Stake Me Out to the Ball Game by Mindy Klasky

Author:Mindy Klasky [Klasky, Mindy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Res Ipsa Press

All hell broke loose in the seventh inning.

A lot of baseball stuff happened. What? “Baseball stuff” is enough description—Philadelphia scored some runs. Washington changed pitchers twice. Three different batters got hit by pitches. Benches cleared for a brawl. The home plate umpire threw out four players and a manager, restoring order.

Tooth stuff happened too. My fang decided to ratchet up its jangling, taking up tap dancing on every nerve in my head. I guess it didn’t like the adrenaline let-down after Josh fled the scene.

But none of that was the “breaking loose” I mentioned.

No, that happened when Dennis and I started talking.

Maybe we felt more chatty because we’d put away our scorebooks. Without the need to record details of the game, we had the luxury of conversation.

Or maybe it was because three rows in front of us were now clear. No one was close enough to overhear our chit-chat.

Or maybe it was because I found myself ridiculously attracted to a guy who would help out a young woman who’d made a mistake, who would shut down her drunk racist boyfriend, all without throwing a punch.

I don’t know what Dennis saw in me.

But when one of the Philadelphia players hitched up with a hamstring pull, instigating a long delay as medical staff evaluated him, Dennis turned to me and asked, “Would you rather lose the ability to walk or the ability to hear?”

He couldn’t know that my vampire senses allowed me to hear far better than his human ears. Right now, for instance, I could make out the steady thud of his heart. I could hear the breath he caught as he waited for my reply.

But I wasn’t going to point that out to Dennis. Instead, I told him I’d take the wheelchair. His grin was tight as he said, “We could race each other.”

I raised my eyebrows. “I thought a guy like you would value the ability to move around!”

“A guy like me?”

There it was again—that swoopy feeling that might have been a blush if I’d had a working circulatory system. I nodded toward the empty seats in front of us. “A guy who isn’t afraid to use his body to get what he wants.”

Oh. That didn’t come out sounding quite the way it had in my head.

Dennis obviously considered teasing me about my choice of words. But he passed up the easy banter, the same way he’d skipped over the obscene term for Josh. Instead, he said, “I can’t imagine giving up the connection I get from hearing a voice. Think about it. We learn so much from tone, from timbre. When I was a kid, my father could order me: Get over here. But those same words, coming from a lover, have a completely different meaning.”

Okay. Maybe he didn’t pass up the easy banter. Because his answer sure made me shiver.

I wasn’t cold. My body never got cold. But I suddenly wanted to experiment with tone and timbre, to say a whole lot of things all night long, to the man who sat beside me.

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