by Julie Kriss
He held out a popsicle, which I could see was melting in its wrapper. “It’s lime.”
“Thanks, kid.” I pulled up a cheap plastic chair and dropped into it, facing the washing machine. I tried not to groan as my back touched the plastic.
Dylan came and stood between my knees, watching the clothes slosh, his back to me. I opened my popsicle and put my arm lightly around his waist and watched with him. And wondered what the fuck I was going to do now.
Ten
Ryan
* * *
I sent Kate home. I didn’t need a nanny right now; I needed to give Dylan some dinner—luckily he loved tuna sandwiches—and think things through. Make a plan. Figure out my life now that, for the first time since I was thirteen, I officially was no longer a baseball player.
Fire it up, Riggs.
I took a long, hot shower, which did almost nothing for the pain in my back. I got out and put on some loose gray track pants, then went to Dylan’s room to get him in his pajamas. He usually fought me on this—the more tired he got, the less he wanted anything to do with sleeping. I’d given up figuring out little kids long ago. I was only twenty-seven, and sleep was my favorite fucking thing in the world—when I could get it.
But I lucked out: Dylan was already in his pajamas. Even better, he was face-down on the bed, passed out, his stuffed cat tucked under his arm next to him. Kate had taken him to the pool today, and it obviously conked him out without the usual struggle. I turned out his light and closed his door.
I stepped out the back door onto the darkened back patio and pulled out my phone. I called my brother Luke in Westlake.
“Yeah,” he said, because none of my brothers ever said hello to each other on the phone. It would kill us, honestly.
“I have a question,” I said to him.
I heard the quick hiss of a beer cap being twisted off in the background. “Shoot,” he said.
I pictured him in our childhood house, where he was living now with his girlfriend, Emily. We grew up in a big house on the wrong side of Westlake’s tracks, a house that had been nice a hundred years ago but was now a run-down mess. Luke moved back in there when Dad went to prison for trying to run over his friend in a drunken argument. Yes, Dad was a role model.
Dad was still in prison, and he wasn’t getting out soon. It turned out that the garage he ran—the one Luke took over when he went away—was a front for a stolen-car and drug-dealing business. Luke had shut it down, Dad was staying away for a long time, and now Luke ran the business clean with our brother Jace. Jace had moved in to the guest house behind the big house, but soon he was going to move in with his girlfriend, Tara. Westlake was turning into a regular home, and two of the Riggs boys were settling down.
I’d always hated Westlake. We all had. But now I pictured Luke sitting on his porch, drinking a beer, his hot girlfriend somewhere nearby, and I realized Westlake was the one place I knew best. The one place I didn’t feel strange. I understood Westlake deep in my psyche, in my bones, and it understood me.
“Do you still need help at Riggs Auto?” I asked Luke.
“Fuck yes,” he said. “Business is picking up and I had to clean out the staff. Again. One of them was informing to the crooked cop who was trying to frame Jace.”
Tara’s ex-boyfriend, a crooked cop, had tried to set up Jace for a coke deal. Since Jace just got out of doing a stretch for car theft, it would have put him away for a long time.
The pain in my back seized, and I winced for a second and tried to speak. “I’ll come back to Westlake,” I said as I patted my pocket, looking for the tube of pills, making sure they were there. “I’ll work for you.”
“Are you fucking serious?” Luke said. “If you’re bullshitting me, I’m going to be very fucking mad.”
Another wince of pain, this one slightly lesser. “I’m not bullshitting, Luke. You need cars fixed, I’ll fix cars.”
I knew how to do it. Cars were in the Riggs brothers’ blood. We all knew how to fix cars. It was the only thing I knew besides baseball.
“What about baseball?” Luke asked.
“Baseball is done. I told you.” I’d told him about my shoulder. In fact, I’d made a scouting trip to Westlake a few weeks ago to get the lay of the land in case my shoulder didn’t heal.
