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Chapter 1
Cruz
As soon as I get out of the car an oppressive humidity smacks me in the face. Summer in the south never changes. The heat is always stifling, and the air, soupy.
Weathering the summer is a badge of honor for southerners; talking about how hot it is, a sport they play while sipping gin fizzes as a fan whirls sleepily overhead. In the year and a half that I lived down here, I never got used to it. Both the idle conversation and swamp-like conditions were counter to all I knew.
I’d spent most of my life in The Bronx. It’s where I learned to play baseball in the street and sat on our stoop watching the setting sun paint the sky in pink and orange. Nowthat’swhat I picture in my mind when I think of summer. This…this is just one of Dante’s nine circles of Hell.
“Aw, fuck man, why are we doing this again?” my buddy Jake asks, while gripping my shoulder as if he’s going to pass out. “I can feel the sweat dripping from my balls.”
I laugh and shove my keys into the pocket of my shorts. “Your balls would be sweating if we were in Iceland in the middle of winter.”
“Fuck you, Cabrón,” he quips, sliding his black Ray-Ban’s up onto his head.
If it were anyone else, I’d knock their teeth out. But Jake’s my boy. He’d called me Cabrón since our first practice as freshman when I nailed him in the foot with a fast ball.
“You know it’s true,” I can’t help but laugh. “You’ve been talking about your balls sweating since the day we met.”
Like me, Jake was a North Atlantic boy. Born and raised inNew Haven, he knew the extremes of hot and cold but not this. Nothing could ever quite prepare you for summer in the south.
“Have you ever considered,” he says with his trademark swagger, “that maybe, my balls are always sweating because there’s a lot taking up space down there?”
“Honestly,” I run a hand through my dark as night hair. “I don’t think about your balls at all, man. Sorry.”
He flips me off and does the same. With superstition getting the better of us, none of the guys on the team had gotten a cut since before playoffs and we were all in need of a trim.
“Hey,” I shrug. “Should’ve been a pitcher not a catcher. It’s light and breezy on the mound.”
“Didn’t pick the position, brother,” he shoots back. “It picked me.”
Jake’s right. He was a beast behind home plate. While he was only an inch taller than me, he had about twenty pounds of muscle on him that made his six foot one frame look enormous. Nothing got by him and his skill for framing a pitch made my arm look flawless.
“Whatever helps you sleep better at night.” I move my neck from side to side as we make our way down the white clapboard sidewalk.
“Now come on,” he scoffs. “You know I don’t sleep.”
“Yeah,” I roll my eyes. “I’m aware.”
I knew exactly how much sleep Jake did not get because we’d been roommates for two years and during that time I’d learned there were two things he excelled at—girls and baseball. He was a legend both on and off the field, and it’s why I knew he’d be up for this trip. A month away from campus, with nothing but girls and heat…One would be good for his ego, and the other, for all of our overworked muscles.
After a grueling playoff season, my arm felt like Jell-O, and I was sure his knees could use a break. Not that he planned tobe on them. With blonde hair and hazel eyes, he bore a striking resemblance to Val Kilmer and it’d earned him the nickname Iceman around campus. Girls swooned when he walked into a room and would gladly kneel at his feet.
“How do you know about this place again?” he asks, while looking up and down the street. “I mean, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore.”
“No, we aren’t,” I agree.
Cherry Cove, a coastal town in southwest Georgia where old money vacationed, was a place so foreign to my DNA, I would never have known about it, had circumstance not thrust both it and the society that called it home in the summer on me.
A relic of a bygone era, it was where wives spent their days sunning, as husbands gambled away inherited fortunes over too many hands of poker, and their glossy haired offspring partied without a care in the world.
I never understood how my father could stomach the place. He loved the vibrancy of New York City—his train ride to NYU where he was a classic lit professor, a journey unto itself he’d said once—and the brick façade streets and white sandy beaches of Cherry Cove were everything his favorite city was not.
But then again, his new wife, Saffron Butler, socialite and widower of the late Senator Reginald Butler, was the reason he did everything now, including smile, and for that I could not fault him for liking this little slice of southern utopia.
As far as stepmoms go, she was pretty cool. Saffron wasn’t your typical spoiled, society wife. She was a free spirit and cared little for the pomp and circumstance of the world she’d been born into. She welcomed me into her family with open arms and never tried to be my mom, and she made my dad happy. For that fact alone, I would never begrudge her, or the world she brought us into.
If you hear my dad tell it, he and my stepmom have an epiclove that rivals all the greats. Given how much time he’d spent studying them, his life was probably destined to be a story with both love and tragedy. I just never believed either would play a part in my own life and turn it upside down in the process.
