“Good choice,” Jake said and smiled. But to my surprise, he declined a glass, sticking with water.
“You don’t like wine?”
“Not as much as beer, as you well know,” he said, giving me a big grin and a wink. I rolled my eyes. “But I don’t drink much unless I have an off day the next day. Otherwise, if I go out, I keep it to a three-beer limit.”
I was about to pounce on that when our waiter arrived. Since we hadn’t looked at our menus, he made a few suggestions.
After we ordered appetizers and the main course, I broke the ice with shop talk, which he instantly took to. We had baseball in common, and it was like talking to a whole new person. It was refreshing, and kind of hard to align with the Jake I knew, not just from my research, but with the way I’d viewed him since college.
Then, with him relaxed, I told Jake about my plan for his branding strategy. How he needed to ditch the frat boy image and keep his antics cleaner, or he was going to end up being the next Ryan Lochte. I also broached the topic of doing some brief interviews focused on a more personal side of him, where he wouldn’t be giving smartass, short answers, but he immediately balked at that idea. I wasn’t surprised, but I’d have to figure out a different approach. A sneaky one.
“I know you do things besides drink, sleep around, and play baseball,” I said, taking a little break from all the business talk. “At least, I really hope you do.”
He chuckled at that. “Not much.”
That was the typical non-answer he loved to give me. I tried from a different angle. “I know there’s more to you than shoving your opponents’ faces in the dirt. Tell me about the real Jake Napleton.”
His resistance was getting predictable. “Jesus, I feel like I’m doing a biographical interview on ESPN or something,” he said, frowning slightly at my choice of topic.
“It’s just you and me, Jake. Two people getting to know each other.” I paused, letting him absorb that. “So, where did you grow up?” I asked, thinking back to the team’s profile on him and all the Googling I had done, which offered little insight. I started off broadly. “Born and raised in Chicago…right?” Nothing. “Why baseball? From what I’ve read, you were pretty good at other sports, too.” Still, zero response. “I read somewhere you were in and out of the system. I think it was in an interview your sister did when she got a full ride to San Diego State—”
“We’re not doing this,” he said, cutting me off. He wasn’t disrespectful about it, just very firm. “My background really isn’t interesting at all, and I don’t like talking about it. End of story. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s just not something I like revisiting.”
Wow. Well that was a lot like running into a brick wall.
I leaned back in the booth and swirled the red wine around in its big glass.
Maybe I was pushing Jake too hard. “You know, I can actually relate to that. I have some stuff about my past I don’t like to bring up either.”
“Great. So you understand that there are some things about the past that are just better left alone and not discussed.” Jake took a sip of his water, as though to signal to me to move on. I could take a hint.
Jake was definitely interesting, and more complex then I’d initially thought. I was also beginning to realize that I’d been judging him through a lens that he provided. And he made it so easy. I learned from watching interviews at how evasive Jake was. In fact, he was an expert at it. Anything personal, and he became guarded, refusing to spill one little detail. His party persona off the field and his dirty plays on the mound were all people talked about, all they cared to discuss. Was it real? How much of it wasn’t? He had the same issues with his last team, the exact same, which was why he was traded. That had to have stung. Ultimately, his defensiveness was telling. While I could relate to not wanting to talk about certain things and let him win this round, we’d have to revisit it. If I didn’t know as much as I could about Jake, his re-branding would be next to impossible.
“Um, okay. Well, I do have another question—something I’ve been wondering about. Where were you going when you rushed out of the locker last Saturday?”
The appetizers came out right as I asked the question, providing a convenient out for him to shake me off. I sighed, wishing I’d come up with better ways to get him to open up.
“Handmade burrata cheese, housemade country pâté, and the local tomato and blue cheese salad,” our server announced as he filled the table. My tummy was rumbling, and I decided maybe now wasn’t the best time to press Jake on his personal life. He was, after all, being surprisingly cooperative in terms of my branding advice. Suspiciously cooperative, I thought.
