The Secret Hook-Up

I’d say it’s nice to see that Addie hasn’t changed a bit, but I’m too busy being pissed that I’m thinking about Addie at all.

Thinking about Addie existing.

Thinking about Addie being in the dress shop I had to stop at this morning on an errand for my niece.

Thinking about how I yanked too hard and hurt her shoulder again and how much I don’t want that guilt in my life once more.

Thinking about arguing with her about helping her get to a doctor.

Thinking about how I’m going to make this right for someone who never wants my help. Who never wanted me. At least not enough to admit in public that we were dating.

I stifle a growl of frustration.

Were we dating? Were we?

We were definitely about more than just sex. For several months, we talked. We cooked for each other. We passed out on our couches watching TV together when we were both too tired after long days of coaching or conditioning to put the energy into getting naked.

But we weren’t enough to do anything in public together.

“I can make it from here,” she says as I pull into the players’ parking lot at Duggan Field, which is the first thing she’s said to me since we got into my vehicle. “Thank you for your help.”

I’m not fucking stopping at the far end of the parking lot to let her walk to the door when she’s in this condition, so I ignore her hint to stop and drop her. “My pleasure.”

My pleasure.

Pulling her out of that dress and then actively avoiding staring at her mostly naked body while I helped her back into her clothes was not my pleasure.

It was my torture.

Botticelli couldn’t do her curves justice. Her luscious ass and full breasts. Collarbones that could cut glass and biceps that say try me. The long legs with the thick muscles that I can’t look at without remembering how they feel wrapped around my hips, regardless of how long it’s been since we were together.

Even her plain white panties are evoking memories I don’t want of the first night we met. The night when she slipped through the crowd around me to buy me a drink at a bar where I’d just taken over the stage to goof off with my guitar.

When she asked me if I was some kind of local celebrity or if the people at this bar truly liked pop song covers this much.

If I wanted to join her at her hotel and give her one good memory of the city after she’d bombed an interview.

That night, I lied to her. I told her my standard line—that I was a lazy bum who just liked music.

Not long after, I spotted her on television when I was hanging with a buddy who had the Fireballs game on. Shocked the hell out of me, but I was happy for her. I had her number but didn’t do anything with it. She was a fucking badass. If she wanted me, she’d reach out, and I had my own shit going on.

But the next season, when I was asked to toss out the first pitch at a Fireballs game, I saw her in person again for the first time.

The look on her face—the oh my god, I know you, but I didn’t know who you were look—told me everything that was echoed in her text to me later that night.

HOCKEY PLAYERS ARE NOT LAZY BUMS. Oh my god. Apologies. I never would’ve hit on you if I’d known. Can we pretend that didn’t happen?

I texted her back, turned on the charm, and that’s when things got fun.

For a few months. In secret. At her insistence because she didn’t like the optics of being with a professional athlete who was friends with a lot of her players.

Until I offered to teach her to ice skate and everything went to hell.

For the four years since, I’ve mostly managed to avoid her. I quit going to the bar where we met. If I hang out with any of the Fireballs players, I do it on my turf at Mink Arena or at one of our houses. When the Fireballs ask for one of the Thrusters to toss out a first pitch, I suggest someone else on the team.

I didn’t know my heart could be shredded as thoroughly as this woman shredded it. And considering how I felt after my divorce a few years before that, that’s saying something. But when I realized Addie was completely oblivious to the way I was hearing wedding bells in our future, that she didn’t want me as anything other than someone to let off steam with in the bedroom, I broke.

And I apparently shouldn’t have been neglecting the sessions with my therapist that I started not long after our breakup because seeing her again today fucking hurts.

Like it was last week that I walked out of her apartment for the final time instead of four years ago. And also as if I’ve spent every day since both last week and four years ago waiting for her to text me and tell me that she misses me and her life is better with me in it and she wants to try to have a real relationship.

Add in the guilt at knowing I’ve hurt her arm again, and I can barely stand to be in my own skin.

I pull my new Mercedes SUV into the loading zone as close as you can get to the staff and player entrance of the ballpark. When I kill the engine, I’m also actively ignoring the soft scent of lavender that’s permeating the air between us, courtesy of this woman who’s once again making my heart pound and my palms sweat and my balls demand to know why it was wrong that we had the audacity to like her so much.

Because that was the problem.

Casual is all I have to give. Baseball is my first true love. I’m living out my dreams, and they’re not you.

I mentally shake myself.

This is one trip down memory lane that I don’t need right now.

Especially when that wasn’t exactly what she said.

It’s what I heard, but it wasn’t what she said, which it took me months to admit to myself.

