The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(65)

“Play ball, Gigi,” Tavi says between spits.

She’s straightened and is balancing much better on her snowshoes now.

Phoebe’s still leaning into me, which feels like fucking heaven. I haven’t had a whiff of her hair or a brush of her hand in five damn days, and I want to toss her over my shoulder, take her back behind the Ferris wheel, and work her out of my system again.

“If you can get me an appointment with God while we’re here so I can check that be a better person box and move on from the torture, I’d appreciate it,” she murmurs.

“Around here, I am God,” I reply.

Dylan cracks up.

Jane doubles over like Carter.

Willie Wayne laughs so hard he trips on his way to sitting down.

“Sorry, Phoebe,” Bridget says. “I clearly haven’t done my job right if he still has that much ego left.”

Phoebe nods, but she doesn’t seem in any great hurry to move away from me either. “Clearly you have work to do. Let’s start with having your normal catcher play instead of me. I’m positive that’ll help your father’s ego.”

Bridget lifts an eyebrow in a terrifying impersonation of Phoebe impersonating her grandmother. “And I’m positive that I eat whiners for breakfast. Get your ass on the field, Lightly. All of you. Play ball. Make me proud. Or at least not so embarrassed that I have to drop out of high school.”

Phoebe nods. “We’ll do our best, Coach.”

“Don’t say ass if you want to not be grounded,” I tell my daughter. Again.

She turns that damn eyebrow on me. “Win first. Then we’ll discuss what a coach should and shouldn’t say to a ragtag team of hooligans.”

Is my eyeball twitching? I think my eyeball’s twitching. “You’re lucky you’re funny.”

She grins. “Still have no idea where I got that from.”

Phoebe laughs softly beside me. She’s coated in sawdust already, yet there’s a smile lurking both on her lips and in her eyes.

Like she’s seeing the same things I saw when I landed here sixteen years ago.

Community. Friends. Family. Fun.

A place to belong.

Get out of your head, idiot. She’s not here to stay.

The weird thing is, for the first time since Estelle Lightly invaded Tickled Pink, I’m not desperate for all of them to leave.

No matter how much that row of reporters out behind center field is making me twitch.

“So the goal is staying upright while you win?” Phoebe asks me.

Her fingers brush against mine in that no one would think anything of it if they noticed kind of way, and her question seems tame enough, but the way she says it—I want to pull her under the bleachers and do things with her that would embarrass even God himself.

“That’s the goal,” I agree.

She flashes a smile so blindingly bright, so real, that I go light headed.

“What is it you say around here?” she asks me. “Oh, right. Hold my cheese and watch this. I’m gonna play the hell out of winning this game.”





Chapter 22


Phoebe


Ladyfingers is hopping tonight.

The bar is nothing like the bars I frequent in New York, but it’s so Tickled Pink that I can’t imagine it being any other way.

I don’t want it to be any other way.

Jane and her husband—ha ha, Tickled Pink, Jane has a husband?—are at our table, along with Willie Wayne and his wife, Akiko, who apparently runs the library at the high school. Several other locals are laughing and joking with them. Most of the tables in the small establishment are full, too, and not just because my entire family is here.

The entire town has come out to celebrate our horrific loss in snowshoe baseball.

The bar is gleaming white, like it’s a cloud, which is the only nod to the heavenly part of Tickled Pink. The stools are all full with out-of-towners who stayed after the game for more festivities. The white Formica tables all have chipped tops, and most are unsteady. The walls are covered with signed photos of celebrities who’ve been here over the years, though most are dated, mixed with movie posters for Pink Gold. Dollar bills with notes in black Sharpie coat the ceiling.

“What’s the story there?” I ask Teague.

I don’t know if he sat down next to me or if I sat down next to him, but since our epic argument in the third inning over which one of us was responsible for catching balls thrown to home base to tag out runners—I said me, because I’m the catcher, and he said him, because I’m terrible at snowshoe baseball—I’ve been desperate to get close to him again.

Okay, fine.

Since he serviced my lady parts more thoroughly than I usually eviscerate my ex-boyfriends, I’ve been desperate to get close to him again. And I don’t care which of us was right or wrong on the ball field.

It just felt good to be poking him.

He doesn’t look up at the ceiling. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Yes.

Teague Miller isn’t poking me. He’s asking if I’m okay.

Possibly the snowshoe baseball game did get a little out of hand. “People have been surviving black eyes for millennia, Teague.”

“Gotta hand it to you, Phoebe—I didn’t take you for a badass that first day you rolled into town.” Jane lifts her beer to me.