I spread burrata over a piece of French bread.
“Enough about me,” he said, taking a sip of water. “Let’s talk about you. So you and Grant Newman went to high school together, huh? Were you also going to mention that you two went to college together, since I know you both went to Tennessee State?” He nodded in the direction of Grant’s table. I felt nervous when I looked in his direction and caught Grant staring right at us. Creepy.
I had taken a big bite just before he spoke, so I had to finish chewing. I chewed very slowly to eat up some time as I figured out how I would spin my conscious omission of the fact that, yes, Grant and I had attended the same university. I’m sure Jake approved of my delay tactics.
“Take your time, Diggs. Geez, the only time you aren’t awkward is apparently when you’re out there on the softball field stealing bases,” he jabbed with a smile.
I finished chewing and was finally able to talk without embarrassing myself. “That seems like a personal question. I thought we were keeping this dinner professional.”
He cocked his head and spread cheese on his piece of bread. The knife looked tiny, and that was when I realized how absolutely humongous his hands were.
“So you’re saying you and Grant know each other personally? Interesting.”
I could barely stutter a coherent word, realizing that I had subconsciously provided Jake with more information than I wanted to. He grinned, knowing he had just backed me into a corner.
“Listen, you obviously don’t want to talk about it, whatever it is that happened between you and him. And that’s fine. The only reason I care is because my, uh, friend, wants to take you on a real date sometime in the future, if you’d let him. And it’s really important for him to know. Especially because I—I mean, my friend, who wants to take you on a real date—is under the impression that you don’t date players.”
I picked up my wine glass, swirled it again, and took in its aroma. “Oh. So this friend of yours is a player.”
“Yes. He is.”
“Is he a clean player or a dirty player?”
“My friend is as clean as they come. He’s not a cheater, if that’s what you mean. And he’s extremely loyal to those who earn his trust. He does have a tendency to rub some players’ faces into the dirt, however. But only when they deserve it. Like Pudge over there.”
Jake thumbed toward Grant, who shot us another dirty look. My heart began to speed up, and I didn’t know if it was because I was sitting across the table from a man I was incredibly attracted to, or if it was the fact that the man who had left me with emotional scars was sitting twenty feet away.
“You’re killing me, Newman!” Jake quietly belted in the direction of Grant’s table, loud enough for Grant to hear, but quiet enough not to make a scene. Then he turned toward me. “Of all the places he could have eaten tonight. Pretty goddamn coincidental if you ask me.”
When I thought about it, it was pretty darn coincidental. Perhaps too coincidental?
No. I was getting paranoid again, like I used to be when I was dating Grant. But then I glanced across the room and saw Grant gazing—no, glaring—at me. At us.
I extended my hand across the table and touched Jake’s forearm, which he was resting on the table.
It felt good to touch Jake, even if it was just his arm. His eyes sear
ched mine for a signal that would indicate he might actually be making headway with me in the romantic department. I kept my gaze neutral, trying not to give away my position. Not like I knew exactly what position that was, anyway. The simple fact was that he had a magnetism about him that comforted me and drew me in.
“You have ginormous hands,” I said, wrapping a hand around one of his fingers. He, of course, took it a step further and wrapped his around mine.
“I thank God every day for these hands. They make me able to throw a hell of a curveball, and an even better cut fastball.” He flashed me a grin.
“Do you need big hands to throw a cut fastball?” I asked. I’d heard the name of the pitch thrown around a lot by my brothers, but I wasn’t sure how the grip was performed on the ball.
“If you have small hands, you can’t get them all the way around the ball, and it won’t work. You need to be able to wrap your two big fingers all the way around the ball. Like this.”
He balled my hand up into a fist and wrapped his huge index and middle fingers around it. I couldn’t concentrate on what he was showing me, or anything going on around me, for that matter. I wondered if Grant was still looking at us, but I didn’t really care anymore. Outside of Jake and me, everything went blurry.
