Hardball by CD Reiss (5)

six

Dash

A librarian in slacks and a bright yellow hoodie wearing sensible black flats on the winter grass of a park field. No makeup. Glasses. Baseball clutched in un-manicured fingers.

Not my usual, to say the least. But I could see her body under the clothes, and the way she went off-balance when she pulled a kid away from a collision with another one had a certain sexy grace. Her voice didn’t screech. Her laugh was like a purr. The first thing I imagined was pinning her under me, holding her hands over her head, immobilizing her while she came. My fingers had tingled when I handed her back the ball. Weird.

Then the glove was gone, and I immediately knew I had to contact her myself. Just to check. To see if I’d lost my mind. I didn’t like glasses or T-shirts. I preferred women who were finished. Polished. I hadn’t gone for that type since I was eleven.

But there was something to the surprise of what was under those slacks. What she’d look like in heels and a dress. And what the heels and dress would look like on the floor.

I was mad about the glove. First at myself because I thought I’d misplaced it, then at whomever took it, then at God and the universe because it was just another sign that shit was going belly-up.

I had my assistant get me the number for Hobart Elementary, then I stared at my phone.

What was I supposed to do? Call the principal’s office and accuse an entire class of underprivileged kids of theft? I made four point three million a year to catch and hit balls. My father would have been ashamed if he was alive to see it.

But I needed that glove back. That glove. Daria’s pin was on it. Losing it meant losing her.

I could go to the librarian. The one in the yellow sweatshirt. With the slim neck and the little gold chain around it, curling on her skin where her trapezius rose and fell. That cleft of space between the bulky hood and her body was somehow more sexual than a hundred miles of cleavage.

I had a meeting that afternoon, so I put on a suit. That was what I told myself, but when I pulled my cuffs and matched my socks, I wasn’t thinking about my agent, who didn’t care what I wore. I was thinking about hitting the Hobart Elementary library first.

I was one of LA’s most eligible bachelors. I didn’t let that run my life, but the papers mentioned it frequently enough that it had become a fact. I could have a ton of women, and I did. But when she’d blurted out that I was handsome, it didn’t feel like part of her strategy. It felt like approval I hadn’t known I needed.

So I tried to wait, then I couldn’t.

Not yet. We’ll find it. I have a thing with the gym teacher tonight. I’ll ask him if he saw anything.

Of course. Why wouldn’t she have a boyfriend? Just because she was wearing a yellow sweatshirt and flats didn’t mean I was the only one who saw a sexy woman. And it was rude to ask. Completely out of line.

An event at the Petersen

What kind of answer was that?

An answer to a question you have no business asking.

I get it. Sometimes I’d like to put a cock in my mouth

Wait. What?

That had to be autocorrect.

But I’d done enough dirty texting in my day to not discount her intentions entirely. Putting my cock in her mouth was on a long list of things I wanted to do to her, and my dick stiffened as I thought about it.

If she wanted to play dirty, I was ready, willing, and able to play dirty.

No! I meant to hit the backdoor butt

I snorted a laugh.

It was autocorrect. She must have meant sock or shoe or foot. Who even knew? But before I could stop laughing and reply, a rapid-fire stream of filthy mistakes buzzed my phone.

backdoor

Goddamnit! Back-space not knees

What? And button not nuts

Butt

Not butt

I hadn’t laughed that hard in a long time.

Are you still there?

Kill me now.

I had to see her. I had a few weeks to kill before spring training, and she was a lot of fun. If she was having a thing with the gym teacher, I’d just back off. Or not. Whatever.

I didn’t wait for a reply. I made a call.

“Jack?”

“That’s my name, Wallace. What do you need?”

“You’re a member at that car museum? The one on Fairfax that looks like a comic strip?”

“Yeah.”

“There’s a thing tonight?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Are you dragging your wife again?”

“She’s trying to get out of it.”

I heard her in the background. “I hate cars, Dash. I hate them!”

“I love them,” I said. “Take me. I’ll buy you dinner and bring you flowers.”

