Pitch Perfect: Boys of Summer, Book 1 (25 page)

“What are your superstitions?”

He chewed hard on a chunk of hash brown. “I have one thing. It’s something I’ve done since little league.”

“Lay it on me.” She thought about Tucker and his grape bubble gum and wondered if Miles’s superstition would be as quirky and endearing.

“It’s a bit weird.”

“Aren’t they all? Isn’t that a byproduct of superstition? Wade Boggs ate a full bucket of fried chicken before every game. I’m not totally sure how he didn’t die of a heart attack by thirty-two. But yeah…superstitions are all weird.”

Miles reached into the back pocket of his jeans and withdrew a beat-up leather wallet. From inside he took out a creased, faded baseball card that had obviously been laminated as a last-ditch effort to keep it from falling apart.

“Nolan Ryan?”

“Yup.”

“Good choice. Never a bad call to pick the guy who owns stake in one of your rival teams.” She winked and passed him back the card. “So the card is your superstition?”

“I keep it in my sock when I play.”

“Every game?”

“Every game.”

“Sounds itchy.”

“Nah, you get used to it.”

“So that’s your dirty little secret?”

“That’s it.”

“You need to work on something weirder. Like, Roger Clemens used to wipe his sweat on the Babe Ruth statue at old Yankee Stadium.”

“So I need to be grosser?”

“Grosser about what?” Tucker put his plate down on the other side of Miles and pulled up a chair.

“We’re talking about superstitions,” Emmy explained. “Tell Miles about yours.”

“Is it gross?” Miles asked.

“My dentist thinks so.” He poked a bit of vegetable omelet with his fork, reminding Emmy she still hadn’t touched her pineapple. She popped it into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully while Tucker told Miles about his bubble gum habit.

“We’re trying to figure out Emmy’s superstition. If she has one, she won’t tell me.”

“She listens to Hall and Oates’s ‘Private Eyes’ before she starts any of her warm-ups.”

Emmy stopped chewing, the tart sting of the pineapple filling her mouth and making her cheeks burn. How had Tucker known something about her even she wasn’t aware of?

“I guess I do.”

Miles gave them both an assessing look, as if there was something he was missing—which he was—and trying to put together the pieces. “That’s pretty tame.”

“I’m not exactly a wild child.” Emmy’s gaze landed on Tucker, who had started eating his breakfast. The mischievous glint in his eyes told her he was thinking of all manner of retorts to her statement, none of which he could say with his mouth full and company at the table.

The dining room had begun to fill steadily, and most of the tables were occupied with either players or middle-aged couples. Emmy tried to figure out what might bring one couple in their sixties to Cleveland, Ohio, let alone multiple couples.

Under the table something hard brushed her foot, and she jolted, causing coffee to slosh against the inside of her mug. She felt fantastically stupid when she realized the touch had been Tucker’s foot. He didn’t pull away. Instead, the arch of his foot shimmied higher, making her calf tingle.

She took a sip of her coffee and pretended she wasn’t playing footsie with a grown man at eight in the morning. And she tried not to let it show on her face how much she wanted to do it every single morning from then until forever.

“You ready for tonight?” she asked Tucker, slipping her foot out of her shoe and into his lap. His knee twitched, likely not expecting her to respond so boldly. The table bounced, spilling his orange juice onto the white tablecloth.

“I think this table might be broken.” Miles gave the round surface a test rattle. “It’s super wobbly or something.”

“Yeah. Weird.” Tucker closed his thighs together, trapping Emmy’s foot near his crotch. He wasn’t hard, but he was on his way. She stroked her toes upwards against the inner seam of his pants, and he arched a brow at her. She couldn’t quite read the gesture, if he was challenging her to go on or wasn’t sure why she was going so far.

Her foot stilled.

“I’m good to go,” he said. “And with Emmy’s help I’m sure I’ll go all the way.”

“Complete game? You’re calling it?” Miles looked mildly impressed, even though a complete game wasn’t the most dazzling accomplishment. Emmy suspected he didn’t think Tucker had it in him anymore.

Tucker dropped his hand to his lap and gave Emmy’s foot a squeeze, brushing the pads of her toes with his thumb. “Yeah. I’m pretty confident.”

The Cleveland Indians ballpark had a unique feature that drove Tucker nuts on the mound. Instead of walls of advertising or the blue or green padding favored by other stadiums, the Indians had installed lowered fan seating into caged areas next to the dugout.

He could deal with the bored-looking expressions of the opposing team, but his attention got diverted by the fans who were less inclined to watch with polite disinterest. The seats might have been astronomically expensive, but the fans who could afford them were among the most diehard, and they tended to be the most distracting.

Whoever came up with the idea of putting fans on the same level as the players was an idiot. Sure, it was a great way to sell tickets, but the architect obviously knew nothing about the painstaking effort that went into keeping calm on the mound.

Tucker chewed his grape Bubblicious and stared down the batter, an aging player he’d seen a lot through the years and who’d switched teams once a year over the last few seasons. In the game it was referred to as the journeyman phase of a player’s career. Shuffled from team to team until they were too old or too beaten down to be of value to anyone.

It was rare for a player to quit on their own. Most men held out until they were falling apart at the seams and someone half their age sat them down in a small white room and told them the time had come. Tucker wanted to think he’d know when to call a spade a spade and retire gracefully before he was forty, but he honestly didn’t know.

Wasn’t his elbow giving a sign he should have left the game? Had he taken the clue then? No. He’d gone through a painful surgery and had his own tendons looped through his bones. He’d endured a year of hard, torturous physical therapy, and for what? He was on top of his game again and everyone knew it, but he had the GM breathing down his neck, telling him it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped and he was shipped off to God knows where.