I stared into Jake’s eyes, which were traveling all around my arms, hand, and face. His deep voice kept speaking, saying words that I no longer understood, and his enthusiasm for talking baseball was evident. I didn’t give a damn what he was saying. He could have been explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity—and I still would have been smiling and nodding.
All I could picture—all I could think of—was how those fingers would feel wrapped around my waist. Interlocking with my fingers. Caressing me behind my neck and pulling on my hair. I wondered how they would feel traveling down the sides of my abdomen, down the lengths of my thighs and calves, and back up.
His fingers were strong and rugged, yet long like a piano player’s.
Something strange was happening inside me. I felt overheated, and my stomach churned as sheer panic enveloped me. I was thinking things I hadn’t thought in a year. Things I wasn’t sure I wanted to think again for a very long time, if ever. I could feel Grant’s eyes. His presence was ruining this, and I was letting him affect my mood. Suddenly, this dinner date, or whatever this was, was a bad idea. Jake wasn’t Grant, but this was me likely repeating the same mistake if I didn’t stop it. Sure, Jake was as charming as Don Juan, but I had a very good reason for not dating players. And I couldn’t break my rules. But I also couldn’t control myself with Jake.
This was a very bad combination.
I yanked my hand away from his suddenly.
“I’m sorry Jake, I have to go,” I said, standing up abruptly and grabbing my purse.
I’d never seen a man look so shocked. “Are you okay?”
No, I’m really not. “I just realized that I forgot to…respond…to...an email...”
My voice trailed off as we stared at each other, but I felt pulled by his gaze, and I had to look away. All I wanted was to run…away from Jake and the fact that I let this dinner become more than it should have. To Jake, I was just a girl he wanted to get into bed. For me, he was stirring up things I didn’t want stirred up anytime soon. As in, never.
“An email?” he asked slowly, confused. “Don’t you have email on your phone?”
“Yes. I mean, no. It’s complicated,” I rambled, probably sounding like a crazy woman.
Jake ran a hand through his hair and leaned back in his booth. “What’s this really about, Andrea?”
Great question, but I wasn’t about to get in depth about my true history with Grant and why he made me want to remove myself from this restaurant in typical, awkward Andrea fashion. “I have no idea what you’re talking about…” Why the heck was I even still standing there? “Gotta run though. Byyeeiiii.”
I walked briskly into the lobby and through the revolving doors.
As soon as I was out of eyeshot of the restaurant, I ran. Tears started to stream down my face uncontrollably. I hailed a cab and gave the driver Amy’s address.
8
“Worst. Date. Ever,” Amy said.
I sank farther into her couch. She was shaking her head and smiling a little in disbelief at the play-by-play account I had just given her of my dinner with Jake. The view from her Gold Coast apartment looked out over the vast Chicago cityscape, making me feel totally open.
I felt especially vulnerable right now, because seeing Grant had reopened a wound that had never totally healed.
“I mean, up until the moment I left, it was a great time. Jake was a good date and—wait—I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Because it was a non-date, not a date. Right. Whatever you say. I wasn’t talking about Jake anyway. I was talking about you,” she said, getting up to pour us more wine. “You just marched out of the restaurant in the middle of the meal!”
She filled my glass and then hers with the California pinot noir, her voice expressing incredulity as much as surprise. I chuckled at the fact that I hadn’t even had the time to finish the two-hundred-dollar bottle that Jake and I had started, and here I was, drinking a fifteen-dollar bottle from Trader Joes.
“Well, to be exact, I didn’t march. I did a sort of shuffle-run, the best I could manage in these things.” I pointed at my heels, which I had already taken off my feet. “Seeing Grant so suddenly after I hadn’t seen him in over a year had me spiraling out of control, and then Jake was coming on so strong, he was just so...”
