Safe at First Page 4

  “You can’t keep me away from an entire team, Mac. I mean, you can try”—she ran her hands down the sides of her body—“but you know it won’t work.”

  “I can, and I will. Get out of my house. Now.”

  She pulled open the door she’d closed, walked out of my room, and straightened her skirt like I’d messed it up, giving anyone who might see her the absolute wrong idea. But I couldn’t worry about that shit right now. In order to make sure Hayley actually left the party and didn’t try to ruin any of my teammates’ lives, I needed to follow her out.

  I was hot on her heels when my heart almost exploded inside my chest. I saw Sunny standing there, watching me, her eyes big and round and filled with sadness. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was, how much just seeing her made me want to get lost in her.

  Looking at Sunny hurt, and it took every ounce of willpower I had inside of me to walk straight past her when all I wanted to do was take her in my arms and kiss the hell out of her. But I couldn’t. At least, not yet. I had to focus on getting Hayley off my property and out of my life for good. So, I kept chasing after the wrong girl, leaving the right one behind.

  When I had come back inside the house after forcing Hayley to leave with all of her demonic friends, Sunny was long gone. Believe me, I checked. I’d looked everywhere, and once I realized that she really had left, I had gone to bed. Alone.

  I woke up the next morning without a hangover. That was what happened when you didn’t drink like the rest of the guys. But I was starving, like I hadn’t eaten in days.

  Stretching my arms over my head, I wandered through the living room and into the kitchen, hoping like hell that someone had done some grocery shopping before I got in yesterday.

  The house was a fucking disaster. A few people slept on the couches, and there was some guy I didn’t recognize on the floor, cuddling with an inflatable doll. Empty plastic cups and bottles were everywhere. Why was throwing things in a trash can so fucking hard for people to do?

  Shaking my head, I pulled open the refrigerator door and cursed silently. The damn thing was empty—unless you counted the lone pizza box that had nothing inside of it, except a single piece of crust.

  Who the hell had left that in the fridge anyway? Idiots.

  When I yanked it out, my eyes widened. Hiding behind the stupid box was a carton of eggs. I knew better than to get too excited though. With my luck, it would be empty too.

  Reaching for it, I smiled at the weight. There were definitely eggs in there. Scanning the packaging, I made sure that the expiration date was still in the future and pumped my fist in the air when I read that it was. Just as I opened the carton to see six eggs inside, Colin walked into the kitchen, yawning.

  “You found the eggs,” he said, holding his head between his hands.

  “Only because I moved the pizza box.”

  “I put that there, so no one would see the eggs,” he started to explain before sitting down at the counter. “You know how stupid we get after drinking. We eat all the things. So, I hid them.”

  I laughed. “From yourself?”

  “From all of us. Especially myself,” he said. “But you’ll make them, right? I need food, or I might yak.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ll make them,” I agreed before grabbing a pan and some cooking spray and getting to work. “Take these.” I tossed him some aspirin that I’d grabbed from the drawer.

  Colin worked on the cap before finally getting it off and dumped two pills inside his hand, taking them without water or any liquid. “You know, Sunny was here last night. Did you see her?”

  I stopped cracking the eggs into the pan and walked over to where he was sitting, spatula in hand. “I saw her for two seconds before she left. Did she say anything? Who was she here with?” I pointed the spatula at him with each question.

  He put up his hands. “Not so loud, man. I don’t know who she was with, but she asked where you were.”

  “She asked where I was? What did you say?” At this rate, I was never going to start cooking the eggs.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I think I said you were in your room. I don’t really remember.”

  Damn.

  That was why Sunny had been right there when my bedroom door opened and Hayley walked out of it. She definitely thought something was going on between us, and I couldn’t blame her. I would have drawn the same conclusion if the roles had been reversed.

  “What’s up with the two of you anyway?”

  “Nothing,” I said a little too quickly, and we both knew it. Denial came out fast, especially when it was a lie.

  “Doesn’t seem like nothing,” he pushed, but I walked away from him and turned on the stove instead, cracking all six eggs into the pan.

  My stomach growled, and I pressed my palm against it.

  “How long until the guys are up? I want to go to the field and get some swings in.”

  “Come on, Mac. It’s, like, our only day off,” Colin started to whine, and it irritated me.

  Fall practice began tomorrow, and even though our team was bound by all sorts of NCAA rules and regulations, we skirted our way around them, rarely taking a day off until winter break.

  “I’ll go alone,” I said as I continued scrambling. “Doesn’t matter to me,” I lied. It mattered but not enough to make me not go.

  I missed Chance. He was always down for going the extra mile, and he never said no when it came to baseball.

  “I’ll go wake up the guys,” Colin finally relented, and I knew that they were probably too hungover to be productive anyway.

  Splitting the eggs onto two plates, I started eating before anyone else woke up and wanted me to share with them. Six eggs weren’t nearly enough food for four guys.

  Colin reappeared with a frown. “They’re not getting up anytime soon. But I’ll go to the field with you.”

  “Eat up then.” I pushed the other plate of eggs in his direction before planning exactly what I wanted to work on today. Weights. Sprints. Hitting off the tee. Ground balls. Sunny.

