Home Run Baby: A Sports Romance by Tabatha Kiss Page B

out of film,” she says, “but my mother didn’t like me messing with it so she refused to buy me more — not that Polaroid film was easy to find in the first place at that point.”
    “Why didn’t she like you messing with it?”
    “Because he gave it to me.” She shrugs. “They divorced when Rose and I were five and disagreeing with each other was more of a principle than anything else.”
    “Right…”
    “She’s never been a big fan of me pursuing art.”
    “What did she want you to do instead?”
    She stops and laughs at her feet. “She wanted me to be a lawyer , like her .”
    I wince. “Boring.”
    “That’s what I said!” She shakes her head. “She wanted Rose to be one, too, but she chose to go into Chemistry instead and Rose can do no wrong anyway, so…” Her shoulders bounce. “Mom let it slide.”
    “You don’t seem to have a lot in common with your twin,” I note.
    “And you’d be correct. Rose is more or less the perfect daughter and I’m…” she inhales a deep breath, holding it for a long moment before finally letting it out, “not.”
    “Well, you seem just fine to me so far.”
    It brings a quick smile to her face but it doesn’t last long. “I left home at eighteen,” she says, “came out to the east coast to be on my own and prove her wrong but… that hasn’t really panned out.”
    “Hence why you haven’t told her about the baby yet.”
    “Ha!” She grins. “Oh, she’s going to have a field day on that one, let me tell ya. There will be I told you so parades flooding the streets from here to California until the day its born.”
    I chuckle. “It can’t be that bad.”
    “It’ll be bad enough.” She looks up at me. “So, what about you? Are you a big failure for Mommy, too?”
    “Not really,” I answer. “My parents are my biggest fans.”
    “Cool.”
    She starts again, walking slowly along the diamond and I trail beside her from base to base. After a few moments of silence, she turns to me.
    “Was that true?” she asks.
    “Was what true?”
    “What you told Trisha earlier. About how you think about me a lot… or, you know, I assume you were talking about me, anyway…”
    I pause, smiling. “Yeah, that was true.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    She looks down at her feet. “Really?”
    I chuckle. “Does that surprise you?”
    “Kind of.”
    “Why?”
    She hesitates. “I guess I never thought of myself as someone that people think about, if that makes sense.”
    “You were the first thing I thought of when we arrived in Hartford the other day,” I tell her. “We drove by the bar as we went through downtown and I wondered what you were doing, who you were with… if you were happy.”
    Her eyes pop up. “You did?”
    “After that night, I wanted to get to know you better but I was leaving and…” I shake my head. “I don’t know, maybe a part of me knew that this wasn’t over.”
    She grins. “Well, I definitely didn’t have that part in me .”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Yeah, I forgot all about you the second I stepped outside of your building,” she jokes.
    “Well, I don’t doubt that.”
    She licks her lips and shrugs. “Okay, maybe I thought about you a little here and there. Once or twice.”
    I smile and come to a quick stop on first base. “So…” I lean in closer, “do you kiss on the first date?”
    “Depends on how it’s going.”
    “And how is this one going?”
    She shrugs. “Meh.”
    “Meh?”
    “Meh.”
    “There is just no pleasing some women…” I smirk.
    She chuckles. “I guess it’s not bad, so far…”
    “Yeah?”
    “Yeah,” she nods.
    “Good enough for me to safely go for it?”
    “It might be worth a shot.” She looks down. “We are technically standing on first base.”
    I laugh, biting my inner cheek, and stalling to gauge that look in her blue eyes. Expectant and wild, there’s nothing about her at all that tells me not to do it.
    I reach out and graze her cheek with my fingertips,