25. MATTHEWS

MATTHEWS

I had been here almost three weeks longer than expected, but I was dragging my feet and taking my time. Tony had called repeatedly for updates, but I kept making excuses. “I’m on to something. Give me an extension.” He had agreed, but I knew I was pushing my luck.

I selfishly needed more time with Cael.

The connection between us had shifted that day in the batting cages. Cael’s apologies had gone from heated and physical to small gestures of attention that did more for my heart than I wanted to admit to anyone. Even Bobbi.

She had called for an update the day after, but I hadn’t been able to give her an honest answer. One simple hug, so tender, it was a sedative to all my hardened edges and dangerous thoughts. I hated his ability to be both people at once. Crazy, free, and funny, but quiet, careful, and purposeful with his intention all at the same time. I was just a mess. I just wasn’t sure if I could be what he needed.

I wasn’t stupid. The second Silas had mentioned the accident, the look on his face gave away more than if he had even told me the truth. I had gone through six more interviews. I didn’t need to do the second string members of the team, but I wanted more information and, in doing so, delayed my departure from Rhode Island. Not a single one of them gave me anything on Cael. I had to finish his interview and still needed to speak to Dean and his father, but I had a feeling they wouldn’t be helpful.

So I went digging. Cael was a mess. Drugs, alcohol, experimentation. It seemed like he had done everything in his power to piss off his Dad over the last seven years. All while still pretending to be that sweet boy with his bright smile. An all-star athlete, on the baseball field and off, he was stumbling through the minefield of his own mind. I wanted to ask him about it, about why he did the drugs and drank himself into that state, but it really wasn’t any of my business anymore.

“Knock knock.” Ella’s voice floated to me from the doorway.

She leaned against it, dressed in her navy shirt and jeans from work, blonde hair tucked up away from her face. I had looked closer at her as well, letting jealousy get the better of me, but only found more sadness and understood within three lines of the article why she and Cael had bonded. It wasn’t romantic. Their souls were just missing a piece that the other was able to fill in ways that no one else could. Platonic in the heaviest sense. Ella had lost her brother, Cael had lost himself, and when they found each other, the scales became balanced again.

“Sorry.” I pressed pause on my music. “Was it too loud?”

“No.” Ella waved a hand in the air and stood up straight. “There’s a Halloween party at Delta tonight. Arlo is away in Dallas, so I was wondering if you’d be my date?”

A Halloween party.

“Zoey and I are going to the thrift store to find something to wear,” she added, when I didn’t answer her immediately.

Old Clementine would have declined, Halloween was never my favorite, but the new Clementine was a different monster, so I nodded, and Ella went from nervous to excited in a millisecond. It was the perfect opportunity to remind Cael he wasn’t courting the same seventeen-year-old by the creek.

“I have an idea.” I smiled at her and she cocked her head to the side.

“Oh, I like the look in your eye.” She laughed.

“Do you have a key for the equipment room?” I asked.

Delta was packed, making the party at Hilly’s look like child’s play. The entire house was dark, lit only by flashing white lights and hanging purple bulbs, which gave everything an eerie feeling.

“God, I hate the east coast, it’s freezing outside.” Zoey climbed from the car and tiptoed in her tennis shoes across the grass. “But, shit, we look so hot!”

She was right. We looked really good. Ella had done her part well. Sneaking down to the stadium, she’d lifted three specific Hornets jerseys from the locker room. Zoey had hers buttoned up, her legs bare except for her short spanks underneath the hem. Van’s jersey was like a dress on her, but she looked amazing with her long brown hair in two high pigtails and a smear of dark makeup across her cheek.

Ella did a flirty spin, resting her baseball bat over her shoulders. Her blonde hair fell around her face in soft curls, which had matching markings to Zoey. Arlo’s jersey rode up on her thighs, exposing the tight jean shorts beneath.

“Take a picture for me?” She handed me her phone and pulled at the undone buttons of Arlo’s jersey to expose the white bra beneath, the long chain and ring dangling between the swell. “I begged him not to go to Dallas this weekend,” she said, taking her phone back with a mischievous grin. “The least I can do is make him regret his very responsible adult decision.”

“Looking good, ladies!” Jensen and Todd hung from the railing of Delta in matching mustard and ketchup outfits.

“They look like idiots,” Zoey huffed, linking her arm to mine.

We walked up the steps of Delta and into the house to find Van arguing with Dean. Van was dressed as a pirate and his head snapped to where we were. I could have sworn a stream of drool dripped from his open mouth.

Dean looked cute in what might have been a toga but was definitely just a white sheet with a knot on his muscular shoulder. His eyes ran over me with a cautious look on his handsome face, a storm brewing, but he wasn’t the attention I cared about. Cael, in all his half-naked glory, lay lazily over the staircase, with two girls chatting on either side of him. His blue eyes flickered over me and a wicked smile formed on his face at the sight.

Cael’s jersey hung over my shoulders, buttoned in the middle by two small buttons that did nothing to hide the lacy, black, harnessed bra beneath it. Our eyes didn’t leave each other’s as Zoey pulled from my grip and slipped into Van’s, or when the jersey slipped open and exposed my thighs, but I could see the restraint flickering over his sharp features. His fingers gripped tightly to the bottle he was holding, and the muscle in his jaw ticked.

“Hey.” Zoey tugged gently on one of the two braids she had laced with navy ribbon, so we really looked at the part. “Come on.” She dragged me through the house, that was crowded with people, to the kitchen, and Van handed me a solo cup full of what smelled like lighter fluid.

“Jungle Juice.” He laughed and kissed Zoey on the cheek.

“It smells disgusting.” I laughed back.

