The Comeback of Roy Walker

“Did I actually hear you apologize to Javier?”

Roy knew where she was going with the question. In his heyday he never would have considered apologizing to a catcher on a wild pitch. But those days were over and it seemed a man who was coming back to the game with his head between his knees could show a little humility now and then.

“Don’t make too much of it. It’s not like he understands a word I say.”

“Session done?” Javier called out to the mound.

Roy nodded. “Session done. Thanks again, Javier.”

“It’s good. It’s good.” The catcher smiled, then jogged toward the dugout and the showers underneath the stadium.

“Does your father know you’re here?” Lane asked.

It was another question Roy understood the reason why she asked. He really didn’t want to talk about his father, but he had to take the fact that she was talking to him as a positive sign so he answered her.

“No.” Roy wanted to avoid that conversation as long as he could. He could just imagine how it would go down. He would have to explain how he lost all his money. Instead of being worried about that or sorry it happened, his father would no doubt be thrilled to fly out and see him at his next game. His father would instantly revert to his old ways, thinking that he and Roy could be a team again.

When Roy left the game his relationship with his father had all but dried up. A lot of that distance had to do with losing his mother the year before. Once she was gone, he and his father realized the only thing that connected them was baseball. The reality of it after he’d left the game was even worse than he could imagine. It was as if his father didn’t know how to speak to him anymore. Like all Roy had ever been to him was a star player instead of a son.

Now that he was back in the game his father would want to be in his life and the pain of that, knowing he would only take an interest because Roy was playing ball again, was something Roy really didn’t want to deal with.

It was something he could have talked about with his mom. Six years gone and there wasn’t a day he didn’t wish he could pick up the phone and call her. Let her explain why Dad was the way he was and how baseball was his way of showing his affection. She had always made Roy feel better about himself, his dad and their relationship.

He should call his dad. He would call him. He just wasn’t ready yet.

“How long do you think you can stay hidden? The season starts in three weeks. You’re going to be on the team—”

“You don’t know that. It’s not official.”

“I saw the five pitches you threw before that last one. You’re going to be on the team. The world will know Roy Walker is back.”

There would be press, there were would be stories and assumptions and investigations. News of his colossal business implosion would be everywhere. Mike and Mike on ESPN radio would no doubt discuss it and his return for a solid week.

Forget the field day Roy would have with the local press, who would be jumping at the chance to beef up their distribution of newspapers with the story of Roy’s return and being part of the Minotaurs. He’d met the owner of the team, Jocelyn Taft-Wright, who seemed ready to pounce on any publicity that Roy might generate that could translate into ticket sales. Considering she was married to a local sportswriter, Roy imagined she would have some influence over the volume of stories produced.

All of it would suck for someone who never craved the media spotlight. It wasn’t as if Roy didn’t love attention. But only when he was on the mound. There he craved it. Soaked it in like sun on a beach. He always wanted everyone to see what he could do.

Off the mound, he always felt like the less people knew about him, the better.

It would be something Lane might have teased him about when they were friends and say it was because he didn’t want everyone to know what an ass he was. Maybe that was true. But he also didn’t want everyone to realize how shallow he was.

What had he been other than a ballplayer? Nothing. Not husband or father. Not a person with interests or hobbies. Roy threw the ball. That’s who he was. An interviewer could ask only so many questions about that. A player could give only so many answers.

Now those questions would be about whether he could still throw the ball.

The jury was still out. The throwing didn’t feel like it used to feel. But he wasn’t as bad as he might have thought after so long away.

“The plan is to hide for as long as possible,” he eventually said. “When the storm shows up, I’ll see how it goes. You know me and my love of the press.”

“They used to call you One-Word-Answer Roy.”

“They ask a question, I give them an answer. They don’t like it, that’s their problem.”

“Right, but it was one of the things that fed in to your whole alter ego.”

“Alter ego? I wasn’t a superhero, Lane.”

“No, Roy, you weren’t. Hate to tell you but you were the bad guy.”

It wasn’t exactly news to Roy. He had always understood how he was perceived. He hadn’t done it on purpose. He hadn’t deliberately cultivated the image as the loner. The team villain. The guy who everyone wanted to hate but couldn’t because he was too damn talented.

His reputation developed because of his nature and how he was brought up in the game. Maybe there had been a time when he thought about changing people’s perception of him. Then he thought about taking time away from his regimented training schedule to do more interviews. Or spend more of his off time with his teammates. The extra effort it would take to show up at some swanky event just to get his face on camera.

The return on that effort hadn’t seemed worth it. Only the pitching mattered to him.

Roy started his career with two, and only two, objectives: a World Series victory and the Hall of Fame. The level of commitment it took to achieve those goals was something that probably only twenty of the three hundred plus pitchers in the major leagues understood. The commitment—the work—was all he was. All he knew. And he’d accomplished one of his objectives.

His objectives this time around were even simpler. He needed money. A mercenary reason that didn’t require him to be the best there was, because there was no way he could ever be better than his younger self. But he did have to be good enough.

Good enough. A heck of a lowly ambition for Roy Walker, but the best he could hope for.

“Maybe I’ll try to do things a little differently this time,” he said, thinking that his capitulation might gain him some goodwill with Lane.

“Don’t do it on my account.”

Or not.

“So you’re going to tell the press the whole story?” she asked.

He laughed then. “There’s no getting around what happened, Lane. I can’t shake it, or dodge it, or pretend it didn’t happen. So, I have to man up. I reached for something and missed and it cost me everything. All I can do is hope I have some gas left in the tank to give myself another shot.”

“People love a good comeback story,” Lane said. “And you’ll be one hell of a comeback to baseball.”

