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“I would never do that to him.”
“I hope not.”
“And what if he hurts me?” Emmy asked, extending Alex’s leg straight and digging her fingers into the tissue of his knee. He winced.
“Emmy…I’m not sure anyone could hurt you.”
Her tension eased, and she bent his knee back towards his chest, tilting it to the side so it was flush with his opposite thigh.
“Alex, you’re a good-looking kid, but you’re probably the stupidest son of a bitch I’ve ever met.”
The catcher laughed. “I can’t believe it took you this long to figure it out.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ominous black clouds hung over the outfield like an angry ghost, and the grounds crew waited with rain slickers, arms crossed on the sidelines waiting to see if the storm would settle in or disperse. The fans had their jackets zipped up to their necks and hats pulled low, but the diehards weren’t going anywhere, a few preemptively wearing clear ponchos.
“What do you think?” Emmy asked, readjusting her ponytail against the building wind.
Miles paced in front of the fence, chewing his lip and staring at the building tempest. “Dunno.”
Chuck sat on the bench, a wad of Big League Chew crammed into the pouch of his cheek. His response was even less involved than Miles’s had been. Instead of saying anything, he grunted and scratched his inner thigh beneath his balls.
The air temperature dropped with each passing moment, making Emmy wish she’d worn a thicker sweater under her training jacket. It still surprised her how cold San Francisco could get in the middle of summer. Back in Chicago she’d have expected this temperature from later September, not August.
She tossed her med bag under the bench and rifled through the snacks on the back ledge of the dugout, stuffing a handful of seasoned sunflower seeds into her pocket. Swirling her fingers in the small nest of kernels, she withdrew two and popped them in her mouth, sucking the seasoning off as she moved to the fence.
Several of the players leaned with their arms flopped over the railing, watching the empty field with the same wary interest as the grounds crew. Diagonally across the home plate the Cleveland Indians were similarly posed, chewing gum or cracking seeds while watching the empty field.
The air crackled with electricity, making the fine hairs on the back of Emmy’s neck stand at attention. Since the game couldn’t start until they got the all clear from the front office telling them it was safe to go forward, they would wait.
And wait.
The longest Emmy had waited out a rain delay was two and a half hours in the height of Chicago’s summer heat. She was hoping the clouds would shift towards Oakland and leave them to the game, but it didn’t look promising.
No matter how menacing it appeared, the decision couldn’t be made until the rain started to fall. And even then they had to wait to see if it would blow over or settle.
She cracked a seed open with her teeth, spitting the shell onto the dugout floor. In a line beside her the boys spit their own shells in unison. And as a team, they all waited.
Tucker sidled up beside her, his jumble of long, lean limbs newly fascinating to her. She watched his hands out of the corner of her eye while he played with a ball, tossing it back and forth and looking at the field the same way everyone else was.
His nimble, wonderful fingers.
Emmy’s mouth watered, and she sucked hard on the seed between her teeth to distract herself.
“Gonna give me some?”
Emmy choked on the seed. “What?”
“Seeds,” he sai
d, a rich laugh bubbling in his throat. “Do you have any extra for me?”
“Oh.” She dug through her pocket, and as she fumbled for the sunflower seeds, Tucker’s lips brushed her ear. She couldn’t believe how many times he tricked her with his cheeky word choices.
“If you want to give me something else, though, I might have a few ideas.”
Emmy went rigid, unable to move or speak. Her breathing shallowed, and she stared straight forward. Her skin erupted in goose bumps, and she nodded in a barely perceptible way, as if to say go on.
