Chapter Sixteen

The last time that Chris' agent had flown down to Charleston to visit him in person had been…well, never. So the fact that she was there now was a little concerning, no matter how many times she said she'd been "in the area" anyway to talk to a new prospect.

He'd only met Suze a few times, in fact. She was in her early fifties, although she'd never claim it, an absolute powerhouse who was a partner at a small, boutique agency based out of New York. He'd had another agent at the start of his career, but had liked Suze as soon as he'd met her and made the switch after his former agent started taking longer and longer in between phone calls and emails. "With me, what you see is what you get," Suze had said, and he'd actually believed her.

Suze's father still held Nippon Professional Baseball records in Japan, and when it came to the sport itself Suze knew her shit. Unfortunately, she also had a laser-sharp detector for when a client was bullshitting her.

"What's going on?" she asked point-blank after the waiter discreetly set their drinks in front of them. Chris knew this was one of the nicest restaurants in Charleston—there was a steak that cost fifteen dollars an ounce—although he'd never had any reason to go there. But he hadn't been at all surprised when Suze made the reservation and told him to meet her there before heading to the ballpark.

"I've just been in my head a little bit," he said. "I'm settling in. It's still early in the season."

"Well, keep in mind that you're playing out the last year of your contract," she said. "And the Battery could re-sign you, or…"

She gave an elegant shrug of one shoulder, not needing to finish that sentence. If Chris wanted to keep playing for the Battery—if he wanted a chance to continue playing in the major leagues, period—he'd need to show that he was an asset to a team. Right now, with his numbers…he wasn't terrible. But he definitely wasn't good, either.

"Maybe it's for the best if we put out feelers to other teams," she said. "You'd have more options in free agency."

Something must've flickered on his face, because she set her sparkling water back down on the table with a sudden keen look in her eye. "Unless you're set on trying to stay here."

Now it was his turn to shrug, a little more awkwardly than she'd managed it. "I like Marv and the guys I play with. But I understand it might not work out."

She narrowed her eyes. "Who's duckiesbooks?"

Of all the possible questions she could've asked, that would've been at the very bottom of his list. It was so strange to even hear the Instagram handle come out of her mouth that for a minute he just stared at her, blinking.

"What?" he said finally.

"You deleted all your Instagram photos," she said. "Thank you for that, by the way."

He really couldn't follow this conversation. "You're…welcome?"

For the first time, he saw a flash of genuine irritation on her face. "Of course I'm not actually thanking you for undoing years and years of my work. Assistants' work. Still. Do you think Coca-Cola would thank one of its employees for deleting all its branding files?"

"Well, in that scenario, I'd be the Coke."

She stared at him like he was talking gibberish. He could explain further, get her to see how flawed and frankly kind of fucked up that whole analogy even was. He wasn't a product engineered with some secret formula. He wasn't a brand ambassador. He was a person, and yeah, okay, he was a professional athlete and that meant he had to play a certain role, but he'd never asked her to maintain his social media accounts.

But he knew that was beside the point now, and getting away from the main topic at hand. "I should've asked you first," he conceded. "But I just need to get off social media for a bit. Take a hiatus. And when I do come back—if I do—I'll be changing the password and taking charge of my own accounts. I don't recall saying you could read my messages."

That was the only way she would've even known to ask about duckiesbooks.

If Suze was in any way chagrined at being called out, she didn't show it. "I didn't read anything in detail," she said. "I don't have time for that. But you granted me some control over your social media, and that means I can access everything, including your messages. In the last ten days, I've seen you become a There's no crying in baseball meme, had to talk to your manager about why you should do a special interview segment and then later why you walked out of said interview segment, seen you erase years of professional photographs from your feed, and then you have one new message chain and it's with someone who seems to have come out of nowhere. I'm your agent, Chris. I care about your career, and I care about you. Do you see why this would all seem concerning when put together?"

He did, actually. When she laid it out like that, it seemed obvious that he was on some kind of spiral. Who knew, a few days ago he might've even described it that way himself. And yet for some reason, he didn't feel that way about it now. He knew he had a lot of work to do, but at least he felt hopeful.

