Pitch Perfect: Boys of Summer, Book 1

by Sierra Dean

  Tucker’s head bobbed in automatic agreement. He still wasn’t hearing any of the worrisome words he’d come in expecting, and it made him more nervous by the moment. “Thank you.”

  “But let’s be honest, you’re not as young as you used to be. And you’ve had a major surgery.”

  “One I’ve recovered from,” Tucker pointed out.

  “Yes, you’ve done well. Chuck and I had a discussion about this new upswing you seem to be on with the quality of your pitching. It’s very impressive.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But we’re worried it’s a fluke.”

  “A fluke, sir?” Tucker had to wonder what Darren’s grasp of baseball was if he believed 95-mph fastballs could be fluked into. But, as he considered it, he also reminded himself he had the same worries. Maybe it really was his one last hurrah before being herded off to the old bullpen of retirement.

  “Your performance was slow to start in the season, I think you know that. You looked uneasy, and it showed in your pitching.”

  “Just shaking off the cobwebs.”

  “I had a discussion with Ms. Kasper about you,” Darren said, and Tucker froze.

  “You talked to Emmy about me?” He wasn’t sure why this made him so uneasy. Of course Emmy would communicate with the GM about him, it was part of her job. He knew all about the daily reports the trainer was required to fill out, detailing the progress of injured players. But the way Darren said it made Tucker think there was more to the discussion than paperwork.

  “She’s been working closely with you, I understand.”

  “That’s her job.”

  The GM made a low hmm noise, but didn’t disagree. “I mentioned to her I’d seen quite an improvement in your performance under her guidance. I did not mention to her, however, how unusual it is for an athletic trainer to be directly responsible for a change in performance. She seems to have taken a…special interest in you.”

  “She saw an opportunity to help me correct something and she took it. She did the same for Miles. She’s very good at her job.”

  “I never claimed otherwise.”

  “Sir, I don’t mean to seem impatient, but did you call me up here to discuss whether or not Emmy—Ms. Kasper—is doing her job better than she ought to?”

  “No, this meeting isn’t about Ms. Kasper at all. It’s about the fact it took the intervention of an unproven athletic trainer to restore you to your previous skill level. There’s a bit of concern that this is something you should have been able to do yourself. There’s also concern you won’t be able to maintain the performance level you’re currently at.”

  “I don’t think that’s a necessary concern,” Tucker said, his tone becoming cool and defensive.

  Self-doubt was one thing, and it was perfectly normal. Having the upper management of the club you worked for doubting you openly? That was a tougher weight to bear.

  “You’re saying we shouldn’t worry?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re reasonably sure you’ll be able to keep this up?”

  Tucker wiped his damp palms on his jeans. “I’ve worked hard. It took time, but now I’m back, and I think there are people who would say I’m pitching better now than I was before the surgery.”

  “I read the sports pages too, Mr. Lloyd.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have any reason to doubt me.”

  “My job is to doubt everything. It makes positive turns into pleasant surprises. Tucker, the reason I brought you in here isn’t to deliver any bad news.” He leaned back in his chair, leaving the pen sitting on the desk. “I know you must have thought the worst when I asked you to come up tonight.”

  “Naturally.”

  “But I don’t want you to think you’re living in the land of wine and roses either.” The GM wove his fingers together and propped his hands over his belly. “Every decision I make is a business decision, and the time has come for us to look at what’s next for you. After fourteen years, perhaps it may soon be time for…change.”

  Ah, and there it was. The other shoe waiting to drop. Tucker didn’t reply, just let Darren finish his speech.

  “We’re going to watch you for the remainder of the season. See how consistent you are, see what your wins look like. Put off making any decisions about your place in the club until the postseason. I don’t want you to think of this as an ultimatum. Think of it instead as an opportunity to prove to us you’re as good as you believe you are.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Well, if you don’t, perhaps you should start imagining a future somewhere else.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Never were truer words spoken than “breaking up is hard to do.”