The old batter on the mound held his bat over his head like a Japanese fighter’s sword. It was a flashy batting stance, one that hadn’t changed in all the years and all the cities Tucker had seen him play. Tucker had a mental catalogue of all the stupid batting stances he’d seen, but this was one of his favorites. It had panache and was in no way helpful to getting more leverage on his swing, as evidenced by the .189 batting average the guy currently had.

Tucker could have struck him out with a T-ball bar.

Alex flashed one finger, calling for a straight-up fastball. Given the age and flagging skill of the batter, it was a good call. A fastball tended to be irresistible to once-great men, since it was such an easy shot right down the middle. The problem for a lot of them was they tended to rely on old instincts rather than adapting to their new, reduced skill.

So they would swing when they
used
to be able to hit a fastball rather than when they should.

Tucker drew up, dove forward and unleashed the ball straight down the middle for a perfect strike. If he’d been throwing at the pitching target, it would have sailed through one of the cutouts without touching the edges.

As predicted, the batter swung too late, and the ball whizzed by him and into Alex’s glove.

Strike.

The Cleveland crowd booed, but Tucker was buoyed by it. If an away crowd was booing, it meant he was doing something right.

And the longer he did something right, the longer it took for the other shoe to drop.

Chapter Thirty-One

Emmy sat next to Mike, the pitching coach, with the new back-up catcher, Pablo, on her other side. She tried to watch the game with idle, professional interest, but was failing hard. She was going through sunflower seeds at an alarming rate, the little pile of shells at her feet growing larger with each passing inning.

“That little move he does, pulling his arm back,” Mike said, jabbing her with his elbow. “He never used to do that, and I didn’t teach it to him.”

Emmy nodded, spitting another shell on the ground. “He was favoring it too heavily after the surgery, relying more on his wrist instead of using the power in his arm. That’s why he was using the knuckleball. It relies on the hand.” She demonstrated by flicking her fingers out to mirror the pushing movement of a traditional knuckleball. “But with his new elbow there was no reason for him to avoid his upper arm.”

“Right.”

“So I told him to suck it up and stop throwing like a gimpy old man. Otherwise his surgery would have been for nothing.”

Slapping his knee, Mike gave a hearty chuckle, his round belly jiggling under the taut fabric of his uniform. “Damn, girl. Where have you been hiding from us all these years?”

“Chicago,” she answered.

“Well, if we can’t get any decent players from them, I’m mighty glad we managed to get something useful from their club.” He slapped her hard on the back, jolting her forward.

Emmy kicked her legs out in front of her, stretching them out and crossing them at the ankle to mirror the gesture most of the other men in the dugout preferred. Spitting her seed shells to the side to avoid depositing them on her lap, she returned her attention to Tucker, who was in his seventh inning. He was well on his way towards making good on his promise to Miles, that he’d complete a full game.

She kept her face impassive, watching his mechanics instead of checking out his ass, but he wasn’t making it easy on her. He wore the tightest pants on the damn team.

But the trainer in her was bursting with pride over how well he was doing. He’d taken her suggestions to heart and was proving to be an even better player than he’d been for years. The season was winding down, but she was hearing whispers in the media. They were saying Cy Young.

Tucker had won the award twice before, but that had been years ago, in his prime. It wasn’t unheard of for aging pitchers to get the prize, but it certainly wasn’t common. And no one had won it with such a large gap of years in between. He’d be a first.

She wasn’t sure how closely Tucker followed the MLB rumor mill—Emmy had the bad practice of keeping a few blogs in her browser’s RSS feed—but he had to know his improvement of skills hadn’t been overlooked by the general public. He was becoming something great again, and she’d played a part. She didn’t want to give herself too much credit, but she
had
helped him. And he was continuing to use her advice, which meant he respected her opinion as a trainer.

It meant a lot to her that he cared about her as a coworker and advisor and not just as a woman he’d wanted to sleep with. Had he only been listening to her to get in her pants, he could have stopped after the first few games. But here they were, months later, and he’d now
successfully
gotten into her pants and continued to take her professional advice.

She spit more seeds on the floor and repressed a grin.

One of the power hitters from the Indians was batting fourth—the cleanup man—and when he got to the plate, all the guys in the dugout leaned forward simultaneously. The guy was a mountain, pushing six-four and easily two hundred and eighty pounds. Modern audiences tended to underestimate the big guys because they couldn’t run fast and didn’t
look
like athletes. But Babe Ruth didn’t look like an athlete either, and he was so good he had become a legend.

She didn’t think the big batter for the Indians was likely to make it to legendary status—not many players would—but she knew he was a force to be reckoned with in the here and now. Already he’d scored a one-run homer off Tucker in the third inning, so the pitcher would be out to prove something.

It didn’t matter how many times a pitcher struck a man out, it would always be the hits he remembered and fought to improve on. That’s what made a pitcher great, but it also made them irritating, mule-headed buffoons sometimes.

Emmy cupped her chin and propped her elbow on her knee, watching to see what would come of this matchup. In this, the third meet-up between the two, all eyes were waiting to see if the batter would break the one-one tie, or if Tucker would keep it balanced.

With the regular season winding down, the Felons had a tenuous hold on the number-one spot in their division, and a loss to the Indians wouldn’t be any help.

The Indians were third in their own division, and barring any miracles, they wouldn’t be making it to the postseason. Emmy wasn’t even sure what kind of miracle would be required to bring the flagging team into a winning position.

But they were out to prove they could win. Starting with the Felons. Starting with this game.

They were playing like they were already in the damn playoffs and the Felons defense was trying to keep up. They’d gone in assuming it was going to be an easy win, but the Indians weren’t going down without a fight.