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I heard the screech of tires.
The lights blinded me.
“Maggie!”
Then everything went black.
But I wouldn’t tell him any of that, so instead, I told him only part of the truth.
“I had just finished college,” I started, leaning back on my hands as I looked out toward the horizon where the water met the sky. “I didn’t have a job lined up like everyone else, but I knew I wanted to take photos of the world. To help me take my mind off job hunting, my dad took me to a Cougars game.” I smiled over at Tommy and noticed him watching me intently like he truly cared about what I had to say. “I brought my camera with me and just so happened to get the picture of Adam Steel when he threw his perfect game that year. I had posted it on my social media and tagged the Cougars. They reached out the next day and hired me.”
“You’re the one that took that picture of Adam?” Tommy asked me. I wasn’t surprised that he had seen it. It was used on the cover of ESPN The Magazine that year. It had been like a dream to see my name printed below that picture. My mom had it framed and hung it up on one of the living room walls. I pulled my knees up to my chest and nodded at him in affirmation. “You definitely have a special eye.”
“What about you?” I asked, leaning my head against my knees as I watched him. Every experience I’d had with Tommy Mikals defied the image I had had of him in my head. “How did it all start with baseball?”
Tommy let out a long breath and lay back on his elbows, as he looked up at the sky and the stars that were twinkling down on us. His face looked conflicted as he rolled his lower lip between his teeth and he thought about my question. I watched him wrestle with whatever was going on inside him before he finally spoke.
“My dad put a bat in my hand at two years old. When it first started, it was something we bonded over. He taught me how to throw and field and took me to my first game back home in California. But by the time I was fourteen, I was on a baseball field more than I was in school. I thought it was something I wanted up until recently.”
“What do you mean?”
“Baseball’s brought me more terrible things in the past few years of my life than good. It makes me wonder if any of it was worth it.”
I had no idea how to respond to that. Everything about Tommy was confident young hotshot who had the entire world at his feet. The man sitting next to me right then looked like he was ready to hang everything up and never touch a baseball again. He looked like he really did believe that baseball had basically ruined his life. There were layers of pain etched in every hard line of his body and the way he held tightly onto his knees.
The strained look on his face made me want nothing more than to pull the megawatt Tommy Mikals smile back onto his face. I wanted to erase all of the pain that he was feeling. It was an odd feeling to want to make someone else happy other than myself, but it felt like heavy pressure weighing on my chest that was begging to be released.
“Have you dived into the Chicago pizza debate yet?”
And there was the smile that I missed, mixed with a sense of relief to be changing the subject.
“I’ve only tried Lou’s so far.”
I leaned my head back and groaned. “Lou’s? You haven’t even gotten to Southside yet?”
Tommy’s smile grew as he watched me. “Maybe you’ll just have to take me sometime.”
“Me take you on a date? I didn’t think that’s how this worked.” And there was that conflicted look back on his face. Pain flickered across his eyes, and I filed that moment away to dissect later. It was clear that he was struggling with the fact that we were in this situation at all. “How about tomorrow? You guys are off, right?”
The strained look vanished like it had never been there. That smile that I couldn’t seem to get enough of replaced it, bringing back the happiness and confidence that normally lived on his face. It made me wonder if this version of Tommy was the real one and the version the media knew was the image they’d created of him.
As I sat next to him, waiting to see if he’d want to widen his pizza tastebuds, I found myself forgetting about the fear I’d felt the day before from how Tommy had made me feel. Instead, all I could think about was the puzzle of this man. He seemed to be more than the professional athlete who liked to party too much and enjoyed his time with women. That was beginning to seem far from the actual truth of who he really was. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be alarming that the folder with all of my feelings had slowly been pulled forward toward the front of my mind without me even noticing.
“Can I pick you up at six?” Tommy asked me, and I nodded, excited to have the opportunity to spend more time with him and unravel who he really was.
Tommy
Iwoke up to another text from my dad the morning after our win on Opening Day. He hadn’t even told me congratulations. Instead, he critiqued the ball I had missed up the middle in the bottom of the fifth that had put the other team up. Apparently, he thought my first step hadn’t been hard enough and that was the reason why I hadn’t wrangled in a missile of a hit. I didn’t bother giving him a response, but the anger that had begun stirring inside me the moment I rolled over in bed to read that seemed like it was going to come to a head if I didn’t do something about it.
Between that and my date with Maggie, I had too many feelings floating around inside me to sit still today. If I did, one of them would consume me, and I wasn’t sure which one would be worse. So I sent Jamil a text and asked him to meet me at the clubhouse for some swings. He responded right away that he’d be there in thirty minutes. His willingness to be down for any practice session I wanted was quickly becoming one of my favorite things about him.
When I pulled into the player parking lot, his car was already there and he was nowhere in sight. I punched the code into the door of the entrance to the clubhouse and pulled it open. Jamil was setting up inside the batting cage for us when I walked in.
“Hey, man!” he called, the biggest smile on his face. “How are things with Maggie?”
I groaned. Jamil was the last person to be polite and not bring up all of the circus that was happening in the media. The talk around me and Maggie hadn’t slowed down since that first photo had been posted from the club. We hadn’t even had any public appearances to add fuel to the fire. It seemed like people liked the idea of the two of us together and were clinging on to it with all their might. Two new articles had been pushed out into the news cycle this morning with close “sources” talking about how Maggie and I had clicked during our first week together and couldn’t deny the attraction between us. It smelled of Monica’s doing. At this rate, it would be a full-time job trying to keep up with the narrative the PR team was pushing out.
“You guys must have really hit it off at the club that night. I was pretty buzzed, but I do remember how you couldn’t take your eyes off her.” Jamil tossed me my bat from my locker. “But it seems like the media is really running with this whole thing.”
