Rounding Third (4 page)

“You know the core of me. More than anyone else.”

I stare directly at her, but she diverts her eyes faster than a scared child. She rises to her feet, and my heart aches because she’s leaving me.

“I should find Jen.”

Right as she says it, a couple starts arguing outside my door.

“You fucking bitch!” Jen yells.

Ella’s footsteps move quickly. She grips the knob and swings the door open.

“Jen?” Ella wraps her arms around her friend’s half-naked body.

“Seriously, she hit me.” Jen’s hand rubs her cheek.

My eyes scan to find a purple-haired girl standing in the doorway across from mine. She’s got a cocky smirk, and her eyes are pinned directly on Jen.

“He’s mine. Get out.” The girl’s eyes seek out the shirtless guy in limbo between the two women.

“Sorry, I must have missed the sign when his dick was in me,” Jen spits back. Her eyes narrow on the guy.

He’s built, but he’s an inch or two shorter than me. He has dark skin and hair with brown eyes, fearful at the moment.

“Get her out of here, Ty,” the purple-haired girl says with confidence, like she didn’t just find her boyfriend cheating on her.

“Listen, Jen—”

I recognize the name. He is Tyler Saucedo, our shortstop.

He steps closer, and I catch a glimpse of Purple Hair breezing by me.

“Would you like me to hit her again?”

Tyler puts his hands in the air to calm the girl down. “Go in the room.”

Ella and I share a look of shock when the girl actually listens. Once she’s in the room, she tosses Jen’s shirt out the door and it lands on her face.

Scurrying, Jen puts it on, and after she’s covered, Ella steps away from her.

“Listen, we broke up last week. I’m not sure why she’s here. I’m going to talk to her, and then I’ll text you,” Tyler says to Jen.

She looks up at him with soft eyes until he moves to touch her.

“Go to hell, Ty.” She turns to the stairs and runs down them with Ella on her heels.

Tyler watches her until she disappears around the corner. He’s sulking back to his room when he catches sight of me. “Hey, man.” He quickly stops, and he must register who I am. “Third base?” He tilts his head up in the air in question.

“Yeah. Shortstop?”

“Yeah. You know Ella, right?” A glint of something flashes in his eyes.

“Yeah. From back in high school.”

“That’s what Brax told me. Anyway, can you walk them home?” There’s an honest concern for Jen’s well-being in his sunken demeanor.

“Yeah.” I move toward the staircase.

“Hey.” He walks over to me and holds his hand out. “Welcome to the team.”

I smile and shake his hand. “Thanks.”

We separate quickly, me going down the stairs and him walking to his room.

The girls are already at the corner before I catch up to them. Jen’s got a bottle of vodka swinging back and forth in her right hand while Ella’s arm is wrapped tightly around her shoulders.

“He’s a baseball player—
player
being the key word,” Ella says.

I bust out with a laugh. She whips around, a long strand of brown hair sticking to her glossed lips. My guess is, she just put some on because I would have had a hard time controlling myself if her lips looked that good before. Not that her lips could look unkissable.

“Why are you here?” she asks, her eyes throwing daggers faster than I can ward them off.

I guess, when one guy is a dick, we all are.

“Tyler asked me to walk you home,” I half-lie. I was going to anyway, but this way, I don’t appear too needy.

“What does he care?” Jen asks with tear-stained cheeks.

Upon meeting her, I assumed she was a diamond chaser, but I was wrong. She must honestly like Tyler, or the alcohol has turned her into a scorned drama queen. Alcohol has the same effect on me, that’s why I never allowed myself to consume too much after freshman year.

“I can’t answer that. I met the guy five minutes ago, but he asked, and I’m happy to oblige.” I come alongside Ella and take a swig of the vodka to show that I’m one of them.

“Of course you are. You want in Ella’s pants,” Jen remarks. But then she links her arm with mine, leaning close enough that I can smell Tyler’s cologne. “So, mystery man, what’s your story?”

“Um…”

Loaded question.

“He’s known Brax and me since high school,” Ella intercepts.

“I got that.” Jen invades my personal space again. “You can tell me later when she’s not around.”

Ella circles to the other side of Jen as the walk continues because Jen’s starting to weave. At one point, I’m holding all her weight.