“Well, that sucks for you, but it’s good for me and Jace,” Luke said. “We need good help, and all we get are shitheads. We can fix up rooms in the house for you and Dylan if you need somewhere to stay.”
I winced again, and this time not from pain. The last thing I needed was to stay with Luke and his hot girlfriend as they banged night and day. It was just a reminder of all the sex I wasn’t getting. “No, I’ll find a place. I’m selling this house anyway. If you know anyone who’s selling something good, hook me up.”
“Actually I do,” Luke said. “Mrs. Amano’s house up the street is for sale.”
I frowned. “Mrs. Amano was like ninety when we were growing up. She’s still alive?”
“No, she kicked the bucket a few years ago.” Mrs. Amano used to yell about getting her shotgun out whenever one of us went near her house, so neither of us had much sympathy. “There was some legal thing where the son and daughter fought for the place, but they’ve settled it and neither one of them wants it. They want to unload. It’s on the market for a princely twenty thousand bucks.”
Twenty thousand bucks. God bless Westlake’s shitty real estate market. “Have you seen it?”
“No, I just have the story from Em. She knows all the gossip on the street now.”
Of course she did. We’d gone to high school with Emily Parker and her fraternal twin sister, Lauren. Emily was blonde and popular. The fact that she ended up with my dark, broody brother was something I didn’t contemplate too hard. “Get her to send me the real estate agent’s info,” I said.
“So you really are serious. This will be good for Riggs Auto, you know. Westlake’s resident athlete celebrity coming back to town to fix cars.”
Resident celebrity. It would have been funny if pain weren’t lancing up into my right shoulder blade. “I see Westlake has as pathetic a celebrity landscape as ever,” I said.
“This place’s pathetic-ness is our gain. We’re going to get business with you here. Mostly women. Just try not to bang all the customers, okay?”
“Jesus, Luke.”
“I knew you in high school, dude. By the way, is the hot nanny coming with you?”
I’d made the mistake of telling Luke I’d hired a nanny, and it had taken him all of one minute to fish out the fact that she was hot. He’d never let me live it down.
Kate. Moving back to Westlake would mean I would fucking lose Kate. The pain lanced down my arm again, and I had to switch my phone to my left hand. “I doubt it,” I managed. “Since she lives here.”
“You’ve actually kept your hands off her. I can tell,” Luke said. “You sound like you have blue balls. Way to have self-restraint, Riggs.”
“Fuck you, Luke,” I said, and hung up.
I dropped the cell phone on the table and hissed in a deep breath. A dog barked somewhere, and a car drove by in front of the house. Far off, I could hear the pulsing bass of some guy’s music as he waited at a stoplight. The air was warm and dark. I could smell exhaust and gasoline and grass clippings. Summer in the city.
I waited for the pain to ease up. When it didn’t, I felt in my track pants again for the little vial of white pills. This time I pulled them out and dry-swallowed two. I had just gotten them down when I heard footsteps coming around the side of the house.
Kate came around the corner. She was still wearing the white shirt and the dark green shorts, an outfit that shouldn’t be sexy but totally fucking was. She stopped when she saw me.
“What are you doing here?” I said. I was saying that a lot today.
“Hey,” she said. She bit her lip. “I, um.”
I realized I was shirtless. In fact, except for the low-slung track pants, I was naked.
She didn’t know that, but something told me she could guess.
Fuck. I was making her tongue-tied. Why did that make me feel good for the first time today? “You’ve seen it before, Kate,” I said.
“It isn’t that,” she said lamely.
“Yes it is. I realize it’s been five years, but you got a pretty good look. In fact, I seem to remember you licking my—”
“Okay.” She held her hands up, palms out, in surrender. “Okay. Ryan. I came back because I didn’t feel right when I left earlier. I feel bad about talking to that guy. I had a bad feeling when I did it, and I’m sorry. I want you to know that will never happen again.”
