Total pages in book: 32
Estimated words: 30889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 154(@200wpm)___ 124(@250wpm)___ 103(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 30889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 154(@200wpm)___ 124(@250wpm)___ 103(@300wpm)
Like this confession. It’s such a relief. I’ve wanted to say that for so long.
“It’s all good,” he says. “Though I was kind of surprised—you don’t seem like the love ‘em and leave ‘em type.”
He’s so chill about it. But I sense his lightness is an olive branch—that he’s giving me a pass on how I took off. I half wish the guy didn’t make it so easy to like him.
But he is, so I turn toward him. “I’m not. My ex and I broke up right before spring training.”
“You mentioned that. What happened?” he asks.
I laugh a little. “What didn’t? Well, I got hit with the ‘not sure how you’re gonna marry me when you’re in a committed relationship with baseball.’ But it wasn’t just that, you know?”
“Was she…” Derek trails off. A faint line develops between his eyebrows like he’s thinking. “Is your ex also Jewish?”
A question that feels slightly adjacent to the one he actually wants to ask, the way he asked if any of my exes were men. “Talia? Yeah, she is.”
“Is that important to you—that whoever you date is Jewish?” Derek asks, a little thickly.
I smile. “It’s not a requirement, no.”
“Oh,” Derek says. “Uh, good.” Like he was asking hypothetically, even if my heart accelerates its beat against my ribs.
“How about you?” I ask. “What are you looking for?”
Derek’s focusing on the ceiling, pensive. If he was handsome wearing a suit for casino night, and handsome on the ballfield, it’s no match for how he looks here, in sweats, lit only by city lights.
“My last few relationships haven’t exactly ended well,” he says. “People told them I was gonna screw around on them. But it was kind of the opposite. Guess I really know how to pick ‘em.”
“That sucks.”
He huffs a humorless laugh. “Don’t I know it.” Like it’s no big thing.
Something that doesn’t sit easily with me. “Whoever they are, they didn’t deserve you.” Then, with some consideration, I say, “I’m really sorry I left like that.”
A brush of his shoulder against mine. “Well, you’re here now.”
“I am.”
I want to reach across the covers, to pull him close to me. To feel his weight on my chest, to let him kiss me into the mattress.
We stay where we are.
“You weren’t how I thought you’d be,” he says finally.
“You thought I’d be an asshole?”
“No. More, like you’d be fake. Like, no one could just be that nice, you know.”
I want to nudge him but I’m not close enough to reach. “Says the guy who’s letting me stay here rent-free and who gets the bread I like at the store.”
Derek laughs. “Turns out I’ve been eating pastrami wrong for a while.”
“White bread and mayo—who taught you to make it like that?”
“No one. I guess I taught myself growing up,” he says with the slightly pinched expression he gets whenever the conversation drifts toward his home life, the details of which he seems reluctant to volunteer.
“You don’t have to tell me…” I begin, but stop when he shakes his head.
“It’s fine.” Said in a way like it’s not—not about me asking, but about the subject entirely. “My family wasn’t exactly great growing up. I had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own. Mostly, I’m over it, but sometimes the smaller stuff gets to me.”
“Like pastrami sandwiches?”
“Yeah, like that.” Derek thinks for a minute. “Or like that I don’t have to put up with someone if they cheat on me.”
“The way your exes did?”
“Like that too. Like my parents did with each other. They’re not together,” he adds, then quickly shifts gears. “Anyway. It’s no big deal you took off. Don’t think twice about it.”
But he’s excusing me, and I don’t want that. I want to own what I did. Be the guy I consider myself to be and make up for it.
“I do think about it,” I say impulsively before I dwell on why this conversation is a risk. “A lot.”
He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He exhales slowly, maybe unsure if he should talk. Then he does, voice rough and hungry. “What do you think about that night?”
I already tapped the door open, I might as well kick it all the way.
I push up on an elbow. “How much I want another,” I say, and the admission both frees me and turns me on.
Derek parks his hands behind his head, lets a slow smile take shape, then murmurs, “How much, Chason?”
And I hear my last name all the time—hollered on the field and across the clubhouse—but usually without such…care. A rumble, like he practiced it. I want to hear him say it with his hands threaded through my hair. “Want me to show you?”
Derek turns to me, his smile wicked. “Yeah. I do. So show me. Show me now.”
The tension of what we’re not talking about vanishes, replaced by a greater one: pure lust and risk…but one I want to take as I reach for his face, then erase the distance between us.