But when Dallas’s brown-green eyes met mine, slightly widened, I’d swear he stood a little taller. And he nodded, saying only one word, “Okay.”

Chapter Fifteen

I looked at my shorts, and then I looked at the weather app on my phone.

According to the screen, it was ninety-four degrees out today. In October. Fucking global warming.

I looked at my shorts again, held them in my hands, taking in the ragged hem for a minute and said, “Fuck it.” I’d worn things a lot shorter when I was eighteen. This pair had been with me for the last five years, and I still wore them on a regular basis. The thing was, I usually tried to avoid anything higher than my knees at Josh’s games or practices because, while the boys didn’t blink twice at me running around the house with only a big T-shirt on or sleep shorts, some boys weren’t used to that.

God knew my mom had never worn shorts while I was growing up. She made faces any time I put on anything that wasn’t a respectable skirt or loose pants. I could still remember what her face had resembled when skinny jeans and leggings had gotten popular. You would have figured I’d been naked.

It was going to be hot as hell today, and I wasn’t going to be showing anybody anything they hadn’t seen a hundred times before simply going to the mall. And Josh and Lou had never told me anything about the clothes I wore—except for this one red dress I’d put on to go out with some friends from my going-out days that pretty much made me look like a prostitute. “No” was the one and only thing Josh had told me that night a year and a half ago before pointing in the direction of my room. “No, no, no,” he’d repeated again, shaking his head. “No, Aunt Di.”

Adjusting the straps of my bra so that they were hidden under my brand new Tornado T-shirt with CASILLAS screen-printed on the back, I slipped on my flip-flops just as Josh yelled, “Are you ready?” from down the hall.

Luckily, I’d already packed the cooler for our day at the park, collected a couple of magazines to look through for new hairstyling ideas, and charged up my tablet so I could catch a couple of episodes of The Office when there was nothing else to do but sit around. I had this competitive baseball thing all figured out.

I rushed out of my room, finding Josh in the living room already standing by the door. He was pumped and ready for his first game in months. “You got everything?” I asked as I grabbed the handle of the blue cooler with one hand and the strap of my oversized tote with the other; it was also filled with sunblock, an extra battery pack for my cell, nuts, a hand towel, bug spray, and two ponchos in their small plastic containers.

“Yeah,” he answered in that same easy, confident tone he always used… even when he was lying out of his teeth.

I blinked down at him. “Did you grab an extra pair of socks?”

Josh tipped his head back and groaned. “No.” Dropping his bag, he ran toward his room. In no time, he was back out, stuffing the extra socks he was always forgetting into his bag. The kid had sweaty feet and needed an extra pair, especially on a day like today.

“Okay, let’s go,” I said, motioning him forward.

I locked the front door as he threw his things into the back. Glancing in the direction of Dallas’s house, I noticed his truck was gone. The fields where the tournament was happening that weekend were almost an hour away, and Josh and I listened to music on my playlist the entire ride, singing along softly half the time. Josh and I were both still half asleep. Our resident ray of sunshine was spending the weekend with my parents at a family member’s house in Houston instead of frying under the sun with us.

At the park, we climbed out of the car, yawning. Josh grabbed his bag and then helped me lower the cooler out of the back, tiredly smiling at me when our eyes met. I held my hand out, palm up, right in front of him, and he smacked it.

“I love you, J,” I said.

He blinked sleepily. “Love you too.”

And in that way that Josh and I had—my oldest nephew, my first real love—we hugged each other, side to side, by the car. While Louie might be the sun, Josh was the moon and the stars. He was my gravity, my tide, my ride or die. He was more like my little brother than my nephew, and in some ways, we had grown up together. I had loved him from the moment I laid eyes on him. Loved him from the moment I knew he was a spark of life, and I was going to love him every day of my life.

He pulled back after a tight squeeze of my middle. “Okay, let’s go.”

We went.

By the time we found the group of Tornado members clustered around one of the picnic tables at the center of the three baseball fields, I was already sweating. “Morning,” I greeted all the parents and kids who turned to look at us as we walked over to them. I didn’t miss the long look two moms shot at me as their gaze went from my mostly bare legs to my face and back. Haters. I also didn’t miss the inappropriately long look one of the dads, who I knew was separated from his wife, shot me either. I just chose to ignore them. I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

Taking a seat on one of the nearest picnic tables, I waited for the coaching staff to arrive. Dallas was the first one to get there. He had two duffel bags hanging over each shoulder, an orange water cooler balanced in his hands, and his sunglasses and baseball cap on. He was wearing a red Polo shirt that had the team’s emblem and what I figured was his name embroidered on it. And just like usual, he had his holey cargo shorts and tennis shoes on. I noticed him glance in my direction and tip his chin up, but he didn’t greet me as he headed straight to the main congregation of parents and kids, and eventually broke off to walk the boys over to an empty patch of grass to start warming up. There was still well over an hour left until the tournament started, and I knew there was no rush to move toward whatever field would be used first until later.

I sat there for the next hour flipping through a magazine and browsing random stuff on my phone. When I noticed a few of the other moms getting up and start making their way over to one of the fields, I grabbed my things and followed after them. Parking the cooler on the floor beside the second row, I hopped up and took a seat to wait. Josh was on home, catching the balls the pitcher was throwing at him to warm up, but it wasn’t going so well. The pitcher was throwing the ball too high every single time. After about the tenth time, Josh had to get up and run after it. Trip, who had showed up minutes ago, waved the pitcher over to talk with him, giving Josh a break.

Standing up, I snagged a bottle of water from my cooler and walked over to the fence separating and protecting the audience from the game and players. “Josh!” I hissed over at him, the fingers of my free hand clinging to one of the links. Out of the corner of my eyes, I caught the big, male figure that belonged to Dallas standing by third base talking to one of the moms that had been giving me a bitch face earlier. It was the Christy woman I was pretty sure, if I had my hair color correct.

Josh turned around immediately, ripping his facemask off, and walked toward me, his palms facing upward as I tossed the bottle up high to go over the fence. “Thanks,” he answered, right after catching it.

“Did you put sunblock on?” I asked.

He nodded, the bottle glued to his mouth as he guzzled a third of it down.

I couldn’t help myself. “On your face too?”

“Yes,” he replied, one eye narrowed.