“He was the rep from the league,” I said. “I’ve been deleting his messages for weeks. Until today, they pretty much owned me. They were going to track me down sooner or later.”
“Maybe, but it shouldn’t have been me that told them where you were.” Her brows furrowed. “What a bunch of assholes, tracking down your nanny and putting her on the spot. Poking into your privacy. That’s low. I have a mind to call them and tell them off.”
I felt myself smiling at her. “You do that.”
“It would get you in trouble.”
“No it wouldn’t because I’m off the roster. I’m fired. That’s what that guy was tracking me down for.”
Her face blanched. “To fire you?”
I held my arms out from my sides in a here I am gesture. “I am no longer the Bad Boy of Baseball.”
“Oh, my God, Ryan.” Kate put a palm to her forehead. “I am so sorry. Can they do that? Just dump you?”
“Considering I can’t play baseball, yes, they can.”
“What about treatment? Surgery? There must be something.”
“I’ve looked at all of that,” I said. “Have you ever heard of something called referral pain?”
She dropped her hand and shook her head.
“It’s pain, but it isn’t coming from the right spot. So you can have an injury in your neck, say, but you’ll feel pain in your shoulder or the middle of your back. It could travel, which means you could feel pain in a different place every day. And they can’t find what’s wrong with you, because the problem isn’t in the spot that’s painful. It’s somewhere else they can’t find.”
“And that’s what you have?”
“That’s the theory. My right shoulder is a problem, but they’ve done dozens of scans and there’s nothing wrong with it. The pain moves around—my lower back, my upper back, my arms, the back of my neck. I’ve had days with shooting pains in my chest muscles and aches in my jaw. I’ve had massive headaches. No one knows what the problem is. All I know is, today I could barely put a quarter in the washing machine. I sure as hell can’t pitch a ball.”
She crossed her arms. The pose made her breasts look good beneath the white shirt—it pushed them together slightly, made them look plump and soft. How many pairs of tits had I seen in my life? I could barely remember any of them. I wanted to peel Kate’s shirt off of her more than I had ever wanted anything. Certainly more than I wanted to play baseball.
“What about those?” she asked, nodding at my hand.
I looked down and realized I was still holding the vial of pills. “These?”
“I see you taking them,” she said. “What are they?”
I held the vial up. It had no label. “Honestly, I have no fucking idea. I only know they work.”
“The doctor didn’t tell you what he was giving you?”
“These didn’t come from a doctor,” I said. “Not a real one, anyway. The guy who sells them to me likes to claim he’s a doctor, but I have a feeling a real doctor doesn’t sell illegal pills under the table to sports teams for three times their street value.”
“Those are illegal?” Kate said.
“As illegal as hell.” I looked at the pills in their little vial. “They aren’t the only thing he sells. Uppers, downers, speed, steroids—if you need it to get through the game, he can get it for you. The fact that you risk failing the league’s random piss tests is your problem.” I looked at her shocked face. “Relax. I’ve never bought any of that other stuff. I mean, steroids shrink your dick, so you know from personal experience I’m telling the truth.”
“Ryan, can you please be serious?”
“Kate,” I said, “I am always serious about the size of my dick. Always.”
“Jesus, Ryan. You’ve been taking pills, and you don’t even know what they are.”
She looked gorgeous in the shadowy light coming from my kitchen window, her face set in lines of concern for me. And those shorts—I could look at her legs all day. She was wearing sandals, her toes painted red. I wanted those feet on my shoulders while I made her come. And at the same time, I didn’t deserve her—not now, not ever. Not for five fucking minutes.
“No, I don’t know what these are,” I said, indicating the pills. “All I know is that they take the pain away. For a little while, anyway.”
“Stop taking them,” she said.
“No.” I’d have to get a new source now that I was off the team. Then again, Doctor Whozit probably didn’t care if I was off the team, as long as I had money. “I like them.”
“Ryan, your mother died of a fentanyl overdose.”
