Swing and a Mishap

by Tara Sivec

  “Understood.” I nod at Owen seriously. “Believe me, I’m doing everything I can to make up for being a jerk before. And I promise you right now, Owen, I will never, ever do anything to hurt her again. If I do, you have my permission to kick my ass.”

  He stares at me quietly for a few minutes, and I don’t know what he’s looking for. I can only hope he hears the sincerity in my words and sees it on my face.

  “I might have a way you can suck up to her” are the first words he says to me, letting me know I’m temporarily forgiven.

  “Lay it on me.”

  “So, people are always asking her to do stuff, because they don’t have time,” he starts to explain. “Like she has the time, but whatever. My mom’s too nice to ever say no to anyone. Our living room is currently filled with boxes of candy she needs to stuff into goodie bags for the baseball boosters, new printer ink and reams of paper for flyers that need to be made for the spaghetti dinner to raise money for our uniforms next year, the concession stand schedule for all the parents with kids on the team who have to volunteer needs to be made, and like, ten other things I’m sure I’m forgetting.”

  “What are you asking me, kid?”

  Owen pauses for a beat before replying. “How good are you with a glue gun?”

  “Will there be glitter and Lisa Frank stickers involved?” I naturally ask.

  “I don’t know who Lisa Frank is, but I’m pretty sure my mom won’t let me have a girl over when she’s not home.”

  With a laugh, I turn off the golf cart and get out with Owen.

  “You’re in luck. I freaking love glitter and stickers.”

  “I changed my mind. I don’t want to do this. Peace out. I’m going home!”

  “Nice try, Owen, but you live here. If you want me to order pizza, hand me the scissors and the glitter.”

  “Please… not the glitter again.”

  “Whose house are you in? Why is my baby brother so sparkly?”

  “Savannah, focus! I FaceTimed you, because you need to see these felt pennants I’m making for each member of the team with their last name and jersey number. Pinterest has failed me. Why do these look bad?”

  “Those are hideous. Did you use iron-on decals? You need a Cricut.”

  “Owen, does your mom have a Cricut in the house?”

  “My mom would freak out if there were bugs in the house.”

  “There’s glitter in the bathtub. Why is there glitter in the bathtub? We weren’t even in the bathroom!”

  “We’ll get that out later. Does this font say ‘This spaghetti dinner will be a blast!’ or ‘This spaghetti dinner will end in bloodshed!’? Does it need a border? More stickers?”

  “Why is there glitter in my socks?”

  “Will you stop yelling at me and just google it? I’m sure trace amounts are fine, Owen.”

  “And I’m sure we don’t need Google to tell us that trace amounts of glitter in three dozen cookies for the welcome bags for the opposing team for tomorrow night’s game is not fine.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen? They shit sparkles and rainbows for a week?”

  “Okay, that was pretty funny. I’m still googling it.”

  “Whatever, Mom.”

  “My mom’s right. You are annoying.”

  “You have to pull the scissors faster against the ribbon to get a perfect corkscrew curl. Like this. We’re almost done with the goodie bags. Only ten more to go.”

  “I can taste the glitter in the air now.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Wren

  “What a screwball.”

  “You have to talk to him now. Really talk to him. Not just call him a bag of dicks and drive away.”

  “I never called him a bag of dicks,” I tell my sister. “That’s a good one though. I forgot about that one.”

  I feel a hand wrap around my ponytail and gently tug, pulling my face up from where it was buried into my arms on top of the bar at SIG. I always love coming to visit Birdie, Tess, and Murphy at the golf course, especially when we get to hang out in the small bar in the clubhouse nestled in between the pro shop and the restaurant. It’s decorated in dark forest-green carpet and furniture, with rich cherry wood accents and a stone fireplace off to one side. It reminds me of a quiet, fancy study in an old mansion, where you can curl up with a book by the fire and enjoy the peace and quiet. Since it’s later in the season and there are less tourists on the island, the golf course only has a quarter of the number of usual customers. Right now, me, my sister, Tess, and Murphy are all crowded around the bar, and we’re the only ones in here, thank God. No one else needs to witness my breakdown.

