A week.
She got the hotel a week before I landed in Arizona. She’d done it every year since my first winning season. Janice. Nice lady. Ass like a pear and God… what else? Nice hair, I guessed. Divorcee. Her ex got the kids for that week, or she got a sitter. She made sure of it. She met me at the field. I signed her shirt. Met her at the same hotel. She was waiting. Same every year. Every winning year, it was boom boom boom. The year I hit .225 between opening day and the All-Star break? When I couldn’t remove my glove from my ass before July fourth? That year we’d changed something critical, and there I was. Schmuck of the century.
So now what was I supposed to do?
Pace around. Not worry. Tonight was Joe Westlake’s Spring Training Dinner, and she was going. I wanted her there at the same time as I didn’t want to go.
I texted Vivian because I had to. The only thing that calmed me down was putting something sexy in her lap.
I can’t wait to get my mouth on your cunt tonight
Guilt for leading her on. Relief that I was being honest. One text could be both. I didn’t know how to exist inside my own contradictions.
twenty-nine
Vivian
We didn’t have an expiration date.
But we did.
I spent weeks in a state of perpetual soreness. I’d never been sore like that, and if someone had told me it was the most pleasurable feeling in the world, I wouldn’t have believed them. But it was. I walked around school gingerly every day and went to his house every night to get sore all over again and started over the next morning.
I found myself in the hallways, carrying a stack of books and stopped dead, looking at some random corner, imagining the flick of his tongue on me, hearing his voice in my ear. Waiting for my phone to buzz.
I can’t wait to get my mouth on your cunt tonight
Is that from Hamlet?
Shakespeare didn’t have enough words to describe how delicious you are He’d gotten filthier as the weeks wore on, until the words cunt and cock didn’t make me flinch anywhere above the waist.
I got on birth control, and without the extra step, we wound our bodies together even more easily. He was considerately merciless, bringing me to orgasm repeatedly, pounding me insanely with a dick that never got tired or worn out, and keeping me up late talking about the silly nonsense people talk about between kisses.
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, a wrapped basket of fruit showed up at the office. Mostly apples. The kids went nuts when he sent a dozen pineapples once. Iris would never have a vitamin C deficiency her entire life with the amount of fruit she ate. Jim and I peeled them in the faculty lounge, and every kid in the school came by the library to have a piece. I thanked him by screaming his name at night, every night.
And the clock wore on.
The days on the calendar didn’t slow down for us.
His workouts got longer, and he came to me sweaty and sore. The smell of him. Testosterone and musk and the leather of a worn-out ball. He was rougher after a workout. More passionate. Less talking. More bending, twisting, grabbing. He growled lower and fucked harder. I couldn’t come enough to satisfy him.
But if I didn’t see him right after a workout, if he dressed and we went out… if he was showered and shaved and ready… he was not just powerful and strong but commanding and purposeful. I trusted him, and even as I took pleasure in that, I called myself a fool. Because I knew what was coming. His workouts weren’t getting harder because he had nowhere to go.
“They look good this year,” Jim said, handing me my crappy black coffee.
I was wiped out, as usual. Sore *. Knees a little rubbed from being on them. Overtired. High as a kite. “Yeah.”
“You might have caught yourself a winner.”
“I don’t think I caught anything,” I said. “He’s going to Arizona in a few days.”
“You going to the Freeway Exhibition?”
“Yes.” I rolled the coffee between my palms.
Every year, I looked forward to the game in the middle of the practice season. Every year, my hometown team played the team two hours south on the 5 freeway, and every year, one team creamed the other before they both went off to polish up for Opening Day.
This year, I didn’t look forward to it as much because it wasn’t about me sitting with Dad all summer and screaming at the TV. It wasn’t about sitting in the bleacher seats a few times during the summer. It was about Dash and me and what I could or couldn’t expect from him.
It shouldn’t have been a big deal all things considered. He’d come back.
“Right?” I said in a moment of insecurity before the season-opening dinner. “I mean, you live here. You’re not disappearing into a black void and never coming back.”
I’d been trying to talk about where we were going during the whole car ride and gotten my nerve up way too late.
“I don’t want you to worry about that,” he said, pulling up to the valet.