“What do you do when you’re at away games?”
“Suffer, usually.”
Miles laughed, and she was struck again by how young he was. Emmy barely remembered her early twenties, but she knew she’d been an idiot. Here was Miles, on a near seven-figure annual salary, and he was famous. How the hell could a kid deal with that kind of pressure? She admired how he was able to hold it together.
“What are your superstitions?”
He chewed hard on a chunk of hash brown. “I have one thing. It’s something I’ve done since little league.”
“Lay it on me.” She thought about Tucker and his grape bubble gum and wondered if Miles’s superstition would be as quirky and endearing.
“It’s a bit weird.”
“Aren’t they all? Isn’t that a byproduct of superstition? Wade Boggs ate a full bucket of fried chicken before every game. I’m not totally sure how he didn’t die of a heart attack by thirty-two. But yeah…superstitions are all weird.”
Miles reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew a beat-up leather wallet. From inside he took out a creased, faded baseball card that had obviously been laminated as a last-ditch effort to keep it from falling apart.
“Nolan Ryan?”
“Yup.”
“Good choice. Never a bad call to pick the guy who owns stake in one of your rival teams.” She winked and passed him back the card. “So the card is your superstition?”
“I keep it in my sock when I play.”
“Every game?”
“Every game.”
“Sounds itchy.”
“Nah, you get used to it.”
“So that’s your dirty little secret?”
“That’s it.”
“You need to work on something weirder. Like, Roger Clemens used to wipe his sweat on the Babe Ruth statue at old Yankee Stadium.”
“So I need to be grosser?”
“Grosser about what?” Tucker put his plate down on the other side of Miles and pulled up a chair.
“We’re talking about superstitions,” Emmy explained. “Tell Miles about yours.”
“Is it gross?” Miles asked.
“My dentist thinks so.” He poked a bit of vegetable omelet with his fork, reminding Emmy she still hadn’t touched her pineapple. She popped it into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully while Tucker told Miles about his bubble gum habit.
“We’re trying to figure out Emmy’s superstition. If she has one, she won’t tell me.”
“She listens to Hall and Oates’s ‘Private Eyes’ before she starts any of her warm-ups.”
Emmy stopped chewing, the tart sting of the pineapple filling her mouth and making her cheeks burn. How had Tucker known something about her even she wasn’t aware of?
“I guess I do.”
Miles gave them both an assessing look, as if there was something he was missing—which he was—and trying to put together the pieces. “That’s pretty tame.”
“I’m not exactly a wild child.” Emmy’s gaze landed on Tucker, who had started eating his breakfast. The mischievous glint in his eyes told her he was thinking of all manner of retorts to her statement, none of which he could say with his mouth full and company at the table.
The dining room had begun to fill steadily, and most of the tables were occupied with either players or middle-aged couples. Emmy tried to figure out what might bring one couple in their sixties to Cleveland, Ohio, let alone multiple couples.
Under the table something hard brushed her foot, and she jolted, causing coffee to slosh against the inside of her mug. She felt fantastically stupid when she realized the touch had been Tucker’s foot. He didn’t pull away. Instead, the arch of his foot shimmied higher, making her calf tingle.
She took a sip of her coffee and pretended she wasn’t playing footsie with a grown man at eight in the morning. And she tried not to let it show on her face how much she wanted to do it every single morning from then until forever.
“You ready for tonight?” she asked Tucker, slipping her foot out of her shoe and into his lap. His knee twitched, likely not expecting her to respond so boldly. The table bounced, spilling his orange juice onto the white tablecloth.
“I think this table might be broken.” Miles gave the round surface a test rattle. “It’s super wobbly or something.”
“Yeah. Weird.” Tucker closed his thighs together, trapping Emmy’s foot near his crotch. He wasn’t hard, but he was on his way. She stroked her toes upwards against the inner seam of his pants, and he arched a brow at her. She couldn’t quite read the gesture, if he was challenging her to go on or wasn’t sure why she was going so far.