My eyes lock onto her image on the screen, and her words echo in the quiet hotel room.
Home.
She used the word without thinking, without filtering it through her legal brain or her professional boundaries. She didn’t saymy apartmentorSweetwater. She saidhome, like the small, brick-walled studio with the sliding barn door and the socks in the protein tub is an established, undeniable reality for both of us.
I lie there on the bed, the ice pack freezing my skin, staring at her through the lens of the phone. Campbell stops talking, her fingers freezing over her keyboard as she realizes what she said. Her cheeks flush a deep, beautiful pink under the glow of her monitor, her bottom lip caught between her teeth as she stares back at me through the camera.
The silence between us stretches over the three hundred miles of highway separating Nashville from Sweetwater, but it’s entirely different from the silence with my father. It’s warm, full, a little electric.
“Home,” I repeat, my voice a whisper.
Campbell swallows hard, her eyes blinking rapidly as she looks at me through the screen. She drops her hands from the keyboard, leaning her chin on her palm, her gaze softening until the PR strategist completely disappears. Now it’s just her.
“We’re each other’s home now, Jake,” she utters quietly, her voice steady but laced with a vulnerability that cuts right through my chest.
My heart hits my ribs, a massive, triumphantthudthat has nothing to do with baseball. I look at her beautiful, exhausted face, at the way she’s holding her breath waiting for my response, looking just as terrified as I was on that couch the other night.
“I know,” I say.
We stay like that for a long time, neither of us speaking, just staring at one another through the small glowing rectangles of our phones. I watch her bite her lip, her blush deepening, her eyes searching mine for the words we aren’t officially allowed to say yet for no other reason than we’re scared shitless. The words are hanging in the space between us, mighty and true.
I love you.
She doesn’t say it out loud, and neither do I, but it’s there. It’s in the slide deck, in the oversized collection of T-shirts, and in the ice pack on my shoulder.
“Me too, Campbell,” I whisper, answering the silent confession she’s hiding behind her teeth. “Me too.”
A wide, relieved smile breaks across her face, her eyesshining in the dark. She clicks her laptop shut, her face once again taking up all of the real estate on my phone screen as she settles down into her own pillow.
“Go to sleep, McKinney,” she whispers. “You have rehab at eight.”
“Good night, Hines,” I say, closing my eyes as the soothing lull of her voice finally puts the fire in my shoulder to rest.
TWENTY-TWO
CAMPBELL
The small, scratched countertop in Jake’s apartment, correction . . .ourapartment, is my designated staging area.
On the left side are three neat rows of plastic meal-prep containers, packed with roasted sweet potatoes, charred broccoli, and lemon-herb chicken breasts that I spent three hours cooking and portioning out. On the right, a giant, commercial-sized bucket of crushed ice I begged off the afternoon bartender at Earl’s, alongside three different neoprene compression wraps and a bottle of high-potency anti-inflammatories, per doctor’s orders.
I am not a domestic person by nature. My idea of cooking during college was ordering Thai food and eating it out of the carton while highlighting zoning bylaws. But when the man you are completely falling for comes back from a road trip with his shoulder wrapped in Saran Wrap and his jaw set in a miserable scowl, you adapt.
“Eat the broccoli, McKinney,” I say without looking up from my cutting board, where I am currently dicing avocados for his afternoon snack.
Behind me, Jake lets out a low, pathetic grunt from the corner of the leather couch. He is sitting shirtless, a massive, dripping ice pack strapped to his right shoulder with a black neoprene sleeve. He looks like a captive bear—huge, dangerous, and completely miserable about being confined to quarters. He’s holding the plastic fork in his left hand, awkwardly stabbing a piece of chicken.
“It tastes like grass,” he grumbles, his voice thick with that grumpy tone I’ve grown absurdly fond of.
“It tastes like garlic and olive oil, and it has high levels of vitamin C to help with the tissue inflammation in your bursa,” I fire back, wiping my hands on a kitchen towel and walking over to the sofa. I sit down on the cushion next to him, gently shifting his left hand out of the way so I can inspect the ice wrap. “How is the throbbing? Scale of one to ten.”
“A four,” he mutters, staring down at the floor between his heavy boots. “A three if I don’t move it. A ten if I think about the fact I might not be back in time for the next Little Rock series.”
I let out a soft sigh, my fingers finding the back of his neck, gently rubbing the tight, knotted muscles at the base of his skull. The heat radiating off his skin is immense, a sharp contrast to the freezing ice on his joint.
“Jake . . .”
“The Texas scout was there Friday, Campbell,” he interrupts, his voice a jagged whisper that cuts into my heart. He clenches his left fist against his knee, the veins in his forearm bulging under the strain. “He was sitting four rows back with a stopwatch. He saw me drop my arm slot. He saw the ball bounce three feet wide of second base. By the time I get back on the field in three weeks, the mid-season rankings will be out. The trade deadline is over. They’re going to lookat the medical report and opt for the older version. I had the shot. I finally had the goddamn bull by the horns, and my body quit.”