“I can make it from here,” she repeats.

Her I’ve got this voice brings back more memories that I don’t want, and I reach deep to hear my old therapist’s voice instead. Being in a relationship isn’t about codependency, Duncan. It’s about the enhancement to both of your lives that you can’t get on your own.

Better.

Except not.

Addie made my life better. I wanted to make hers better, and she wouldn’t let me.

“There are seven cars in this parking lot,” I say. “If one of them isn’t the team doctor, I’m taking you to urgent care.”

“The doctor’s here.”

“Which car is theirs?”

“He takes public transportation.” She reaches her good arm across herself to try to unbuckle her seat belt, grimacing as she struggles to reach it, and that pisses me off too.

I pulled too hard.

I pulled too hard on the dress and I didn’t listen to the sounds she was making because I recognized her body and her voice and I knew who she was while I was tugging.

And if it hadn’t been her body and her voice, the pink-and-white lady’s slipper tattoo on her hip was the final clue. Her homage to her home state and its flower.

And I was pissed.

I was pissed that in the one dress shop in the entire city where I had to pick up Paisley’s dress for this weekend, where there seemed to be no one at all in the boutique so I could just grab it and go, that it sounded like someone was beating up a woman in the dressing room, and most of all that it turned out to be Addie fighting herself trying to get out of a dress.

That she’d tried to get into a dress that clearly didn’t fit her.

That there was seemingly no one in the shop to help her.

That I could see all of the smooth skin on her belly. Her trim hips. The way her thigh and ass muscles were straining with all of the effort.

That I nearly popped a boner when I spotted her tattoo.

And I didn’t care that she was grunting and making little gasping noises.

I just wanted to get her out of the damn dress so I could leave and not have to see her any more than necessary, a knee-jerk reaction telling me I’m not over her the way I’ve insisted I am for the past several years.

And now she’s reinjured her shoulder.

I was reckless and irritated and I hurt her.

Again.

I’m not leaving her alone until I know she’s in good hands.

The sooner we find those good hands, the better.

I hit the button on her seatbelt, earning me a halfhearted glare that fades quickly into a sigh. “Thank you.”

I don’t answer.

I’m already halfway out my door on my way around to get her door for her.

Naturally, though, she’s climbing out herself by the time I get there.

She’s tall—the top of her head is level with my mouth—and absolutely capable of getting out of the car herself. But I don’t miss the way her eyes pinch with the effort.

Shoulder has to hurt like hell.

And there’s nothing like reinjuring the same thing—for at least the third time—to spike frustration.

Her normally smooth chestnut hair is sporting flyaways around her crown, and her thick ponytail is crooked. She reaches behind herself to pat at her back pocket, then cringes again.

“Forget your ID?”

“No.”

I look at her ass and spot the outline of a card in her left back pocket.

The bad side.

I reach into the pocket, actively tell myself to ignore the firm ass muscle under the denim of her jeans, and whip the card out so fast that it goes flying as I lose my grip on it.

We both bend to pick it up off the pavement at the same time, and our heads clunk together.

“Fuck,” I mutter.

So does she.

“I’ve got this,” she grits out. “You can go.”

“As soon as someone else is helping you.”

She snags the card and straightens with another wince. “Ballpark isn’t abandoned, Duncan. Someone can help me.”

“I’m not trying to insult your independence.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

“So why won’t you let me help you?”

“You dressed me. And you drove me here. I think you’ve helped plenty.”

Of course she doesn’t want me walking into the ballpark with her.

She’d have to admit she knows me.

When we were together, she didn’t want to tell anyone. You’re not one of my players, but you hang out with them, she said. This could impact my job, and I’ve never loved a job the way I love this one. Let’s just keep this to ourselves for now.

I still don’t know if that was the whole truth, or if her insistence on discretion was code for I don’t publicly admit to my meaningless flings.

There I was, falling head over heels for a kind, sexy, playful woman who spent her workdays wearing an I’m a hardass mask to take on the world and win it over one day at a time. She was helping take her team on a path to greatness and glory for the first time in their entire history, while showing me her soft side at home, but I was ultimately nothing more than someone to scratch an itch.

“Will you at least text me later and let me know you’re okay?” I ask.

She doesn’t look at me. “Yes.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I should turn around, walk back to my car, get in, and leave.

But I can’t.

Not until she’s inside.

And she’s not moving very quickly to get inside.

I rub my head. Fucking thing aches where it hit hers, and I’m used to taking knocks to the head. Hers probably doesn’t feel too awesome either.

“I’m sorry,” I grunt.

