Pitch Perfect: Boys of Summer, Book 1 (10 page)

“You can do this,” he whispered. “You know how to do this.”

It was too bad his brain didn’t quite believe the words his mouth was saying. Was a two-seam fastball the same as riding a bicycle? Could he simply fall back into the habit when it had been years since he’d thrown one properly?

Letting out another breath through clenched teeth, Tucker set himself up, eyed the target and dove forward, releasing the ball. He didn’t need to look to know it was bad. He’d felt the failure of the pitch the moment it left his hands. He’d tried to push it forward like he would a knuckleball, but pushing the ball didn’t help with a fastball.

The ball glanced off the target and rolled pitifully to the end of the bullpen green.

Tucker sighed, rotated his shoulders and neck, then picked up another ball.

He would get this if it killed him.

Emmy felt like a stranger in what had once been her home.

U.S. Cellular Field had been her day-in-day-out life for four years, and she knew every locker room and corridor like the back of her hand. She could have navigated the hallways blindfolded, but it wasn’t her house anymore.

She stood outside the home team locker room, no longer entitled or allowed to enter. Her old office was there. The supply closet and the equipment she’d once used almost daily.

Now she got the crappy second-rate visiting team offices and the equipment that might make Jasper cry more than he had in Kansas. Their visit to Detroit had been like taking a break in heaven. All the equipment the Tigers used in the visitor clubhouse was as nice as that used in the regular home suite. Jasper had to be restrained from sending them flowers.

They’d been spoiled.

The door to the clubhouse opened, startling Emmy enough for her to let out a little yip.

“Hey, rock star.” Riley Hanson, the Sox star first baseman was wearing nothing but a towel, showing off a very well-muscled chest. “How’s life in the Bay treating you, Em?”

Emmy was accustomed to ignoring men in towels. Nudity went hand in hand with working around athletes. Riley wasn’t shy, and there was no sense in her getting flustered. She’d seen him way more naked during her four years with the team than he was right then.

“Hey, Riley. It’s good. Good. Really good.”

“Sure, yeah. But is it good?” He winked at her, big blue eyes flashing.

Emmy smiled. “How you been?”

“Good.” He laughed, and she couldn’t help but follow suit. It was nice to know some things didn’t change, even though she was now banned from the inner circle of the Sox. She’d made her choice, and it was for the best. She had to remind herself of that.

“How’s the new me?”

“Jason?” Riley shrugged. “He’s not as good as you were. And some days I think Mitch might strangle him for missing the obvious stuff. But that’s life. You know how Mitchy is about change.” He rested a hand on the towel, absently tightening it around his waist. “Anyway, speaking of the old man, he needs me to have my knee looked at.”

“Still taking nasty slides?”

“You know me.”

Emmy smiled and considered giving him a hug, but given his state of undress it might be unwise. “Good to see you, Riley.”

“Hey,” he said, halfway down the hall. “Nice piece in the
Sun-Times
today.” He gave her a thumbs-up and almost lost his towel in the process.

What piece in the
Sun-Times
?

Emmy waited until Riley was gone before turning and ducking back into the visitor’s clubhouse. Amongst the copies of
Sports Illustrated
and
Baseball Digest
was that morning’s copy of the
Chicago Sun-Times
. She discarded the world news and local interest, dumped arts and entertainment on the floor and went right to sports like her father every Sunday.

Her own face was looking back at her, the smiling first-day photo she’d had taken for her Felons press release. There was a second inset photo of her, a candid snapshot from her days as the Sox assistant A.T., laughing at something one of the players was saying.

She was too dumbfounded by seeing her picture in the paper to absorb the headline at first.
Breaking the Big League Glass Ceiling
.

Simon Howell’s byline was beneath it, and a lump formed in her throat.

Her vision blurred, and she couldn’t properly focus on the entire content of the article, but the best she could tell was Simon was singing her praises as a new feminist icon in the sports industry. The first female head athletic trainer of any major league sports team, he pointed out, and an icon for young women everywhere.

It should have been sweet. It should have been flattering. She should have felt something other than a blinding white rage that overcame her.

He wrote an entire article about her without telling her.

The whole goddamn thing was about her, and there were no quotes
from
her. There were, however, an awful lot from Cassandra Dano at ESPN. She’d met Cassandra a handful of times at different sports dinners, but they weren’t exactly pals. The leggy reporter sounded like a big fan, telling Simon about how Emmy was changing the world one elbow sling at a time.

The fuck?

There were quotes from players on the Sox she’d worked with. Quotes from coaches and managers. And there it was, near the bottom, a quote from goddamn Tucker Lloyd.

We like her,
the quote said.
I like her. Do I think she’s different because she’s a woman? No. Do I think she’s good for the team? Yes. She’s good for us.

Good for us.

I like her.

More importantly, though…what the hell was Tucker doing talking to Simon about her?

She lowered the paper and looked around the room, hoping something there might offer her a little insight. All she saw was Tucker’s duffel bag and a pair of street shoes tucked into his locker.

Emmy clutched the paper to her chest and marched out of the clubhouse, up through the dugout and into the open air. It wasn’t until she hit the field that she realized it was still cool outside and she was only wearing her uniform polo. When she crossed her arms, the paper crinkled under her armpit, and she jogged across the field towards the visitor’s bullpen.

The steady
whap
sound grew louder as she approached, first silence, then the smacking sound of a hard-thrown ball hitting something that wasn’t a glove. The ball-in-glove sound had its own specific, lovely cadence. This was something different.

