Totally Opposed (Love In Play #3)

11. Ryan

Chapter eleven

Ryan

Precious meows at me from the windowsill from the moment I sit up in bed.

“Well, good morning to you, too,” I say and look past her for signs of Don. He must not be up and moving yet, and by the looks of it, Precious is getting hungry. “I’m sure he’ll be up soon. Now be careful on that ledge.”

Precious meows again.

I head to the bathroom to take a piss, but when I return, Precious is still meowing on the windowsill, and I can’t shake the feeling that something isn’t right. I throw on some sweats and a shirt and jog down the stairs of my building to head over and check on Don.

I knock three times, but there is no answer. Shit. Do I break it down? He could be hard of hearing. Fuck, what do I do?

I grab my phone and call Alan.

“Hey, so I am outside your Gramps’ place,” I blurt the second he answers. “And Precious is meowing, and he won’t come to the door, and it’s probably nothing. He’s probably sleeping, but the cat is being weird and—”

“There is a spare key on top of the door frame on the right,” Alan replies, and I hear him fumbling around, knocking something over, and then he calls out, “Kelly.”

I reach up and feel across the top of the door frame for the key. It’s stuck down with something that clings and comes away like gum, and I resist the urge to gag, because if it is gum, that’s just gross.

“Okay, got it,” I say and unlock the door, but the second I push it open, the chain grabs.

“Shit, the security chain is there. Mr. Beaker, are you awake? Can you hear me?” I call through the opening.

Precious arrives at the door and pushes her head through the opening.

“No, get back in there, silly cat,” I say, trying to scare her back with my foot.

“Can you break it?” Alan calls through the line, and I take a step back, then shove the door with my shoulder, hard. It sends a ripple of pain through my arm, but the door flies open, and Precious jumps like she’s been struck by lightning.

“Is he okay? Is he there?” Alan asks.

“Mr Beaker, are you in here?” I call, making my way towards the kitchen when I don’t see him in the main living space. Before I can get there, the bathroom door opens up down the hall, steam flooding the hallway, and a surprised Mr Beaker steps out wearing a towel around his waist.

“What the heck are you doing in here, boy?” he asks, and I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

“He’s fine. He was in the shower,” I say to Alan, and the fucker actually starts laughing.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Beaker. Precious was meowing, and you didn’t answer and…”

“So you broke in?”

“Well…” I glance back at the door, the security chain hanging with a chunk of door frame still attached to it. “Well, yeah, but I’ll get it fixed. I swear.”

Precious struts through my legs up to him and circles him with a playful cooing noise.

“I told ya I would feed ya in a minute, you silly cat,” he says, like she can understand any of what he is saying.

“Well, I better be getting changed. While you’re here, you want to get her breakfast. That’s why she be calling you over, anyway.” And he disappears into his bedroom and I hold the phone up to my ear.

“I was manipulated by a hungry cat into breaking and entering, and now I have to fix your Gramp’s door.”

Alan laughs harder down the line. “I told you it’s a demon spawn.”

“I guess I’ll see you at warm-up in a bit.”

“Can’t wait,” he replies, and I hang up and grab Precious’s bowl.

She rubs up against me, twisting her way in between my legs as I prepare her food and then sit it down on the floor.

“You seriously were just hungry?” I ask, but she ignores me to eat, a purr rumbling from her as she devours the bowl of food almost as fast as I placed it.

I check on the damage to the door, rubbing my shoulder where the sting still vibrates through the muscles. I’ve been off Kyle’s routine for a while now, and my throwing speed is back to what it used to be, but that hit still hurt.

“Well, you did make a bit of a mess in here now, didn’t you?” Gramps says, coming out into the room fully dressed.

“I’m sorry again, the cat, she.”

He waves a hand in my direction and goes to the window.

“I’ll have to feed her first next time. Well, since you are here anyway. How about some coffee?”

“Sure, that would be great, cheers.”

“No problem, pot’s in the kitchen,” he replies, and he sits down at the window. Precious is done with her food and hops up onto his lap, curling up immediately into a ball and falling asleep.

“Umm, sure, okay. How do you take it?”

“Creamer and two sugars, oh, and grab the biscuits, the chocolate ones.”

“For breakfast?”

“I had my lucky charms for breakfast at five. Are you only just getting your butt out of bed?”

“The baseball game today doesn’t start until four thirty,” I call back, and he scoffs.

“Baseball, pfft, that’s not baseball.”

“What would you call it, then?” I ask, and he doesn’t reply.

I bring back the coffee and biscuits and put them down on the table beside his chair by the window. Looking up, I spot what could be the edge of the arena where we play.

“It might not be the type of baseball you grew up watching, but it’s the baseball I love,” I say, sitting down on his couch. Precious takes this opportunity to leap from his lap and makes herself comfortable at my side, resting her head over my thigh.

“No baseball player in my day would be caught dancing around on the field like a clown in the middle of a game.”

“Clowning is fun. Didn’t you ever go to the circus as a kid?”

“I did, and it wasn’t baseball.”

I laugh. “Yeah, it wasn’t, but it was fun. And you liked it. So maybe you could like baseball that has a bit of that fun worked into it?”

He doesn’t reply, simply takes a sip from his coffee and frowns at Precious, who is now purring away.

“I play one of the OG teams tonight, then Alan’s team will play the other one. You should come to check it out. But I need to be going. We have warm-ups and I still haven’t eaten. Umm, sorry again about the door. I will pop over later and fix it up.”

