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★☆★☆★
I could practically hear Cara’s eyes roll as I held the phone to my ear. I pulled the emery board from my desk drawer and was filing my nails as I had dialed her extension.
“Baseball? I’d rather watch paint dry.”
I laughed. “Me too. But there are hot guys at the minor league games.”
She was quiet for a minute. “Can I bring my Kindle?”
I was confused. “Your what?”
“My Kindle. My electronic reader.”
I shook my head. “What the hell ever. I don’t care. Just go with me. I hope the hot men in tight pants will distract from any electronic devices you plan on bringing with you.”
I heard her shift the phone to her other ear. “I was gonna make a joke about electronic devices, but I’d better not.”
I smiled. “Yeah, especially the battery-operated kind, right?”
“You are so bad! I would never bring that kind in public.”
“Of course not,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Did you say something?” she asked, an accusing tone coloring her voice.
“Uh, no, of course not.”
“Yeah, let me find out you’re mocking me, you whore!”
I laughed so hard, I almost spit water out of my nose. “Whore? Seriously? You’re one to talk.”
She gasped. “As if!”
“As if? What is this, 1995? Did you just say ‘as if’?”
“There’s an inmate at my door. I’ll talk to you later,” she said, right before she hung up.
I couldn’t help but laugh. I loved riling her up. And after I’d hung up, it dawned on me that she hadn’t committed to going to the minor league game with me. My sister had scored tickets – really good tickets I might add – from the local radio station, but couldn’t go. If Cara couldn’t go with me, I was gonna give them to my parents. But I really thought she’d like to go. Just as something to do with her weekend since I knew Father’s Day was next weekend and both Ashlynn and Aiden would be with their dads.
And I didn’t think Cara wanted to visit Marker’s to see her dad. Truth was, I felt bad for Cara in that regard. Her mom and stepdad seemed cool, and even her dad... but I knew he’d had a drinking problem, and sometimes she’d make little comments about it, like “I really need to quit drinking” or “I shouldn’t drink this hard stuff”... but I had blown it off.
In all reality, we really should cool it. We’d been going out on weekends here and there for about six months. We had a lot of fun. We would sometimes hang out at a bar, or we’d go to a dance club. We recently found a country bar called Cowboys and we had fun there. There were always cute boys and we even learned how to line dance and bought some fun cowboy boots to wear with our jeans and skirts. When we weren’t out partying, we’d chill at home with our kids. It was almost a relief that I had met Cara. She was such a good friend and we had so many things in common on so many levels. While she was pretty quiet and level-headed, I was sometimes loud and impulsive, but I think we balanced each other out. She was real pretty, too, and we never had trouble talking to guys when we went out.
But at first we did. We couldn’t figure out why nobody wanted to talk to us. So finally one day, I asked this really cute but really drunk guy while we were at Cowboys. I walked right up to him and just point-blank asked him why he and his friends had been eyeballing us all night but wouldn’t make a move. He had finally told us we were so pretty, we looked intimidating. Then his friend had interjected that we looked stuck-up. Wow, really? It was quite an eye-opener. Now we just walked up and talked to whomever we wanted. I learned quickly people liked being approached, and rarely would we get rejected.
A loud, obnoxious whistle broke me out of my thoughts. I looked over to see a young guy and his friends whooping and hollering at the baseball game, which had obviously started while my head was in the clouds.
“Are you listening to me at all?” Cara asked, her green gaze boring into my topaz one.
I turned my head and looked at her, plastering on a mask of impassivity. “What did you say, hunny?”
She jutted her chin toward the cute boys whose whistles had jolted me out of my daydreaming. “I said, I can see why you dragged me to a god-awful sporting event.”
I fished some cinnamon gum from my pocket and popped a piece in my mouth. I offered Cara some, but she declined. I looked at the guys, then back at her. “Did you just call baseball a god-awful sporting event?”
She squared her chin and put on a haughty face. “I may have.”
