Perfect Catch(32)

“Good luck. Maybe I’ll, I dunno… Can I email you? Text you?”

Alex nodded gruffly. Since she’d seen fit to decide everything for them, the only thing he wanted was to get the hell out of Dodge. “Sure. Do that.”

“Sure,” she repeated.

“Say goodbye to Liv for me.”

“I will.”

They stared at each other for a minute then he inclined his head towards the car. “I gotta…go. My family is expecting me.”

“Yeah. I’ll see you around?” She phrased it like a question.

“Yeah.” He walked back to the car, not sure he’d ever lay eyes on her again.

Not sure he wanted to.





Chapter Fifteen

“Strike three, yeeeeer out.” With a punchy flourish, Jim Riley pointed Alex’s way back to the dugout.

Just fucking fabulous.

Three weeks into the new season and strike three was fast becoming Alex’s new personal motto. If he wasn’t striking out, he was sending pop-up flies directly to the outfielder, or aiming his groundballs so the infield players barely needed to stretch for them.

Which was to say he was sucking harder than a Hoover attached to a jet engine.

“Fuck.” He chucked his bat onto the ground in front of the dugout.

It was a shitty, childish thing to do, and he hated making the bat boy run around collecting his mess, but he was mad, and rationality didn’t factor in all that much when he was cranky.

After tossing his helmet and batting gloves into the cubby on the back wall, he threw himself down on the bench with all the grace of a huffy teenage girl. Tucker, who was waiting to head back to the mound, had a warm-up jacket wrapped around his pitching arm to keep the muscles from getting cool and tight. He looked a bit goofy wearing a jacket on only one arm, but a lot of the things pitchers did made Alex question their general mental health.

“All right there, buddy?” Tucker asked.

“It’d be better if I wasn’t the worst goddamn player in the history of baseball.” Alex tugged on his catcher gear with exaggerated jerks, taking his aggression out on the kneepads and vest.

“Oh Jesus, Alex. Be more of a prima donna.” Tucker laughed and smacked him on the back. “It’s not that bad.”

“No? I think I’m the only one on the team with an average under two hundred.” One ninety to be exact, which was more than a little pathetic, given how few at-bats he’d seen in the season so far. It was typical for batters to have their best averages early in the year, when the hits-to-at-bats skewed in their favor. For Alex, if this was the best he could do, he would be batting a two out of a thousand before the season ended.

There was a saying that claimed baseball was the only sport where a player could fail seven out of ten times and still be considered a great batter. Right then, Alex would have traded his left nut to be a three-for-ten batter. He’d be happy to get back over the two hundred mark.

No one could bat a thousand, not in real life, and certainly not in baseball, but he was about as far from that as he could get.

The batting coach had brought him in for special sessions, trying to figure out what was wrong with his swing. But there was nothing wrong with Alex’s swing, it was all mental. There was a big brick wall in his head getting in the way of him doing his job. A big brick wall named Alice.

He didn’t want to admit she was still on his mind, because what grown man wanted to acknowledge pining for some chick he barely knew? She’d made it clear she didn’t want to be a couple and didn’t want to waste time pretending they had a shot, and he had to accept her ruling on it.

So why did she still text him every other day?

It was all mundane stuff, like gripes over grocery store parking lots, or giving him updates on the Felons AAA affiliate team and how they were shaping up for the season. She’d sent him photos of a weird-shaped tomato she’d found, and a picture of ESPN The Magazine where the article had mentioned him.

Nothing about the messages indicated a romantic attachment. She certainly hadn’t tried to sext him anything. If she had, he wouldn’t have complained in the least, but as it was she was sending him the same stuff his sisters might.

In fact, Ricki had photo texted him the exact same ESPN blurb.

Which meant Alice held him in the same regard as his sister did. Awesome. It was love, but not the kind of love he could do anything with. The girl he liked had the kind of ambivalent emotional attachment for him some people had for their pet fish.

To Alice, Alex was a cute goldfish, destined for a swirl in the toilet bowl of life.

He held his catcher’s helmet in his lap, thinking about what an idiot he was being. One of the unwritten rules of the sport was you don’t let women mess up your game. That was why married guys or the men in long-term relationships rarely brought their ladies on the road with them. Keeping your woman and your job at a distance meant one couldn’t mess with the other.