  Emmy had avoided Simon after the game, bypassing the areas most commonly populated by the press. She’d made sure all the boys were stretched out and cooled down before she made a break for it. Jasper had known something was up the entire time, nagging her with questions and following her around while she gathered her things. The man was too aware of her quirks. It made it impossible for her to hide anything from him.

  So, instead, she hid.

  Avoiding her work partner was a lot trickier than avoiding her boyfriend, but she managed to escape the park in one piece. It wasn’t that she was chickening out. Emmy had every intention of breaking up with Simon before the evening was over. But she wanted to avoid the awkwardness of doing it on her home soil. The stadium was where she spent her days and was more a home to her than her apartment would ever be. The last thing she wanted was the memory of her breakup to haunt the sacred walls of a ballpark.

  You don’t do unhappy things within a stone’s throw of a ball diamond. It was an invitation for disaster.

  She drove for over an hour, doing a full loop from downtown San Francisco to Oakland and back over the Golden Gate, her FasTrak toll pass beeping each time she went through an express check, reminding her that this avoidance was costing her. Time, in this case, literally was money.

  The time window between evening and late night was an ideal moment for city driving. People weren’t out and about for dinner and movies anymore, and the game had long since ended, but the party crowd hadn’t yet gotten going. The streets were easy to navigate, and traffic was negligible. It meant the trip from Golden Gate Park to Simon’s downtown hotel took next to no time, and soon Emmy was confronted with the reality that she’d have to do what she’d promised herself she’d do.

  For someone who was as self-motivated as Emmy, she was having a hell of a time pushing herself to Simon’s door.

  When she got off the elevator on his floor, she paced in front of his door for a full minute, psyching herself up.

  “Simon,” she said to herself. “We’ve been good together, but maybe it’s time we think about being good apart.” Grimacing at how pathetic it sounded even to her, she gritted her teeth and started again. “I think we’ve both known for a while now we can’t continue on with things the way they are.” She raised both brows and chewed on the inside of her cheek. Not bad.

  Was there really any good way to do it? Probably not, but there had to be a slightly less crappy way than saying, Fuck it, I’m done. He hadn’t been bad to her. He wasn’t a bad boyfriend.

  Emmy sighed. She was the bad guy here, and she knew it. Might as well show her true colors and get the deed over with.

  She strode up to 1805 and was about to knock when the interior lock jostled and the door opened. Cassandra Dano was in the process of having a hearty laugh about something and was actually tossing her long blonde hair. Tossing it, like she was some sort of ’80s video vixen. The laughter stopped dead when she saw Emmy standing in the doorway.

  “Oh,” the anchor said, clearly not expecting anyone to be in her way. “Hi.”

  Emmy stared back. Cassandra’s hair looked more tousled than the usual controlled waves she sported on camera, and there was a faint glow in her cheeks. She appeared radiant, and it pissed Emmy off in a way she couldn’t
have imagined.

  Rather than a polite greeting, Emmy asked, “What are you doing here?”

  “I was, uh… I mean, Simon and I were…”

  “Cass, who are you talking to?” Simon’s voice preceded him around the corner, and then he appeared, his dress shirt unbuttoned and his own blond coif rumpled.

  “It’s Emmy,” Cassandra informed him.

  Emmy waited in the hallway, staring at the woman who was between her and her boyfriend, trying to come up with any logical reason why Cassandra would be in Simon’s room after eleven o’clock at night.

  “Emmy,” Simon said.

  “Why do you seem surprised to see me?” Emmy asked. “I told you I was coming by after the game.”

  Simon was buttoning his cuffs, and each gesture he made caused Emmy’s frustration to increase. “The game ended over an hour ago.”

  “I had things to do.”

  “I went looking for you. Jasper said you’d left.”

  “So because I didn’t come over right after the game you decided to settle for the next best thing?” Emmy glowered at Cassandra, and the skinny newscaster flushed guiltily.

