“Maybe you’re wrong about him.” But Alex wasn’t convinced by his own words. If he’d knocked someone up on the road, he would have the decency to tell the world the kid was his. He wouldn’t hide the baby like some shameful secret. When Liv got older, how would she deal with her father’s absence? How would it impact her to know her dad didn’t want to admit he had a kid?
When Olivia visited Matt’s Wikipedia page and it said no children, what would that do to her adolescent ego?
Plenty of major league players had illegitimate kids. It wasn’t a career ruiner. People might think slightly less of Matt on a moral level, but having children out of wedlock wasn’t as taboo as it had once been.
The more Alex thought about it, the more he thought how scummy it was for Matt to keep Olivia as a dirty little secret. If Alex had a kid as great as Liv, he’d be proud to show her off. Frankly, from a PR standpoint, Matt was missing out on a goldmine. Doting dads looked a lot better in the public eye than douchebag millionaire man-whores.
Alex remembered reading an article somewhere that said Matt was known to send gift baskets to his conquests, filled with signed Hernandez memorabilia. Congrats, you slept with me, have an autographed ball.
The guy’s reputation could only get better.
Sadly Matt mustn’t have seen it that way.
“So, it goes without saying you can’t tell anyone about this. I mean no one.” Alice stared at him, her face pale and serious.
“Who would I tell?”
“I don’t know, but whoever you could tell, you can’t tell.”
“Okay.”
“Now what’s your thing?” She nodded at his lap. For a moment he thought she was talking about his penis, until he glanced down and the iPhone blinked up at him.
Decidedly not the thing he thought she meant.
“I got a call from the Skip. Sounds like things are looking up.”
She stared at him for a long while then simply said, “Ah.”
“We knew this was inevitable. I mean…I wasn’t coming to stay, it was always meant to be a temporary thing.”
“I know.”
“But you sound disappointed.”
“Of course I’m disappointed. There’s a big difference between knowing you’ll have to go back eventually and finding out eventually is now.”
“Well, not now. Soon.”
She nodded. “Soon, then. Soon is still finite. Eventually…that’s a much bigger concept of time.”
He got up, not liking how alone she seemed on the bed. For her story it had felt okay, but now that they were talking about something pertaining to them both, it felt awkward and cold to have so much distance between them.
Sitting close enough for their knees to touch, he held his hand out palm up, and she put hers in it. Compared to the clammy sweat of his big mitt, her hand was warm and dry. He wished he’d thought to rub the dampness off on his pants before going for a handhold. Amateur move.
“What do you want to do about it?” he asked.
“About you leaving?”
“No, about us.”
“You leaving sort of factors into the whole us thing, doesn’t it?”
“Not necessarily.”
“I don’t know. You’re still going to be…there. And I’ll be here. And how does that really work, you know? I think long distance is kind of bullshit.”
Alex laughed, then got serious. “Do you want to sleep with anyone else?”
“Do you?”
“I asked you first.”
“No. Of course not.”
“Neither do I.”
“Okay…”
“Do you want to be with me, Alice? Don’t think, just answer.”
“Yes.”
“So that’s it then.”
“That’s what then?”
“We give it a try. The whole bullshit long-distance thing. And when I finish the season, we reassess. Georgia and Florida aren’t different planets. And it’s not like moving is unheard of.”
“Who moving where? You can’t expect me to totally change Liv’s life on a whim.” Her voice hitched up, not quite hysterical but edging on panic. Clearly Alice wasn’t big on change.
“I’m not. I’m saying we see where we are in October. I think it’s silly to call it quits just because I’m going back to California.” The conversation felt like déjà vu, only this time things seemed to be leaning more in his favor. “Look at it this way, even when we weren’t together, we still talked every day, didn’t we?”
She blushed. “I guess.”
“And you said you want to be with me.”
“I do.”
“So this isn’t rocket surgery, Darling. Communication is half the battle…or something. We’ll talk. We’ll talk a lot. We’ll talk dirty a lot. Maybe you Skype me topless sometimes.”