Pitch Please (There's No Crying in Baseball 1)

“Oh, God,” she said the moment she was back there. “Is your hand okay?”

My eyes immediately went to Gentry’s hand, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw it wasn’t his pitching hand.

“Yeah, fine,” he grumbled, starting to press it to his shirt to stop the bleeding.

“Wait!” she cried. “I have some Band-Aids in the car.”

She hurried around the other side of the SUV, and came back moments later with a little red pack in her hands.

“I carry this everywhere. I hope you like Transformer Band-Aids,” she smiled timidly.

Gentry held out his hand, which she reached for, and she pressed a white gauze pad against it before covering it with the Band-Aid.

“Bumblebee,” Gentry murmured. “My favorite.”

The woman started to laugh.

“You and Cailean,” she pointed to the back seat where I assumed her son was sitting.

Gentry looked through the glass, and his eyes widened.

“You’re not kidding.”

The woman shook her head.

“No, I’m afraid I’m not,” she grinned.

I took a look myself and smiled when I saw the kid fully decked out in Transformer clothes—Bumblebee to be exact—and waving at us.

“Happy kid,” I mumbled.

“He thought it was fun,” she sighed. “Now I have to go beg my dad for a ride.”

“You sound like you’d rather saw off your own foot,” Gentry observed.

“I would,” she confirmed. “My dad’s a mechanic, and I’d rather not hear him say ‘I told you so’ about buying this car.”

“Why?” Gentry asked. “What’s wrong with it?”

She grinned.

“It’s not American made.”

Gentry and I both nodded, understanding clear now.

“He a soldier?” I wondered.

She nodded her head again.

“Army. Retired after twenty years,” she confirmed.

“Well, we’ll wait until someone comes. As long as you’re comfortable with that,” Gentry offered.

The woman looked relieved.

“Thank you,” she whispered, and then pulled out her phone, a look of pain on her face. “I’ll be biting the bullet over there for a few seconds.”

With that, she walked away, and I looked over at my still staring friend.

“You might want to wipe that drool off your face.”

Gentry’s head whipped around to stare at me.

“Fuck off.”

***

“That little fucker is about to have his ass handed to him,” I murmured to Gentry as we walked into the locker room half an hour later. “What’s his deal?”

Gentry’s eyes went to the kid in question.

Croft was shoving his shirt into his pants, making sure he was tucked in completely all the way around his body, before he turned to grab his glove.

A glove that looked exactly like mine, even down to the red nail polish on the tip of the left finger.

That was something my mother used to do to all of our gloves as a way to distinguish my glove from all of my brothers. I had red. Hannibal had green. Hunter had blue. Harrison had orange. And Holden had yellow.

Which made me wonder…why the hell did that kid have a glove with red tipped fingers? Nobody else did that, and I began to ponder the likelihood of him doing the same thing with the red paint. It wasn’t a fucking coincidence that that kid had it and I did, too.

Which got me to thinking.

I hated the glove.

There was something wrong with it since I’d gotten it back, and I didn’t like it one freakin’ bit.

“What’s wrong?” Gentry pushed.

“Fuckin’ glove has felt off since I got it back,” I grumbled. “Gonna have to switch to my back up.”

“You should start breaking in a new one,” Gentry suggested.

I sighed.

“I am, and I will,” I mumbled. “How’s your hand doing?”

“Fine,” he murmured. “Better since I got the Band-Aid, unbelievably.”

I snorted and hunched my shoulders as I ripped my shirt over my head, throwing it in the bag at the bottom of my locker.

“Do you think she’ll come to the game next week?” I questioned him.

He’d invited her to the game when he’d seen her face after she’d spoken with her dad, and her eyes had gone all round as she looked from me to Gentry.

“Yeah,” Gentry nodded his head. “I do believe that she will.”

Turning my smile away from him so he wouldn’t see it, I bent down and grabbed a clean shirt just as I heard Rhys clear his throat directly next to me.

I turned only my head and raised a brow at him. “Can I help you?”

“You might want to head to the training room,” he mentioned. “Stop right outside the door.”

Brows furrowed, I did just that, leaving my clean t-shirt on the bench behind my locker as I weaved my way through the people milling about here and there as they trickled in from their workouts.

At first, I wasn’t too concerned.

Rhys looked fairly calm.

Nothing could be too wrong with Sway if he was that calm, right?

Wrong.

I realized about thirty seconds after arriving at the doors to the training room why he’d been so calm.

He didn’t want to say anything and risk taking the brunt of my anger. So, he’d sent me here, knowing I would hear.