Moonshot (10 page)

Dan Velacruz,
New York Times

30

New York

I nodded my head to the beat, Jeremih and 50 Cent pumping as loud as my Beats would allow. Wiping down bats, I sang along to the lyrics, my rhythm interrupted by Big Lou, who tugged on the cord of my headphones, speaking to me in a string of Spanish. I obeyed his request, pulling out the headphone jack, my phone blasting “Down On Me,” the beat hitting hard, the Dominicans laughing at my music before nodding their heads in time. I beat-boxed with Frank, dancing in place as he rapped out a line, his version ten times dirtier than my clean mix.

I spun, my hands raised, a laugh spilling out, and saw Chase. He stood in the doorway, a towel over one shoulder, his V-neck shirt dirty with clay stains. I looked away, before our eyes met. Laughing at Frank, I stepped back to the bats, focusing on the task, the beat continuing, everything continuing, but everything, as it always was when he came near, was different.

31

She was laughing, her head back, smile big, her blonde hair fanning out as she lifted her hands and turned.

It might have been the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

32

Beneath my feet, the slight vibration of travel. Above my head, my seat light shone down on the pages of my economics textbook. When the ball of paper dropped from above, a gentle tap on the page, I stared at it. Tightly crumpled, the size of a grape, it looked innocent, coming to rest in the gully of my textbook. A silent, deadly foe. I glanced around, my dad sound asleep in the next seat, the same fate hitting the two men across from me. I glanced back, the Yankee jet dark behind me. I unrolled the ball of paper carefully, stretching it out.

check underneath your seat

The handwriting was terrible, slanted and sloppy. I didn’t have to study the lines of it, didn’t have to turn around to identify its thrower. In this plane, it could only be from one man.

I didn’t want to dig under my seat. I wanted to be the stubborn, proud woman who tore up love letters and moved on to the next great event in her life. But I wasn’t that woman, and this wasn’t anything close to a love letter. This was bait and at three in the morning, it was infinitely more exciting than the power of the euro in economies of scale. I reached under my seat, my hand closing around two distinct objects, and I smiled before I even pulled out the Starburst tower and the Twix.

I unwrapped the Twix, halfway into my first bite, when the second ball of note hit my lap. This time, I didn’t hesitate, my fingers fast in their work.

Quit hogging the only candy on the plane. The hot guy five rows back is starving.

I almost laughed, my lips clamping down as I glanced quickly at my dad, a well-timed snore coming from his sagged chin, his cap pulled over his eyes. I finished my chew and contemplated my choices. There were really only two—stay in my seat or don’t.

I didn’t. I got up slowly, as quietly as possible, laying my textbook on the seat, and stood in the aisle. My eyes tried to adjust to the dark, scanning the rows of sleeping athletes. He waved, six or seven seats back, and I stepped toward him, stopping by his seat, his lazy smile tilted up at me.

I looked at him in mock confusion, holding up the wrinkled scrap of paper. “This says…” I squinted at it in the dark, “a
hot
guy.” I looked up from the paper in time to see him tilt back his head and laugh. I didn’t think, prior to that moment, I’d ever found a neck sexy. His was. Half-covered in the dotted texture of stubble, thick and strong, leading to that jaw, then that
mouth
. I tried to remain unaffected, to not think about what it could do, how it could taste.

“Sit down, Little League.” He patted the empty seat next to him—a window seat. I looked down at his long legs, stretched out, the crawl over one that would be impossible in any sort of a lady-like fashion. He saw my predicament and leaned forward, standing up, towering over me in the small space, our bodies too close for comfort. “Sit,” he whispered, right against my ear.

I sat, his return to his seat giving me the vague feeling of being trapped. This was a bad idea. I should be back at my seat, finishing my work, not surrounded by sleeping giants, holding out my candy to the worst one in the bunch.

He took the candy, breaking off a piece of Twix before handing it back to me. There was a pause, and I wondered what on Earth we were going to talk about.

33

“That doesn’t make sense,” I argued, pulling my hair into a messy ponytail. “It’s selfish.” New fact learned about Chase Stern: he had a family. A mother and father, still married and living on five acres in Ohio. His mom worked as a paralegal, his father an electrician. They wanted him to be a lawyer, and still wondered when he would ‘stop this ballplaying and settle down.’ He hadn’t mentioned any siblings. We’d gotten distracted at the mention of Casper.

