Behind the Plate: A New Adult Sports Romance (The Boys of Baseball Book 2)

by J. Sterling

  “Maybe I’ll go walk around campus and check it out. Can I, Mom?”

  Cassie contemplated the question, like she was unsure if she should let Jacey out of her sight or not.

  She must have waited too long because Jacey said, “Never mind. I’ll just stay here,” and Cassie visibly relaxed before her eyes widened.

  “I almost forgot. Your cousins are coming,” Cassie said, and Jacey perked up.

  “Yay! We can walk around campus together then, right? So, I won’t be alone?”

  “I’ll ask your aunt when they get here,” she said, and Jacey moped only momentarily before sucking it up.

  That was one more thing I loved about Chance’s family—that they all came to watch him play. I enjoyed being a part of it.

  “Ask me what?” Aunt Melissa suddenly appeared behind us, and I stood up to tell her hello. She pulled me into a hug across the stadium seats, her wavy, dark hair sticking to my eyelashes. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Thank you. You too.”

  “Your cousins are in line at the snack bar,” she informed Jacey.

  “Already?” Jacey asked before standing up and running over to find them.

  “Where’s Dean?” Cassie asked, and I had just wondered the same thing.

  “He’s watching some kid play in Alabama.” She stuck her finger down her throat and made a puking face before looking at me. “Sorry. Inside joke from a hundred years ago.”

  “You two hate Alabama. Noted,” I said, pretending to check it off an imaginary list. “Does your husband travel often to watch guys play?”

  “Yeah. Dean always wants to meet any kid he’s thinking about signing first. He doesn’t believe in doing everything online. He wants face-to-face meetings. And he wants to see what kind of person they are.”

  “I think that’s smart,” I said. There was something different about talking to a client in person, as opposed to online. It was more personal, and I believed it led to a better relationship, one that was more trusting.

  “It is smart. But I miss him when he’s gone,” Melissa said, and Cassie pretended to throw up. “Oh, please, you’re one to talk.”

  “I know; I know.” Cassie waved Melissa away as the announcer’s voice broke through the hum of the crowd and our conversation.

  He ran through the lineup for the visiting team before music started blaring, and he introduced our players. The crowd went wild. I’d been to a few games before, but I swore that it was louder today than it had ever been.

  As each name was announced, the high-pitched squealing and shouts from girls filled the air. But none compared to the sound of the screaming and cheers that could be heard when they announced Chance’s name in the lineup. The entire stadium erupted, and I added to it, cupping my hands around my mouth as I yelled for my man. I felt nothing but pride as I watched him strut out onto the field in his catcher’s gear with his helmet in his hand. He stood behind home plate, and looking at him from behind was a sight to behold. I couldn’t stop staring. He must have sensed it because he glanced behind himself and gave me a grin that made my entire body melt. At least, I hoped that smile was for me; otherwise, I was about to feel like the world’s biggest idiot.

  “He never looks in the stands,” his mom said with a wicked grin. “He likes you,” she teased, and I felt giddy inside.

  We stopped talking as the national anthem played, and the crowd sang along. And just like that, the game started, and the three teenage girls reappeared, carrying more food than I knew they could eat.

  “Did you buy one of everything?” I asked Jacey as she sat down next to me.

  “Pretty much.” She shrugged before shoving a cheese-covered chip into her mouth. “Want one?”

  “Hell yes, I want one,” I said before taking the chip with the most cheese on it and eating it. “Thank you,” I tried to say, and she laughed.

  Everyone seemed to be invested in the game while I was solely invested in Chance. He was the only one on the field I cared about, so my eyes stayed firmly glued to his body and actions. Every once in a while, I’d get lost in a fantasy, remembering what those hands could do to me and how they made me feel. I wanted to be the baseball every time he gripped it, his fingers rolling and moving it around like it was an extension of him. He commanded that ball the same way he commanded my body. Knowing what he looked like underneath all that gear was a blessing, and I was definitely blessed. I couldn’t wait to get him home later.

