Gorilla Dating

by Kristen Ethridge

  “Well, that doesn’t sound very nice.” I give him a mock-swat as I pass him to take my seat.

  “It’s part of what makes baseball great—if you’re not blessed enough to have your cleats out there on the field. Baseball is legendary because of things like opening day, the smell of freshly-mowed grass, the crunch of peanut shells under your feet, and the opportunity to be a part of the game with a well-planned heckle.”

  “A well-planned heckle? I’ve heard some heckling, but I don’t remember any of it being any good.”

  Jack adjusts his cap and looks at me, his eyes dark and serious. “Amateurs. There are rules for good heckling.”

  I give him a well-planned dose of side-eye to go with his theory on well-planned heckling. “There are rules? For heckling?”

  As he leans back a bit in the green plastic seat, he lightly drops his arm over my shoulder. I don’t move, wanting to remember the feel of it as it settled behind the curve of my neck and the double-tap of his pointer and index finger on the top of my shoulder.

  “Sure,” he says with confidence. “A great heckler knows you keep it family-friendly, you have to be funny—even when you’re kind of being a jerk, and you have to do your research.”

  “Research?” I turn and study the edges of his face, doing a little research of my own.

  “Sure. I usually focus on the first baseman. It’s perfect. I’m just feet away from him. Especially with the in-conference rivals, by the time these kids are juniors and seniors, I’ve likely seen them play several times, so I’ve gotten to know them and their quirks. As you have to know, baseball is a very quirky sport. Superstitious.”

  I nodded in agreement. A breeze ruffles my hair and brings the scent of fresh popcorn to section R2. My tummy grumbles, begging me to go get a bucket for myself. I’d missed this—all of this—the popcorn, the ninety feet between each white base, and the gentle possession of a man’s arm around my shoulders.

  “What’s your quirk?” I wondered aloud.

  “Pointing.”

  “Pointing? Where?”

  “Up.”

  “Up, as in the sky?”

  “Up, as in my mom.” His eyes soften and his smile turns inward. “It’s funny. I never really told anyone on the team what I was doing or why. I just brushed it off and said it was a reflex, something I’d been doing for so long that I didn’t remember why I’d started doing it. That wasn’t the truth, of course. I knew exactly why I was doing it. But I couldn’t tell them like I can tell you now.”

  “So, you pointed up to the sky as a tribute to your mom?”

  He shrugs a bit while keeping his one arm draped around my shoulders. “I guess. I think I was trying to signal her. To let her know it was my turn at bat. She’d been there for T-ball, at every Little League game, and drove me all over the state and more for clinics and tournaments. She’d always been there. I didn’t want her to miss out.”

  I lean in just a little. “I wonder if she’s here now, still watching you at the ballpark?”

  “Probably so.” Jack laughs a bit, then turns his head. “And I see my dad just over there—looks like he just got to his seats. Maybe the grass and the peanuts aren’t why I love baseball so much. Maybe it’s because I can feel everyone I care about here.”

  He turns just a bit and tucks a wind-tossed half-curl behind my ear.

  “Even you,” he said.

  The warmth in the bottom of my stomach was better than that bucket of fresh popcorn I’d wished for earlier.

  I’d never loved baseball more.

  As baseball games tend to slow down time, I had plenty of opportunities to sneak looks to the box behind home plate. Today, Johnny Cooper runs one of the most powerful lobbyist firms in the Lone Star State, but back when I was spending summers at the Astrodome, watching for myself up on the giant screen, Johnny Cooper was the governor of the state of Texas.

  He has a similar profile to Jack—I flash my glance between the man behind home plate and the man next to me. But where his features are set and angular, Jack’s are just a little softer, less-chiseled from stone. The influence of Jack’s mother, perhaps.

  I tried not to think about Jack’s family. I figured it was likely that I’d be introduced to Jack’s father while we were here, and I didn’t need any more nervous energy. My Bears were already down by two runs and we were only in the third inning.

  “Nice shoes. You borrow those from your grandma?”