“It is disgusting, bottoms up.” Van tapped two fingers to his chest and the rest of the men in the room followed.

“Drink the Kool-Aid, Mary.” Ella giggled, pressing her fingers under my cup and lifting it to my lips. “It’ll be good for you.”

The entire college experience was foreign to me. I had gone, I had studied, and I had even participated in after-school activities, but nothing to the extent of how the students at Harbor University did. Their parties felt like a moving time capsule. It was as if they were dragged straight from a 90s slasher film. It was intoxicating.

“What are you supposed to be anyways?” Dean appeared from our left, his eyes on me as he sipped from his cup.

“We’re bat bunnies. ” Ella lifted herself onto the counter and leaned forward with her fingers curling around the edge.

“How degrading of you,” Dean joked and slid in beside her, his height still eclipsing her as he leaned over and whispered something that brought a smile to her face.

“It was last minute,” I said, defending the cleverness of our outfits. “And if you take the degradation of the term ‘bat bunny’ and use it against those who coined the term. Isn’t that a shift of power?”

Dean’s brows furrowed, and Van snorted.

“So, really, it’s pretty empowering of us.”

Ella watched the interaction with a funny look on her face .

“Sure,” Dean licked the trace of booze off his bottom lip as his eyes darted up away from me to Cael, who had moved into the kitchen behind me.

I only knew he was there because I could smell the citrus cologne that mimicked that sweet gummy bear smell, it coated his skin and wafted through the stench of drunk college kids. Cael stood at my back, his hand hidden as his fingers rubbed the fabric of his jersey at the hem along the curve of my ass.

“If I had known a group costume was happening, I would have joined.” He pouted. “I would have looked better in that than you. Everyone knows I’m Arlo’s bat bunny.” He pointed at Ella with a smile on his face and the bottle he was babying between his fingers.

Ella scowled at the liquid sloshing around inside.

“It’s water, Peach.” He tossed the bottle through the air at her, and she popped the lid, unashamed, and smelled it. I was slightly offended for Cael, but he didn’t seem to care, catching it in his hand as she chucked it back to him.

“You though…” He turned to me, voice dropping in tone and eyes dragging down over my body. “I’ve never seen that jersey look so good.”

“And you wear it every night,” I cooed back. “So that's saying something.”

Cael blushed, with red cheeks and dewy-looking eyes, as he exhaled.

I thought for a second he might do something brash in public, but he tossed his arm around me and smiled, tucking me into his side. “Let’s give Mary,” he choked out the name, “a true Harbor Hornets Halloween.” He looked down at me, and the mischief in his smile made the tips of my fingers tingle.

“What exactly does that entail?” I asked as a few of them moved through the house to what might have been a dining room, but it was covered in silly string and fake skeletons. The music thumped through the walls from the living room on the other side, and it was hard to hear myself think.

“Poker.” Van smiled.

“That feels underwhelming after stadium karaoke.” I sat in the chair that Cael pulled out for me and took Ella's drink as she wandered around to my left.

“They always play for something,” she whispered in my ear as she sat down. “They’re also really fucking bad, none of them have poker faces. ”

“Not fair, because Ella hasn’t lost a game since…” Cael waved his hand in the air and rolled his eyes dramatically. “Well, I’ve never seen her lose…so statistically her opinion is flawed.”

Dean sat across the table from me, between Van and Zoey, while Cael took a spot beside me. “So what are we playing for, clothing?”

Strip poker was something I had never played, but I was certainly down to try.

“Nah.” Van shook his head. “We’ve all seen each other naked. It’s not fun anymore.”

“It’s always fun to see me naked,” Cael chirped.

Ella dealt the cards with a smirk on her face.

Dean grunted and checked his hand with a scowl.

“So what then?” I asked. When Cael looked up at me over his cards, my body trembled in response, his lip between his teeth and fire behind his ocean eyes. “We play for keeps.” He shrugged, and I watched his pupils flare. “We play for orgas—”

“Absolutely not,” I said before he could finish. He was trying to wager our intimacy over a poker game, and I saw right through him.

He leaned in close, whispering against my skin, and said, “you can have anyone. It doesn’t have to be me. ” His tongue ghosted over my ear lobe and my cunt throbbed from the sensation that flickered down over my skin. “You can pick any Hornet you want.” His voice was hot against my neck. “But keep it inside the Nest. The prospects in the Delta pool are infested.”

“Infested?” I asked, trying to hide my laughter.

“STIs.” Zoey giggled. “They have a running line outside the doctor's office.” She pointed to a group of six standing in a huddle. Three of the six had shifted uncomfortably, clearly itchy.

“All holes are goals with those guys,” Van sighed like he had seen the horrors of Delta firsthand.

“So any Hornet I want?” I questioned Cael.

“Within reason.” He shrugged. “Best to leave Van alone unless you wanna wrestle Sour Patch in the pudding pool outback.”

“I mean, that could be—“A hard slap stifled Van’ s comment.

“Any Hornet.”

My eyes widened as I pulled back to look at him. I hadn’t expected that.

“Anyone?” I asked as my lips started to curl.

He nodded, and I picked up my hand, eyes lingering on Cael before I checked it.

“I want him .” I looked up from my cards, eyes landing on Dean Tucker, and felt Cael tense beside me. He had expected me to pick him, but I had seen his hands all over that girl on the stairs. His mind and hands wandered. Why couldn’t mine?

A punishment suited to the crime.

The question was, would Dean play with him as the stakes?

Cael looked over at him, all the color leaving his face for a second, as Dean continued to glare at me. The tension in the room rose the longer Dean remained silent, but Cael exhaled a heavy breath as he finally spoke.

“Fine,” he bit back. “But don’t get your hopes up."