I nodded again.
“She doesn’t like the way I’m doing things, and would much rather me go back to school and allow the board to run Weaver House. However, I don’t want to go back to school. I want to find vindication for my mother, and I’m going to do that by running the business that she started and making it everything she always wanted it to be.”
“I’m sorry about your mom, honey.”
“My mother passed away when Diamond’s father decided that she needed to learn a lesson. He beat her to death on my twenty-fifth birthday. She’s been dead for almost four years now.”
That just fucking sucked.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said as I reached forward and started the car. “My mother wasn’t in that exact situation, but in one very similar. She never divorced my step-father. She stayed with him until the bitter end. She died from a drug overdose about nine years ago. She did what she had to do to stay alive, and in the end, that’s what killed her. Not my step-father.”
Wrigley shook her head.
“My mother loved baseball,” she said into the silence that’d lapsed between us. “Loved it so much, yet I never really wanted to know anything about it. I regret that now, which is why I went to that first game.”
I found myself grinning despite the shitty topic.
“I’m glad.”
“You’re glad that your ball hit me in the face?” she teased.
I chuckled. “Yeah, I’m glad my ball hit you in the face.”
At that, we both burst out laughing.
***
“So, Diamond, Dodger, and Wrigley. That’s a pretty intense love of baseball to name your kids after three such significant baseball terms. Why Wrigley, though? Did she love that field?”
I found myself solely focused on her, and I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the smile that lit her face.
“My mother said I was conceived at Wrigley Field. She said it was only fitting.” She shuddered. “I’d rather not think about that, though. Then I have to think about my mom having sex, and as far as I am concerned, that never happened. I was immaculately conceived.”
I snorted. “I once walked in on my mother and father doing it on the couch. I walked in with three of my friends, and they all saw, too. It was the single most humiliating thing I’ve ever witnessed.”
Wrigley slapped a hand over her mouth. “That’s awful!”
It was.
“So I think I got you beat in that department at least,” I started, my eyes going back down to her wine glass. “Do you want more, or are you okay?”
We’d had dinner. We’d chatted and gotten to know each other. And now we were sitting in front of her house in my car.
I’d made a pit stop to an all-night grocery store and picked up a bottle of their most expensive wine and a couple of plastic glasses so we could drink it.
Though, we’d never gotten out of the car long enough to use them how I’d intended to use them.
Turns out, Wrigley was in love with my car almost as much as I was in love with it.
“I’m fine.” She shook her head, eyeing the bottle.
I snorted and poured another glass—all the way to the top.
“I swear, I feel like you’re trying to get me drunk,” she joked.
I shrugged. “I may get you drunk, but I’m not going to capitalize on your drunken state if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She licked her lips. “Maybe you should drink more so that you forget that you’re chivalrous.”
I eyed the single glass that I’d been nursing since we started talking in her driveway two hours earlier and smiled. “I’m not much of a drinker, to be honest. And, when I do drink, I usually gravitate toward whiskey. I’m not sure about this wine business yet.”
“Wine business?” she teased.
I shrugged. “You know what I mean.”
And she did. Her smile gave her away moments later, too.
She turned her face away from me and continued to study the car. Something she’d been doing for a while.
“What?”
“I’m just surprised that you have a car like this,” she said. “I always wanted one almost exactly like this. I used to have this tiny little Hot Wheels car that was almost identical to yours. It was painted a silvery blue with sparkles on it, and it had these fat racing tires. I used to take it everywhere with me. It’s just a little surreal to be sitting in a car that is so similar to it. I still have it sitting on the windowsill in my bedroom.”
“I had one, too,” I admitted. “But, I gotta say, I thought girls weren’t supposed to play with boy’s toys.”
She flipped me off, and I started to chuckle.
Holding out my hand, she took it, and then I tugged her closer.
I didn’t pull her all the way into my lap and kiss the daylights out of her like I wanted to, but I did tug her into the curve of my arm and squeezed her in tight.