We reach their apartment, which is only five blocks away from The Ballpark. It’s off Main Street where all the bars and restaurants are located, whereas the baseball house is on Athlete Row—two streets of rented houses, each one filled with Ridgemont athletes. Talk about testosterone overload.

“You got her?” Ella asks.

Jen’s whole weight rests in my arms. Reaching under her legs, I pick her up, bride-style, to make it easier on the both of us.

Ella opens up the door and flicks on the lights.

I enter a part of Ella’s new life and follow her into what I assume is Jen’s room. Clothes are scattered on the bed, but Ella lifts the comforter, resulting in the pile of clothes falling to the floor.

“I’ll be right out. I’m going to undress her and make sure she’s on her stomach.”

I nod and leave Jen’s room, shutting the door behind me.

Their apartment is cute and girly. Noticing what I assume is her room on the right, I turn on the light and walk in. Instantly, the smell of her perfume engulfs my senses. The light and airy scent hits my nostrils, and I’m back on Screw Hill with her in my arms.

Her desk is cluttered with papers and books, but her bed is made, and no makeup is strewed around her dresser, like Jen’s. My eyes fixate on a picture frame placed next to her phone charger. Instantly, I recognize it.

Walking over, I try to convince myself that looking at the picture is not a good decision. Seeing their faces will only make the heartache worse, especially since she’s not mine to hold close tonight. If that’s the picture I remember, it confirms that she’s healed, and I’m not because there’s no way I could stare at this picture every day.

The silver frame is the first thing that stands out. Second, there’s an engraving on the bottom—
Friends Forever
. I vaguely remember that Ella received this as a birthday gift from Kedsey. Then, my eyes finally focus on the image. The four of us are standing side by side with goofy smiles and arms hanging over each other’s shoulders. Kedsey’s and Ella’s cheeks are pressed together. We were best friends.

Noah’s brown eyes haunt me every night. Even now, through this picture, I’m there, in that car, hearing his choking voice begging for safety.

“Hi.” Ella’s voice pulls me back from the memory.

“You’re able to look at them every day?” I ask, the picture frame dropping onto her mattress, as though it were moments away from spontaneously combusting in my hands.

“Yes. They were a part of my life. You all were.” She steps further into the room, her hands behind her back, and leans against the wall.

She’s fearful. She doesn’t know how I’ll react.

“But to be constantly reminded of it…” I shake my head.

“Crosby, you know that it wasn’t—”

Unable to hear the classic bullshit line, I push past her. “I need to go.”

“You haven’t healed, have you?”

I whip around and look at her. Those sad fucking eyes from two years ago are staring back at me.

What the hell did I think I’d accomplish by coming to Ridgemont? Is baseball this fucking important that I’ll torture myself all over again?

“Healing?” I shake my head again. “There’s only moving forward from something like that.” I open her apartment door, slamming it shut.

I
watch
Crosby from my window. He’s outside the apartment across the way bent down on his knees, pulling on the strands of his hair. Obviously, he’s at war with himself. A part of me hopes he’ll come back and let me console him. Hell, we need to console each other. We’re the only ones who know the hell of that night, and we both chose to push the grief away and ignore the power it held over us.

I’m saddened that one picture has the capacity to plague his guilt. Healing was the sole reason we promised to move on, away from one another.

I went through a year of therapy and started stepping toward a future without him while he obviously remained in limbo between his past and his future.

He finally walks out of my parking lot, his hand continuously threading through his hair, and I’m relieved that he will be leaving my vision before I can run after him, promising to fix him. The urge to crawl into my bed, bury myself under the covers and cry for him only strengthens, but my eyes won’t leave him until he disappears out of sight.

Just when he’s about to turn the corner to pass the building on the right, he stops, and my heart halts. Turning around, he stares at my apartment window.

Tears well in my eyes. I wish things were different. I wish we had faced the aftermath of the accident together rather than apart.

He slowly shakes his head and rounds the corner.

In an instant, I’m there.

C
rosby pushed
his body off his truck, and without a word, he took my hand, weaving us through the trees to find our spot—the one from that night, where he had promised me a future, no matter what happened. I believed him because of his eyes. Crosby’s eyes were like a tunnel straight into his thoughts. It didn’t hurt that Crosby was a determined person, and that showed on and off the baseball field.