  Jack’s voice rings out clearly and breaks up my musings on his DNA as he starts talking to the first baseman.

  “Spats, son. No self-respecting baseball player wears spats.”

  The first baseman scuffs his toe in the dirt at the edge of the bag, but otherwise gives no indication that he’d even heard Jack.

  “So you like to keep your shoes clean, son? That’s good. Grandma will be proud.”

  I roll my eyes a bit. My date, the heckler, is acting like a kid and clearly loving every minute of it. “Shoes? That’s what you’re heckling about? Shoes?”

  “Yeah. I told you I usually get to see these guys play a number of times over the course of their careers. Your first baseman here has been wearing these same clunky cleats for years. I’m pretty sure they have them in a museum at Cooperstown.” He turns his attention away from the game and looks at me. “I see that little frown. It’s harmless teasing. Trust me, I heard far worse about me while I was playing.”

  “But shoes, Jack. In my world, you just don’t hate on shoes. It’s against everything I stand for. Shoes are kind of sacred.”

  “Oh, I see. It’s not the heckling. It’s the subject.”

  I nod smugly. “Shoes deserve your respect.”

  “Barnaby here has my respect.”

  As Jack explains his logic to me, Barnaby, the erstwhile first baseman, reaches toward the dirt track, ready to scoop up the ball. The Longhorn who’d just hit the ball barreled toward first base. The runner would be close, but the ball was so perfectly hit that Barnaby could grab it and tag the runner out with ease.

  A textbook play.

  Until Jack’s voice elevates significantly. “Any man who wears his grandma’s spats in an NCAA Super Regional gets respect.”

  Suddenly, Barnaby is on the receiving end of far more than respect, far more than he’d bargained for. He gets a face full of red dirt as somehow a cleat catches in the white cover over the top of his laces. Gravity and momentum combine to pitch him forward.

  The ball rolls into the grass, coming to a complete stop as the runner easily tags first base and heads toward second.

  Barnaby scrambles and makes the throw, a few seconds after the Longhorn had screeched to a halt at second base. Jack leans back in his seat and smiles. “Don’t worry, Barnaby. Grandma still loves you.”

  Barnaby threw a little bit of a scowl up at Jack as he tried in vain to wipe the dirt from the front of his white pants. Jack gave a two-fingered salute at the bill of his cap. I watched Barnaby take a slow breath and quickly make the same motion at the corner of his own green cap.

  Jack then catches my eye and gives me a wide grin, all white teeth and sparkle. “And so does my girl.”

  I couldn’t even be mad at him, sitting there as the orange rays of the sunset began to fall on the orange knit of his shirt. I didn’t really love Barnaby.

  But I know I’ve completely fallen for Jack Cooper, master of the boardroom and bane of first basemen at the ballpark.

  There are so many sides to Jack, and I want to know them all. But the one thing I still can’t put out of my mind is the simple fact that we are working together on the zoo project. It was all fun and games tonight, but I knew what could happen.

  Without a doubt, I’m far more likely to wind up like Barnaby, falling on my face. These moments together are golden, but can we make it safely to home plate without being found out by the wrong people?

  Between the fifth and sixth innings, it looks like my curiosity is about to be settled with regard to Johnny Cooper. Jack had caug
ht his father’s eye during the inning and waved. Within a few minutes of the end of the round of play, Johnny walks over to our seats.

  “I thought I heard you before that poor guy tripped.” The former governor claps his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “You and your heckling.”

  Jack waves a hand in Barnaby’s direction. “I don’t do it to be mean, Dad. It’s just part of baseball. Come on, you remember all the stuff that was said to me all those years.”

  “I sure do. And if you’re going to have a career in politics, you’re going to have to take a little more than just comments about your fielding.”

  Jack’s mouth tightens into a hard twist. “Nothing’s been decided yet, Dad. I told you, I’ll let you know soon.”

  This clearly isn’t a conversation I need to be in, but I am curious as to what they are talking about. But instead of looking nosy, I instead try to feign an interest in the Longhorns’ first out of the new inning.

