by J. Sterling
Shaking my head, I responded, “No. Just that being in public with you means that my every move is tracked somehow. Someone is always watching.”
“It’s true. Did you tell Jared you were going out with me?” he asked, and I knew it was only because of how I’d handled things the last time we did something alone.
“I did.”
I had sent Jared a text from the car to let him know I was going to grab a drink with Chance to celebrate him passing the class and that I’d text him as soon as I got back home. His jealousy seemed to have pretty much disappeared overnight, so I figured that my going would be a nonissue.
I had no way of knowing how wrong I was.
Her Boyfriend is Still a Dick
Chance
We walked inside, and I was thankful that The Bar wasn’t packed like it had the potential to be, even during a weeknight. I’d checked online earlier to make sure that no live bands were scheduled to perform; otherwise, I would have taken her somewhere else. Yeah, I’d planned on asking Danika to go out with me tonight, even before I knew that we had a reason to celebrate. I’d assumed my passing grade would show up during our tutoring session at some point, and I had hoped to use it to my advantage.
Not that I was trying to do anything. I just … fuck … I missed her and wanted to spend time with her before she left for winter break. Plus, once my season started, I’d be way too busy to find excuses to hang out with her. And now that she had called off the rest of our tutoring sessions for the semester, who knew if I’d ever see her again? The thought crashed into me, and I swore my heart fucking sank lower inside my chest. The idea of never seeing Danika again after tonight sucked. But that was a very real possibility.
I headed toward the most secluded high-top table in the back corner and planted myself there. Danika sat next to me instead of across from me, and the temptation to reach out and touch her was almost too much.
“I was just thinking about break,” I started to say as she leaned closer toward me so that I wouldn’t have to shout above the ruckus.
“What about it?”
“Do you go home the whole time?”
Our winter break was over a month long, and I was curious if she stayed here for any of it or spent the entire thing back in New York.
She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, my dad works most of the time, but if I didn’t go home, he’d be all alone, and I hate thinking about him sitting there during Christmas and New Year’s without me.” A soft, sad smile played at her lips, and I wondered if I had been crazy, bringing her out tonight.
A cocktail waitress appeared out of thin air and asked for our drink orders.
“I’ll take whatever IPA you have on draft.”
“I’ll have a cranberry and Belvedere,” Danika said, and I shot her a surprised look.
“Belvedere, huh?” I teased because that wasn’t some poor college student’s vodka. Everyone usually drank whatever they could afford or whatever they could get the most of for the least amount of money.
“I hate shitty vodka. And I hate shitty vodka headaches even more.” She smirked before lifting a shoulder.
“I can respect that.”
“So, what do you do for break? Do you go home to Newport or stay in the baseball house?” She wrinkled her nose, and I chuckled.
“What’s the face for?”
“I just imagined you staying in that gross house the whole time and”—she visibly shuddered—“just … no.”
I grimaced. “It’s not gross,” I started to defend the house before rolling my eyes and grinning instead. “Okay, it’s a little gross. But we’re guys. What do you expect?”
“Maid service,” she said without skipping a beat.
“Sometimes, if one of the guys has a girlfriend, she’ll clean the house for us. That’s always nice,” I said.
She snarled, “That’s embarrassing.”
“Nah, it’s sweet.”
“No, it’s not.”
“You wouldn’t clean the house if you were my girlfriend?” I asked before realizing what I’d even said. “I mean, hypothetically speaking.”
She put one finger in the air. “Hypothetically speaking, no.” Her hazel eyes leveled me on the spot before she gave me a small smirk. “I might help pick up your room, but nothing outside of it.”
I laughed loudly. “I knew it.”
“I don’t think we can help it,” she started to explain. “We’re nurturers, you know? Girls nurture. But it stops you guys from growing. And then we get mad at you because you rely on us to do things that you should be doing yourselves. But really, we created the mess in the first place. We just don’t see it that way.”
I felt totally lost and was thankful when the waitress appeared with our drinks and placed them down before walking away.
“We’re still talking about cleaning my room?”
“You’re an idiot, Hotshot,” she said as she reached for her glass and held it in the air.
Our glasses clinked together, and we both said, “Cheers,” at the same time before taking a sip.
“You never answered my question, by the way.”
I swallowed. “Which was?”
“Do you go home during break? You must, right? Your mom would kill you if you didn’t,” she said with a smile.
I loved that she had met my family and felt like she knew them enough to make assumptions. Anyone else, it would have pissed me off but not her.
“My sister would kill me more. But, yeah, I go home. It’s just not for long. Usually for a couple weeks. The team has to be back right after New Year’s. We have practice and preseason games before the spring semester even starts.”
“Oh.” She sounded caught off-guard. “I didn’t realize that.”
“Yep. We play a bunch of non-league games, so they don’t count in our official record, but they still count overall.”
“Are you excited?”
I shifted in my stool and straightened my back. “Very. I can’t wait to play. You should come to a game. I can leave you tickets.”