“Manly? Protective? I don’t understand what you’re complaining about! I would love to have that man wrap his long baseball arms around me. What happened to enjoying the journey?”
Yeah. That little mantra had gone right out the window. The truth was, I did want Jake. I mean, what girl with a pulse could sit across from him and not be attracted to him? But it all seemed too good to be true. His charm was hard to resist, sure, but behind the façade? Who knew what was under there? I shuddered, thinking about Grant and how well-masked he was before I got to know him.
“I guess seeing Grant at the restaurant reminded me that if something is too good to be true, it usually is.”
“I don’t understand why you had to run away, though,” she countered. “It wasn’t a date, right? It was just a professional meeting. Technically speaking.”
I couldn’t help but crack a soft smile. “If I’m being honest, we were starting to cross a line, and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to stop myself. He did this thing with his fingers. He was showing me how he throws a special kind of pitch, which apparently only works if you have giant hands. He grabbed my hands and did this.” I tried to imitate the way he ran his fingers over my wrist and hand. “It felt...intimate. Like I was finally getting a piece of the real Jake. But then I felt other things too. All these memories of Grant, of how it had ended, of how it almost ruined me—”
I stopped mid-sentence. Amy was sitting on a beanbag chair facing me. She was in shorts and a tank top, her brown hair up in a messy bun and a bucket of popcorn in her lap like she was watching a movie. Watching me have a meltdown.
“Why’d you stop?” she asked, a hint of aggravation in her voice.
I rubbed my eyes, mentally wiped and physically exhausted. I wanted to go home, take my contacts out, get into comfy clothes, and cry some more. At the same time, I didn’t want to go home precisely so I wouldn’t spend all night wallowing in self-pity. “I, uh, don’t know what the point of my story is anymore,” I told her, feeling confused. Though probably not as confused as Jake.
“Well, I know,” she stated with a handful of popcorn poised in the air. “Jake Napleton has huge, long fingers, and you are curious how they would feel wrapped around your...wrist…or something.”
“Uh, no, what I was really wondering is how they would feel sliding between my—” I realized what I was saying and brought a swift hand to my mouth to stop myself.
“You
really know how to leave a girl with a cliffhanger!” she remarked and took another sip of her wine. “Are you embarrassed? He’s super hot. I don’t get it. Any normal girl would be thinking exactly what you’ve been thinking. Why are you holding back? You think it’s part of the whole conservative upbringing thing you were talking about the other day?”
I sighed and reached for my glass of wine on the coffee table.
“I honestly don’t know. Maybe it is. I do know I feel scared. I just feel like if I let myself cross the line, I’ll ruin everything I’ve worked for. What if I hook up with him, and then we break up? What if people found out? How would I be able to get a job in sports PR again? I’d just be another notch on his belt. And what if he doesn’t even like me in the first place? What if it ends up being exactly like Grant? I can’t go through something like that again.”
Amy ran her finger around the rim of her wine glass, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Grant really did a number on you, didn’t he?”
I felt like my stomach was about to collapse inward. “Yeah, pretty much,” I said quietly. “We’ve been over for nearly a year, and I just stopped thinking about him three months ago.” My last year at Tennessee State, Grant’s face had been everywhere since he was the touted number one pick for the draft. He was still the golden boy, but after graduation back in May and getting this internship, it’d felt like a fresh start.
“You can’t live in fear,” Amy said sternly. “He’ll win. You deserve to have fun and be happy.”
I nodded, agreeing but still glum. “Finally, I was moving on, and then—poof. Now he’s back on my mind.”
“I mean, he plays for the Bulldogs. You’re in sports PR. It’s hard for you to totally avoid him, especially since their series with the Jags lasts the rest of this week.”
“I know. Ugh. It’s just all so stressful.” I sank farther into the couch. “Why can’t I just be a normal girl who finds a normal boring accountant guy who just plays a little softball on the weekends? It’s all so difficult.”
Ten Night Stand Page 27
