Listen, Pitch (There's No Crying in Baseball 3)

When she was taking her last breath, my uncle was fucking another woman in the bathroom—my aunt’s hospice nurse.

He hadn’t cared one single bit when the alarms started shrieking, signaling the end of her life.

That’d also been the day that I saw the light inside my father die.

Uncle Pablo doing that had broken him, and he’d never been the same.

“Earth to Rhys!”

I blinked, going back to my phone call.

“Sorry.” I paused. “Hang on for a minute and let me get into another room so I don’t wake Henley.”

“Henley?” Sterling said. “Is that her?”

I didn’t answer him until I reached the kitchen.

The moment the swinging door was closed between the living room and the kitchen, I answered him. “Yes, that’s her.”

“You never told me about her,” he accused. “I feel shafted.”

I snorted. Sterling wouldn’t give one single shit that I’d neglected to tell him a thing.

“You’re not bothered in the least,” I countered. “How’s your face feel? I saw you take a fastball to the cheek last week. They replayed it about fifteen times on the game recap.”

I’d finally started watching baseball again—just not my team. I couldn’t quite take that step yet. It fucking hurt to watch them play without me alongside them in the game.

I stuck to the other teams and studied the players while I did. Something that I used to do in passing now became almost a daily occurrence for me since I had nothing else to do.

I’d be back on that baseball field in a few weeks, and I would have my starting position back.

Though, after what I heard today from the boys, I’d have to be taking it back.

The new kid that’d come up from the minor leagues, Gunner, had been impressing the coach with his skills. He’d covered for Manny when Manny had gone down with a pulled hamstring for five weeks and was now covering for me.

I just knew he wouldn’t be impressing him for that much longer—at least not when it came to my position.

“It feels okay,” Sterling admitted. “The first two days it hurt like a motherfucker. Then Ruthie made this salve shit and pasted it on there. I left it on for like an hour, and I could already feel a noticeable difference in the swelling. It was a miracle.”

“Why didn’t she do that for you when you got hit in the groin?” I teased.

“Because, apparently, it’s not allowed to go on places that have ‘orifices.’ Or so she likes to tell me.” He grunted.

I grinned and walked to the fridge, pulling out a bottle of water and draining half of it before I commented.

“Tell me what happened, man,” Sterling said. “Swear to Christ. When I heard that on the fucking news, I was scared. I thought you were a goner, and the next time I’d be seeing you was in an open casket.”

“I wouldn’t have done an open casket. My sister’s under strict orders to cremate my ass so that my mother can’t play the poor, pitiful me card,” I explained.

He grunted in reply. “That’s not an answer.”

Grinning, I leaned my hips against the counter and told him.

“Not much to tell, really,” I said. “I was driving my bike to the convenience store for something to eat when a van pulled out of a driveway and I ran straight into it. From there, I can’t remember much of anything. The police said eyewitnesses jumped into action. There was a nurse and a doctor that just happened to be riding together home from a hospital retirement party. They got me stable, and the doctor did CPR on me until paramedics arrived. From there, it was touch and go.”

Touch and go meaning I’d nearly died so many goddamn times that it was unreal.

“I heard that you have a blood disease that kept them from doing further surgeries.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s not really a secret. The media found out about my hemophilia when that ball hit me in the nose, remember?”

He grunted. “Yeah, I remember. You had to go to the hospital to get something—a clotting agent if I remember correctly—because it wasn’t stopping.”

“Yep,” I agreed. “That kept them from doing anymore surgery on me even though they needed to. They were able to get a drain in place to relieve the pressure on my brain. But honestly, your guess as to why I’m alive right now is the same as mine. All I’m able to come up with is it being a divine miracle.”

“A divine miracle in the form of a woman that sat at your bedside for a full two weeks. A mail carrier.” He chuckled.

The image of Henley in her mail carrier uniform started to stiffen certain parts of my anatomy. God, she was fucking cute in that uniform!

“I didn’t know she was a mail carrier when I met her,” I told him honestly. “When we first met, Ol’ Bruno the bodyguard stepped on her transmitter. She’s deaf and the transmitter is the mechanism she wears that allows her to hear.”