  “Right, Danika?”

  Shaking my head, I looked at Cassie, completely flustered and embarrassed. “I’m sorry, what?”

  She laughed. “I said the girls should be fine, walking around campus right now, don’t you think?”

  “Oh yeah. It’s still light out. I’d just make sure they came back here before it got dark.”

  “That’s what I was thinking too,” she said before leaning over me and giving Jacey instructions and demands.

  The three teenagers stood up and practically skipped away, and Melissa jumped down and took Jacey’s seat.

  “Do you want to switch with me?” I asked, assuming that she’d want to be next to Cassie.

  “No, you’re fine. I’ll have to move once Jacey gets back anyway. Heaven forbid she be far away from her brother,” Melissa said.

  I looked at Cassie. “Is that true? I feel like she doesn’t want to be here.”

  “She doesn’t,” Cassie said. “But when she is here, she has to be closest to him. I don’t know why. It’s just her thing. She’s always been that way.”

  “That’s kinda sweet.”

  “I heard that you and my nephew broke up. What happened?” Melissa asked, and I was a little taken aback.

  “Melissa! Don’t listen to her, Danika. She’s nosy,” Cassie pretended to chastise her.

  Melissa threw her hands up. “What? I can’t ask her what happened, but I can ask you? That doesn’t seem fair.” I opened my mouth to respond, but Melissa stopped me. “I already know anyway. Sorry. But I didn’t know you two had worked it out. Are you happy?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Very. I think we’ll be okay,” I said as I blew out a small breath.

  She threw her arm around me and pulled me close. “I think you will be too. I like you for him. And I don’t like anyone for my nephew.”

  “That means a lot. Thank you,” I said, and I hoped she knew how genuinely I meant it.

  Melissa grinned, her eyes practically closing. “Oh, you have so much fun stuff to look forward to.” Her words were positive, but the way she’d said them were disconcerting.

  “Don’t scare her off,” Cassie said quickly, and I got a little nervous. “We just got her back.”

  The crowd erupted once more, and we all looked toward the field just in time to see the ball fly over the center field fence. Mac had hit a home run, and all the guys were running toward home plate, waiting for him to get there. I watched as Mac pulled off his helmet once his foot touched home and high-fived his teammates with it before sprinting back into the dugout. Chance looked so excited, and I watched him slap Mac on the back and then the ass before picking him up in a back-breaking hug. Boys were really adorable sometimes.

  “Can I ask you something?” I addressed the question toward Cassie, but I made sure Melissa heard me as well.

  “Of course. You can ask me anything,” Cassie said as she waited for what I might say next.

  “How did you get through it with Jack? I mean, was it hard for you when he played professional baseball, or was it easy?” I figured that I might as well ask so that I was more prepared for what my potential future entailed.

  “It definitely had its challenges,” she said, her face twisting for a moment, “but it’s nothing you can’t get through. As long as you guys are honest with each other and communicate about everything.”

  I nodded in understanding because everyone always said that the key to a healthy relationship was communication. “It’s so easy to let things spin out of control if you don’t talk about th
em,” I said, realizing just how sideways Chance and I could have become these past few months if one of us hadn’t pushed the other to stop running and talk it out.

  “It’s extremely easy to keep things to yourself. To assume that your partner should just know when you’re upset and about what. But that isn’t fair,” she started to explain, and I found myself hanging on to each and every word. I wanted her advice. “None of us are mind readers. We have to talk. It usually fixes everything anyway.”

  “Eventually,” Melissa added, and they both laughed while I felt a little left out, not knowing exactly what they were referring to.

  “It’s not always easy to talk about the hard things. But you have to. If you’re starting to feel resentful. Or angry. Or like you aren’t getting enough time and support for you,” Cassie explained, “you have to tell him. He won’t know anything’s wrong unless you let him know.”

