Somebody to Love You by Eliza Lane

Author:Eliza Lane [Lane, Eliza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2023-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

I stare at the ceiling for hours, feeling untethered. This body I’m in doesn’t even feel like mine. My body works. My body allows me to run down ground balls and speed around the bases.

It allows me to protect the people I love.

If somebody offered me a million dollars to do any of those things now, I wouldn’t be able to. It would be impossible.

I’ve been pushing myself to be a better baseball player since I was six years old. All this time, the dream has been the same: get to the major leagues. And here I am, much closer to that goal than most guys ever get, and it’s all gone.

What I’ve spent my entire life working toward. Gone.

What I’ve planned my future around. Gone.

All those Cs I’ve been getting in my classes are going to come back and bite me in the ass now. I’m an accounting major who doesn’t know shit about accounting.

I try to picture myself as an accountant: wearing a suit, sitting in a cubicle or small office, crunching numbers. I can’t. I try to imagine what my life will be like in two years, in five, in ten, and I see a white, empty slate.

Dad comes back into the room from a snack run, holding a Dr. Pepper. “Azalea and her dad are still here,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes.

I glance out the window. It’s close to sunset. “They are?”

He nods. “Julian says she’s refusing to go home until she sees you.”

My heart lifts at the same time my stomach twists. I want to see her, but I know I can’t. I can’t handle it. The timing of all of this is so atrociously horrible that I almost let out a sardonic laugh. Just when things were looking up, when I was on cloud nine, happier than I’d been in months—hell, years—this had to happen. Of fucking course.

I was holding my feelings back from her because I knew that I wasn’t emotionally stable enough to begin a relationship. I lost sight of all that in Chicago, and we crossed the line. Several of them.

Now reality is staring me in the face again, and it’s even more brutal than before.

“I can’t see her,” I say.

Dad raises his eyebrows at me. “They’ve been waiting all day, Mav. Not even for a minute?”

“No. I can’t.”

He watches me for several seconds with a pinched, disapproving look on his face. I wait for verbalized disappointment about how ungrateful and rude I’m being—and he would be correct—but instead he just clenches his jaw and says, “I’ll let them know.”

Even as he’s walking out of the room, I regret it. I want to call him back, ask him to please bring her to see me. I want to see that she’s okay with my own eyes. I want to hold her hand and tell her that I would throw myself in front of that car for her again and again, even if it cost me my career. Even if it cost me my life.

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