He shakes his head.

“I’ll call the super to do it. That lock obviously needed replacing anyway if a scrapper like you could bust through. Best be off with ya, then.”

I head out and immediately text my cousin.

RYAN: I was just tricked by a cat into committing a felony.

TEDDY: Please tell me you were carrying an ice cream cone in your back pocket!

RYAN: What? No way that is a felony.

TEDDY: Yep, in Georgia it is.

He proceeds to send me a link to an article about how in the old days people would do this to lure a horse away. Apparently, they never took the law out.

RYAN: Why do you even know this?

TEDDY: Granny and I go to Trivia every Thursday night down the pub. You’d be surprised what you remember. So, what crime did you commit?

RYAN: Break and enter. The old guy, Don, across the way wasn’t answering, and the cat was meowing at me nonstop, so I thought maybe he was hurt, or sick.

TEDDY: Because the cat was meowing? You know cats do that, right?

RYAN: I get how stupid it is now, but he’s Alan’s Gramps.

TEDDY: How are things with Alan? Is the Funky Monkey finally getting his coconuts cracked?

RYAN: Oh look at the time, gotta get to practice. Chat soon.

***

I hit the pool and swim a few laps, trying to shake off the fear my body is still holding onto after this morning. I was totally freaking out about Don for a minute, but the old coot was just in the fucking bathroom. Stupid cat. I rub my shoulder as I head out onto the field for the meet and greet with fans.

“I thought you were all better?” Kyle says when he spots me.

Shit. I feel okay. It’s a little tender, but what if he thinks it’s something more? He’ll bench me, that’s what he’ll do, and then we’ll have zero chance of beating the OG’s. It’s not that the team isn’t great without me. They are. But I’m the fastest pitcher we have, and my fastball was the only thing that scored us any points the last time we were up against them. Tonight, I’m taking the win, and after I do, I’ll be collecting on that celebration Alan promised me.

I swing my arm around, trying to prove it’s totally fine and I wasn’t just rubbing the painful spot where it connected with Gramps’s door.

“Ahh, yeah, I was good. I am good.” Shit, this isn’t going well. “I just shoved a door a little too hard, so it’s a bit…you know, stiff.”

He frowns, like he’s trying to decide if he believes me or not.

“You shoved a door?”

“Okay, I busted through a door, but I’m fine, really.”

“I’ll forget how you maybe hurt yourself, but not that you did. Come on, meet and greets can wait. I have to clear you or you won’t be pitching anything tonight.”

Double fuck. I turn on my heel and follow Kye back towards the locker rooms. He puts me through the paces and after about ten minutes of “do this”, “now that”, “stretch this way”, and “does this hurt?” he clears me to play.

“Cheers,” I call, jogging back out to the field. Now it’s time to win me some one-on-one Alan time.

The crowds at Savannah are what helped propel this game into the incredible league it is now, so we have a few extra games scheduled here this season, which to me, seems only fair. Game one was massive, the whole first weekend was, with celebrity visits and fireworks and flame shows. The second week was smaller, but still huge compared to what we were used to from last season. Now it’s only a few days and we’ll fly out to our first destination, and then it’s full steam ahead across America.

The crowd takes their seats, and I grab my costume for our opening number Dennis has lined up. The OG’s are already on the field, their welcome number went first, and as I stride out onto the field to join the others at our people fish tank and the music starts up, they find themselves a partner and start waltzing along to the music while Alan and I pretend to be Romeo and Juliet.

It’s hard not to blush, gazing at him through the pretend water. Dennis chose us because of our on-camera chemistry, but how long until they see it’s not just on screen?

We meet at the edge, do our dance number, and then while some of the OG team members fan out, the rest head to the dug out or into the first rows of seats to watch. Their first hitter steps into the box right on queue. Alan spins me, and then I pull the ball from my pocket and pitch it fast down the line. It lands square in the catcher’s mitt.

“Woo hoo,” Alan cheers, and lifts and spins me around by the waist. I was stoked when Dennis changed the skit to be the real first pitch to the OG team, but Alan was supposed to be already headed to the stands with the rest of his team, not cheering me on. I guess, to anyone else, it would look like it was all part of the act. But there is nothing fake about the way Alan makes me feel. He leans in and whispers.

“Keep that up and you’ll get that private celebration I promised.”

***

The rest of the game is kind of a blur. I pitched a new personal record, one hundred and three miles per hour before I was swapped out for a break, one of the best things about Banana Ball for a pitcher is that our games have a two-hour timer on them, so I get way more game time than I would if I was playing MLB. John, Dave, and Duckie have been on fire, too, catching outs and sending the ball right onto the next glove, and when the last out is called and we’ve secured the points for the win, the whole team rushes the field including Animal Control who was sitting in the stands. We did it.

I’m getting dressed when my phone chimes, and I grab it to check the message.

ALAN: Are you ready to celebrate?

Fuck, I sure am, but the whole team is going to Gopher, the bar across the street for a drink, and I can’t bail on them after our first win against the OG’s.

RYAN: Drinks at Gopher , then we can celebrate our win.

ALAN: I didn’t win anything. It was all you!

RYAN: It was that pregame release that secured the win for sure. You just wait and see for yourself. I’ll make sure you are ready for your game tomorrow night.

ALAN: I’m not normally a superstitious guy, but I’d like to test that theory.

RYAN: I’ll make an excuse after the first round of drinks.

ALAN: I’ll be waiting by the car.