitely groupies.
They had their tits pushed most of the way out of their kid sized Empires shirts, which were always cut down the middle, damned near to the navel, and on a regular basis, they didn’t tempt me. Aside from the fact that they were the type to prick holes in condoms, they had about a minute to make an impression on any one of us as we made our ways to the elevators, and the frantic desperation wasn’t exactly a turn-on.