  “If you’re going to run, we need to start getting a plan together. How about I just call Dan Busby and get you on his agenda and y’all can talk about it?”

  There was a deliberate pause before Jack’s answer, which was anti-climactic. “Mmphm.”

  I can sense this is a conversation Jack would rather not be having. I don’t know what they are discussing—or not discussing, as Jack clearly would prefer—but I feel like a neighbor listening at the fence. I push my toes over a peanut shell near my feet and try to focus on crushing the brown shell to a fine dust on the rough concrete—anything to be a little less conspicuous.

  “Dad, let’s not do this now. I came here to enjoy a night at the ballpark. And besides, you haven’t met Kate.”

  He puts his arm back around me, with just the right amount of gentle squeeze.

  Jack’s dad reaches out a hand with an easy confidence. His grip was strong, and he gave my hand a measured shake. “Johnny Cooper. Nice to meet you, Kate.”

  “Kate Cormick. Likewise, sir.”

  He lets out a little laugh. “You don’t have to call me sir.”

  Oh my gosh, I sound like Laura Lynn and her constant kissing up. Sir. I was pushing thirty and not in the military. Why did I call him sir?

  “I’m sorry.”

  Apologizing for it comes almost reflexively, but leaves me feeling even more stupid, if that is possible. Now I just apologized for being too polite. I kind of want to be that crushed peanut dust on the ground right now.

  “Don’t apologize for being a good Southern girl, Kate. My late wife was that way. Impeccable manners and always wanted to put others at ease.”

  Much better. I’ve now been compared to the mother Jack so clearly adored. A little sigh of relief escapes from my lungs.

  “I guess I’ve been a little out of the loop, Jack,” his father says. “I didn’t know you were bringing anyone to baseball games these days.”

  “Well, I wasn’t—until I met Kate.”

  Speaking of polite, there’s nothing about Jack that can be interpreted as impolite or rude. But ever since his father came over, his tone and cadence have changed. The fixer-upper in me wants to fix this too. But I don’t know what it’s about, and more importantly, I don’t know Johnny.

  If I consult my calendar, the argument could easily be made that I barely know Jack, even.

  But I wished I could do something, anything.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see something small and white. With electric speed, I look up, my mind terrified to confirm the instinctive conclusion it had already come to.

  This was a baseball stadium, and those little white flying things were usually baseballs.

  In this case, there’s a wild hit down the first base line that popped up and is now headed straight for me.

  Specifically, my nose. Scenes from my childhood at the Astrodome flash in my mind.

  Barnaby, the first baseman, sees it too. He raises his glove and puts his much-maligned shoes in motion, heading toward the rail near me.

  Living in split seconds as the ball lasers in on me like a hurricane about to make landfall, I begin to panic. Jack may have spent much of his life on a baseball diamond, but I hadn’t.

  And there was a reason why.

  I’ve never been athletic and I have virtually no real hand-eye coordination to speak of.

  With lightning-quick speed, Jack puts his arm up. I’m sure he has some great plan for saving my face from thousands of dollars of reconstructive surgery, but I don’t really have the time to get a full presentation of his ideas.

  I just need to move. Quickly.

  If I crawl to the row behind me, the ball will hit me in the back of the head. Then I’ll be knocked unconscious in front of the former governor of the state of Texas and his good-looking son. If I move any place else, I’ll have to get up and out of my seat. Standing up will theoretically bring my nose higher, closer to the ball, and closer to needing major plastic surgery.

  But still, standing up gives me the best option to run and not die of blunt force trauma to the back of the head. At least I feel like I could survive a nose job.

  I decide to pop up, and in doing so, knock Jack’s forearm out of my way. The push propels me off-kilter.

  All the while, the ball continues on a specific trajectory. Instinctively, I know I need to deflect, no matter the cost to my palms or my fingers or my forearms. I throw my hands up, thinking that if ever there was a time to make Coach Pandall from eighth-grade PE proud of me, now is that time.

  The ball continues to barrel on. Barnaby raises his glove and gives a lunge.