“How’s that selfish? It’s my dog.”

“It
was
your dog. Then you decided on a career that put you on the road. You can’t play baseball
and
have a relationship with your dog.”

“A relationship?” he coughed, shaking his head as he finished off his water. “It’s not a relationship.”

“It
should
be,” I pointed out. “The strongest bond on Earth … man and his dog…” I waved away his skepticism, plowing forward. “You can’t take the dog away from everything he knows and bring him to New York. It’s wrong.”

“He doesn’t exactly have Wednesday coffee dates with his friends,” he said. “He plays in the yard with a Frisbee. He can do that in New York. I’ll get a yard. Besides, he’s
mine
.” He reached out and stole a Starburst.

“Your mom wants what’s right for him. She’s the one who’s taken care of him for the last four years. I agree with her.” I shrugged. “Here he’s going to sit at your house, all alone, and be miserable.”

“You can come over and play with him,” he offered.

“Ha.”

“Seriously. I’ll hire you. You can be his new best friend.”

“No. And his owner is supposed to be his best friend.”

“You can teach me.”

“I don’t know anything about dogs.”

“Ha!” he said loudly, and I gripped his arm in warning.
Swoon
. So strong, I felt the tendons move when he turned toward me, my fingers instinctively tightening, wanting to feel every pulse, every seam of his body. He glanced at my hand, and I let go.

“Shh,” I hissed, and his eyes lifted to mine. Our seats suddenly felt too close, the side of my knee against his.

“You just said you don’t know anything about dogs,” he whispered.

“So?”

“So stop telling me what I should do with mine.”

“He belongs at your mom’s house,” I whispered back, our eyes still connected, our arms now touching as we hunched together, over the center console.

“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he said, the words husky, his hand moving forward to cup—

I leaned back, needing air. Possibly a soda. Maybe I was dehydrated. Something was wrong; I was too flushed, too hot in this space, my skin jumping against itself, the twist and pull of right versus wrong, kissing him versus not … we couldn’t do this again.

“Were you about to kiss me?” I accused, my whisper forgotten, my voice too loud, and he looked around in warning.

“Watch it,” he snapped.

“Were you?”

“I don’t know.” He sat back in his chair. “What if I was?”

“You can’t kiss me again.”

“Why not?”

“I just…” My eyes darted front, my dad in shouting distance. “Don’t.”

“You know, most girls, if their dad tells them to stay away from someone, they do the opposite.”

“And most guys avoid jailbait.”

“I’m avoiding you.”

“Doesn’t seem like it.”

He watched me closely, his direct eye contact something that twisted my stomach into knots. “We’re friends.”

Friends
. I didn’t have a lot of experience with friendship, but I was pretty sure this wasn’t it. “You kiss all your friends?”

The corner of his mouth turned up. “When they have a mouth like yours.”

I snorted. “Please.”
Did he mean it?
Had he been as affected as I was by our kiss?

He kept his eyes on me. “You think you know me, Little League?”

I considered the question. “I know enough.”

His mouth twisted in a mocking smile.

“I do,” I pressed. “Honestly. It’s embarrassing my level of Chase Stern trivia.” I waved him on. “Go ahead. Quiz me.”

“You know what’s been written about me. That’s not me.”

“You love to do interviews. That tells me something.” Dad never did press, despite every attempt by the Yankees to push him into the spotlight. Nineteen years in the Majors, and I’d never once seen him sit down with a reporter. Chase had them trailing him like groupies. Dad once said that a man who sat down and spilled his soul to strangers didn’t have much of a soul to protect.

“I have a brand. I feed it.” He tossed up the ball and caught it. “Try again.”

I jabbed harder. “I know you make some stupid decisions.”

He scowled. “Life is a series of stupid decisions interrupted by luck.”

“Poetic, but completely wrong.”

He spun the ball on the center console, the red stitches blurring, the ball wandering toward the edge. “You can’t always recognize stupidity, Ty. Most of the time it takes years to see your own mistakes.”

I caught the ball when it fell off the edge, squeezing it hard, my fingers at home in their grip. I looked up from it and into his face. “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made?

I expected him to say the Davis affair. Or the DUI he got rookie year. Or the two years he wasted at Stanford. I was wrong.

His answer took everything I thought I knew about Chase Stern and scattered it to the wind.

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