Authors: Kristen Kehoe
Chapter Thirteen
Jake
I’m relearning my throwing motion and I feel like a fucking toddler.
This is when rehab feels like too much work, like a lost cause and a heartache waiting to happen. I want to rage, I want to smash things, I want to punch someone. And then I remember that I’d be more likely to break my goddamn arm than actually hurt anyone or anything, which just pisses me off more.
I’m a couple of weeks behind on my rehab program, though the doc I’m seeing here (along with the one I was seeing in Arizona) swears that the estimate they give after surgery is rough. Some players heal within the allotted twelve months, some take longer. He also swears that healing slower doesn’t mean anything different. Healing is healing, he says, but I can’t help but want to call him on his shit. Healing? I’m five months in and I’ve just gone from
practicing
(so not actually releasing) my throwing motion with a fucking one pound medicine ball, to what’s termed a
soft toss
from less than fifty feet away from my target. The fact that it’s actually pretty difficult to reach the target is where my rage is coming from.
Underhanded tossing, that’s what I’m doing, and that’s what I’m struggling with. How the fuck am I ever going to throw a ninety mile an hour fastball from sixty plus feet away?
Baseball players in general are considered arrogant, and for good reason. There’s a certain amount of arrogance needed to go one on one with someone in front of your team and theirs, knowing that the victor earns points (be they actual points or just emotional points, which are just as important sometimes), while the other has to continue the rest of the game with the loss in the back of his mind. Baseball isn’t just about the end score; it’s about runs stolen, bases stolen, pitches snuck through, and those forced through. Sometimes it’s about luck.
I analyze my batters, their percentages, their weaknesses, and I go through them systematically with everything I’ve got. When what I know doesn’t help me, I use what I am and I work to make every batter’s life a living hell when he steps up to that plate. Until seven months ago, I was renowned for facing down batters and taking away their confidence, so when I heard that today was the day I got to start my throwing program, I ran through my morning workout with the knowledge that the minute I picked up the baseball, my life would fall back in line. Which makes me an idiot. Or an asshole. Quite possibly both.
Not only did nothing fall back in line, I think I may have regressed a couple of steps emotionally, and the doc was more than happy to point out that counseling was recommended since I’m so far away from my team, something that
isn’t
recommended.
Counsel this
, I think and swing through the outside door and down the hall to our apartment. The sight that greets me when I unlock it and enter is one that improves my mood significantly faster than any medical interference could.
Christ, is there anything greater than yoga pants and the women who wear them to actually do yoga?
Cora’s pushed the low, refurbished yellow table that usually sits in the center of the small space off to the side. In its place, she’s rolled out a mat that she’s currently twisting away on, in a position I’m pretty confident has the word dog in it.
Thank you, Jesus
.
Hands flat on the ground, superb ass in the air, legs straight and feet planted so she’s in some sort of upside down V, Blue doesn’t notice me as she balances on one hand and reaches for her opposite ankle with the other, showcasing not just her fabulous assets, but her extreme strength and flexibility, too. There’s music pumping through the small Bose speaker that sits on the shelf perpendicular to the window. It’s more like dance music than relaxing meditation music, and it’s the throbbing bass combined with the erotic poses that have my body tensing for entirely different reasons than the one I carried in twenty seconds ago.
Christ, I want this girl.
Because my instincts are telling me to take, to walk up behind her and grab her and show her everything I want, I shove my hands in the pockets of my sweats and lean back against the door to enjoy the rest of the show from a safe distance. Yogi is sitting on the desk chair, and he slits his eyes at me as if he knows what I’m thinking. In the month that we’ve lived here, he’s taken to Blue and become her shadow when she’s home, following her from room to room, curling up in the corner and watching her while she cooks, cleans, peruses the Internet. As if he senses my jealousy at the fact that he can be close to her and I can’t, he’s always staring me down, and if a cat could talk shit, I know just which words would be coming out of his mouth as he eyes me from his seat right now.
I glare right back at him and finish the show, admiring each new pose and the fluidity with which Blue goes through them. Our relationship has been a little rocky in its beginning. Rather than feeling closer now that we live together, since that first night it feels as though Blue’s put a wall up between us, one that she stays safely behind. She’s polite, friendly even, but never forthcoming and playful, never spicy and confrontational like she was when we first met and she told me in no uncertain terms to back the hell off.
It’s been four weeks since I got here, and other than polite conversation, she’s hidden behind her imaginary wall, finding things that keep us at a safe distance, finding solace in her room or the excuse of a busy work schedule to keep her busy. I’ve let her breathe because I realized that first day that she needed to be the one to make the next move or this relationship — at least the one I want — is doomed.
She hasn’t made a move, and as I watch her roll up and out of her last pose, I wonder if I’ve just fucked myself into wanting her even more while she’s still maintaining what she considers a safe distance. Knowing I’m close to begging, hating myself for it even though I know I can’t stop it, I clear my throat and wait for her eyes to meet mine.
She doesn’t flinch or jump, which makes me almost positive that she knew I was here while she finished. I don’t know whether it’s good or bad that she didn’t acknowledge me.
Trying for light even though my whole body is tense with this need for something, whatever it is, I smile. “I like your workout routine, Blue. And your pants. Have I mentioned before how much I like your pants?”
Her smile is slow, but it comes eventually and some of the heaviness inside of me eases.