“Don’t students get tickets for free?” she teased as she took another drink. Her glass was almost empty already.
“They do, but I could leave you better tickets. The student section is trash.”
I thought back to giving Cole shit for leaving Christina tickets last season, but he had been right. The student section sucked, and he’d loved seeing his girl front and center, knowing that she was there to watch him. I knew that I’d love to look behind the plate and see Danika there. I’d love it even more if she were there with me.
“I’ll think about it.”
“Not sure if you’ve heard”—I crooked my finger at her, calling her closer—“but baseball’s a real hot commodity at this school,” I whispered.
“You don’t say?” she whispered back, and goddamn, I wanted to grab her by the back of the neck and taste her lips.
I was so attracted to her. I wondered for a second how stupid I was to put us in this position, alone together and drinking. Maybe I enjoyed the torture.
Thankfully, we were interrupted by a commotion at the entrance doors. We both turned at the same time to see her boyfriend walking in with a group, who I assumed to be his frat brothers. Jared scanned the room, eyes landing on us for only a second before he started laughing at something.
“Shocking,” I said sarcastically under my breath.
Danika looked at me. “I didn’t know he was coming, I swear.”
“I know,” I said because I believed her.
I should have known that there was no way he’d be able to stay away from here tonight. Not when I was involved. It was in that exact moment that I realized that everything I had thought about Jared was spot-on.
I had ignored my gut reactions and my instincts because I wanted to be mistaken when it came to him. I’d tried to convince myself that every bad thought I had was either born out of jealousy, miscommunication, or the sheer fact that the guy had something I wanted—her.
“Can I bring you two another round?” The waitress reached for Danika’s empty glass.
I answered for both of us, “Yes, please.”
“I was going to say no,” Danika argued as the woman walked away.
“I know you were. Which is why I said yes.”
Danika’s head swiveled between me and her boyfriend. I’d assumed he’d come right over to our table and sit with us or at least say something, but he didn’t. Instead, he and his bros sat down in a booth near us but never looked toward us again.
“Are you kidding me?” Danika said, her tone disgusted and annoyed. “He knows I’m here. He looked right at us when he walked in.”
“Maybe he’s just giving us space to do our own thing,” I suggested with a shrug.
“No, he’s not.” She was agitated and perturbed.
“Then, what is he doing?”
Two fresh drinks were deposited on our table, and Danika reached for hers before answering me. She swirled it around with the tiny straw before taking a sip, not a gulp.
“He’s …” She sounded flustered, like finding the right words were a struggle. “He’s being possessive.”
“And you don’t like that?” I was genuinely asking because I had no fucking idea what girls liked, but I knew that my mom seemed to enjoy it whenever my dad got a little crazy over her.
“I do not like that,” she said slowly, drawing out each word. “No one likes that.”
I cocked my head in disagreement. “Hmm … I think some women like it.”
She contemplated my statement, and I knew she was deciding between asking some smart-ass question or not. “Okay, sometimes, we like it. But not like this. Not all passive-aggressive.” She waved a hand in Jared’s direction without looking at him.
Nodding my head, as if that had made all the sense in the world and totally cleared things up, I asked, “So, you like it when it’s aggressive-aggressive?”
Danika laughed, her lips toying with the tiny red straw. “I guess. No. I don’t know.” She put her drink on the table and rubbed her temples. “Sometimes, it’s a turn-on. Other times, it’s the opposite. I don’t know how to explain it without sounding crazy.”
“Too late.” I took a long drink of my beer. “Incoming,” I said because Jared was heading straight toward our table, flanked by two guys on each side.
“In what?” She shook her head, confused, before she looked behind her and saw exactly what I’d meant.
“My girlfriend and Baseball Boy, together again,” Jared sneered.
I wondered why he was so riled up. The last time I’d seen him, he had faked being completely cordial, pretending like there were no issues between us. Maybe because he was in front of his boys, he felt like he had something to prove.
“I sent you a text.”
“Why do you think I’m here?”
“That’s why you’re here? Because I told you I would be?”
“You’re my girlfriend,” he scoffed, emphasizing the word my. “Thought you might have forgotten that fact.”
“Looks like she already has,” one of his boys piped in.
I shot him a look that told him to shut the hell up. He pumped up his chest for only a second before taking a step back and snapping his jaw shut like a good little boy.
“You’re making a fool out of me,” Jared said, waving his hand in my direction. “Being seen in public with him when everyone knows we’re together.”
I pushed back from the stool and stood to my full height, muscles flexing. “What the hell is your problem, man?”
Danika stood up then and put her hand on my chest in an effort to keep me back. “I got this,” she told me, but I refused to back down or leave her to deal with this asshole on her own.
“Mind your own business, Baseball Boy,” he said before reaching for my beer and throwing it at me.
Motherfucker threw my own damn beer on me.
