Stealing Home(60)

She grabbed my hands and gave me a shake. “To help you fix it.”





IF I SPENT all of my time worrying about finding the worst in a person, I’d never be able to see the best. That was one of the hundred things that had been floating through my mind after dropping Alex back off at Luke’s apartment. He wasn’t there, but Alex had told me where he would be. Where he liked to go when he had things to work out.

I’d been standing in the parking lot and watching him for a while. My sedan was parked next to his tank as I searched for the right thing to say to him. There were a million right things to say to him, a few things I should, and one thing I had to. I only hoped he’d be more receptive to having a conversation than I had been when he tried.

He was hovering at home plate of the field he’d played on in college. Luke had been one of the few players to earn a spot in the pros in the same city where he’d gone to college. I knew that had to do with him wanting to stay close to his family.

He’s a good man. That phrase kept echoing through my head, a reminder of how many people had described Luke as such. Not just as a good baseball player or a decent guy, but as a good man. He’d lived up to that title again and again. From doing right by his sisters after their parents’ death, to the whole ordeal with Owen, to the way he’d handled me even when I was being psycho.

The one in a million. He was standing right in front of me.

The bucket of balls he was hitting was getting low, and I couldn’t miss my chance. I couldn’t let fear mess things up one more time. I might have felt like I wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it, but really, I knew. Alex had been right about life and love being simple. It was only when we tried to make things what they weren’t, and morph them into something they couldn’t be, that life got messy.

Shoving off from the front bumper of the same vehicle Luke had driven when he’d been a student here, I started for the field. The man made millions of dollars a year and he still drove that thing, not because it was what people expected of him but because it made him happy. I couldn’t help comparing myself to that. Luke could have had his pick of millions of girls, but he’d chosen me. Not because of what the public would expect, but because it was what made him happy.

I was choosing what made me happy too. No more setting booby traps and guillotines to sabotage that.

The parking lot was a long way from the field, so he couldn’t have seen me pull up. From way back there, it would have been impossible to tell it was Luke Archer on that field, hitting ball after ball, the crack of his bat echoing into the night.

When the next ball sailed over the back fence, landing with a mess of others, I realized that maybe it wouldn’t have been so hard to figure out it was Luke Archer after all.

For as hard of a time as he’d had connecting with the ball during the past two games, he was tearing it apart out here. Practically every ball he tossed into the air, his bat sent whizzing over the back fence.

Alex had said he’d spent a lot of time here after their parents died, that this was his way of working out problems and anger. I could see why. All of the lights stationed around the field were on, but no one was in the stands, no announcer was talking in the background, no ballpark smells filled the air. It was so quiet, just the crack of Luke’s bat and his sharp grunt after each swing.

I’d never been on a baseball field like this, and somehow, it was even more magical than it was when it was brimming with players and fans, noises and smells.

Coming up to one of the entrance gates, I paused. It was locked. I wasn’t sure how Luke had gotten in, but I wasn’t going to let one locked gate stop me from doing what I had to. It had been a while since I’d climbed a cyclone fence, and it had been never since I’d climbed one this tall, but it only was ten feet of holey metal. If I couldn’t tackle this, I had no right to assume I could tackle all of the other hurdles that would come in this kind of a relationship.

Slipping out of my shoes to make the journey easier, I tucked my shirt into my shorts and started climbing. The up was easy, the over scary, the down tricky, but I didn’t try to make it something it wasn’t. I was climbing a fence. That was all. I didn’t need to think about the possibility of falling, of breaking my neck, of spending the rest of my life paralyzed, of any of the crap that would have kept me from doing it before.

Fear bled the love out of life. When there was an abundance of fear, there wasn’t room for love to grow.

Fear had no place in my life anymore.

After hopping down on the other side of the fence, now barefoot, I jogged through the maze of concessions booths until I’d reached the stands. I walked up the third base line. His back was to me, his focus on nothing but the ball and his bat’s connection with it. As another ball cleared the back fence by a large margin, it was impossible not to wonder if I was watching a legend in the making—one that would be remembered by generations.

Luke was in his standard jeans, sneakers, and T-shirt, his Shock ball cap settled into place. Watching him, feeling him close, made the ache start to spread inside me. It only grew the closer I moved.

I was passing third base when he froze just as he was about to toss another ball into the air. He didn’t turn around; he didn’t speak. He just stood there, rigid and with his back to me, waiting.

Say something, Allie. But don’t just say something, say what you came here to say.