I snorted. “Okay yeah, baseball kinda blows. But you’re right. Tons of hot men. I’m sure this is why Vanessa always goes to these things.”
She shook her head and took a swig of her cup of beer, then made a face. “Beer is so nasty.”
I laughed. “Then why are you drinking it?”
“I’m just saying, your sister is pretty and educated, why doesn’t she have a man?”
I lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “I’m not sure. I think she’s too picky. Usually the guys she meets are the wrong sign.”
Cara’s lips thinned and she looked at me curiously. “Please tell me you are not talking about astrological signs?”
I giggled. “Yep. Big believer in the stars and all that.”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s such a load of shit.”
“Tell me about it. She was with a guy who was the right sign for like ten years and just broke it off with him. So obviously that has no bearing on anything.”
Her eyes got big. “No way.”
“Totally.”
The crowd erupted in cheers and we both looked out to see one of the players get his white uniform filthy by sliding into home plate. The digital screen exploded with fireworks and the words “HOME RUN” flashed across the screen, along with some obnoxious music – and the player’s name, which read Jace Lawless.
“Dude! Did you see that? He totally stole home plate!”
Cara and I looked over to see the boneheads from earlier high-fiving each other. They looked over at us. “Wasn’t that awesome?” a cute brown-haired guy said.
I bit my full bottom lip and peered at Cara, who was staring at me with her blonde eyebrow raised. I then nodded and threw on my enthusiastic face. “Oh yeah, totally awesome.”
The cutie emptied out of his seat and sauntered over to me. “Whatcha doin’ after the game, blondie?”
I lifted my chin. “Nothing.”
The guy, who I now noticed was fully sleeved up in tattoos on both arms, some with skulls, a few playing cards, some weird creepy birds... pulled something from the front pocket of his black jeans. “I got tickets to a party.” He waved them in my face. “Wanna come with us?” He pointed a thumb behind him at his friends.
I peered over his shoulder and then back into his eyes, which were the exact color of the sky on a clear day. “And who’s going to be at this party?”
He waved at the baseball field. “Well, most of the players.”
I stifled a laugh. “And you needed tickets for this? These guys are minor league, are they not?”
Now, I am obviously no big baseball fan, but I did know the difference between the San Francisco Giants and the San Jose Giants (real original name, by the way!) so I was kinda surprised that this guy had “tickets” to an after party with these guys. I sort of got the feeling he was blowing smoke up my very fine ass.
Cara vacated her seat and stood next to me. “Where exactly is this party?”
“It’s at some club in downtown. The Blue something...” he trailed off, looking into the blue sky which was crowded with puffy white billows, as if the answer was just going to spell itself out in clouds for him.
I glanced at Cara, who had a mischievous grin on her face, then back at the guy. “Well, we’re there.”
He smiled. “Awesome.”
“I’m Miranda, by the way.” I gripped his hand. “And this is Cara.”
“Dalton. And these are my buddies Sims and Hans.” He pointed to his two friends, who looked strangely almost just like him, with their skinny jeans, tattoos, and one of them even had thick black-rimmed glasses and a scraggly beard. These dudes looked like a bunch of rockers. Which made me wonder what the hell they were doing at a baseball game. But then I just shut up. He had tickets to some party where there would be a group of hot, buff, baseball players, so today, I would be his best friend, and I’d even flirt with him if I had to.
“You’re shameless,” Cara whispered in my ear, as if reading my thoughts about the self-loathing behavior I was engaging in just to get invited to a party.
“Totally,” I grunted back into her ear.
She started laughing. Then I started laughing. Then Dalton started laughing, as if he was in on the joke.
Noticing that there was a crapload of empty seats next to Dalton and his friends, we picked up our stuff and moved next to them for the rest of the game.
“So, Dalton,” I said, eyeballing the letters D A L T tattooed across his fingers, “how did you score tickets to an after party?”
He pointed at the field. “That player who just slid into home, Jace Lawless? He’s my brother.”