Looking down at my soaked-through shirt, I said with a laugh, “Feel better now?” I acted perfectly calm, knowing that it would only piss Jared off more when, in reality, I wanted to rip his fucking head off and send his frat bros home with it.
“Are you kidding me? What the hell, Jared?” Danika yelled, and if everyone inside the bar hadn’t been paying attention to us before, they were now.
“Maybe you’ll stop embarrassing me,” he growled toward her, referring to the fact that she was out in public with me, wet shirt and all.
“Yeah, maybe you’ll stop embarrassing him,” another frat bro shouted in response.
“What are you, a parrot?” Danika asked the frat dude, her voice laced with venom, and I couldn’t stop the laugh that bubbled up and out of my mouth.
“Do you know how it feels to get DMs and texts of pictures of the two of you together? Everyone was asking me why my girlfriend was on a date with the hot baseball player.” Jared’s face turned red, and it looked like he was about to pop.
“But you knew it wasn’t a date.” Danika’s response was so reasonable, and Jared was anything but.
“No one else did,” he argued back.
“But you knew the truth, so who cares what other people think?”
He shifted. “I do. I fucking do. If we were back home, you’d never even think about pulling this sort of disrespect. It’s like you’ve forgotten who you are. Who we are and where we come from.”
This guy always brought up the fact that they were from New York like it came with a completely different set of rules for dating.
“Stop acting like we’re from some sort of mob family.”
“Stop acting like you’re single!” he screamed before directing his anger at me and pointing. “And you, stay away from my girlfriend. How many times do I have to tell you?”
I shrugged, my T-shirt currently plastered to my chest with wet beer. I continued to play it off like it wasn’t driving me absolutely insane, but it was. I wanted it off my body, and I wanted to strangle this fucker with it. “At least a hundred more since, apparently, I’m not a very good listener.”
“Let’s go, Danika. We’re leaving,” he insisted, and I wondered what she’d do.
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
That was the girl I adored—all feisty, headstrong, mouthy, and independent.
She looked around the bar at all the faces watching us like it was the first time she’d noticed the scene we’d created, and I could tell how uncomfortable it made her. Her entire demeanor shifted in that moment.
I watched as she swallowed hard, her eyes meeting Jared’s before agreeing to leave.
“I’ll leave. But not with you.” And before I could offer her a ride home or say anything, she turned to me and added, “And not with you either.”
Why the hell was I in trouble too?
Pre-Winter Break Party
Chance
The rest of the semester flew by, and I was honestly grateful for it. That night at The Bar was the last time I’d seen Danika in person—naturally, online stalking didn’t count. And aside from the single text she’d sent me, replying to my fifty asking if she was all right, I hadn’t heard from her since. She’d responded that she wasn’t okay, but that she would be, and then she asked me to give her space.
So, I did.
And it fucking killed me.
I felt like it took every ounce of willpower for me not to text her or call her or show up at her door like that jackass stalker from last year. I didn’t even let her know I’d passed my math final with flying colors. When I’d grabbed my phone to tell her because she was the first person I wanted to call, I’d remembered that she had asked me for space, and I forced myself to continue respecting her request.
I had no idea if her and Jared had broken up or not, but I figured that if they had, she would have at least told me that much.
Or shown up at my door.
Naked.
In a bow.
But since that never happened, I assumed that they were still fucking together and most likely always would be. I really needed to stop pining over someone who was choosing to stay in a crappy relationship with an even crappier guy, no matter their history or how disappointing it was. I was done chasing the girl who obviously wanted nothing to do with me.
“Still sulking?” Mac’s voice shot through the ones in my head, and I looked up from my bed to see him walking in my room with a glint in his eyes.
“I’m not sulking.”
“What do you call it then?”
I shrugged. “Fine. I might be sulking a little, but I was just telling myself to get over it.”
“Well, you know what they say,” he said as he plopped down on the edge of my bed, uninvited, per usual. “The best way to get over someone is to get under someone new.”
“You’re an idiot.”
I reached for the shirt lying next to my pillow, rolled it up, and tossed it at his head. He caught it easily.
“But I’m not wrong.”
“You are something else.”
The smile on his face grew. “Yeah? Tell me more.”
“I just mean that I’ve never seen anyone hook up with more chicks than you do. And there is never any drama. How the fuck do you pull that off?” I sucked in a breath before continuing my line of questioning, “Also, how do you never catch feelings for any of the girls you mess around with?”
His back stiffened, and the smile instantly dropped. “You remember what happened freshman year.” Mac’s voice was serious.
“Of course I remember. But that was two years ago, and you’re still—” I started before he cut me off.
“Still what?”
“I just thought the hook-ups were a phase.” I knew that his ex-girlfriend had done a number on him, but I’d figured he’d grow out of all the meaningless shit at some point. Get tired of it maybe or eventually want more.
“Nope.”
“So, you’re just going to do this forever?”
“I thought we were talking about you?” His eyes narrowed as his forehead creased. “But for the record, I’m not interested in getting my heart broken again.”