"Everything's fine," he said. "I'm working on my swing with the hitting coach. I've been fielding well. I'm sorry that interview didn't go the way anyone wanted it, but…"

He thought about her, the interviewer. His heckler. He realized he still didn't actually know her name. There'd been a single daisy doodled in the corner of one of her notecards the day of that interview, and he remembered staring down at it until his eyes unfocused. He'd been so in his own head, and then later so up his own ass that he'd decided to go on that whole riff she'd overheard. He should offer to sit down for another interview, prove that he could be cooperative and available. A part of him even wanted to. She seemed like she would be easy enough to talk to.

But he also couldn't trust himself not to fuck it up again.

"I just need to make sure we're on the same page," Suze said. "That we're both focused on the same goals. You're allowed to have a personal life. From a branding angle, I wish you would have more of a personal life." She held up her hand, as if anticipating his retort to that. "I'm not saying you're only a brand. I respect that you're rethinking your social media presence. I really do. I wish you would have talked to me about it first…but ultimately those are your decisions to make. What I don't need is to have to do a bunch of damage control because you've been sliding into some random person's DMs."

It sounded so sordid when she put it that way. Chris could feel the tips of his ears growing hot.

"It's not like that—" he started.

"Whatever it is like," she said. "Do your due diligence. And no dick pics."

She said it so matter-of-factly, looking up a second later to smile at the waiter who dropped off their food. She was already starting in on her filet, slicing off a neat sliver of a bite as though they'd been in the middle of talking about the weather.

"I wouldn't—" he said. "I mean, I've never—"

"Because they will be able to prove it's your dick," she said. "I'm running up against client confidentiality here, but let's just say that men love their dicks until they're in court against an expert witness who's holding up items for scale."

This was like having the birds-and-bees conversation with a parent all over again. Worse, even. All Chris' dad had done was bring home a pamphlet from the pediatrician's office about Sex and Your Changing Body and leave it on Chris' bed for when he got home from school. At least he hadn't had to sit across the table from his father at a fancy restaurant in the middle of the day and listen to him talk about the etiquette of sending personal photos of genitalia.

"Obviously, if they're unsolicited, that's harassment anyway," she continued. "Even solicited, it's just as dangerous for you. I can't think of a single reason why anyone would solicit a picture of that unless as a setup for blackmail or extortion."

She took another bite of steak, covering her mouth as she hastened to add, "Not yours specifically. I mean dicks as a genre."

"I have no plans to send any pictures of my dick," he said faintly, still unable to believe he was having this conversation.

"Good," she said. He could practically see her checking an item off her list in her head. "And the less you put in writing, the better. Stick to phone calls, in-person meetings."

He wondered what his agent would say if he told her he'd never communicated with this person any other way than through text. If he told her he didn't even know Duckie's real name. She might choke on her steak.

God, he'd wanted so badly to talk to Duckie on the phone last night. He'd almost thought about just calling her, and seeing if she'd pick up. But she was so skittish around talking to him, and he didn't want to risk scaring her off.

"I appreciate you looking out for me," he said now to Suze. "But I hope I haven't done anything to give you the impression that I'm looking to harass anyone, via text or otherwise. I'm really not worried about this becoming a situation."

"No, no," Suze said. "Of course not. That wasn't even necessarily what I was thinking of. I meant more…if you had an argument with a teammate, if you're frustrated with your manager, if you're looking to make a move on any endorsement deals, if something is affecting your playing…those are the kinds of things you share with me. They're not anything you should share with a stranger, and especially not in writing."

For a second he wondered if she had read through that first message exchange with Duckie. If he didn't know any better, he'd almost think that Suze was chastising him for telling Duckie about his brother's death, when he hadn't even shared that with her as someone with a fiduciary duty toward him and a vested interest in his career. But being indirect wasn't Suze's style. It was far more likely that she sensed there was something going on with him, thought it was suspicious that he'd started talking to a new person right around the same time, and had connected some dots just as she'd said she had at the start of their conversation.

He briefly thought about telling her more. Help me help you, she'd said in one of their first meetings, unabashedly quoting from the most famous sports agent movie of all time.

He just didn't see how she could help him, or what difference it would make.

"I'm being careful," he said, picking up his fork to take his first bite of his food. It was one of the first meals he hadn't eaten in the clubhouse or alone in his condo in a while, and was undoubtedly of the highest quality. But he barely registered the taste while he managed a smile for Suze. "Don't worry about me."