In the darkest of nights with only the glow of a crescent moon hanging high in the sky, we sat on the hill, remembering and wallowing in our sadness. The last two months hadn’t been easy for either of us, but Crosby had been taking the wrath from our small town that wanted to point a finger. I saw it in the deep, dark circles under his eyes and the way his skin hung off his bones.

The boy—once full of laughter, cockiness, and brawn—had whittled himself down to a cold, hollow shell of a guy who couldn’t meet my eyes.

“My parents are moving,” he whispered.

I wish I were surprised by the news, but I wasn’t. Rumors had been filling the streets that the Lynches were getting harassing phone calls, and people were asking Preacher Lynch to step down from the church.

“They think it will be easier on Spencer,” he said.

Hearing the confirmation from his lips stabbed my heart as fierce as when Ariel told me. We were in the same spot as the night of the accident. He brought his knees up and rested his forearms on them, staring out at the factory. His outlook on life was now scorned from the night when he’d held the world in his hands.

“Where?”

“Reckling, Colorado.”

“Colorado?” I was taken aback. I’d thought for sure it’d be only a few towns over. Maybe a few hours’ drive. Hours that would mean nothing to us because we were the lucky couple, but Colorado was a two-day drive.

“They want to get far away, and my uncle got my dad into a church there.” He plucked a blade of grass, wrapping it around his finger.

“Well, you’re going to Vanderbilt, and we’ll figure out a way to see each other during holidays.” I was desperately trying to find some sort of hope in this thunderous cloud closing in on us.

We’d thought we’d have summers, Christmases, and spring breaks to see one another while we attended different colleges. Now, that would not be the case.

“I’m not going to Vanderbilt.”

“What?” I whipped around and scooted in front of him, giving him no choice but to look at me.

Still, he focused on the patch of grass. “I’m going to go to junior college out there.”

“Cros, you have to take the scholarship. What happened was not your fault!” I gripped his arms, thinking I could change his mind.

My arm went up in the air as he stood fast to his feet, leaving me sitting. He stalked to the edge of the hill, and I followed, wanting to comfort him.

“Have you ever thought about ending it?” he mumbled.

My feet stopped inches away from him. I hung my head while my blood rushed through my veins. I had thought about it, many times during the first month. The plaguing question was,
How could either of us ever move on?

“That’s not our future, Crosby. There’s a reason we survived.” I was desperate to talk sense into him. I’d lost two friends, and I wasn’t about to lose the guy who held my dreams. “We have to move forward. Eyes ahead.” I reminded him of his dad’s trademark line.

Preacher Lynch had said it to the congregation days after the accident. At that point, the town had been in the denial phase of grief, like robots mindlessly functioning through the days. It wasn’t until three weeks later when Kedsey’s mom had snapped her fingers, like a magician, that most of the town switched to the anger phase.

“No, we don’t.” He left the edge of the hill.

I released a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. I sat next to him in the same place he had been moments before. Linking my arm through his, I placed my head on his shoulder, desperate for us to find our place together again. “I know it’s hard, but time will heal us.”

“Please spare me the preacher talk, Ella. I’ve gotten enough of it over breakfasts, dinners, and late-night walks. My dad called in all his Preacher friends to make sure this doesn’t ruin me. He’s mad that I turned down my scholarship.” For the first time that night, his eyes met mine. “How can I continue my life?”

Crosby had stopped showing me any affection after the funerals. I’d thought he was afraid to hurt my injuries. But, deep down, I knew. Neither one of us would ever go back to what we had been before the accident.

What Crosby said next strengthened my suspicions. It wasn’t only my parents lecturing in my ear about the two of us.

“My dad thinks we should take a break. That seeing each other is a reminder of that night.”

A tear trickled down my cheek, but I pushed back the flood that desperately wanted to release because a small part of me agreed. “What do you think?”

He swiveled around, grasping my head in the middle of his hands. His thumb wiped the few tears away. “When we’re together, all that fills my head is the sight of blood and the sounds of squealing tires and their screams.”

My heart shattered into fragments from his words because I still saw the boy I loved.

At that moment, it was confirmed. We couldn’t continue on this path. Something needed to change if we were ever going to heal.

I drew back, but his hands held my head harder. “Why did this happen?”

His eyes morphed into a deeper dimension of sadness. “Because I’m completely fucked up.”

