If I was here out of obligation instead of joy, my parents would know they were holding me back, and they’d feel bad, and we’d have a level of resentment to our relationship that I don’t want, and neither do they.

So when I say I’d let my family down?

That’s not guilt or obligation. That’s real fear that the people I love would be hurt by my actions.

If Max and I had an actual future? Yeah. My family would rally.

But he’s not the settling down type, and he clearly has walls up keeping him from winning over whatever demons he’s fighting. I don’t have a magic vagina, the world’s best personality, or whatever else it is that would convince a playboy pitcher like Max to quit hooking up with one-night stands in the city, and honestly?

I’m not ready to settle down either. I still have more things I want to do first. Things I need to quit pushing off, honestly. It just always feels like it’s not the right time.

Oh my god.

Am I standing in my own way too?

Sloane shakes her head. “I suppose I get it, but…”

I tilt my eyebrows up. “But there isn’t a good but.”

“Maybe Cooper can convince some of the single hockey players in town to do their summer training out here.”

I burst out laughing.

She does too.

And then Dita and LaShonda show up with offers to help, and Annika’s mom, her boyfriend, and little sister pop by, and the day slips away with good food and laughter and hugs and stories and bets over football games and plans for who’s heading into Copper Valley for shopping trips with whom.

The next thing I know, I’m stuffed, the sun’s long gone, and the kitchen at Crusty Nut is clean and ready for tomorrow morning, when we’ll open early with a reinforced wifi signal for everyone who wants to start their holiday shopping online over eggs benedict and mountain man breakfasts.

Max didn’t come out for the festivities.

The roads are finally clear, so I have no idea if he’s still in Shipwreck—Cooper didn’t say anything about him, and I didn’t ask—but I still pack up a box of leftovers when I kill the lights at Crusty Nut, lock up, and head home.

Max’s SUV is in his driveway, and there’s light flickering in the front and side windows, suggesting he’s watching TV.

A wave of melancholy hits me, both in the heart and in the gut. I don’t know a lot about his past beyond the basic, no-details run-down he gave me the other day, but I imagine holidays aren’t for him what they are for me.

I also know odds are high at least a half-dozen people from the block would’ve knocked on his door to invite him to join us for our progressive dinner today.

I’m probably not the first person to think to leave a box of leftovers on his porch, and given his usual strict diet, I don’t even know if he’ll touch most of the food.

But I leave it on his porch anyway, ring the doorbell, and retreat back to my own house before he can answer the door.

A guy doesn’t stay locked inside his house in Shipwreck on a holiday unless he wants to be alone. It’s not my place to make him do anything else.

But at least he’ll know we were thinking about him.

And that, I’d do for anyone.

Not just Max Cole.

But the one thing I do for him that I wouldn’t do for anyone else?

I think about him long, long after I should.

And for the first time in my life, I wish he wasn’t a pitcher for the Fireballs.

15

Max

My favorite part of baseball has always been the way it makes me feel like one of the guys, like a normal person with normal relationships, and today I’m seeing a few more teammates for the first time since our post-season run ended, and it’s good.

It’s really good.

We’re all up at Cooper’s place—like a dozen of us—plus a camera crew, testing a new card game management had developed to highlight the mascot wars that went down last season at Duggan Field.

They’re technically over, with Ash the Baby Dragon hatching in a surprise reveal after management got the fans all riled up over retiring Fiery the Dragon, the Fireballs’ much-beloved mascot from their losing decades, but management also declared that the four terrible options for replacement mascots were staying on at Duggan Field until they, quote, can find new jobs.

The firefly and the duck have half a chance, but the meatball? No way. And definitely not the echidna either.

No one outside of Australia even knew what an echidna was until the new Fireballs owners insisted on making it a mascot option.

But they knew what they were doing all along. Case in point—the news is still covering Ash’s antics as she travels all over Copper Valley visiting schools and fire stations and the other local pro sports teams’ venues, and all the baby dragon merchandise keeps selling out online.

And the Ashes we painted last month with Tillie Jean just sold for ungodly sums of money for Robinson’s family’s favorite charity.

Ah, hell.

There I go.

Thinking about Tillie Jean again.

It’s been two weeks since she left me a box of Thanksgiving food, and other than putting a glow-in-the-dark golf ball in the box, along with a note that she’s always happy to show her friends and siblings how to get better at Scuttle Putt, she hasn’t tried to get revenge for me throwing snowballs at her, nor has she treated me any differently than Robinson, Cooper, and Trevor the two times we’ve gone into Crusty Nut for lunch while she was working.

She’s more or less leaving me alone, and it’s making everything worse. She’s supposed to flirt with me.

“Just play a card, dude,” Robinson says to Cooper. I’m at the dining room table with the two of them, plus Luca. We’re surrounded by video lights and camera people, with half the rest of the team watching our game from behind the scattered cameras until it’s their turn to play. All of us are wearing our team jerseys under orders from the marketing director, drinking out of Fireballs-branded water bottles, each holding a single card in our hand until it’s our turn to draw one more from the deck and pick which card to play, and yeah, it feels good to be in uniform again, even if it’s only my shirt.

I don’t love a lot of things, but I love baseball.

It’s Cooper’s turn. He’s been studying his two cards for what feels like an hour, even though a round of this game should be done in about the amount of time it takes for a commercial break between innings.

“It’s not that complicated,” Rossi says. He and his girlfriend are crashing at the inn in town for a week or so, and she’s busy hanging out with the rest of the Lady Fireballs booster club. “You need me to pick? Here. Play that one.”

He flicks a card.

Cooper leaps back like Luca’s trying to steal it from him. “Hands off the cards, Rossi. You can pick when it’s your turn.”

He throws down the other card—Meaty the Meatball, the worst possible mascot choice from last season’s contest, even without the pirate costume he’s wearing on this card—and mutters something as we all read the instructions on the card.

“What?” Robinson almost shoots out of his seat. “No. I hate that card. Why’d you play that card? Take it back. Play the other one.”