Page 33 of Last Night Was Fun

Gabe blushed in shame, and Emmy couldn’t help noticing his eyes trace the outline of her thigh from her hip to her knee. He bit his lip, and she dropped her leg.

“Sorry. Bad joke,” he said. “Anyway, my arm is out of commission for a while.”

“Well, good thing there isn’t a pitching contest involved in getting promoted at work.”

He smirked at her, but it was half-hearted. Beneath the customary sass, she could see the vulnerability she’d glimpsed before. For some inexplicable reason it compelled her to expose some of her own vulnerability.

“My brother played baseball,” she said quietly.

Gabe turned to her with an intrigued look. “I also did not know you have a brother.”

“Had,” Emmy said on a near whisper.

“What’s that?”

She took a breath and forced herself to walk through the door she’d opened. “I saidhad. Ihada brother. He died when I was a teenager.”

His face fell into a look of sincere sympathy. The kind that stabbed right at her wounded heart, and one of the main reasons she didn’t talk about Josh much. “I’m so sorry, Emmy.”

“Thanks. My love of the game comes from him. He was older, and I grew up watching him play. He and my dad were always playing catch in the backyard, and I used to make them let me join.” She softly smiled at the memory even though it had grown faded and blurred.

If she looked hard enough, she could see Josh’s smile, feel his big hand mussing her hair, smell the leather of his old glove he gave her. But if she looked too hard, she saw too much, and her heartcircled back around to hurting. His injury, his recovery, the struggle she didn’t understand—the struggle none of them understood, honestly—until it was too late.

“What position did he play?” Gabe asked, and she appreciated the question much more than the one she usually got:How did he die?

“Shortstop. He was one of those ballerina-on-the-field types.”

“Ah, yes. I know those. The ones who can catch anything and look good doing it.”

A warm smile lifted Emmy’s face. “Yep, that was Josh!”

Gabe did a double take. His eyes bugged out and then zigzagged over the island like he was putting pieces together before he looked up at her. “Wait, your brother was Josh Jameson?Josh ‘JJ’ Jameson?How did I not know that?!” He looked more disappointed in himself for not making the connection than in her for not telling him about it.

She shrugged a shoulder. “Because I don’t talk about it.”

“Um...” Gabe trailed off, and she knew he was remembering headlines from over a decade before.

Superstar Shortstop’s Bright Future Cut Short

Josh Jameson Remembered for His Brilliance on the Field

All-Star Rookie Found Dead of Overdose at 23

Those headlines simplified the truth about how Josh had hurt his back making one of those highlight-reel-worthy catches and had been prescribed painkillers to recover. And how those painkillers woke a sleeping darkness in his brain that consumed him. The news didn’t cover how Emmy’s mother begged him to end his season and go to rehab, or how her father pushed him to fight through it, and how this drove a wedge between them. Or how Emmy and Piper, only sixteen and thirteen at the time, couldn’t understand why their beloved older brother had become someone else. How his moods darkened, and his temper grew short, and why he’d call them in the middle of thenight from the road, leaving slurred messages about how much he loved and missed them, and had they watched the game on TV that night?Of coursethey had. They watched every game just to see him. He always winked at them from the batter’s box. And then one day, he wasn’t there. Someone else took the field at shortstop, and her parents got a call Josh had been found in his hotel room that morning. And then, he was gone. Just like that.

Emmy’s mother disowned the sport. Her father retreated into himself, taking blame for pushing his son to keep playing, having no idea he was driving him deeper into his addiction. Piper took their mother’s side, shattered by the loss. Emmy shattered too. Into a million tiny pieces she could only begin to put back together by devoting herself to the one thing she and Josh loved most. Baseball.

She felt Gabe eyeing her, not really sure how to come back from delving into her painful past. In fairness, she didn’t know either. And that was part of the reason she avoided the topic.

He eventually cleared his throat and nodded at the TV she’d left playing across the room. “What were you watching?”

She turned to see a shot of an attractive couple handcuffed to each other while struggling to assemble furniture. “Name Your Price,” Emmy said.

Gabe circled back around the island to his stool. “Is that the reality show where they make people do shitty things for money?”

Emmy snorted a laugh. “Yeah. I love this show. In this episode, these exes are trying to live locked in the same house together for a month for a million dollars. He’s an actor, and she’s an entertainment writer, and they had this big dramatic breakup that went viral a while ago.”

They swiveled their stools to face the TV as they finished breakfast. They forked mouthfuls and laughed at the contestants’ misfortune as they tried to tolerate each other through a series of increasingly intimate challenges under the same roof.