  “He crafted for you,” Birdie says softly when my eyes meet hers.

  Sitting up the rest of the way on my barstool when she drops her hand from my hair, I look around at all the eyes staring at me in the same soft way.

  “I still think someone needs to bust out his kneecaps. Preferably me,” Murphy mutters from where he’s standing at the end of the bar, arms crossed, with a scowl on his face.

  Okay, so all eyes except for Murphy. With his receding white hairline and a little bit of a beer belly that is absolutely caused by beer, even with an angry look on his face, he still slides a bag of cookies down the shiny bar top toward me. Like the grandfather we never had, Murphy is more grumpy than grandfatherly, but he taught me and my sister a very valuable lesson when we were younger. If you suck it up, you eventually get cookies. We learned this lesson when Murphy made us cry by calling us “a bunch of little asswipes” when we were kids and kicked a ball over the fence into his yard, but he promised to give us cookies if we’d just suck it up and stop crying. So we did.

  As I easily stop the bag of Pepperidge Farms Strawberry Thumbprint Cookies before they go sailing past me down the bar, I rip into the white bag, grab three cookies at once, and shove them into my mouth, sucking it up and refusing to cry. I did enough of that last night when I got home from work to a quiet house, since Owen was asleep, and found boxes and boxes of finished projects I agreed to do and hadn’t had time to accomplish yet. All of them perfect and looking like they were professionally done, neatly boxed and lined up in date order for when they’re needed.

  “Did he sew red yarn into paper plates to make it look like baseball stitching?” Tess asks, zooming in on one of the many photos on my phone I took last night once I could see through the tears.

  Shoving another cookie into my mouth, I nod, spraying cookie bits all over the place when I reply without even bothering to finish chewing or swallowing, because fuck manners right now.

  “He did. Oh yes, he hand-stitched those. But scroll over three photos. He used my actual sewing machine to make pillowcases with baseballs on them for the giveaway baskets for the spaghetti dinner raffle.”

  “You have a sewing machine?” Tess asks, looking up from my phone. “Do you know how to use it?”

  “Of course I know how to use it. Murphy taught me.”

  Tess’s head whips to Murphy, still standing at the end of the bar with a perma-scowl on his face.

  “You know how to use a sewing machine?” Tess asks him.

  “Who the fuck do you think hems my pants, the Tooth Fairy?” he fires back. “You women need to focus! I need to know if I should grab the baseball bat out of my golf cart I keep there for knee-breaking emergencies.”

  Getting another cookie out of the bag, I shove it in my mouth with the other one I still haven’t finished chewing, spewing more cookie bits and words around the bar.

  “He sewed, he used puff paint, he put stickers on all two hundred and fifty spaghetti dinner flyers, I will be cleaning glitter out of my curtains for months, and he did it all after a week of me being a total bitch to him.” I sniffle while I finish chewing, lean over the bar, and tug the white bar towel off Tess’s shoulder to clean up the crumbs in front of me as she continues looking at the pictures. “I’m being mean to him, and he’s using a fucking Cricut to make fucking felt pennants to hang on
the fucking dugout for the boys during fucking games. I don’t even own a fucking Cricut!”

  “You’re giving a lot of fucks for someone you’ve been trying not to give any fucks about over the last week,” Birdie reminds me as I toss the towel to the side, rest my arms back on top of the bar, and smack my head down onto them.

  “Whatever. My son is also now grounded for the rest of his life for conspiring with the enemy and then racing out of the house for school this morning before I woke up just because he knew I would kick his little ass,” I grumble against my arms.

  “Don’t you touch one hair on that perfect boy’s head, or I will rip you limb from limb,” Murphy warns me from a few feet away.

