SWNOVELS Stealing Home: A Reverse Grumpy-Sunshine College Sports Romance: Chapter 3
THIS EARLY IN THE MORNING, the house is quiet.
I rise from my plank, breathing through my nose, and pick up a set of fifteen-pound dumbbells for the next round of exercises. Cooper, by my side, does the same. There’s no need to talk, not when we’ve done this routine together, the exact same way, for years now. Sometimes we play music, but today there’s nothing. No distractions except the ones inside my head.
We could have gone to the gym on campus, the nice 24/7 one specific to athletes, thanks to his position on the hockey team and mine on the baseball team, but he’s leaving on a post-semester road trip with his girlfriend, Penny, in a few hours, and wanted extra time with the cat currently sitting on the staircase.
She blinks her enormous amber eyes at us, unnervingly intelligent. I’m more of a dog person, but Tangerine has grown on me. Cooper and Penny rescued her last fall, and she’s become a permanent fixture in the house since. I still haven’t fully forgiven her for leaving a dead mouse in my cleat, but she’s cute. I can’t tell if being her sole caretaker while they’re on the road trip and our little sister, Izzy, is in Manhattan for an internship, will bring us closer together or end with her attacking me in my sleep.
She swishes her tail back and forth, as if she’s considering it, while we work through the exercises. After the last one, I set the dumbbells on the floor and swipe my hand through my shaggy hair. Baseball hair, Izzy always teases. It’s longer than Cooper’s now; after his team went to the Frozen Four—and won—his girlfriend begged him to trim the beard and cut off some of the mop.
He glances at me. “You’re quieter than usual.”
“I’ve been up for a while.” I stretch; my shoulder protested that last set of reps. During a game a couple days ago, I slammed against the warning track as I chased a deep fly ball. Got the ball. And a bruise. We still lost. Four games in a row now. If we’re going to make the playoffs, we need to right the ship—fast.
He makes a sympathetic noise. “I thought that had been getting better.”
I shrug as I take a sip of water. “It comes and goes. I didn’t manage to fall asleep last night. Got to practice my knife skills, though. And watched a documentary about bread making in France.”
He shakes his head. “I was wondering about all the chopped onion in the fridge. Your hobby is weird sometimes, dude.”
“They were diced, not chopped. And call it weird all you want, but you eat everything I make.”
“Happily. It’s fucking delicious.” He sets down the dumbbells and stretches. Tangerine pads over on light feet, winding around his bare legs. He picks her up, hugging her to his chest. She purrs contentedly. “That sucks, though. Do you want to talk about it?”
“You all set for the trip? Still visiting James and Bex first, right?”
“Sebastian.”
My adoptive brother’s deep blue eyes are full of concern. He reaches out to squeeze my shoulder. “Was it…”
A nightmare? One of the persistent, sickening nightmares that years of expensive therapy didn’t squash completely? Never mind how hard his parents—my adoptive parents—tried?
I swallow. There’s a sudden knot in my throat. “No. Not a nightmare.”
Not a maw of crushed metal and broken glass. Not blood on leather seats. Not a scream, cut short thanks to a severed windpipe. I can call up the memory so easily, even a decade removed. You don’t look into your mother’s lifeless eyes as an eleven-year-old and not remember it like someone cut open your skull and branded the image there.
Cooper’s grip on me tightens. He told me once that he can tell when I’m lost in the memory. We were fourteen, sitting under the bleachers during one of our older brother James’ many Friday night football games, each with a stolen beer in hand. A rare night in the fall when Cooper didn’t have ice time, and I didn’t have a training session. It was October, the Long Island air finally turning crisp after a late-season heat wave. Something about the sudden rain triggered it, I think. We were dry, and safe, and the game was still going on, but I froze as I stared at the downpour, and Cooper had to shake me to drag me into the present.
Now, I shrug off his grip. “I just… I couldn’t sleep.”
His gaze turns shrewd. “Because of her.”
I’d never tell Cooper, because he has a strained relationship with his father that’s only just getting better—and our own relationship was strained for a time earlier this year, when his piece of shit uncle came crawling back to New York and tried to swindle him out of his trust fund—but when he makes that face, he looks just like Richard Callahan, down to the furrowed brow.
The Callahans all look alike, with their dark hair and deep blue eyes. No one would ever mistake them for anything but family. Richard Callahan, quarterback legend. His son James, two years older than me and Cooper, now finished with his first year in the NFL. Cooper, my best friend and near twin. Our little sister Izzy, a vibrant ball of energy with a wicked volleyball serve and enough swagger to get her in trouble left and right.
I’ve got my dead mother’s blonde hair and my dead father’s green eyes, and the last name Callahan now; I’ve used the name on the back of my baseball jersey ever since I turned twelve. Cooper and his family have been my family for a decade, thanks to a pact Richard and my father, Jacob Miller, made when they were just young men with hopes for futures in the NFL and MLB. Richard and Sandra welcomed me into their family with open arms after my parents’ deaths, and I’ll never not be grateful.
Given all that, we’ve been brothers long enough that Cooper knows when I’m holding back. I pet Tangerine between the ears. The silence is confirmation enough: I haven’t gotten Mia di Angelo out of my head.
Enjoy watching me leave, Callahan.
Her words taunt me. Over a month later, they still echo in my mind. One minute, I had her in my bed, in my arms, so close to more. The next, she fled—and told me to watch her leave, like I’d never see her again. I have seen her since, because she’s Penny’s best friend and it’s impossible to ignore someone going to the same university, but she’s acted like every hookup, every conversation, every moment we shared meant nothing.
“Are you ever going to tell me what actually happened?”
“You saw her leave.”
