Page 48 of Serving Bunt

He glanced out at the dance floor, where Mila and Nora were now dancing circles around a reluctant James and Colt was chatting up . . . Mr. 8.5?

Well, damn.

“I don’t know.” I paused to drain the last of my panty dropper. “I maintain that curses are a valid scientific possibility.”

“Peter.”

“Matty.”

He rolled his eyes, but there was a smile tugging at his lips.

“You know perfectly well that baseball’s not really like that. Usually, it’s a bunch of little things.” He traced a finger through the condensation left behind on the bar. “A lack of leadership, somebody trying to carry more than they should. One guy overthinking while another stops trusting their instincts.”

My smile faded a little.

I was pretty sure we weren’t talking about baseball anymore.

“Then, everybody notices things are off, so they start trying harder.” He exhaled softly. “And somehow that just makes it worse.”

Hm, sounds familiar.

“So, what’s the fix, Coach Miller?”

Matty went still. His fingers tightened briefly around the glass.

“I don’t know. I think maybe . . .” He swallowed and fixed me with a pointed glare. “We should stop trying to force everything back to normal and figure out whether things were actually broken in the first place.”

Toto, we definitely aren’t talking about baseball anymore.

My throat tightened.

This was about a lot more than a slump. This was about us.

I had spent months chasing the version of us we had been before the wedding, the one where I got to be the charming, carefree guy who made Matty laugh without consequences.

But that version was gone.

We’d broken it. Or maybe just outgrown it.

Now we were here, on the edge of something different, something better, and I had no idea what the right move was. Push too hard and I might scare him off. Hold back and we might be stuck in this weird limbo forever.

I chanced a look in his direction. Matty was watching the dance floor now, but his shoulder was still angled toward me, like some unconscious part of him was still reaching in my direction.

Fuck it.

I set my glass down and turned fully toward him, voice low enough that only he could hear it over the music.

“So, what do we do about it?” I asked him. “The slump.”

The heat in his eyes nearly made me leap off my barstool. He knew exactly what I meant.

“I don’t know,” he admitted after a beat. “But I know we can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

I nodded slowly, heart thudding harder than the bass line. “Then maybe it's time to try something new.”

“Like what?”

I slid off my barstool and held out my hand.