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“Of course I fucking hate it. I don’t want some idiot reporter prying into my life. Or yours. It’s the off-season, I’m supposed to be soaking in the jacuzzi and smoking cigars.”
“Cigars?” She wrinkled her nose.
“Not literally. The point is, I’m supposed to be relaxing, not putting on some kind of show.”
“Well, we do work well together as co-parents.” She had to point that out, since she took pride in that fact. “That part’s not a show.”
He surged to his feet and paced to the mantelpiece at one end of the living room. She’d filled it with framed family photos and quite a few shots of him on the field. If someone didn’t know better, they might think this house belonged to a still-married couple. “I know we do. But it’s no one’s fucking business.”
“We could be role models. Like Divorced Barbie and Ken.”
He whirled around. “Are you saying you’re willing to do this?”
“That was a joke. No one aspires to be divorced. But…” She broke off and looked down at her hot chocolate. Maybe she needed to think about this more. Draw up a list of pros and cons. It had already formed in her mind. Finances and career benefits on one side, family disruption on the other.
As a baseball family, they were already used to disruption. She knew the kids would adapt. And she’d get some international travel opportunities out of it. She could work from anywhere. She’d just have to find a portable drafting table and bring along cases of her favorite pencils and other tools.
But all pros and cons aside, one fact kept rising above the others. This was the one she kept coming back to, the one that had inspired her statement that she was in favor of this change.
If Billy was in Japan, there would be months when she didn’t see him. Maybe she could finally eject him from her overly-romantic heart once and for all. Maybe she could finally, genuinely, move on.
“It’s just one reporter?” she asked him.
“I think so. Maybe a photographer too. But just one media outlet. An exclusive, that kind of thing.”
That made sense. You could control the message a lot better with one reporter at a time.
“When would this be?”
“Lord, I don’t know. Whenever Pete sets it up. Maybe next month, to take advantage of the holiday season and all.”
“No,” she said firmly. “Nothing during the holidays. The kids will be home and things will get crazy. They can either come before the school break or after the kids go back to school. Let’s keep the holidays media-free.”
“Fair enough.” He walked over to stand in front of her. “Just so I’m understanding, you’re giving the green light to this, yeah?”
“What do you want?”
“I want to see where it goes,” he said after a brief pause. “I don’t want to be counted out because of the past.”
She caught an undertone that made her wonder if he was referring to more than the Japanese team.
“Then I’m in, too.”
She let out a breath, feeling as if she was pounding a nail into the coffin of her stubborn romantic dreams. She and Billy were done, she knew that. In her mind, she knew that. It had been her choice. She’d suggested that their only harmonious path forward would be as an ex-couple. But her damn heart was slow to catch up. Not to mention her libido.
She still wanted him, just as much as she had since the age of seventeen, when he’d first asked her to the movies. That fact made her absolutely furious with herself.
“It’s a good career move, and the boys and I will work with it. Annika always talks about Japan, so maybe she can bring them to visit a couple times.”
She caught his wince, and suppressed a smile. Annika liked to keep Billy on his toes. She considered it a service to the family, making sure that he was very aware she kept an eye on things. Lord knew their father didn’t bother. He was too busy with his painting.
“We can talk about that down the road,” Billy murmured.
“Fair.”
“Do you think…?” He stopped and shoved his hands in the pockets of his sleek black trousers. “Will the boys…do you think they’ll be angry? Forget me? Anything like that, I won’t go.”
“Billy.” Impulsively, she put a hand on his arm, then immediately dropped it. The feel of his hard baseball-honed forearm was too much for her. “You’ll be FaceTiming every day like you do now, right? All those online video games you play with Zack, the Wii, the whatever else. They’ll get to go on Japanese adventures, and you’ll be back here during the winter.”
