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“Fine.” She got up off the floor and went to her own bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
Whatever happiness had followed her home was long gone now, leaving only an empty, ugly hole for her to fill.
Chapter Fourteen
Alex crammed the last of his things into the big duffel bag on the floor, too hurried to care if there was any rhyme or reason to his packing job. Other guys were folding their clothes and systematically finding places for batting gloves and other items they planned to take with them. Everything else would be boxed up by the equipment manager and shipped home on the semis.
Since he didn’t have any photos or memorabilia hanging up, all Alex had to do was chuck his jock, some clean T-shirts and his custom Nike sneakers into his bag, lest he be without them during the few days between training and the start of the regular season.
A few other players were already gone, having left right after their last training game to head home for two days of R and R before they were expected to report to San Francisco for Monday’s season opener. His sisters were anticipating his arrival home later that evening, and there was no getting around it.
It was a six-hour drive from Lakeland to Macon, where he’d stop at Jane’s for the night. The annual Alex-goes-back-to-baseball party she hosted would be in full swing by the time he showed up, and once it was over he’d be too drunk to make the final hour drive back to his home in Atlanta.
He knew Jane hosted the party mostly to show him off to her neighbors, but all his sisters came, and his parents usually made the trip from Athens, depending on how his dad was feeling. The elder Alexander Ross had suffered a stroke four years earlier, and though he had recovered most of his mobility, he now needed a cane. Sometimes long car rides were hard for him, and no one wanted to force the old man to be unhappy just so he could participate.
Typically Alex looked forward to the event as the highlight of his preseason, but today he only felt bitterness. During the final two weeks of training, he’d managed to spend a mere six evenings with Alice, and none of them had provided any alone time for the two. She hadn’t yet given him a firm answer on where she saw things going, and it made him nervous because he had to hit the road in an hour and still had no clue where things stood between them.
As far as he was concerned and had been all along, he wanted to make a go of things. He was thirty now, old enough he didn’t want to pick up girls at the bar anymore. His sisters had all been married or engaged before they turned the big three-oh, and he was throwing off their average by still being single. He didn’t know if men had a biological clock, but something in his head was telling him it was time to think about settling down.
It didn’t help that most of the guys on the team were single. Stories of wild dates with easy cocktail waitresses bounced aroun
d the changing room on a daily basis, making Alex feel like the odd one out for not having a new conquest to share every day. What’s more, he felt weird for not wanting a new conquest.
Thank God Tucker had met Emmy. Having one reasonable, non-Casanova friend around made Alex feel sane. Even if the other guys teased Tucker for having a ball and chain once he’d proposed to Emmy, Alex saw how much happier his friend was for having someone like her in his life. And that’s what Alex wanted. Stability, love and a sense of family. The stuff he missed when he was away from his own clan for most of the year.
Being raised as one of six children made him crave a family unit. The guys on the team had served as a great approximation of one for a long time, but now he wanted more. He wanted a real family.
He didn’t know if Alice was the person for the task, didn’t know if she even wanted to be considered. All Alex understood was that being around her had made him want those things. What he needed to know was what she wanted.
If she didn’t want him, that was fine. It would suck, and he’d mope about it for a while, but at least he’d know.
If she did want him though, a whole new series of questions would come up. How would they deal with the distance? Was he prepared to have an instant family? He liked Olivia a lot, but he’d always assumed when he was ready for kids, they’d be his kids. With Alice, he’d be getting a two-for-one deal, and one half of that deal would be a teenager before he knew it.
Terrifying.
He needed to see her before he left, before he let his sisters get his brain all tied in knots. They’d all have something to tell him, advice he was never sure he wanted. Emily would be all for it—she was the dewy-hearted romantic of the Ross family. Jane and Carla would think he was out of his mind, surely. Ricki would tell him she was friends with a dozen other women she could set him up with and would proceed to pull their Facebook profiles up on her phone—she’d done this several times over the past years. It was Violet he wanted to hear from the most though. Quiet Violet, the youngest of the Ross sisters, and the one he cherished most. He loved all his sisters, but he liked Vi best.
Vi had a warm heart and a willingness to listen, where his other sisters tended to fight over who was next to speak. She would tell him if he was crazy for wanting to find an in with Alice, or if this was actually worth the effort.
He was leaning towards crazy, but a second opinion would be nice.
The drive from the field to Alice’s house felt longer than it had before, probably because he knew this might be the last time he made the journey. When he pulled in front of her house, she was in the yard, kneeling in front of a flowerbed with her sleeves rolled to her elbows and dirt smeared on her knuckles.
She looked up when he got out of the car, shielding her eyes against the sunlight.
“Not working today?” he called out, knowing the answer already.
“Only two games today. My crew was off.” She rocked back on her heels, crouching low and wiping her hands on her jeans. They were as ratty as the ones he’d worn on their first date, and he liked seeing her this casual. It felt real and honest, her in her ugliest jeans and still as beautiful as anything he’d ever seen. “So was yours, weren’t they?”
“Yeah, last game was yesterday, but we had final drills today. Cleaned out the locker, you know.”
“Just like the last day of school.”
It was strange, standing with the street between them, talking to each other like unfamiliar neighbors. He wanted to go to her, but he felt like closing the gap was risky. He would hold her, and knowing it would be the last time for a long, long time, he might not let her go.
“Permission to approach?” he teased.
“Yeah, c’mere.” After jamming a spade in the soft black dirt, she stepped over the small bed and met him on the driveway.