  I wobble, partly out of trying to avoid Jack, partly out of trying to avoid Barnaby, and partly out of being completely out of any options that weren’t going to hurt like the dickens.

  And that, I guess, is how I find myself propelled into a desperate embrace with Reid Barnaby, first baseman for the Baylor Bears. Toppling over the rail, I take my fellow Bear out with me. Barnaby breaks my fall and I land heavily atop him on the red dirt track.

  “I’m sorry,” I say for the second time in the last five minutes. This time, it is totally appropriate to apologize.

  Sprawled on top of him, I choke in his face as I try to regain my breath. All things considered, the simple apology seems a little underwhelming

  I roll off his midsection, finding myself face-first in Barnaby’s feet.

  I shrug my shoulders and point feebly. “So…these are spats?”

  From about twelve feet above me, back at the seats I’d so recently been sitting in, I hear a deep-throated chuckle.

  Jack is nonchalant, tossing a baseball up and down in one hand while shaking off the sting in the other.

  I really am not sure I like him much anymore.

  By the end of the game, I do like the score. My team pulls it out with a grand-slam home run at the top of the ninth inning. Of course, there will be two more games to play over the course of the weekend, but the Bears would need to march to victory without me and my awkward lack of balance. Tomorrow night, Jack and I will be attending the Zoo Donor’s Ball…and then who knew where this whirlwind would take us from there?

  I’m definitely not in control—but I’m looking forward to every minute.

  Jack locks his fingers in mine as we walk through the parking lot and back to his Jeep. The stars are starting to flirt with the black sky and the early Texas summer breeze is warm.

  I feel as though I’m wrapped in a bubble, like a lightweight cashmere throw settling on my shoulders and making the world soft and beautiful.

  Fleetingly, the thoughts about what could happen if the wrong person sees us at the wrong time try to surface again in my mind. I consciously raise my chin and steel my jaw.

  Not this time. Not tonight. Not these doubts.

  Not anything but me and Jack, and this moment, and these intertwined hands, with these stars shining down and this fuzzy, cashmere-soft sense of well-being wrapping around me, around him, around us.

  Us.

  That sense of togetherness, of p
artnership, of friendship, of the hope for more.

  If Emily Dickinson was right, and hope truly was the thing with feathers, then I wanted wings. I wanted it all. And I wanted it with Jack.

  Instead of heading north from the ballpark, Jack took the Jeep in a completely different direction.

  “You know, I live that way.” I point over my right shoulder once it became clear we were nowhere near any route that would logically lead to my apartment.

  “I know. But I live this way,” he replies, as though that explains it all.

  Except it doesn’t.

  “I know you didn’t forget your wallet because you bought me popcorn at the game. And clearly, you remembered your keys, because your car is running right now. So why are we headed to your house?”

  “Because I have a boat and you don’t.”

  I wish he’d quit answering in ways that just leave me with far more questions.

  “I didn’t know you had a boat.”

  “I do, and I want to take it out tonight. With you.”

  The idea of a moonlit boat ride seems very romantic, I have to admit.

  “You’ve got a ranch, a boat, and a job at one of the most powerful groups in town. Is there anything you don’t have?” I was kind of wondering out loud, and while it occurs to me that Emily Post probably would frown on my general line of questioning, proper etiquette doesn’t make me any less curious.

  “You,” he says simply.

  “Me? But I’m right here. Buckled in your car, on the way to your house where you’ve just said we’re going to get on your boat. I’d say you have me.”

  We come to a complete stop, and the edge of the Jeep’s dashboard is bathed in a narrow strip of red glow from the stoplight above. Jack taps two fingers on each hand lightly at the top of the steering wheel’s curb, then abruptly stops the drumming.

  “I’m not talking about proximity, Kate. I want to kiss you. I want to kiss you under the stars. I want to take you someplace that no Chimps will see us. I promised you we’d stay under the radar. I didn’t promise you we’d take it slow.”

  He had me there. In fact, if I had anything to say about it, he had me for keeps.