“You gonna try to suck my dick too?”

There was a scuffle as the phone was snatched from Youder’s hand.

“Are you offering to go? Please go. I can put on yoga pants and watch Scandal.”

“Deal. Go get your yoga pants on.”

She hung up before her husband could refuse her. Gotta love that woman.

It had all started with the avocado tree.

The first thing it did wrong was make fruit in June instead of September. I hadn’t known about off-bloom years, when a tree just went apeshit a few months early. I’d come back from a losing series in New York to find my front yard had turned into a minefield of squirrel-chewed fruit. That gave me the first inkling that the thirty-foot tree would be a major encroachment on my routine.

I called the same guys I always called to come harvest the fruit. They thanked me and hauled away ten bags, leaving me one I tossed around on the plane the next time we traveled.

That could have been nothing. Really. But I knew it wasn’t. I carried around a kind of discomfort I didn’t have the will to release. Like a tiny rock in a lace-up boot. You figure it’s not so bad, not bad enough to warrant the unlacing and relacing of the entire boot.

Not until a pipe under the house broke and I found out it was the avocado tree roots pushing on the foundation did I know why the off-bloom had bugged me. The tree was going to be a major pain in my ass. So I had it cut down. Had the stump ground out. Roots dug out as far as they could be without sending my house down the hill.

Then my patio was too sunny. The front of the house wasn’t on the street. It faced south, right into the giant eyeball rising and setting over the east and west sides of the horizon. I was home half the summer, and I spent it trying to manage the shade in my front yard.

I was in a tucked-away enclave in the Oaks section of the Hollywood Hills. I’d bought it for the view and kept it for the quiet. I was easily distracted by anything sensory. Everything found a way into my eyes and ears. Even a strange taste could distract me. A shirt seam half undone and rubbing my skin could drive me nuts. So the ambient noise of the city was great until a truck was a little too loud or the neighbors two blocks away let their smoke detector battery go dead and I was assaulted by chirping every thirty seconds.

In my house, I controlled my distractions. I could have as much sensory input as I needed to work out or run my business. No one watched me up in the hills. One side of my house faced the cliff and Los Angeles. One faced the narrow street. The back faced the neighbor, a movie director and his wife who were home half the year, and the other side faced an acre of nothing.

But the avocado tree had been a sort of good luck charm, and that off-bloom, and the crushing roots on the foundation, had fucked everything else.

The girl I fucked in New York found a boyfriend. The one I fucked in St. Louis tried to get me to commit to I-don’t-know-what. Mary in Oakland was fine, but we only played the A’s once a year unless they got in the playoffs, which was unlikely. So I went without pussy for too much of the summer, and the bad luck built up.

I made an error in game three of the playoffs.

I didn’t think of things as going to hell. None of those individual craptastications spun together to make a shitstorm.

At Christmas, my mother had announced she was selling the house and moving into an apartment with her boyfriend. I was happy for her but felt unmoored.

Still, I could juggle all the little things. I’d work it out.

Not until I looked under the table and saw my glove was gone did I put it all together. Things were going wrong. General things. Every piece on the board had shifted, from my personal to my professional life and everything that linked them.

I needed to put it all back.

I backtracked. The tree. Well, there wasn’t much I could do there that wouldn’t take eighty years to fix. But I planted a fig tree and hoped for the best. I’d find new women where I needed them, and I bought the house I grew up in. My mother still left it to live in town, but the house? I had that.

Then Daria’s pin.

Losing the stupid insult of a pin reminded me that I hadn’t fixed a thing. All I’d done was plaster over the leak. I needed Daria’s pin. I couldn’t play without it. Not successfully. I didn’t know where the leak in my charmed life was, but I knew the luck was seeping through it.

Going to the Petersen and seducing a school librarian was exactly what I needed to keep my mind off everything. An easily achievable goal that would fill the well of shitty circumstances.

Vivian the librarian.

Vivian with a bowl of apples on her desk for the kids.

Vivian with a neck like a lotus stem.

She’d do nicely.