Page 123 of Challenge Me

“Good, cause he hurt my feelings.”

“Sad.”

“It’s hard for me to tell if you’re being sarcastic, you know.”

“Double sad.”

Amir swung but missed the ball. Mal got up to stand beside me, lifting and lowering on her toes. I did the same, and it sort of helped.

The second swing clipped it, but it went behind him. As he tapped his bat on the plate, I saw the way he blew air out of his lips and centered himself. I put a piece of popcorn in my mouth, then flicked one toward the field as a little offering.

“Take it to the skies, Sól.”

Mal sucked in a breath when he hit the ball. I put my hands on my head as it flew over centerfield, barely visible through the sunlight shining down.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Swear, swear, swear,” Mal muttered.

I shushed her and put a hand over my brow to see better. “It’s gone!”

A smile spread across Mal’s face. She stayed on her toes, watching as Amir continued to round the bases.

“Up,” I said, crouching. “He’ll see you better here.”

She hesitated for a second, then climbed onto my shoulders. I grunted as I stood and made a mental note to start doing squats again.

“You’ve gotta be loud, Little Valkyrie.”

“Go, Dad!” she shouted. I glanced up at her and saw her arms waving above her head.

As he came up on home plate, he put his hands over his mouth. He continued until he stood in front of the dugout below us. I could’ve sworn his eyes were watering, but it was hard to tell from here.

“You’d better get us a win,” I called.

He glanced behind him, then blew a kiss toward Mal before he headed back to his little bunker. I was still smiling as I checked the scoreboard. We were only in the third inning, but they were set up pretty well for the rest of the game.

Mal tapped my shoulder, then pointed at the screen. She ducked her head to hide from the camera, not that it did any good.

“You’re a star,” I told her.

She said something, but it was drowned out by the crowd. My attention caught on something across the way. From this distance, it wasn’t all that clear, but I was ninety percent certain about what I saw. More accurately, who. He was standing, staring right at me, even as the people around him sat down again. I didn’t know if he’d been aware of where I was the entire time or just learned after the camera focused on us. It didn’t really matter.

Cole was here, and that didn’t bode well for anybody.

*****

Amir was giddy at dinner. It was easy to stay under the radar when he had Avery and Mal to focus on. He paid attention to me but not for long enough to recognize anything was off.

Something about seeing Cole had turned me into a coward. I wanted to run back to the bar, board up the doors, and sit in my office with my gun locked and loaded, preferably with a good bottle of whiskey. I had a feeling that if I did that, he’d show up eventually. It would be self-defense. Sure, the restraining order wasn’t active anymore because I hadn’t seen a point in renewing it, what with the time and the distance, but I could still make a case based on the past.

I wanted to think it was brave to trap him and eliminate the issue entirely. A lot of people would run, after all, and here I was, prepared to stand my ground.

But the mature, more healed part of me knew that violence was the cowardly way out if it could be avoided. Cole was the true coward, the one who used his fists when I wasn’t the exact version of myself that he wanted. The one whose tongue turned venomous to remind me that he was exactly what I deserved whenever I forgot it. Nobody else would want to deal with a guy who covered the mirror and had a bad habit of reading too far into things like ambiguous dreams, or the guy who both shoved people away and clung on for dear life. The guy who pushed buttons to see how far I could push them before they revealed the truth of who they were.

Because everybody was hiding something ugly beneath the surface, and I didn’t like monsters that lurked in the dark. Better to know what brand of vicious a man harbored and face it head-on.

Looking at Amir across the table, I found him already watching me. I smiled, and he returned it, so bright and lovely.