That hit a fucking mark. I should have known that Kate was too smart not to hit where it hurt. Because aside from the fact that they took the pain away, I didn’t want to give my pills up. I just didn’t want to. Because they felt… good. When I took them, shit just didn’t matter as much. Everything was fine.
So I took them a lot.
And I could keep taking them, and taking them. Even when the pain was gone.
Just like my mother, who had walked away from her two-year-old son for another hit.
Just like my mother, who had followed one hit with another until she finally took her last one.
I hadn’t even known her, but she was inside me. She always would be.
“I’ll be fine,” I told Kate.
“Really? Are you going to promise Dylan that?”
The words were right there, ready to be spoken: It’s none of your fucking business. Back off. It would be so easy to lash out, to hurt her feelings and make her leave. I could make it bad enough that she might never come back. I could say things that would make her never want to see me again.
But this was Kate, and I would rather carve my heart out with a rusty penknife than say any of that shit to her. So I said, “What does it matter to you what I do?”
She blinked at the question. “Because… because we’re friends.”
“Are we?” I asked her.
“Aren’t we?” she asked back.
I didn’t know. I didn’t know what we were. All I knew was that I didn’t want her to leave. No one had ever actually given a shit about me before, and I wanted her to keep doing it. I also wanted her underneath me in bed like she’d been five years ago, her back arched and her legs wrapped around me and her fingernails digging into me as she came.
I wanted her to like me. I wanted her to trust me. I wanted her to laugh at my jokes. I wanted her to think I was a good person.
I wasn’t going to get any of those things.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
I shrugged. “Whatever you want.”
“You told me that you tried out for baseball when you were thirteen because a girl said she’d kiss you if you did it.”
One stupid dare, and everything in my life went from that point to this. What an idiot I was. I wondered what it felt like when you didn’t regret every choice you’d ever fucking made. “Yeah. That’s true.”
“Did she?” Kate asked.
“What?”
“Did she kiss you when you tried out for the team?”
What was that girl’s name, anyway? I didn’t remember anymore. I remembered she had long black hair. She’d tasted like breath mints when I kissed her, probably because she’d gobbled a few of them before I did it. I remember thinking it was
weird, kissing a girl who tasted like Mentos. “Yes. She did.”
“Okay then.” Kate took a step forward, putting her face further into the muted light. She uncrossed her arms. “I’ll make you a deal.”
“What deal?”
She held out her hand, palm up. “Give me the pills, and don’t buy any more. Give them to me, and I’ll kiss you.”
I stood there, dumbfounded. I should have laughed or told her that was ridiculous. I should have called her naïve. Instead I just stood there with my blood pounding in my temples, unable to say a fucking thing.
Give them to me, and I’ll kiss you.
Give up the only thing that took the pain away. The only thing that got me through the day anymore. Give it up for a kiss from a woman—something I could get any day, any time, from any woman.
Give it up for a kiss from this woman.
Yeah, I knew my answer.
I took a step closer.
Easiest decision I ever fucking made.
Eleven
Kate
* * *
I didn’t think he would do it. But he stepped forward and put the vial of pills in my hand without another word. Just like that.
It seemed like a big thing. Because I knew he didn’t want to give up those pills. I knew he needed them, that without them he’d be in pain. When he put the pills in my hand, it felt like he was giving me a gift. Like he was trusting me.
“Make it good,” he said, his voice low.
It didn’t cross my mind that I shouldn’t be doing this. I’d forgotten that he was my boss, that he was off-limits, that he was someone I shouldn’t touch. In that moment I wasn’t Straight-A Kate, and he wasn’t the Bad Boy of Baseball. I’d forgotten that he was a chaotic mess and he’d only cause me trouble. Or maybe I hadn’t forgotten—I just didn’t care.
I dropped the vial in my pocket. Then I stepped close to him, put my arms around his neck, pulled him down, and kissed him.
And the fireworks went off.