  That was a good point. I knew that, in the past, I’d expected Jared to sense that I was upset about things and instinctively know how to fix them. Not only did he not fix the things that bothered me, but he also carried on like everything was fine. Because in his mind, it was. And that had only made me angrier and more annoyed.

  “She’s right. Guys are pretty simple. They will want to fix what’s wrong. But they have to know what it is first,” Melissa said.

  I was grateful to have the two of them to talk to. They filled a void I’d tried to pretend I wasn’t living without.

  My brain reeled as it fought with itself about the next question I wanted to ask. I knew it was none of my damn business, but a part of me wanted to know how Cassie had done it. It seemed so impossible from the outside.

  “I read some stuff about you online. I didn’t mean to, but I was researching, and it came up.”

  “What kind of stuff? We went through a lot,” Cassie said with an awkward laugh.

  “That’s putting it mildly.” Melissa made a silly face.

  “The cheating?” I whispered before looking around. I didn’t want anyone to overhear our conversation and start judging or eavesdropping. I felt protective over Cassie and Jack for whatever reason.

  “Ooh,” Melissa made a sound like she’d been sucker-punched. “Straight for the jugular.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not my place. I shouldn’t have even brought it up,” I said, feeling awful for instigating such a touchy topic and what was most likely still a sore subject.

  “Don’t listen to Fun Size over there.” She thumbed toward Melissa, and I started grinning at the nickname. “That was a long time ago. A lifetime. What did you want to know?” Cassie seemed completely unfazed by my asking, almost like she had expected the question.

  “How did you forgive him?” I couldn’t imagine.

  Her smile softened. “It wasn’t easy. Forgiveness for something that devastating is really hard. It eats you up day in and day out if you let it. And people said a lot of horrible things about me online. They called me a doormat. They said I was weak,” she admitted with sadness, but I still heard the strength in her voice. I knew all the things she had accomplished in her life, and Cassie Carter was the opposite of weak. “The thing is, it’s really easy to judge a relationship from the outside when you’re not the one in it.”

  I nodded in agreement because that was exactly what I had done when I first read about it online. I judged. I made assumptions. I’d put myself in her position and convinced myself that I’d never be able to forgive that kind of indiscretion. I assumed that once a guy did something like that, he could never fix things. Once trust had been obliterated, it would never rebuild the same way. I had no idea how someone could forgive a cheater, but here I was, looking at a woman I completely respected, unable to imagine her married to anyone else.

  “But other people have no idea what goes on behind closed doors. They think they know everything, especially when a celebrity is involved. So, maybe from the version of my and Jack’s relationship they had in their heads, I appeared weak to them. I know that I wasn’t. I know that there’s strength in forgiveness.” She looked past me as she said those words, and I thought she was looking for her husband.

  I glanced at the field but didn’t see him when Cassie continued, “To be honest, Danika, no one else saw how sorry Jack was. They have no idea how hard we worked to rebuild the trust we’d lost. They didn’t know the things Jack did to make sure that I was okay or how he made sure to never put me in a position where I felt vulnerable or unloved again. He worked to prove to me that I was the only woman for him. And he’s proven it every day since.”

  I listened as she talked, unsure of what to say in response. My words felt inadequate, like I didn’t have the life experience to even attempt to contribute.

  “He made a mistake,” I said, finding some words after all.

  “Yes. He made a mistake, and people make those. He was sorry. I didn’t have to forgive him. It would have been really easy to walk away with my pride, but I would have missed out on all this love.” She closed her eyes for a moment before reopening them. “I can’t imagine going through this life with anyone else.”

  “There was no way you were ever going to end up with someone who wasn’t Jack Carter,” Melissa added before wiping at her eyes. “Sorry, but your story always makes me a little emotional. And as someone who watched the whole thing unfold, Jack deserved to be forgiven, and you can never convince me otherwise.”

  “She’s only saying that because if I never forgave Jack, she wouldn’t have ended up with his brother.”

