“No.” Her voice gets soft. “Things were different after that. Then Star and I were adopted, and we discovered music.” I know her older brother Tag wasn’t adopted by the same family, and that they spent years apart. “We never played again, but I still love to watch.”
She leans back and rests on her palms. “If I ever have a kid, my kid is going to have to be a ball player,” she says. “There’s no way around it.” She takes my cap off my head and turns the bill backward, then pulls it down around her ears. “Can you see me as a coach? I’d be good at it, right?”
“Or you could just let your other half do the coaching,” I say.
Her face falls. “No other half. There’s just me.” She pushes up from the bench.
“Maybe by then…” I start. I leave the words hanging there in the air between us.
“I don’t think I want another half. At least not any time soon,” she says quietly. “I kind of like just being me. I’m okay with that.”
“So that one moment when you jumped in my arms and wrapped your legs around me…?” I say. I wait.
She looks at me sheepishly. “I would have done that to anyone who hit a homerun.”
But she hadn’t. Other people hit homeruns too and she did nothing of the sort. “Liar,” I say. “I think you liked holding me close to you. I think you should do it more often.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“I need to do this by myself for a while. See what it’s like.”
“Being alone?”
“Being single.”
“Oh.”
“But we can still be friends, right?” She nudges my shoulder.
“Yeah, of course.” I hold out my pinky finger. “Pinky swear.”
She smiles and loops her pinky with mine. “Pinky swear,” she says. “So, when’s the next game?”
“Next week.”
“Can I come?”
“Can you behave yourself?”
She snorts. “No.”
I wouldn’t have her any other way. “You can come.”
We finish up the pizza and sodas, and the team thanks her for feeding them.
“We’ll see you at the next game, right?” my boss asks.
Wren’s eyes meet mine and there’s a question there. Do I want her to come? Hell yes, I want her to come.
I grab her in a gentle headlock and give her a noogie. “She’ll be here.”
She grins and wipes her hair back from her face.
“I haven’t had this much fun in a really long time,” she says as she lifts her wavy dark hair from her neck. Little wet tendrils of it stick to her skin. “Thanks for bringing me.”
“Thanks for coming.”