  Murphy Swallow has a soft spot for the Bennett women, but it’s nothing like the one he has for my son, and it’s the only thing that cheers me up right now. The only time any of us have ever seen that man smile was the day he came to see me in the hospital when I had Owen and my mom put him in Murphy’s arms.

  “Let me see the note again,” Tess says from above me.

  Not bothering to lift my head, I reach back behind me and pull the folded-up piece of paper out of the back pocket of my jean shorts, holding it high in the air above me.

  Tess grabs it out of my hand, and I hear the crinkle of her unfolding the piece of paper that was left on top of all the boxes when I got home last night, followed by her reading the words out loud that I already have memorized.

  “Don’t be mad, but I gave Owen a ride home from practice. I was already going this way, and it seemed stupid to make Dominic go out of his way. Your son mentioned some projects you haven’t had time to get finished, and just in case you forgot, I enjoy a craft project or two. And before you get mad and call me a fuck wagon again (hilarious, BTW), I did not spend any money on anything. Honestly, Wren, how does someone not have a craft room in their house? You’re lucky I already unpacked mine. A quick trip back to my place gave me everything I needed. Well, almost everything. Your neighbors, Rob and Tianna—lovely people who invited me to dinner next Friday and to snuggle their dogs—let me borrow their Cricut. I mean, have you ever seen more perfect, straight edges on vinyl baseball decals? So, in conclusion, you can’t be mad at me, and you need to find a new place for your silverware in the kitchen, because that is now your ribbon drawer. Relax. Take a bubble bath. Read a book. Do something for YOU, and don’t stress. At least not about this stuff. Have a good rest of the night, Shepherd.”

  When Tess finishes reading the note, nothing can be heard in the bar except for the ticking of a clock hanging on the wall above the glass liquor shelf, Birdie tapping her fingernails on the bar two seats down from me, and my snotty, whimpering, muffled crying from where my face is still smushed into my arms on the bar. I get to enjoy the quiet and wallow in my misery for thirty seconds before all hell breaks loose around me.

  “Who cares if she’ll be the other woman, she needs to screw his brains out!”

  “Fuck him! Who cares if he can sew. He still hasn’t apologized to her for being a shit!”

  “Excuse me, Tess, can I just get another beer?”

  “Either you take him out at the knees, or I will, but someone needs to do it already!”

  “Does no one even care how sweet this is? It’s like something right out of a movie.”

  “Fuck movies! Let’s burn his shit!”

  “Sorry, I don’t mean to bother you guys. Tess, any chance I can get that beer now?”

  “Can we make a decision already? I need to eat and take my water pill.”

  “Fuck water! Burn. His. Shit.”

  “My tee time is in like, three minutes. I just need one beer.”

  “Jesus Christ, Jared, here’s your beer!” Tess shouts, twisting the top off a bottle and then smacking it down in front of the poor man who works at the ferry dock that has been trying to get her attention. “It’s on the house!”

  It was probably pointless for Tess to shout that to the man after he grabbed his beer and ran at top speed out of the bar and into the pro shop. He wasn’t going to stick around long enough to pay for it anyway, just in case Tess decided to grab a lighter instead of his beer.

  “Listen, I think you need to—”

  “I think you all need to shut the hell up!” I shout, making all of them shut the hell up and stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. Which I probably have. Too bad this isn’t a recent loss, and I’m pretty sure I lost it in eighth grade, the first time I ever saw Shepherd Oliver take his shirt off.

  “I’m sorry, but none of you are helping right now,” I continue, softening my voice so I don’t hurt their feelings. “I feel like I’m going crazy. He did these incredibly sweet and amazing things for me, and I owe him so much for that and I’m so grateful, but a part of me is just still so angry. He just brings out the mean in me, and I don’t know why.”

  Birdie gets up from her bar stool and moves to the one right next to mine, wrapping her arm around my waist and resting her chin on my shoulder.