I shook my head. “That’s not true.”

My blood boiled as I fought our options. We might never be fixed, but we needed to carry on with our lives as normally as we could.

“El”—his hands fell from my skin, taking the little warmth I’d felt tonight—“I have to remind you of that night.”

I cast my eyes toward the uneven ground, picking at a patch of longer grass. “You know what I remember?”

Chirping crickets hidden under the luminous sky were the only sounds cutting the silence.

“Your eyes when you slammed on the brakes. Your white knuckles on the steering wheel. That’s it. Everything else is black.”

A low growl rumbled out of his throat.

“Because you were unconscious. I thought you were…” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll never again be the guy you fell in love with.”

“What haunts you?” I inched forward, begging him to let me in, to trust me.

He shook his head. “I’ll never share that with you.”

“Crosby, how will we overcome this if you don’t tell me what you saw?”

“We won’t. I brought you here tonight because this is where I promised you a future.”

A threat of doom quickly sank into me, and all of his words tonight started making sense.

“And this is where you’re going to break that promise?”

He placed his hand on my shaking knee.

“You know as well as I do that it’s for the best. The only hope we have is to move forward.” His voice was so even…so unaffected. “Hopefully, years down the road…”

A glint of hope washed over me. A future? Our future?

He shook his head again. “No, I’m not making promises I can’t keep. This is for the best.”

I stared down at my pile of grass pickings in front of me. What he was saying made sense. When I looked at him, I saw the boy I loved, but Kedsey’s screams rang in my ears, too. If I was keeping him from being the guy he was meant to be, then I had to let him go.

“I can’t live with knowing you aren’t one hundred percent happy.”

“I don’t know how to live without you,” I whispered.

His hand moved up to the back of my neck, urging me to look toward him. “Me neither.”

Deep down, the choice seemed like our only option. We would have to heal apart. My parents had signed me up for therapy at a clinic near Ridgemont, and I knew our parents had been talking to one another about the closeness between Crosby and me. But it seemed crazy to separate from each other.

“Take out your phone,” he said.

I nodded, dug it out of my back pocket and held it out in front of me.

“This will only work if we delete each other’s phone numbers.” He poised his phone in the palm of his hand, my contact information already lighting up his screen.

“But I know your phone number by heart.”

“We have to do this. You’ll eventually forget.”

Never.

My thumb scrolled through, and soon, his name was on my screen.

“On the count of three, we’re going to delete.” I heard a crack in his voice and wondered if he was having second thoughts.

“One…two…” He paused a few seconds, and I watched his chest rise and fall. “Three.”

My thumb pressed the Delete button, and in a millisecond, his name was no longer there, like the love of my life had vanished.

His phone vibrated. “Listen, I have to go.” He stood and held his hand out to me.

He walked me to my car with his hand still in mine.

Although I felt like this was the right choice for us and our parents would agree with it, my whole body felt as though I’d been in an MMA ring, bruised and battered beyond repair.

Over the crickets and wind, his phone continued to buzz, but he ignored it.

“I love you, Ella,” he whispered into my ear. Then, he kissed my cheek.

My fingers gripped his T-shirt, fisting it in my hands. A fear buried deep inside me that I’d never see him again.

“I love you.”

He backed away, my hands having no choice but to let go of the thin fabric. He rested his back on the door of his truck, with longing in both of our eyes.

“Go, baby. Live.”

My eyelids closed, cutting off the wetness in my eyes to form trickling tears down my cheeks.

“You, too,” I choked out before climbing into my car.

As my car drove forward, I watched him standing there until he morphed into a dot in my rearview mirror. And then he really did vanish out of my life.

S
hivers run
up my spine as I remember that night. I step back from the curtains and fall onto my couch. With my feet propped up and my teeth biting my nails, I start to absorb his return in my life.

My body yearned to be in his arms again. To feel his soft lips kiss the top of my head. His strong hand to link with mine, leading me through life’s ups and downs.

I can’t though. I can’t dump Liam and go right back, especially since Crosby hasn’t done what he said he was going to do. He’s as screwed up about the accident as before, and I’d be lying if I said that it didn’t hurt that he had done nothing to heal himself during our time apart. I started counseling with the hope that, when he returned to me, I’d be ready. But he’s done nothing but hide the guilt and sadness.