When Chris got to the clubhouse, he should've headed straight to the exercise bikes. That was his usual routine, to warm up his muscles a bit before taking some batting practice. But something made him turn down the hallway, out of the clubhouse proper and toward where the station personnel usually hung out, planning their segments for the broadcast.

He waved to a couple guys in the war room, who sat up straighter before giving him a delayed greeting, obviously surprised to see him in their territory. Then he tried the room next door, which had groupings of monitors set up, various control panels, and other equipment. He almost kept walking, thinking that room was empty, but then he saw her. She was leaned forward in an office chair, scrawling notes in a spiral-bound notebook on her lap, glancing up at the screen in front of her every once in a while.

She had headphones on, and he didn't want to startle her. But he also felt weird, just standing there watching her. His gaze flickered to the screen she was studying, surprised to see himself on it. It was an at-bat from a game that he instantly recognized as one from last season, where he'd had that big walk-off home run against the Royals. He'd ended the season with decent numbers, including seventeen homers, but that one had been special.

He lifted his hand, rapping his knuckles lightly against the door, then harder when she didn't seem to hear the first time. That got her to jump a little, turning in her chair to face him.

"One second," she said, her voice pitched louder than it needed to be as she scrambled to pause the footage, then pull the headphones off her head. They'd left an impression in her curls, and she clenched her fingers in the hair at her scalp, bunching it up and then releasing as if trying to reset it.

"I was just…" She gestured back toward the freeze-frame on the screen. "Watching old broadcasts. Trying to learn from what Layla would do."

The image happened to be him coming into home plate, his hand already raised for the teammates who were waiting to high-five him there. Even in the blurriness of the image, he could see that he was smiling. And he could press play on the memory in his own head, remember the way it had felt when Randy removed his batting helmet from his head, and Beau jumped up for a chest bump.

"Makes sense," he said quietly. "We study film all the time. Go ahead and play it."

She shot him a doubtful look before leaning forward to press play. She unplugged the headphones and turned a knob until sound started to fill the small room.

"I was really trying to cue up the postgame interview," she said with an embarrassed grimace. "See what kinds of questions Layla asked."

And there it was. A moment that he could watch happen in front of his eyes, and still feel in his body as though he were right back there on that field. That Chris hadn't known he would lose his brother months later, hadn't held a single molecule of fear. That Chris had lived in a completely different world, one that was captured there on that little screen for posterity, one that he could never go back to.

She was watching him watch himself, and for a moment there was such compassion in her brown eyes that he almost thought she knew. But that was impossible. He was just paranoid, after that weird meeting with his agent only hours before.

"Did you need something?" she asked softly, almost tentatively, like the room had come under a spell and she was afraid to break it. It felt like it had.

He had sought her out for a reason, but he couldn't quite remember what it was.

"Uh," he said, scrambling to think. "Just that I wanted to let you know that I'm available."

Her eyes widened a little, and he realized what that had sounded like. That conversation with his agent must've really fucked with his head.

"I mean for another interview, if you needed one," he hastened to add. "Or to give you background on matchups, tips on how to approach some of the guys…whatever would be helpful."

On the screen, Last Year Chris was standing with Layla, his face covered in a sheen of sweat, still a little out of breath not from the home run but from the celebration afterward. Layla was turning to him and asking him if he knew when he saw that pitch that he was going to send it to the cheap seats, and he was grinning and starting to say something about I had a pretty good idea, because…

He'd been the one to tell her to go ahead and play the footage, but suddenly he didn't want to be in the same room as Last Year Chris anymore.

"So, yeah," he said, slapping the doorframe with the flat of his hand. "Let me know."

He turned to head back down the hallway, but then one last impulse had him turning back around.

"Oh, and one more thing," he said.

She still looked slightly shell-shocked. "Yeah?"

"What's your name? Sorry, I didn't catch it."

He could've asked around—someone had to know. Marv or other players who'd already talked to her at yesterday's game. Greg, the executive producer, if he could stomach the interaction. But for whatever reason he wanted to hear it directly from her.

"Daphne," she said finally, lifting her gaze to his.

"Daphne," he repeated. It was a pretty name. It suited her. "Nice to meet you. I'm Chris."