  “I know you haven’t had any experience with this since sperm donor certainly never brought this out of you. You’ve refused to ever have a one-night stand again since then. The one relationship you had lasted three months, just because you were both too nice to break it off sooner absolutely doesn’t count. Nor do the handful of awful blind dates you’ve been set up on,” she says quietly. “But Wren… Shepherd doesn’t bring the mean out of you. He brings out the fire. There’s a big difference. Why do you think I spend half my time arguing with Palmer? Because it’s fun. And it’s especially fun making up.”

  As I swipe at the tears on my cheeks, Tess nods from behind the bar.

  “Sadly, that’s true. Bodhi drives me up the goddamn wall, but man does he make up for it later on.”

  Since Birdie’s right and I have absolutely no experience with any of this, I’ll just have to take their word for it. And not collapse into another pile of tears, because even though it secretly has been kind of fun giving Shepherd hell the last week, none of what they’re saying matters. He’s still not mine. I still don’t get the benefits that they’re so helpfully reminding me aren’t available to me.

  “Right, well, if you guys will excuse me, I have a crafter to apologize to,” I tell them, sliding off my stool, giving them all a smile I don’t feel, and heading toward the double French doors that will take me outside.

  “Grab the bat from my golf cart just in case!” Murphy shouts after me.

  Thwack.

  My heart skips in my chest when I hear the sound of a bat connecting with a ball, not just because it’s one of my favorite sounds in the world, but because of who made it. My heart always tries to jump out of my chest whenever I see Shepherd step up to the plate and power through a swing.

  I’ve been sitting in the bleachers for the last fifteen minutes since I got to the high school, just watching Shepherd hit a bucket of balls on the empty field while school is still in session. He’s not in his uniform with the ass-hugging pants, but it doesn’t matter. Even wearing a pair of black athletic shorts and a fitted, long-sleeved, ocean-blue Nike shirt, watching him toss up a ball and then launch it out by the fences beyond the outfield without breaking a sweat is a sight to behold. With every hit he makes, I watch the muscles in his biceps bulge, the ones in his powerful thighs tighten when he bends his knees into his stance, and my breath leaves me with a whoosh every time he connects with the ball. I’ve seen it a million times on TV, but there’s something special about seeing it in person.

  As he continues to go through the bucket of balls he dumped around home plate, I get up from my spot in the bleachers and make my way down the stairs. Walking through the gate in the fence, I stick close to the fence line inside the field, paying close attention as I walk just in case Shepherd suddenly hits a line-drive foul in my direction. When I’m standing a few feet away in the dirt and he bends down to grab another ball, I let him know he’s not alone out here.

  “I wondered why that ball was getting bigger, and t
hen it hit me….”

  The stupid baseball pun is out of my mouth before I can stop it, Shepherd’s eyes flying up when he hears my voice while he’s still bent over, reaching for a ball. Feeling all hot, sweaty, and itchy with his eyes locked on mine as he slowly stands back up, I shove my hands into the back pockets of my jean shorts and start kicking my toe around into the dirt. Thankfully, I’m on my way to work, and my white T-shirt with the Dip and Twist logo on it is still free of chocolate sauce stains.

  “That was the worst pun ever,” Shepherd says with a small laugh, and I can’t help but return his grin, even though I kind of want to throw up right now. “God, I’ve missed you.”

  My heart skips again when he whispers those last words, and I have to squeeze my hands into fists in my back pockets before I’m tempted to yank them out and launch myself into his arms. I haven’t let myself stick around long enough in his presence to fully appreciate just how overwhelming it is. He’s so beautiful it makes me want to cry. I still look at him and just see Shepherd. I don’t see the fame, and I don’t see the fortune; I just see him. And he’s so sweet, and thoughtful, and I wish he’d just be a huge asshole and treat me like crap. I’m used to dealing with people who don’t consider my feelings first, and I’ve become an old pro at trying to shut everything off when Kevin tells me I’m looking old, or when he tells me I’m not a good mother because I work too much, or when he calls me a bitch because Owen wants nothing to do with him, or when he likes to tell me that he has plenty of women to keep him company and it’s just pitiful that no one wants me.