  “It’s not—” Cassandra started to speak, but Emmy shot her a look that dared her to continue the sentence. Cassandra didn’t rise to the challenge and fell silent.

  “You think that’s what this is?” Simon asked.

  “Look at it from my perspective and tell me what else I’m supposed to think. I go see you in Chicago, and she’s on her way over. Fine, I believed you then. But I’m supposed to think this is all sweetness and innocence when you have another woman in your hotel room this late at night? I’m not an idiot, Simon.”

  “Neither am I, Emmy,” he shot back.

  Emmy sputtered, her cheeks hot and most likely very red. “What does that mean?”

  “Guys, I’m going to go…” Cassandra tried to edge around Emmy, but Simon stopped her.

  “No, you stay for a second,” Simon said.

  A pit of fear settled in Emmy’s belly. Guilt swirled uncomfortably in her gut.

  Simon continued, “You’ve been avoiding me. You barely replied to my text messages today. You refused to meet me for dinner after the game. How do you think that looks from my end?”

  She hadn’t realized her avoidance was so apparent. As it turned out, she was as bad at passively avoiding conflict as she was at facing it head-on.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “When you didn’t come over after the game like you said you were going to, I called the only friend I had in the city. And yes, believe it or not, that’s all this is. Friendship. Cassandra and I have been working on a book together about legacy sports franchises in Chicago.”

  “Oh.” Emmy hadn’t the faintest clue he’d been working on a book. “I didn’t know.”

  “No, because you don’t ask. You never ask. We don’t talk anymore.”

  “I know.”

  “And when we do talk, all I hear is baseball. Baseball, baseball and more fucking baseball. I love sports too, Em, but there’s more to life than the Felons and Tucker Lloyd.”

  Her heart skipped a beat at the mention of Tucker’s name, and she was reminded of her reason for coming to see Simon in the first place. Now that she was able to process it, she became aware he was berating her in the middle of a hotel corridor for being a bad girlfriend.

  She had the obvious solution for both their problems.

  “I think we should break up,” she said, her tone flat.

  Simon, it seemed, had been building up to say more, but his words sputtered and came to a full stop. “What?”

  “I think we should break up,” she repeated.

  “Because I said there was more to life than baseball?”

  The timing of her words could have been better, evidently, but it didn’t matter. Now that she’d said them, there was no turning back.

  “No. Because we don’t love each other anymore.”

  Poor Cassandra, still standing in the door between them, was looking at the ceiling trying her darnedest not to draw attention to herself, but Emmy could tell from the flushed color of Cassandra’s neck and the sweat on her brow she was uncomfortable as hell. Who could blame her?

  “Em…”

  “Don’t try to disagree now. Not after your whole speech. You know it’s true, and it’s time we admitted it. My life isn’t in Chicago anymore, it’s here. And it isn’t fair for either of us to pretend that isn’t true. Maybe there is more to life than baseball, but right now my life is the Felons…and Tucker Lloyd… That’s my world.”

  “After four years, that’s it? You’re picking a losing franchise over me?”

  She pursed her lips, fixing him with a cool glare. “That’s not fair.”

  “I feel like this is a conversation you guys should have had before Emmy moved,” Cassandra pointed out.

  Maybe every breakup needed an awkward third-party mediator. It wasn’t like the situation was fun to begin with, so why not make it even more absurd?

  “It’s over,” Emmy said. “And Cassandra’s right. I think we knew it was over when I left.”

  Simon’s shoulders slumped. He was a competitive guy by nature, and Emmy suspected he would view the end of their relationship as a challenge he’d lost. “Are you sure?”

  Emmy had to laugh. Both Simon and Cassandra were visibly startled by her outburst, taking a step backwards each.

  “Considering your little rant not two minutes ago, I would have figured you’d be relieved.”

  “Are you?”

  She toyed with the strap on her purse, avoiding his gaze for as long as she could without being cruel. “A little bit.”

