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As he waited for her today, he wondered why was he waiting? Why did he look forward to her coming? Why was there anticipation tightening his chest and causing his stomach to swirl? Wasn’t the whole point of him moving to North Dakota to be alone? To get out of the spotlight and hide his face?
But instead of doing that, here he was, not just showing his face to this woman, Peyton, but greeting her. Deliberately.
He stood in the kitchen and watched as she got out of her car, but instead of coming directly to the house, she opened the back door and pulled something out. Something that looked like a casserole.
Had she brought food?
His jaw ground together, and he stomped into the hall toward the door. He didn’t like charity. Didn’t like people looking at him and seeing his face and feeling pity.
Even though he knew his line of reasoning wasn’t quite accurate, he still hadn’t quite gotten hold of his thinking as the front door opened.
She smiled at him, like she always did, and greeted him before he could say anything. “Good evening. I hope you had a wonderful week. Mine was busy. Seems like people were coming out of their winter hibernation, and I sold a lot of coffee and baked goods this week.” She held up the pan she was carrying. “On Saturdays, I make my famous berry French toast bake. I brought some for us to share tonight. It’s best if you eat it right out of the oven, so I have it made. All we have to do is cook it for twenty minutes.”
Her cheerfulness and her kind thoughtfulness made his anger evaporate.
Most of it anyway. He still felt anger at the universe for how he looked and what had happened to him. Anger at the unfairness of God who had taken everything he had away.
Why had he given him so much, just to take it all away?
“You can put it in the kitchen for now. I’ll put it in the oven at eight thirty.”
His gruff words and unwelcoming exterior did not seem to bother her in the least. She wasn’t excessively cheerful, just sweetly calm.
“I’m not sure where the kitchen is,” she said, scrunching her face up and talking like she was admitting that her jeans hid a tail.
He almost smiled at the thought but stopped himself just in time.
He opened the door wider, indicating she could come in. Then he pointed at the door to the dining room and assumed she could figure out the kitchen was on the other side.
For all his looking forward to her coming, he could never get himself to act more welcoming—the way he felt.
Maybe he just liked looking at her, liked seeing her peace and seeing how she was kind to him no matter what he did to her, or...he didn’t know. But she never stopped trying to make small talk with him. He never engaged, even though he’d been rather good at striking up conversations with strangers and charming them, back in the day.
Certainly he hadn’t charmed anyone in quite a long time.
She walked through the dining room, and he didn’t follow her, moving instead to go to the exercise room he had outfitted. Changing his clothes in the small dressing room, he strapped on his boxing gloves.
Boxing didn’t really help him get rid of his pent-up aggression, but it did feel good to hit something. Just, he never really felt better about anything after he was done.
Probably because his issues were more mental than physical.
All mental.
How many times had he heard that baseball was a mental game?
He believed that himself.
After the accident, after everything went down on social media, he allowed himself to dwell on the negative, and...he probably looked pretty nasty to someone like Peyton, who seemed to have if not exactly a cheerful view of the world, at least she didn’t seem to be bothered by anything.
Of course, he was the only thing around that might bother her.
The thought didn’t sit well with him. It wasn’t the kind of person he thought he was going to grow up to be.
He had an immense amount of talent, and he coupled that with a work ethic that few could match, and that was why he had been successful. Anyone would be upset to have it all come crashing down the way it had, through no fault of his own. Happenstance and lies.
He finished working out and went to take a shower, seeing that he had hours to kill until it was time to eat.
He wandered around the house, stared out the window, and finally decided he didn’t have to wait until eight thirty. He could cook it now, and they could eat earlier. There was nothing wrong with that.
