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There were a few perks to my job, I had to admit.
He’s hot, I mouthed at Olivia. She nodded emphatically in response. The two of us couldn’t deny that we definitely appreciated the eye candy we got to stare at every day at work. It would be a shame not to appreciate beauty when it was walking right past you in a pinstriped uniform with sweat glistening on its muscular body.
I kept my camera lens on him as the next player came up to take some practice swings. Tommy took off his hat to wipe at some sweat that had accumulated on his forehead, revealing a head of perfectly messy brown hair. It should be illegal for a man to look that good during physical exercise.
The crack of a wooden bat hitting a ball echoed again around the stadium, and I watched through my lens as Tommy turned to look in my direction. His eyes widened like he was watching a car crash in slow motion, and then I realized he was looking right at me.
“Maggie!” I heard Olivia yell. “Protect the camera!” I glanced up to see a foul ball sailing toward me, and I had barely enough time to dive out of the way, camera in hand. My shoulder took most of the fall; a bruise would most likely be there tomorrow. But I luckily kept my camera from hitting the ground and myself from being demolished by a baseball.
“You okay?”
Standing over me was Mr. GQ Model himself. Of course I had to notice that his eyes were the brightest blue I’d ever seen. It was like I was trapped in a trance, unable to look away from his face. His smile reached all the way up to his eyes, and it felt like if I looked directly at it, I’d be blinded. All of the air felt like it had been sucked from my lungs as I stared up at him. After a few seconds passed where I had yet to respond to his question, he raised a worried eyebrow.
As I realized that he was probably wondering if I had a serious head injury, I quickly fumbled around with my camera and reached up to place my hand in the one he had extended out toward me, letting him pull me to my feet. He yanked me upward as if I were as light as a feather, practically sending me flying face-first back into the ground.
“You okay?” he repeated, since I hadn’t answered him the first time. This time, his voice had softened as if he realized I was struggling to form a coherent sentence. His eyes seemed to search my entire face, looking for any signs that I had been injured. If I had known I was going to lose all dignity today in front of one of the most attractive men I’d ever seen, I wouldn’t have run from my apartment to avoid missing the bus. I nodded, not trusting that I would open my mouth only for no sound to come out. There was no need to embarrass myself any further. I’m not sure why I did it, but I found myself squeezing his hand to reassure him that I was fine and was surprised that he squeezed it back. The corners of his eyes squinted as he gave me a closed-lip smile. The moment had to have lasted a minute at most, but it felt like an eternity with the two of us standing there before he let go. Tommy started to walk backward, his eyes still on mine, before he turned to jog back to his position.
“Smooth,” Olivia told me after Tommy was far enough away. I flipped her off behind the screen of my camera.
The head coach called the team to pick up the stray balls, which was Olivia’s and my cue to walk onto the field to get some casual pictures of the guys. Most of the older players that knew us posed, hoping to get some new shots for their social media.
“Maggie!” Jamil waved at me as he tossed a few baseballs in from the outfield. I waved back at him, laughing as he struck a pose with one of the outfielders and motioned for me to take a picture. When I pulled my face back from the viewfinder, I noticed Tommy looking at me curiously. I ducked back behind my camera, not wanting to get stuck staring at him blatantly again.
“Why did it have to be him?” I whispered to Olivia.
“Because you have the worst luck,” Olivia replied. She wasn’t wrong. Life hadn’t dealt me the greatest of hands these past few years.
“Hi, ladies.” Jamil walked over to me and Olivia and slung his arms around our shoulders. I winced when his hand pressed into the spot on my shoulder I had just landed on. His smile was electric and much too enthusiastic for this early in the morning. He came to the club the same year that I did. We bonded one night over leftover concession-stand hot dogs, slushies, and a mutual feeling of struggling with a new chapter in our life. Jamil listened to me as I told him how my new job felt like I was starting over. It felt like as soon as I left college that door was completely shut, and I had taken a leading role in an entirely new story. Jamil shared his feelings of imposter syndrome, that season being his first year on the big stage, and that night he had gone zero-for-three at the plate. His golden retriever energy and the earnestness with which he listened to my sadness sealed Jamil’s place at the top of my list of favorite players on the team.
“Jamil.” I let him squeeze us into his sides before he took off running toward the team. He turned back around when he got halfway.
“You haven’t drunk enough of your coffee yet, Canon.” I rolled my eyes at his familiar nickname for me. He coined it after that night we first met, when he realized he never saw me anywhere without my camera. When he first gave the nickname to me, I remember thinking how corny it sounded, which I had voiced to him constantly at the beginning. After a while, it grew on me, but I would never admit that I secretly loved it or I’d never hear the end of it.
“What are you trying to say, Jamil?” I yelled back at him as I turned the camera to snap a few shots of him.
“He’s trying to say you’re always cranky at morning practices,” Olivia jumped in. Part of me wanted to argue, but we both knew that if I did, she had a list of times on her phone when I had been less than pleasant to be around that was longer than a CVS receipt. She had started it halfway through our first season together after I failed to remember a single time I had acted like I’d woken up on the wrong side of the bed. From then on, she always had actual proof to prove me wrong.
The morning went by as it normally did. After Olivia and I took all of the pictures that May had requested, we scammed one of the grounds crew into getting us some of the doughnuts that they always had in their shed, and we relaxed in the stadium seats behind home plate to work on our tans as we waited for the practice to end.
The entire time my eyes followed Tommy. After a quick search, I found hundreds of articles about him and confirmed my earlier conversation with Olivia that he was, in fact, a ladies’ man. There were whole Reddit pages dedicated to his escapades.
Even so, I couldn’t help but watch the way he moved on the field. I glanced back down at my phone and found that it was evident the confidence he exuded on the field didn’t stop once he walked off the dirt. I quickly scanned a few tabloid articles detailing wild nights at clubs that involved hookers, drugs, and lots of alcohol. Everything in those articles was screaming at me that he was exactly the type of player that I kept at arm’s length. One of the last articles had pictures pulled straight from his personal social media account, and I made a mental note to remember the username for later.
“Maggie? Did you hear me?” I snapped out of whatever trance Tommy had me in for the second time today.
“What?” I asked, noticing that she was packing her stuff up.
“Were you daydreaming about Tommy Mikals?” Olivia wiggled her eyebrows mischievously at me.
I shook my head adamantly. “Absolutely not.”
Olivia leaned over to whisper in my ear as we passed the media team on our way out of the stadium. “You’ve got to admit he’s gorgeous.”
I hated that I couldn’t tell her that she was wrong. Because Tommy was drop-dead gorgeous. The kind of gorgeous that I was sure would have groupies fawning over him as he left the stadium after games. The kind of gorgeous that was far out of my league. But I knew that if I even admitted to her that I found him attractive, she would get her hopes up that I was finally coming around to dating again. Or at the very least, was open to talking about things like that.
“Hold on.” I stopped in the middle of the tunnel. “I left one of my bags. I’ll meet you at Burt’s later.”
Olivia rolled her eyes at me. It was typical that I forgot something at least once a week. I turned back down the tunnel and walked out onto the field, only to see Adam, Jamil, and Tommy walking toward me. My camera bag was slung over Adam’s shoulder. He held it out like an offering when he saw me, a knowing look on his face. He had saved my camera more times than I wanted to admit. Before a couple of years ago, something like this never would have happened. But after college, it seemed like my mind was skipping around far too often, never reliable enough anymore. I used caffeine like a crutch to try to keep my mind sharp enough to remain in the present and not dive back into a hole where it felt like my thoughts couldn’t reach.