  Simon braced his arm on the wall inside the doorway and looked from Emmy to Cassandra and back again. “This might be the strangest breakup I’ve ever been through.”

  “It’s certainly the first time I’ve broken up with an audience.”

  “It’s weird for me too, if that helps you guys at all,” Cassandra said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to go?” she asked Simon.

  “No. Stay,” Emmy replied before he had a chance. “I’m going. Simon, you deserve better, and if it isn’t with her, it’ll be someone else, but it’s not with me. You’re right, my relationship with the team was more important than my relationship with you, and you have every right to be mad at me about that. It wasn’t fair, and I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks?” he said, obvious uncertainty turning the word from a statement into a question.

  Emmy reached past Cassandra with the intent to hug Simon, but at the last moment she changed her mind. She extended her hand, and he took it. Exchanging a painfully forced handshake, they regarded each other, unsure how to proceed. They each dropped the other’s hand at the same time. She didn’t have anything at his house, nor he at hers. After almost four years, that was it. One pitiful handshake standing on the ugly carpet in a four-star hotel with one of Maxim’s Hot 100 standing in between them.

  “Goodbye,” Emmy said, since see you later seemed inappropriate.

  “Bye, Em.”

  “See you later,” Cassandra concluded with a small wave.

  Emmy nodded politely then turned back to the elevator bay. Once inside she checked her watch. They whole thing had taken less than ten minutes. She hoped the valet hadn’t gotten too far with her car.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “Who says that?” Emmy slurred, pointing a shot glass at Alex while the contents sloshed inside. “He actually said the team was more important to me than our relationship.”

  “Was he right?” The five variations of Alex sitting next to her all gave her identical mildly condescending looks.

  “Maybe.” She finished her shot and propped her chin on her hand. “But he was with another woman.”

  Alex took a big swig off his beer and nodded sagely. “Did you catch them doing anything…untoward?” He smirked at his own word choice like he was proud to have chosen it over all the other options circulating in his head.


  “Untoward?”

  Alex shrugged, evidently giving up on politeness, and said, “Yeah. Did you catch them fucking?”

  “No.” Emmy swirled her empty glass on the bar with one finger. “But her hair was messy. And she was glowing.”

  “Literally?”

  Emmy gave him a look that would make any elementary school teacher proud. “She’s not Tinker Bell.”

  “Oh no? ’Cause I’m pretty sure she just spirited off your man.”

  “Ha-ha. You’re funny.”

  “If you can’t be hot, you gotta be something.” He took another swig of beer and winked at her. “Not that you’d know anything about that.”

  “Was that a compliment or an insult?”

  “Both.”

  “You’re a complicated man, Alex.”

  “Not really. Beer. Baseball. Boobs. This is the life of Alex Ross.”

  “And a hint of bitterness.”

  “A dash. It adds to the overall flavor.”

  Emmy rolled her eyes. She’d arrived at the Bottom on the Ninth pub across the street from the stadium shortly after midnight. She hadn’t been expecting to find anyone she knew, hoping instead to quietly nurse a glass of wine and take a cab home.

  Instead she found Alex sitting alone at the bar and joined him for a drink—his buy. Four whiskey shots later she was telling him all about her gong show of an evening, and he was listening as patiently as one could when they didn’t give a shit.

  “You honestly think they weren’t doing anything?” Emmy stopped spinning her glass and waited for Alex to reply.

  “Are you crazy? Woman leaving his suite that close to Cinderella’s curfew?” He shook his head and placed the now-empty beer he’d been nursing onto the bar. “Guy was cheating on you, no doubt in my mind. But that’s beside the point.”

  “How is that not completely the point?”

  “You said you went there to break up with him, right?” Alex called the bartender over with the wave of two fingers. He arched a brow at Emmy, both asking her to reply to his question and seeing if she needed a refill.

  “Whatever you’re having,” she muttered.