He sighs. “I don’t understand her. I know Penny loves her, but she can be… difficult.”
“She hasn’t said anything about me?”
I hate the pathetic note in my words, but I can’t stop myself from asking the question. I worry my necklace, the medallion that once belonged to my father, between my thumb and forefinger.
He just shrugs, no doubt thinking about the moment he caught us together. It wasn’t like we were in the middle of fucking; we were just making out. Yet the second Mia saw him, any vulnerability I’d won from her melted away. The armor went back up, as solid as steel.
“If she has, she told Penny not to tell me. Probably because she knows I’d tell you.”
“Fantastic.”
“It’s not like you’ve told me all that much about what went down.”
I grimace. “Nope. And I won’t.”
“You two are ridiculous,” Penny says from the top of the stairs. She shuffles down, her feet bare, wearing a shirt with a dragon on it that I’m sure belongs to my brother. He has enough nerdy fantasy gear to rival a fan convention. Her rust-colored hair, so different from Mia’s raven locks, is practically a bird’s nest. “For the record, she hasn’t told me anything either. She refuses to talk about it.”
It’s easy to hear the note of concern in her voice. Mia’s her best friend, after all. I’ve kept my own tabs on Mia, and while I know it’s not my fucking business, it seems like she’s been enjoying a lot of company. That’s her right, and sure, I’m doing the same, but after the way we’d been together?
Whenever I think about that moment in my bedroom, I see her smudged lipstick, her bright brown eyes. In between all the kissing, I asked her out to dinner for the second time—for just one dinner, one actual date after months of secretive hookups—and she said yes. Then approximately one minute later, Cooper stumbled in on us, and approximately one minute after that, she hauled her NASA tote bag over her shoulder like a shield and fucking left.
Enjoy watching me leave, Callahan.
Since then, she’s acted like she managed to wipe me clean out of her life without a second thought. I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell Cooper all the details. I still showed up for the date we planned—I waited over two hours just in case she’d show—but she ghosted me. I don’t want to admit that to my own brother. Not when his girlfriend is Mia’s best friend.
“You sure you’re fine on your own for a while?” he asks. He glances at Penny. “Should we stick around? Come to your games? I know that Mia—”
I shake my head. “No, enjoy the trip. Tell James and Bex I said hi. I’ll be fine.”
Penny kisses Cooper’s cheek. He pulls her closer, rocking her as he rests his chin on her head, an unconscious motion. I swallow my spark of jealousy. When James found Bex, it made sense—he’s always been meant for a big love. The soulmate of a wife, kids, the white picket fence, the dog. When Cooper found Penny, it was a surprise to everyone, but it clearly suits him, having one person to focus on, one person to love. I’ve never seen him happier, which makes it worse, the way I miss being casual players together.
My brothers are both deserving of that love. Yet it sucks to be alone and pining over a girl who, apparently, wants less to do with me than dog shit on the bottom of her shoe.
“We told my dad we’d get breakfast with him before hitting the road,” Penny says.
I clear my throat. “Right. I need to head to practice, anyway.”
“Text me if you get draft updates while we’re away,” Cooper says with an easy grin. Since this is his off-season, he’s had a ton of time to focus on other things—namely, where he thinks I’m going to end signing after the MLB draft in July. Whenever I think about it too hard, my stomach ties itself into knots. “Dad mentioned something about the Marlins? Miami would be sick.”
I manage to smile back. I haven’t had the heart to tell him—any of them, actually—that the looming draft is hanging over me like a rapidly approaching storm. It’s ridiculous, because it’s what I’m meant to do. My father wanted to create a legacy, so he made sure that I loved the sport from the moment I first picked up a baseball bat. Baseball has always been my life, and once I’m drafted, it’ll be my future.
But lately, a tiny part of me, just loud enough that I can’t ignore it completely, is wondering if it’s the right future.
When I turned down the first draft offer the summer after high school, instead committing to McKee, it meant that I wouldn’t be eligible for the draft again until I turned twenty-one. It’s the way a lot of top baseball players go—see what the offer would be, then stay in college and plan for the next steps when your skills improve, a couple seasons down the line. If the near-daily articles Richard sends me are accurate, I’ll go in the first round, likely to the Miami Marlins or the Texas Rangers. There’s already talk of the Cincinnati Reds trading for me down the line, so the organization can have a Miller back on the team.
It’s what Dad wanted. If I close my eyes and focus, I can still hear the way he spoke about baseball, the beauty of it, the history, the symmetry that has made it so enduring in American culture. He was famously patient, a coiled rod of energy in the batter’s box, ready to strike. The National League home run record, set by him in his last season before the accident, remains unbroken.
There are a lot of people out there who expect me to be the one to break it.
It’s poetic, his son being drafted a decade after the tragic accident that took one of baseball’s best players—ever—from the game, way too soon. Not since Thurman Munson died in that plane crash had there been a bigger tragedy in baseball. The Sportsman, the oldest sports magazine in the country, called the other day to ask about me giving an interview, but I haven’t replied yet.
However much I care about baseball—however alive I feel when chasing down a fly ball, when hitting a line drive, when sliding into home plate—it isn’t just mine. When my future in the MLB begins, the comparisons will just get more and more intense. The great Jake Miller’s son.
Letting Dad down isn’t an option. He wanted one thing for me, and it was this. He died in a horrible, unfair instant, arm flung out as if that could protect my mother from death right alongside him. I might wear ‘Callahan’ on the back of my jersey right now, but once this is my job, the expectations will be different.
So I just keep that fucking smile plastered to my face.
“Sure,” I tell my brother. “Maybe it’ll be Miami. Have a good trip. You earned it.”