“You know, I think you have,” she says and reaches over to lower the volume on the speaker, so the music falls to a low pulse. There’s a ray of sunshine pushing through the rain, illuminating the small spot where Yogi sits and, looking at it, I can’t help but think that’s how Blue is for me. She’s my port, my piece of sunshine when all I want to do is wallow in the darkness and sink.
Knowing I might not be good for her doesn’t change my need for her, which probably makes me a bastard, but there it is.
“Rough day?” she asks and I meet her eyes. She’s standing with her mat rolled up in her arms staring at me. The light’s still pouring in behind her, and I wonder if she knows what I was thinking, or how badly I needed her to ask.
“It wasn’t great.”
Her hesitation is minimal, just enough that I can tell she’s not one hundred percent sure of her moves. I wait, and eventually she makes her decision and takes a small step forward. “Want to tell me about it?”
My shoulders unwind instantly, and a large breath exhales from me. “Yeah, I really do.”
~
“Tell me about baseball, what it’s like to play in college, to know your career might go beyond that.”
“What do you want to know?”
She shrugs and sips from her coffee. She’s sitting in the corner of the couch with her legs curled under her and I’m sitting next to her, a beer in my hand. We’ve finished dinner and are capping off the night together, something that we haven’t done since the night I moved in. Over dinner, I told her how training is frustrating and slow, and that even though the doctors and trainers and therapists all say that people heal at different speeds, it’s making me crazy. I want to be done, to know where I stand, where my future and my baseball career stand.
Talking to Blue and being with her for the last hour has made that itch, that impatience, die down a little.
“Start with college life. I didn’t do the whole college thing and though I went to my fair share of college parties, I wasn’t on campus day-to-day. What’s it like being a scholarship athlete for a major university? Tits and ass and alcohol every day?”
Her voice is lighthearted, for me I think, to make me remember the fun while I’m still digging myself out of the bad, so I laugh and sip my beer again, trying to figure out how to explain what it was like.
“You’re both wrong and right,” I start and she rolls her eyes, annoyed, most likely, by the fact that I can’t just give a yes or no answer. “I never thought anything would be better than the day I signed my letter and knew I was making a future for myself, and then I arrived on campus and went to my first training session and I was proven wrong. Everything was better than I’d imagined, and I’d imagined some pretty great things.”
“Like what?”
“Well, I thought I’d get some gear, a room, and some food and have someone take care of me while I majored in something I loved and played the game I’d dedicated my life to since I was little. I got all of that in a much larger sense. I lived in an apartment style dorm with three other teammates, the same but larger than the rooms other people on campus lived in, and in the first four months I was there I had two Christmases — days when I walked in and in front of my locker was a bag stuffed to overflowing with shoes, shirts, sweats, socks, shorts, hats, batting gloves, and loads of other swag.” I shake my head at the memory, still a little awed even after three and a half years of the same treatment. “The gear, the stuff, it was unending, and for a kid who had come from nothing and was just looking for a way to never go back there, it was very clear that I was no longer going without like I once had. From the first day that I walked into that locker room I was someone, and it felt really good.”
“That’s what she said,” she quips with a wiggle of her eyebrows and I laugh, appreciating the light banter as it pulls me away from the frustrations I walked in with. “Seriously, though, I’ve spent time with enough people like you to understand that you’re not a normal person on campus. There had to be more to the perks than an extra T-shirt or two.”
I nod, thinking of my last three years, the people who supported me, loved me, shouted my name even though I had no idea who they were. “Let’s just say that being on the baseball team definitely gave me certain advantages in the social world. For instance, you weren’t wrong when you called me lazy the first time we met. The fact is, even with Lise, I didn’t have to do much because girls came to me. So did the guys, in reality. Everyone is more interested in helping you, tutoring you, talking to you in the hopes that they get to be your friend and embrace the extras that come with your position on campus. And when it becomes apparent your career might take you further than college, your friend count doubles because even if you fail at your attempt at the majors, people love nothing more than being able to drop your name into party-time conversation and talk about how they shared beers or a class with you way-back-when.”
She frowns. “Sounds like people are assholes.”
“Maybe, but if you do make it, they’re also you’re biggest fans, and that can’t hurt in a world where less than one percent of most college players ever get to go.”
“What did you do when you weren’t playing baseball?”
“Train to play baseball,” I say. “People call baseball players lazy, which is partly true because our bodies don’t take the daily beating that a football player does, so a few beers after a game aren’t going to kill our recovery. But,” I add, “we also have longer training year round, with expectations that most people don’t see.”
“Like…”
“Like, I went into college weighing one hundred and eighty-four pounds with around thirteen percent body fat. At the end of my freshman year, I weighed just over two hundred pounds with eleven percent body fat. It’s only gotten better from there. Outfielders and infielders lift all season, and all of us conditioned from the start of the school year through the start of the season and work to play well into June and make it to Nebraska. And then we play summer ball.”
“So I was really only half right when I called you lazy the first time we met.”
“With baseball, I was never lazy. With girls… you weren’t wrong,” I say again, and her smile is triumphant. “I’ll admit that after a game, when frequenting an establishment that served alcohol, if I met a girl, a conversation may have gone something like ‘Hey, I’m Jake,’ to which she would respond, ‘OMG like in Twilight?’ We’d then discuss the mythical wolf creature and his many flaws — none of which I possessed, of course — and then girl, whose name I’ve most likely forgotten by this point in the conversation, would ask what frat I was in, to which I would promptly reply
,
‘I’m not in a frat. I play baseball.’” My grin is back as the memories of my first year swarm through me. “Things got infinitely easier and more guaranteed after I dropped that tidbit of information.”