  “That is not true.” Melissa got animated. “Okay, okay. It’s totally true.”

  Cassie laughed before sucking in a long breath. “You know, people have strong opinions about cheating. They take it so personally that they lose the ability to be rational, or see things from different angles. The whole thing becomes very black and white to most people.” She chopped the air with her fist.

  “But you didn’t see it like that?”

  “It wasn’t black and white. Situations rarely are. And look, I’m not saying that everyone deserves to be forgiven because they don’t. And some people don’t deserve second chances. But Jack did. And I don’t subscribe to the theory of once a cheater, always a cheater or else I wouldn’t have taken him back and we wouldn’t still be together.”

  “I always thought that cheating was just in someone’s nature,” I admitted, feeling a little naive. “That if they did it once, they’d do it again.”

  “I think most people think that. Jack’s the prime example of that not being true,” Cassie said matter-of-factly, like there was no question.

  “You never worried that he might cheat again?”

  “Of course I worried. But that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Jack showed me every single day that I had nothing to worry about. I asked him to prove it, and he did. The other girls didn’t go away, but the way he interacted with them did. He owned up to his mistake, knew he’d made one, and never wanted to make it again. Jack made me feel like the most important person in his life. Even more important than baseball. He gave me exactly what I needed to be able to move past it and truly forgive.”

  “Is this seat taken?” The familiar voice hit my ears, and I turned to look.

  “Dad?” I practically jumped into his arms. “Oh my gosh, what are you doing here?”

  Family Meeting

  Chance

  My teammates fanned out around me, and I stopped in my tracks, noticing a strange man standing next to my mom and Danika. It made me curious, and for whatever reason, I couldn’t stop watching them.

  “Who is that with our girls?” my dad snuck up behind me and asked over my shoulder.

  “Girls? Mom is not a girl,” I argued.

  “I’ll tell her you said that.” He grinned.

  I stuttered on my response, “You know what I mean!”

  “Do we know who that is or not?” My dad’s voice turned serious. He did not like strange men talking to my mother.

  “No clue.”
I shrugged. “Give me five, and we’ll go see.”

  “Make it four,” he said, sounding uncomfortable—and Jack Carter was rarely uncomfortable.

  Leaving my dad alone for too long might have disastrous results, so I decided to forgo the shower altogether and quickly changed into some street clothes, tossing my dirty uniform in the oversize bin and putting on extra deodorant. When I walked out of the locker room, my dad was already changed and waiting for me. I had no idea how he’d gotten there before me, but then I looked down and noticed he was still in his coaching uniform, minus the jersey. He’d basically thrown a T-shirt on over his coaching pants, and he still had on his turf cleats.

  I peered around him. “He still there?” I asked, and my dad let out some gruff-sounding response. “Let’s go then,” I said before I started walking.

  We headed up the cement ramp toward the main aisle, where Danika, my mom, and this strange man still stood, talking. They hadn’t even moved from their seats, and our women were always waiting for us at the gate near left field.

  Dad and I strode down the stairs toward the three of them, none of them even noticing we were coming.

  “Hey,” I said as I reached Danika and bent down to give her a kiss, assuming that my dad was probably doing the same thing.

  “You’re done already?” she said before pulling her head back. “Oh, you didn’t shower?”

  “Do I stink?” I asked, suddenly mortified, and she laughed instead of answering. Of course I stunk. I’d just played nine innings, covered from head to toe in catcher’s gear.

  “Chance,” she said before focusing her attention on the man at her side, “this is my dad, Ralph Marchetti.”

  “Oh. Sir”—I extended my hand toward him before shooting my own dad an embarrassed look—“it’s so nice to meet you.”

  “Ralph Marchetti,” my dad’s voice boomed in the almost-empty stadium, his demeanor instantly relaxed. “Fly all the way out here to give me shit about the Mets in person?”

  “I came out here to make sure your son was good enough for my daughter,” he said with a wink, and they both started howling with laughter, but I almost pissed my pants.