  Sunny?

  What the hell was I going to do about this girl?

  Stupid, Perfect Jerkface

  Sunny

  I’d left the party last night, beyond pissed off. I’d gone through a wide range of emotions on the drive home but kept coming back to anger.

  And when I woke up this morning, I was still angry. It was the one thing that made me feel the best. Being mad meant that I wasn’t sulking—or worse, crying. I didn’t want to do either of those things.

  Sitting up in bed, I tossed the covers off of my body and huffed. Screw Mac and his deliciously gorgeous face, stupid surfer hair, and hot baseball-playing body. Who needed any of it? Not. Me.

  I had no idea what I’d truly expected from him, but I guessed I hadn’t counted on him being able to walk past me like I was nothing. He didn’t even acknowledge my existence. No. All he had done was give me a quick glance and then continued chasing after a girl who looked like she belonged more on the cover of a magazine than at a college baseball party. How typical.

  He could have sent me a text message afterward, apologizing for being such an asshat. I knew he still had my phone number. No one deleted people’s numbers anymore. But he hadn’t apologized or texted or done anything. It was June all over again.

  Reaching for my cell, I pressed Danika’s name without stopping to calculate the time difference, something I usually did by habit.

  “Hey,” she answered, sounding happy to hear from me.

  “Hi,” I responded, but my tone was less than happy.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked before adding quickly, “Oh no. The party. What happened? What did he do?”

  “What did who do?” I heard Chance ask in the background, and Danika tried to cover up the phone, but I heard her say Mac’s name.

  I sucked in a long breath, determined not to cry. “He just ...” I started. “It sounds so dumb when I say it out loud.”

  “You haven’t said anything out loud yet,” Danika chastised.

  “Fine, it sounds stupid in my head before I say it out loud to you.”

  She groaned through the phone, “Spit it out, Sunny.”

  “He ignored me. I mean, first of all, he was in his room with some girl who was ridiculously pretty, and then he just walked right past me while he was chasing after her,” I explained, and she was quiet.

  “What did he do? Tell me,” Chance whispered, and I rolled my eyes even though they couldn’t see me.

  “Just put me on speaker.”

  “ ’K. We’re both here.”

  “So, he ignored you? Maybe he didn’t see you,” Danika suggested, and Chance agreed.

  “Mac can be dumb sometimes, you know.” That was Chance.

  “He saw me. He looked right at me and walked on by.”

  “He didn’t even say hi?” Chance again.

  “No. He barely even acted like he knew me. It was embarrassing. I felt like an idiot,” I said, feeling vulnerable and dumb all over again. Being mad was so much better than this crap.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Chance said, and Danika squealed.

  I’d never heard my best friend squeal before.

  “Did you just ... squeal?” I asked, making sure the sound of that word was as unbelievable coming out of my mouth as it had been from hers.

  “Be quiet. Chance just said he’d call him. Did you hear that part?” she asked.

  “I heard, but you don’t have to do that,” I said, and I meant it.

  Maybe if this had been a few months ago, Chance might have been able to make a difference, but I wasn’t sure there was any point now. Mac clearly didn’t care.

  “I’m not going to let my best friend be a dick to you, Sunny. I’ll handle it. And I’ll find out w
hat’s going on and put a stop to it.”

  Before I knew it, the phone clicked off speaker, and Danika was on the line alone. “Well, I guess he’s handling it then,” she said with a little odd-sounding laugh.

  “Oh God. You’re turned on right now, aren’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t you be? Did you hear him? I need to go jump his bones for all that macho, bossy shit.”

  “Go away. Call me later and let me know if Chance actually talks to him,” I said, and she made another weird sound. At least one of us was getting the baseball player we wanted.

  “I will. And you should think about coming to New York and working with me. ’K-thanks-bye,” she said really fast before ending the call, knowing that if she stayed on the line, I’d argue with her about it.

  Danika had mentioned a couple times since she’d started the new division in her dad’s company that she was going to need help eventually and that I’d be perfect for it, but it always made me nervous whenever I tried to work through the logistics in my head. I knew absolutely nothing about real estate, and I’d never even been to New York before.

  How could she even think that I’d be good at matching high-end clients with properties when I knew nothing about any of it? I had to admit that it sounded exciting, and Danika had never been happier, but I thought that had more to do with Chance than anything else. Don’t tell her I said that.

  After showering and washing my hair, I decided to run to the campus bookstore and pick up some things. It was hot out, and even though I was in cutoff shorts and a crop top, I still felt the beads of sweat starting to form. I reached for my long blonde hair and twisted it around my fist before tying it into a knot on top of my head.

  Campus was pretty crowded for a Sunday with people milling around all over the place, staring down at their phones and almost walking into things. I couldn’t remember a time when we didn’t have cell phones, but my parents did, and they talked about it a lot. They made it sound so appealing and freeing, not having a phone attached to you twenty-four hours a day. But the idea of turning mine off for said freedom gave me this weird level of anxiety instead. It made me feel unsafe and uncomfortable to be so disconnected.

