Hardball (28 page)

“Yes.” I would have agreed to anything, logistics be damned.

“I need to come inside you.”

His fingers gathered sensation like cotton candy in a sugar mill.

“Do it. Come in me.”

“Show me first. Show me how you come.”

His finger twitched a little differently, flicking instead of circling, while he got the length of him inside, filling me with him. My hips pushed back, begging for more, and he pushed his finger down. My muscles stiffened, and my mouth opened with soundless satisfaction. I let everything go and came in the Dodgers’ home dugout.

“Thank you,” I gasped when his finger slowed and stopped.

He pulled me back, letting his dick slip out. He grabbed a waist-high bin of bats and helmets and wheeled it closer.

“Come back here. Put your hands on the edge.” Looking up, he changed the angle so I couldn’t see the stands anymore. “I’m not going to be able to be discreet about pounding you right now.”

I didn’t ask how discreet we could be if someone came through to the dugout because from behind me, he pulled back the skin of my thighs and licked my sensitive pussy. My groan echoed in the empty space.

“Shush.”

I felt his dick again, and again he didn’t pause. Just used my wetness to slide inside. Not slowly. No, this time, he slammed into me. I had to brace myself against the bin as he did exactly what he’d promised. He took me from behind, pounding my pussy deep and fast, hands gripping my hips for leverage.

“Harder,” I said. I wanted him to break me with it.

“All of it.” I knew from his voice that he was close. “Take all of it.”

“Yes.”

He went as deep as I thought possible, balls slapping my clit, the base of his cock pulsing against me, grunting like the sexiest animal on the planet.

When he slowed, I turned to see his face above me. He pumped me one last time and pulled out.

“I declare this stadium christened,” I said.

He pulled my waistband back over my ass. “Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

He bit his lower lip and shook his head. I didn’t know what a girl had to do to christen a stadium around here, but I was about to find out.

Vivian

We stepped onto the field. The grass was pristine, and the decomposed granite that made up the dirt parts was smooth and even. The lines hadn’t been drawn between the bases, but the square sacks that marked the bases were pristine white in the rising sun.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

“Since you were on the field?”

“Yeah. Ten years. I was fifteen, and everything seemed as big then as it does now.” I spun to look at the stands.

“I was playing college ball ten years ago.” He pulled me to home plate. “Here, touch this.”

“Touch what?”

“Home plate.”

I leaned down and stroked it, thinking there was a texture he wanted to share, but once I did it, he took my hand and led me down the first base line.

“My first day on the job,” I said, “I wore makeup because I thought I’d be on TV. By the second week, I barely brushed my hair.”

“I bet you were still beautiful.”

“Hey, I was too young for you, mister.”

“Right. Forgot.”

I jabbed him with my elbow. “How is it no one ever gets an interview with you?”

“I did
Rolling Stone
last May.”

“On camera.”

“I don’t come off well on camera. Tag first.”

“What do you mean? You’re on camera all the time. You’re gorgeous.”

He pulled me back and pointed down. “Tag first.”

He tapped first base with his toe. I stuck out my foot and tagged. Satisfied, he took my hand and walked me toward second base.

“When I was a kid. Second grade. Fourth grade. Up to sixth. I was a mess.”

He stopped talking. I waited. I dealt with kids all day, every day. I knew what a kid with problems looked like, but I didn’t know what young Dashiell with problems looked like. So I waited while he paced slowly to the next base.

“I didn’t know how to regulate myself is what the therapist said. And I was both overstimulated in areas and under-stimulated in others. My brain wasn’t wired right. Still isn’t. But it’s subtle, so it looked like I was just disrespectful and inconsiderate.” He put his finger up and looked at me finally.

Once I could see him, I knew that what he was saying might have seemed inconsequential, but it was critical for him, and the words came hard.

“I was talking to my friend in the hall. Second grade, I think, and we were in line for the fountain. We were talking about, Jesus, who even remembers… something about drinking from the fountain and spitting it out. How far it would go if the drain wasn’t there. And I wanted to show him how far, so I spit in his face.”

I laughed.

He smiled. “It’s funny now. At the time? I got suspended. It was always something like that. I had zero impulse control. When I had a tantrum, I had a fucking tantrum. Right? This is going somewhere, I promise.”

I squeezed his hand. “You’re not boring.”

“Whatever you say. Tag second.”

I leapt forward and landed both feet on second base and cried victory. “Stand up double.”

He high-fived me. “Nice play.”

He tapped second with his toe and took my hand so we could continue to third.

“Okay, so my parents loved me,” he said. “They gave me everything, and they were at the end of their rope. My mom… one day she took video of me flipping out so she could show me what I looked like. Maybe if I could see it, I would catch myself before I lost it again, right? And knowing she was doing that, seeing her with that little camera? I went… crazy.”

He shook his head, his expression changing from mild amusement to shame to horror to courage to dismissal to guardedness in flashes so quick I had no idea how he was feeling. He stopped at the midpoint between second and third. Though he turned to face me, he looked up at nothing in the stands.

“So I hit my mother.”

I felt how difficult it was for him to say it. If he had told a million people before me, you’d never have known it because it seemed so hard I could have been the only person in the world he’d told.

“I was in sixth grade, but I was big. It was the low point of my life.”

I squeezed his hand. He’d been in sixth grade. Eleven or twelve years old, yet he carried it like a dead weight on his soul.

“And the cameras,” I said, leading him to third. “You remember that when they’re on you.”

