Just meeting the new characters at Ace Sports felt like something I should naturally be discussing with Adam—even more so than Georgia or Emily.
But then I remembered that he was the reason for my new office. My new coworkers. My new state.
It was hard—feeling some days like I was angry at him and other days like I’d completely overreacted. Like I’d punished him for something he barely did. He’d said the wrong thing, yes, but it was only a passing sentence. A fleeting moment. And he’d had the best of intentions.
But his intentions didn’t change the way I was perceived at Engelman, and as much as I’d wanted to power through it—through the judgment, the assumptions, the talking—I couldn’t.
If I stayed, I’d want to be with Adam, but if I was his girlfriend, I’d be seen only as that. AJ, Adam’s girlfriend. The one who got promoted because he threatened to quit if she wasn’t.
The short of it was that I wanted to give myself a shot. To prove myself and have my accomplishments stand alone. I’d worked long and hard enough, and I owed it to myself, so whether or not Adam was my soul mate or my “twin flame,” according to Georgia, it didn’t matter.
I had to give myself an honest chance at my dream. It was as simple as that.
“Don’t second guess yourself. You’ll hit your stride eventually,” Emily told me on the days that were hard, when I’d go back and forth between wondering if I could keep in contact with Adam because I missed him so much, and reminding myself that my heart could never handle th
at. “Just keep your chin up. There’s going to be a turning point for you, AJ. And after that, everything’s going to make sense.”
Like so many other pieces of her advice, I’d held all that close to my heart. I let myself be sad if I had to. But I was patient. And things did feel better when I started getting to those firsts-as-an-agent milestones, in particular, when I signed my first client, whose first minor league start I was now on my way to seeing.
He was an eighth round draft pick out of LSU and a kid I’d actually been scouting for ages, before I even arrived at Ace, so I was beyond excited to have front row seats to witness his first ever pitch as a pro. It wasn’t quite work—it was celebratory. The very start of my working relationship with my first ever client.
I’d desperately needed something to be excited about, and it was like a true breath of spring to feel a real smile finally spread on my face when the car pulled up to the stadium.
Alright. This is it, I told myself as I got out. This is going to be your turning point.
I was convinced it was going to my first perfect, seamless day on the East Coast.
But like an idiot, I hadn’t even checked who my client was facing up against.
The opposing team today was the Carolina Redwolves. Visiting from Asheville, North Carolina.
Cole’s team.
I realized only as I got into the stadium to see them leaning against the dugout in their uniforms—red lettering emblazoned across a grey jersey and white pants with a single red pinstripe down the side.
Cole was leaning right at the end, by the stairs.
I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t Googled him before. I’d actually done it the day after Adam told me about him. Stats and scouting reports had come up along with one official portrait of him that was used across every website.
He’d looked young in the picture, and not much like Adam.
But even from a distance, in person, the resemblance was striking. So much so that it made my heart sharply twist in my chest, because I’d done well all day not missing Adam.
But as I watched his brother lean against a railing with his tanned arm dangling loosely over the side, I felt a knot rise in my throat. One that only grew as the game started, because as proud as I was watching my client—watching him hurl fastball after fastball with his velocity inching toward the mid-nineties—half the energy and attention in my body was tuned into Cole in the dugout.
More than half, really.
Even during the stretches of the inning where I forced myself to pay full attention to the game, when I clapped and cheered like everyone around me, my pulse was still hammering, refusing to let me even fake normal with myself for a second.
One second, I breathed almost steadily.
The next, it felt like I had no air in my lungs.
Especially when the bottom half of the inning came and I watched Cole jog to take his position at third base. My palms were sweaty as I wrung my hands in my lap, feeling as completely enthralled as I did guilty.
Because I knew how much Adam missed him.
How long it’d been since he’d seen him in person. I knew he wished he could just sit at one of his games unnoticed and just watch him play. But he couldn’t.