  As I approached the two-story stucco building with a Get Your Books Here banner hanging from it, I noticed a We’re Hiring flyer underneath some Plexiglas by the doors. They were looking for part-time help, and I briefly considered applying before hearing my parents’ voices in my head once again.

  “You have the rest of your life to work. Don’t start now.”

  They had both emphasized my not working while I was a full-time student, insisting that once I started, I’d never stop. It wasn’t like I’d never had a job before. I’d worked over the summers, helping my parents in the vet clinic, which I was sure might not have counted to some people, but it did to me. I’d learned all kinds of skills just from working the front desk.

  So, the idea of picking up a few hours had been crossing my mind lately. Nothing too serious, just something to fill my free time. I had far too much of it with Danika gone, and I figured that anything that stopped me from focusing on Mac had to be a good thing.

  Pulling open one of the glass doors, I was hit with a wave of air-conditioning before Mac’s stupid, grinning face painted on the wall with the rest of the team from last year’s College World Series greeted me. So much for not thinking about him or trying to escape his hazel-colored eyes. They’d even gotten the color right on a freaking mural.

  Who was I kidding? I couldn’t work here, not with Mac’s eyes following my every move. Growling at his giant-sized painted face, I decided that it was all his fault the store was so crowded. The lines for the cashier were about twenty people long, and I had zero interest in waiting when all I’d wanted in the first place were some cute pens and stuff.

  I spun around to leave and literally ran into a rock-hard chest. An apology was on the tip of my tongue when I realized that it was none other than Mac himself.

  “Sunny,” he said my name so sweet as he moved to reach for the pieces of hair that had fallen around my face but stopped himself.

  His eyes roamed over the entire length of my body before stopping back on my bare midriff and my belly-button piercing. He liked what he saw, and it took everything in me to not say that out loud and call him out.

  “It’s not enough that you’re on the freaking wall, but you have to be here in real life too?” I grumbled to myself, but Mac clearly thought I was talking to him.

  “What? Oh,” he said as he looked toward the wall, obviously forgetting that he was painted on it! “It’s a little obnoxious, right?”

  He actually looked embarrassed, and I figured that he probably was. For as much as Mac acted like he loved the attention, some part of me knew better.

  “Are you asking or telling me?”

  “I was asking, but damn, Sunny, you sound mad.”

  Is he serious right now?

  I narrowed my eyes, hoping they might shoot lasers at him or something as equally destructive. “I am mad,” I admitted before realizing that we weren’t alone and his teammates were watching our interaction with rapt attention. “But it doesn’t matter anyway, does it?”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “How I feel.”

  He gave me a one-armed shrug, and I wanted to sock him in it. When had we turned into two people who couldn’t even have a normal conversation with each other anymore? Instead of waiting for him to figure out what to say to me next or formulate the perfect response, I gave him mine instead.

  “You’re an asshole,” I tossed over my shoulder before walking away from him, hoping like hell that he’d come running after me but knowing he never would.

  Why did I keep hoping he’d want me when he kept showing me that he didn’t?

  Mac

  Damn it.

  Every time I saw Sunny, I screwed it all up. I turned into a tongue-tied idiot who couldn’t speak, and instead of fixing things between us, I kept letting them get even more sideways. Everything I’d confessed to her during our talk last summer would rush back into my mind, and I’d just get so ... fucking ... embarrassed.

  I found myself consumed with how she must see me now that she knew all those things that no one else did. I’d told her my innermost thoughts when it came to baseball and my future, shared my deepest fears, and practically cried into the damn phone. And if I was thinking about our conversation every single time I ran into her, I assumed that she must have been as well.

  I was almost surprised she hadn’t laughed in my face yet even though, deep down, I knew Sunny wasn’t the type of girl to do that. She wasn’t evil, like my ex. Even if I didn’t know Sunny all that well, I knew at least that much. And it scared the hell out of me because I had no idea how to trust females anymore.

  “What was that?” Matt asked as I watched Sunny leave through the glass doors, her long hair swaying from side to side with each step. It had been up when I first saw her, so she must have taken it down.

  “Nothing.” I tried to blow him off. I refused to get into it with him, the one guy who I knew the least of all. Plus, I didn’t want him checking her out. She was barely wearing anything!

  “You sounded like a dick,” he boasted, acting proud.

  “I know, and I didn’t mean to be.”

  “You didn’t? Girls like that anyway. You know, the meaner we are, the more they want us,” he said like he was some kind of professional on the matter.

  “I’m not interested in a girl who wants to be treated like crap. And Sunny,” I said, not meaning to tell Matt her name, “she’s pissed because I was mean, and she doesn’t like it.”

  “You should go after her, man.” Dayton stepped toward me, his eyes still on her before she finally disappeared out of our line of vision.

  I knew he was right. I should be chasing after her, telling her how sorry I was and promising I’d never be mean to her again. But I didn’t. My stomach was tied up in knots. I was in unfamiliar territory here—wanting this girl but not knowing how to go about it. All of my fears kept me rooted firmly in place.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I pulled it out, praying it wasn’t my dad. Chance’s name flashed on the screen, and I swore my face must have looked like a schoolgirl with a crush.