“Not your fault.”

“I pulled too⁠—”

She looks over her bad shoulder at me, brown eyes igniting as hard as her jaw is clenched. “It. Is. Not. Your. Fault.”

I’ve heard my buddies on the baseball team talk about her from time to time since she started here over five years ago.

Don’t get on her bad side.

Coach Addie is a baller.

She ate and left no crumbs just by waking up this morning.

But every one of those she will flay you alive statements is said with utter reverence and generally followed with if she ever quits, none of us will be able to bat right again.

Or she really got me through a tough time last season.

Or I didn’t know it when she first started on the team, but she gives good advice if you just ask.

Every time, I nod or cringe or mutter complaints with them, whatever seems appropriate, as if I’ve never met her before.

As if I’ve never seen her shake her ponytail out and sigh in relief as she scrubs her fingernails over her scalp. “Relieving the tension,” she said once.

As if she didn’t fall asleep on my shoulder still mumble-singing along to one of the songs in Pitch Perfect on one of our early dates when she’d just gotten home from a three-week road trip right after training camp started for me.

As if she hadn’t laughed until she cried while telling me the story of Brooks Elliott showing up for on-field batting practice once with a Fireballs cape draped around his shoulders, wearing a thong over the outside of his pants prominently featuring their old mascot stretched across his cup. “I couldn’t let them see me crack, or they would’ve known they could push me around,” she’d said.

Or something to that effect.

I know this woman’s soft side.

But that’s not the side she’s giving me now.

Now I get why she’s sometimes called the marble statue.

She’s not fucking around. She’s all business. And that business is getting rid of me.

I hold up my hands in surrender even though I feel like an ass. “Great. You’ve got this. Glad to be useless again.”

I expect more glaring. Foot stomping. Eye rolling.

Instead, a muscle ticks in her jaw and her eyes take on a shine.

“Yo, puckboy, that’s an illegal parking job,” a familiar voice says from the doorway. “This guy causing you headaches, Coach Addie? Want me to have one of my security guards take him down?”

Addie jerks her attention to the door and starts toward it. “Hello, Cooper. Nice baby.”

Her pace increases as she strides the last few steps, supporting her arm with the other one as she approaches the dark-haired, newly-retired baseball player wearing a baby in a sling at the employee door.

“The best baby,” Cooper replies with a grin, rubbing his large hand over the baby’s fine dark hair. She’s nestled against his chest. “She gets it from her mom. What are you two doing here together?”

“Long story,” Addie says before I can answer. “Thank you for holding the door.”

“You find a dress?”

“The saleslady got food poisoning and couldn’t help me today.”

That much is true.

The woman running the shop finally appeared as we were leaving the dressing room with Addie back in her normal clothes. The woman had looked like death. Pale, sweating, and weak. She apologized and said she was going to have to close for the rest of the day.

We waited until someone picked her up before I drove Addie here.

Cooper looks at me, then at Addie, who’s past him now and is disappearing inside, and then back at me. “Why are you here, and what did you do to piss off Coach Addie?”

“Long story.” Might as well stick with what Addie said. I nod to Cooper’s chest. “Cute baby.”

He squints one eye at me. “You’re pissed.”

“I’m Canadian. We’re never pissed.”

“That’s why this is weird.”

“What’s weird is thinking of you as part-owner in this club.”

Mentioning his relatively new change in position with the team distracts him.

Dude smiles so big, I want to punch him in the face.

I don’t usually resent other people being happy, but seeing Cooper Rock marry one of the world’s biggest pop stars, happily go into baseball retirement at the end of last season without a care in the world about what came next, take on fatherhood like a natural, and then his wife gifting him a minority share of the team he’s loved from birth feels like more than one man deserves.

Especially when the last woman I let myself be obsessed with won’t even let me make sure she gets to a doctor safely and when I shouldn’t care as much as I do.

“Surreal, man,” he says. “It’s like every day is better than the last, and the last was pretty freakin’ awesome.”

I nod. “Happy for you.”

“You still look pissed.”

“Haven’t had poutine in too long.”

Cooper looks down the hallway that Addie disappeared into, then back at me once more. “You give her a ride? She was going dress shopping. Were you at the dress shop?”

“Wrong place, wrong time.” I pull out my phone like someone’s calling. “Gotta take this. See you around.”

I like Cooper most days.

Today isn’t most days.

Today is go home and work out until I can’t move so my brain shuts off.

While I wait for the text from Addie that won’t come.

And while I know I’ll turn on the Fireballs game tomorrow night to see if the cameras pan to her, so that I can see for myself that she’s okay.