He pointed at two spots in the stands. “There and there.” He pointed up at the announcer’s booth. “There.” He turned to the scoreboard and walked backward a few steps. “There and there. A couple more. When I’m playing, I’m fine. But as soon as I talk, I hear the way I screamed, and I feel like I’m that out-of-control kid again.” He barely paused, glancing at me then away. “You think I’m crazy.”

I tagged third. “No. Crazy is thinking you had to hit your mother. Sane is making sure you don’t do it again.”

He tapped the base and put his arm around me, walking me home and holding me tight.

“I did,” he said. “I got it together.”

“What did you do?”

“My dad wrestled me down, but it had all gone out of me. My mother had a bruise on her cheek and that little bit of video. It did the trick. I saw myself, and I hated it. I got my shit together. I took my meds. Kept a journal of how I felt until we hit the right ones. I let my parents set routines, and I stuck to them. I played baseball because I needed something to fill my time when hockey was off, and it was…” He put his hand on his chest and directed it outward as if the world expanded from it.

“Less chaotic,” I said.

“Exactly.”

We made our way to home plate. The sky was fully blue now, and the birds of Elysian Park had quieted a little.

“I was good. I was at home with baseball. But I set my routines, and I need them. I can’t… I can’t play without them.”

He didn’t say anything else until we got to home plate and stepped on it at the same time. He put his hands on my face and looked at me directly, as if putting a tunnel of attention between us. His thumbs rested on my cheeks.

Why hadn’t I seen it the night before? Or an hour ago? Why hadn’t I put it all together from the exhibition games and the spring training video? He was coming apart at the seams.

“You,” he said. “You threw it all in the fire. Things started collapsing right before you, and when you came, everything went to hell. It’s you. I denied it because if I let you in, I had to start over. I tried to bend it around to not want you. But I can’t deny it anymore. There’s no center without you.”

I was breathless. I wanted this, heart and soul. I could fall into him in a blink and lose myself in him in a breath. I wanted him, but it was too much. He was asking me to be the conduit between him and his talent. To be responsible for his center, his routine, his very sanity. I didn’t know how to be a man’s center. He brushed his thumb along my lower lip.

“I’m just a regular woman. I’m not special.”

“I disagree.”

He kissed me, flooding me with his needs, commanding my body’s response while my mind was drowning in its own questions. I had no resistance in me.

“Will I see you tonight?” he asked.

“Dad and I always watch opening day together.”

“I figured. I got him a seat too.”

“Wait! What? Where?”

He motioned thataway. “Behind the dugout.”

Oh.

My.

Fucking.

God.

I was about to gush, but he cut me off. “If you want a skybox—”

“No! God, no. It’s too far. You read my exact wish.”

“I want to see you in the stands for every game. Can you?”

“I’ll try, Dash. I’ll try.”

I wanted to discuss the finer points of traveling while holding down a job, but he kissed me, and I figured I’d let the details take care of themselves.

Vivian

To say Dash Wallace played brilliantly on opening day would have been a gross understatement. To say he owned the field and commanded the game would have been closer but not quite descriptive of the way his confidence turned into action.

After they’d won with the starting shortstop coming up to bat four times and getting a BB, two line drives no one could touch, a stolen base, and a two-run homer over the left field fence, the announcers Dad played on his phone asked each other if he’d been joking around during spring training. They wondered how the guy who’d swung at everything but what he was supposed to managed to keep up the act for two months.

I knew it.

VIP parking was worthless. I couldn’t leave in the eighth inning of the blowout. I had to stay until the end since, you know, I was sleeping with the shortstop. Dad and I were stuck in the traffic out of Elysian Park, which was always ten times better than the traffic onto the freeway.

Dad let me drive his car. His knees were aching after the long day of getting the house back in shape.

My phone buzzed in the center console again.

“What’s happening with this thing?” Dad grabbed it.

“Dad, really?” I didn’t want him to see the texts between Dash and me. Awkward.

“He says he knew it.”

The traffic opened up, and I went right on Sunset. “Please don’t scroll.”

“Knew what?”

“I have no idea, and I’m driving. So forget it for now.”

“I’ll ask him.”

Knew what?

“Dad, really?” I snapped the phone away.

Ding ding.

I couldn’t look. I was going thirty on Sunset, and the lights were synchronized for a westward trip, so there would be no stopping at a red.

“Let me see,” Dad said, hand out.

All I needed was for my father to see something about Dash’s tongue on my pussy or the way I sounded when I came. So I pulled over.

“I’m looking,” I said. “But back off.”

“I’m a curious man, and that was some game he played back there.”

“It was.” I put my back to the driver’s side door and tilted the phone just a little so I could see his response.

You’re my lucky charm

I didn’t answer it. I pulled away from the curb and thought about it.

His lucky charm. That was a nice thing to say. Everything about it was right and good, and I should have been happy. It was nice to be needed. It was nice to be the good thing in a man’s life. Baseball was very important to him, and if I was the charm that made him play better, no matter how ridiculous that was, it should have made me happy.

But it didn’t.

I must have looked pensive or something, and I was so in my own head about the responsibility he’d laid on me that I didn’t think about my father’s reaction.

“That guy’s a
putz
. That’s it with him. You’re done.”

“What?”

“I’m not letting him in the house. Do you hear me?”

“Why?” I asked.

“What do you mean why? You got that look on your face. The one you had when he was a
putz
last time. I don’t have the stomach for it. I’ll kill him first.”

“Dad—”

“I know I’m getting old—”

“It’s not—”

“I’ve had it.”

I tossed the phone in his lap. “Don’t scroll up. Just look at the last two, or you’re going to give yourself a heart attack.”