She felt good up against my body. Right. Like she was meant to be there.
“Did you always want to be a baseball player when you were younger?” she whispered quietly, taking a sip of her wine after she spoke.
I made a disagreeing sound. “No. I wanted to be a basketball player. Baseball was my second sport. The love I had for basketball was unreal. My senior year in high school I was told that I needed to pick one sport and focus on it, because I was equally good at both. When I asked the coach which one he thought I should do, he told me that I needed to make that decision on my own. I went home and asked my mom, and she was the one who helped convince me to play baseball. I made the right choice in the long run, but I still love to play basketball when I have the time.”
“Why would you not choose basketball if you loved it more?” she questioned, looking up at me.
She smelled like the wine she was drinking and a sweet cinnamon flavor that she’d already informed me was her perfume. I wanted to bury my nose in her neck and inhale.
Luckily, I managed to keep that desire under control.
“Basketball is my favorite sport, but in all honesty, I had a better probability of making it in baseball. Not to mention, if I fucked up and had to go to school for an actual job, I wouldn’t have made it. I’m severely dyslexic. You have to be nineteen to get drafted for basketball. Baseball you only have to be graduated from high school and not attending college. If I had to wait, I would’ve had to get a job in the real world. And then probably wouldn’t have even bothered going to the draft at all. Baseball was just the way to go.”
“Hmm,” she hummed. “My sister is dyslexic. I know how you feel, kind of. She struggled to make it through high school. It was letters for her. Now she works in a bank and does awesome, but I swear to God, getting her through freakin’ high school was a lesson in patience.”
“I cheated my way through high school,” I admitted. “It was fuckin’ horrible. I couldn’t do half of the shit I needed to do, and the only way I could keep my grades up to play was to schmooze the teachers and be sneaky. It was a nightmare, and the day I graduated, I’d felt like a two-ton truck had been lifted off of my chest.”
My eyes had closed, so the feel of her hand on my thigh caused me to jolt.
She brought her cup back to her mouth and took another healthy sip, but didn’t remove her hand.
“George?”
I lifted my hand and let my fingers trail through her hair. “Yeah?”
“Do you know the Muffin Man?”
I found myself grinning. “The Muffin Man?”
“The one on Dreary Lane.”
I burst out laughing.
“I kinda like you,” I wheezed.
She turned her face into my chest. “I kinda like you, too.”Chapter 4Quit Your Pitchin’. The game’s on.
-Things Wrigley never thought she’d say
Wrigley
Lumberjacks v. Vikings
Blame it on Las Vegas for me doing what I did.
I shouldn’t have gone. I really shouldn’t have.
But, like the imbecile that I was, I had. I’d gone to Vegas because George had asked me to.
And, like the loser that I was, I’d jumped on it.
We hadn’t spent a whole lot of time together. He was always busy, and so was I.
But, the time we did spend together was awesome.
I was slowly falling in love with the man, and we hadn’t even really gone on very many dates.
Four.
Four dates that lasted for about two hours a piece.
However, it wasn’t the dates that had caused me to fall for him.
It was the hours and hours of time that we spent in his car talking about anything and everything.
His job. My job. My sister, his brother. My brother, his dislike for my brother.
And yes, George didn’t lie to me.
He didn’t like my brother, and I respected that. I liked that he didn’t beat around the bush, and I liked that he didn’t try to act like he did when he didn’t.
Dodger was Dodger.
He was either loved or hated.
There was no in between.
And apparently, my new friend George was on the hater’s side.
See, Dodger was a dick.
He always had been, and always would be.
Why was Dodger a dick? Because he could be.
There was no rhyme or reason to his madness. None.
My brother had always been, and always would be, my least favorite person.
But, he was family so I couldn’t kick him out.
Family stuck together, no matter what.
“George Hoffman, number seven!”
My belly started to flutter when George made his way onto the field, turning and waving at all his adoring fans.
And he really did have adoring fans. Everyone thought he was the best thing ever, and it really made me wonder whether I was good enough for him.