She got to the gate leading into the bullpen and stopped.

Tucker was standing on the makeshift mound with his back to her, staring down a pitching target at the end of the green like it was his worst enemy. He set up, huffed a breath, then released his pitch.

It knocked the corner of the target, nowhere near the strike zone.

Tucker growled and announced, “Fuck you too, you goddamn piece of shit.”

“You know, it didn’t actually move,” she pointed out, the newspaper rustling in the wind.

He jumped and turned towards her, a nervous expression on his face. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to see you walk the invisible batter.”

His shoulders slumped, and his frown deepened. Emmy had the distinct feeling she’d hit him where it hurt without trying to.

“I was teasing,” she said.

“Yeah, except you’re right. If I keep pitching like this, they’re going to banish me to the farm team.” He tossed the ball up and caught it in the same hand. His long fingers made it look positively miniscule. Emmy sucked back a sigh and reminded herself she was there because she was angry, not because she wanted to think wanton things about Tucker’s long fingers.

“I have to ask you something.”

“If it’s to teach you how to pitch, you’d have better luck asking the groundskeeper.”

“Ha-ha.” Emmy rolled her eyes and didn’t pretend to smile. She held the newspaper up and pressed it against the chain-link fence. The pages didn’t rest flat, their edges ruffling in the late-morning wind.

“What’s that?” He dropped the ball into a nearby bag and approached the fence, squinting in the sunlight to see what she was showing him. “An article about you?”

Emmy stopped holding up the paper and glowered at him. “Don’t say that like you have no idea.”

“Why would I have any idea?”

She lifted the paper again and recited his own quote back to him with a hint of faux masculinity in her voice, affecting his Midwestern softness. When she looked back up, he was grinning at her, and her heart might as well have exploded.

“Do you really think I sound like that?”

“You’re sort of missing the point there, Thirteen.”

Tucker unlocked the gate and opened the door, swinging it in towards him. “Come in here and let me have a look.”

Emmy hesitated, clinging to the paper and staring at him through the open gate.

“I won’t bite,” he assured her.

That wasn’t what worried Emmy so much. She was more afraid of her own desire to take a nibble out of him.

Must keep tongue and teeth to myself.

He smiled again, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep any promises she’d made to herself when he played dirty like that.

Chapter Fourteen

He should have left her outside.

Keeping a cage between them seemed like a smart thing, given his penchant for wanting to touch her. She must have been aware of it too, because she kept an arm’s length between them when she handed the paper off and quickly went to sit on the bench. She picked up one of his wayward balls and tossed it from hand to hand.

Tucker flattened the rumpled paper and read through the article. He was apparently going too slow for Emmy’s taste because her knees began to bounce, and he was barely halfway done when she got to her feet and started to pace nearby.

“I don’t know what you’re so bent out of shape over. It’s a really flattering article.”

Emmy’s cheeks turned red, but not in the cute way he was used to. Her neck and ears flushed a pink hue as well, reminding him of a cartoon character who was about to have steam pour out of her ears.

“You’re
quoted
in it.” She tapped the paper, though nowhere near his actual quote. “You can’t pretend you didn’t know about this.”

“I had no idea.”

“Then why are you quoted in it?”

“Simon interviewed me on opening day, remember? He asked some questions about you. I had no idea we were still on record. I thought we were shooting the shit and he wanted to know how you were fitting in.” He folded the paper up and handed it back to her. “I really don’t know why this has you so upset. Have you read some of the stuff they write about me?”

“That’s not the point. You’re a star, Tucker, they’re supposed to write about you. I’m nobody. My job is to stretch out muscles, ice wounds and make sure you idiots don’t royally screw up your multimillion-dollar contracts.”

“You’re not nobody, Emmy.”

“I’m nobody that deserves a two-page newspaper story. I sure as hell shouldn’t be written up in a market I don’t even work in anymore. This isn’t good for me.”

Tucker crouched down and picked up a baseball, not sure what to do with his hands when they were empty and she was off-limits. He wrestled with the notion that maybe he should give her a hug, but he wasn’t sure where that registered on the scale as far as bad and good ideas went. Holding a baseball took the notion off the table entirely.

“Why?” he asked plainly. He couldn’t wrap his head around her reaction to the article, or why she was mad at him for being an unwitting party to it.

“Imagine you had a famous father. Like an actor.”

“Okay.”

“Now imagine you wanted to be a part of the same industry he was famous for.”

“Sure.”

“And say you work your ass off to succeed. Envision the
years
it took you to be taken seriously as your own person in that industry.”

The little bulb went off over Tucker’s head, and he caught up to what Emmy was suggesting. “Oh.”

“It’s bad enough he mentions my dad three times. What’s worse is the number of times he points out I’m a woman.”

“Well…you are a woman.”

“I know.”

“So…”

“My doing this job isn’t about me being a woman. I got this job because I’m
good
at it.”

“No one is claiming you aren’t. We know you’re good. Didn’t my quote say as much?”

“People reading this article aren’t going to be thinking about that. They’re going to read this and say,
She got the job because she’s a woman.
When the God’s honest truth is I probably had to work ten times harder to get it because I
don’t
have a cock.”

She stopped speaking instantly and clapped a hand over her mouth.

“Don’t get shy now,” Tucker said. “It’s not like I’ve never heard the word before. And for the record, having a cock is usually pretty detrimental to all those of us who do have them. Little prick does all the thinking for us sometimes.”