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Maverick squeezes my hand in acknowledgment, so I keep going. “I always wondered what my mom would think of me. If she’d be proud. You won’t have to wonder that, though.”
“I might,” he murmurs.
“No, you won’t. I know you and your mom bicker about school and baseball, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t proud. I’ve seen her in the stands at your games, screaming her head off.”
He nods, not looking convinced. “Yeah.”
“She’s here now,” I continue. “Spend time with her, and with your dad and Lilly. No matter what happens, you won’t regret that. And if—if you do lose her—” I pause to get a handle on my own emotions. “I promise you can handle it. You’re capable of so much more than you give yourself credit for.”
My final words settle around us. I wait for Maverick’s response, watching as he puts our hands in his lap and plays idly with my fingers. “I’m wondering if I should move home for the semester,” he says finally. “Leave the team, commute to class.”
“Could you still be drafted if you did that?”
“There’s no way I’d still be drafted as high as I should be, but I can enter it as long as I complete my coursework.” Meeting my eyes, he adds, “It just feels fucking stupid and selfish to be off playing baseball when my mom’s sick like this. Look what happened tonight—I’ve been so focused on getting ready for the season since Christmas that I had no idea she was getting worse. I don’t want to be at a road game in Nebraska or some place and get a call that she’s died, and I wasn’t there.”
A cold gust of air blows through, and I disentangle my hand from his so I can zip my coat up to my chin. “Did you talk to your parents about coming home?”
“No. I wanted to ask you what you thought.”
Touched, I take his hand again. My head falls onto his shoulder, and Maverick leans his on top of mine. “If that’s your instinct, I think you should follow it.”
“Leaving the team right now really would set me back in the draft,” he says quietly. “I have no other plan. I can’t be an accountant. I don’t know shit about accounting.”
“You’ve been studying it for almost three years. You have to know something.”
“You’d think, but no.”
“Then change your major.”
“In spring of junior year?” Maverick lets out a sigh, his shoulder rising and falling beneath me. “I have no idea what I’d change it to.”
I gasp like I’ve had a brilliant idea. “Biochem!”
He throws his head back and laughs—loudly, genuinely. I grin back, pleased with myself. “Sorry, but you’re alone on that one. Just watching you do that shit gives me a migraine.”
“I’ll help you if you change your mind.” I squeeze his hand before growing serious again. “You have all the time in the world to figure out a career. You might not have that kind of time to…”
Maverick is nodding, hearing the thought I can’t bear to say out loud. “Yeah,” he says, his voice husky with emotion. I curl further into his side, and he wraps his arms tightly around me. “Yeah. I don’t think I do.”
Chapter Ten
Maverick
“Wow,”saysGrant,lookingaround my sparse apartment bedroom. “I can’t believe it.”
Neither can I.
I’m not moving out completely. I’ll still be driving to campus for classes every weekday, and there might be times when I need to stay the night. The furniture is still here, but almost everything else is gone. There is a pair of shoes on the floor of the closet and one t-shirt hanging up. The console table that housed my TV and XBOX is empty. The books and spiral notebooks that usually live on my desk are already in the car.
We got home from a road trip two days ago. We lost the Friday night game, but won on both Saturday and Sunday. The last game—mylast game—was exactly the way I wanted to go out: I got on base every at-bat, hit a home run, and made a tough play on a hard grounder. After we shook hands with the other team, I crouched down beside home plate, kissed my fingertips, and pressed them to the rubber.
Saying goodbye felt wrong.
But so did sitting on a charter bus, surrounded by guys talking about sex and alcohol, knowing that every mile we traveled was a mile further from my sick mother.
“So what do you think?” Grant asks me, taking a pull of his Gatorade. Despite the cold outside, there’s a light sheen of sweat on his face from trekking up and down the stairs. “Are you still doing the draft?”
“Yeah,” I say, although I’m not sure. It depends how things go with Mom, I guess. I look at him and shrug. “Not sure what else I’d do.”
