“So are you from around here?” she asks.
I nod. “Newmont, Texas. Born and raised. Believe it or not, I was actually a student at Morris High eight short years ago.”
She gapes at me. “No way.”
“Yep. I was even on the—”
I choke on my words as the memories rush back in like a dark, twisting storm of wind and rain and feelings that confused me back then. Maybe they still confuse me now.
Dana obviously notices my change of expression. “On … the debate team?” she attempts to finish for me.
I bring my eyes back to hers. “Baseball, actually.”
“Really? I didn’t take you for an athlete. You look more like a drama nerd to me.”
I laugh at that. “I had a girlfriend in the Theatre department.”
“Girlfriend, you say?” She nods, tapping a finger to her chin. “Interesting.”
I feel the kiss of cold sweat in my pits. “Interesting …?”
“Nothing. Anyway, I’m from Fairview. And I was totally a band geek. A slutty one, but a band geek. Seriously, musicians are some of the horniest people in the world.”
“Hey, hey, don’t slut shame yourself,” I protest. “If Bryce So-And-So on the football team can bang half the cheerleaders and be revered as a hero, then you can let any dude jump into your tuba as far as I’m concerned.”
“Trombone.” She wiggles her fingers, then lowers her head and adds in a mock sexy voice, “I like things that slide in and out.”
I bust out into laughter at that. Dana joins in, my sudden new best friend, and the pair of us can’t seem to collect ourselves for a solid minute.
Then, through the watery haze of tears in my still-laughing eyes, I turn toward a noise I hear at the bar. It’s a man who has broken into a fight with someone else. One of them—a bearded brute who looks like he eats tree trunks for breakfast—has some other unlucky guy in a headlock whose back faces me. The guy in the headlock has the perfect V-shape of a muscular body, his shoulders broad and his waist slender. His heather gray shirt pulls across the muscles of his backside and his sleeves hug a pair of bulging biceps as he fights the brute who’s two times his size.
I wipe away my tears of laughter and squint. Do I know him?
“OUT!” shouts the bartender through the noise, pointing at the door. “BOTH OF YOU! OUT!”
Other men are already trying to intervene, but the hairy giant has eaten too many logs today apparently, and his strength is unmatched. The hot guy gets thrown to the floor by the giant, then picked back up and slammed against the bar counter, only to be gorilla lifted and thrown yet again.
Goodness. I gape, horrified as mister Big Foot breaks this poor guy into pieces before our eyes.
But the guy in the gray shirt isn’t broken. Far from. He pushes off the ground at once, his face gleaming in sweat and a trickle of blood from his forehead. He staggers once to the side, growls, then launches himself right back into the brute’s stomach, tackling the enormous hairy beast to the ground.
The other customers are upon them all over again to break them up. In a matter of minutes, the hot guy is finally torn away once more from the hairy ogre, dragged kicking and cursing across the room, and is thrown out the door of the bar onto the street.
My eyes are wide open. It took just that one little glimpse of his face to recognize him.
02
RYAN
With just that brief glimpse of his face, I’m fourteen years old again and hearing him shout at me across the field by my house.
“Bro!” I recall Stefan’s fourteen-year-old voice vividly. “I knew you were going to need a lot of work if the pair of us are planning to make the high school team together!”
“Shut your ass up,” I shouted back at him, lifting up my bat, “and pitch!”
He did. I swung. Strike. “Dang it, Ryan! You swing too high!”
“You pitch too low!” I shouted back, annoyed.
He was by my side the next instant. I watched as he took the bat from my hands and assumed the pose. “Like this.” He swung it, showing me. “See my feet?”
I looked down and saw his feet for sure. I also saw the way his socks bunched up at his cleats, and the way his legs were sinewy and strong—especially his thick thighs. He filled out his jeans so well. I wished I filled out mine the same way. I admired Stefan so much, I almost forgot what I was supposed to be looking for.
“You’re not gonna hit anything swinging like you do,” he said.
Just then, a pair of kids burst into laughter on the sidewalk by the street where the field ended. Stefan and I turned. We knew the kids from a rival Little League team. Their insults came in waves—most of them directed my way. “The girl needs batting lessons from her boyfriend!” was my particular favorite that day.