“Can I ask you something? Honestly.”

“Have I ever been dishonest with you?”

Roy thought about that but didn’t necessarily want to go to the past. The answer to that question wasn’t as black-and-white as she wanted it to be. Maybe she hadn’t been dishonest with him, but she’d damn sure lied to herself. It was the only reason her marriage to Danny lasted as long as it did.

“Do you really think I’m pathetic? A thirty-seven-year-old, has-been pitcher. Are they going to pity me?”

It felt like he was exposing himself. Like he’d ripped apart his T-shirt, shown her his bare chest and asked her if she wanted to take a stab at his heart. Except she was Lane Baker, and she used to be the princess of baseball. Before her breakup no one respected the game more, except maybe Roy, so he knew he could trust her to tell him the truth even if she did hate him.

Was he blowing up his reputation, his history in the game and everything he ever worked toward for a damn paycheck? Lane would understand, even through her anger, what it would do to him to shit on his own legacy.

She bit her lower lip. Five years ago that habit would have been enough to give him a hard-on and have him thinking about other places he wanted her lips.

But not now, in this moment. This was too real. Lane Baker had hated him for five years. Had walked away not just from her husband, but also from the game she loved because of what Roy had done to her. There was no reason to think she should give him anything other than a crushing, devastating blow.

He really hoped to hell she didn’t.

“I shouldn’t have said what I did. Yesterday. About you being pathetic. You were the last person I expected to see and I lashed out.”

“You were being honest,” he reminded her.

“I was angry. But I know what you’re asking and I think it depends,” she said. “Do you think you can do this? Do you really think you can throw again in The Show?”

Honesty. It’s what he promised. “I don’t know. Lanie—sorry, Lane. Help me.”

Her arms closed around her body more tightly. “I already agreed to do your physical therapy. That’s all I’m offering.”

“No,” he said, reaching for her upper arm, circling it with his left hand. It was strange to touch her again. Like suddenly she was even more tangible to him now than she had been standing in front of him with her arms crossed over her chest. “I need to find me again. Because right now I’m so lost I have no sense of what’s up or down. And as crazy as it seems, you were one of the people who knew me best back then.”

“You’re asking me? For that kind of help? You don’t think it was enough to ask for my skills, now you want more? That’s a lot of nerve, Roy.”

“I know it is. But I also know you were the most generous person around.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not that person anymore,” she said. “I don’t give anymore, because I don’t trust anymore. You did that to me. You and Danny.”

To be lumped in with Danny Worthless felt like someone had shoved a knife through Roy’s stomach and twisted it all around. But was she wrong? They had both betrayed her.

Roy dropped his hand and could feel that some heavy clouds had blocked out the sun. Cool air had rolled into the stadium and his arm felt all of it. Definitely the start of spring, where one minute it could be balmy and beautiful and the next minute a person could be shivering and cold.

His shoulder started to stiffen and he knew he needed to get to a hot shower fast if he was going keep it loose enough to take another session tomorrow.

“I gotta...” He pointed to his arm and Lane nodded, totally familiar with what was happening to his body in the cool air. That shared knowledge created a sense of intimacy between them. Just like it had back then when she used to work on him. There had been times when he believed she understood his body more than he did. It had always been an unsettling thought.

“Yeah. Right. Take your shower and then meet me in the therapy room. We’ll get to work.”

Therapy. That was more than he should have asked for. To ask for even more from her probably had been a dick move.

“Okay.”

She walked away from him but then stopped a few feet away and turned back. “I don’t know if it helps or not, but the Roy I knew back then had a lot of nerve, too.”

Roy smiled at that. “Yes, he did.”

Lane shrugged. “Maybe that’s where you start looking for yourself again. See you in a few.”

CHAPTER FIVE

LANE LOOKED DOWN at the lean body with the hairy chest and belly that was stretched out on the therapy table and listened as Roy let go with a particularly erotic-sounding groan. Her finger pressed against an artery, constricted because of the inflammation in his shoulder, and waited it out until the nerve relaxed and the blood started to flow. She could feel the pulse of it beneath her fingers, could feel Roy’s muscles release the tightness. Then came the groaning.

Roy had always been a groaner. It wasn’t as though he was her only client who would make noises during their therapy sessions. But for some reason that raw sound coming from him always did something funny to her insides.

And then there was his chest. With swirls of dark hair that always seemed intriguing, despite the fact that bodies were commonplace to her. Short ones, tall ones, fat ones, skinny ones. None of it mattered when someone was a patient on her table. They were like a big lump of clay that she needed to mold back into health.

The fact that Roy’s chest fascinated her could have been borderline unethical. It wasn’t as if she had ever given in to temptation and ran her fingers through those dark swirls of hair.

So she was fine. Mostly.

Danny had had a smooth chest. Something that had been so sexy to her when she had first started sleeping with him. Later, it became this big contrast between the way he and Roy looked. A contrast she never would have made had she been a happily married woman.

Roy’s chest reminded her that when she’d still been married, there had been a part of her that saw Roy the man, not just the player.

“Jeezus, that feels good,” he said, sounding like a man getting a blow job instead of physical therapy.

Damn it! Why had she even gone there in her head? This was work. This was a client. This man was her greatest enemy.

Except...he wanted her help. Because he was lost.

Despite what she told him, the hurt she’d tried to inflict, there was a part of her that wanted to give him that help. She couldn’t lie to herself. Roy was different and she toyed with this idea that if she shook him hard enough, then the old Roy would return.

What a hypocrite that idea made her. Calling him pathetic, comparing him to Danny, telling everyone she hated him. If that was true, she should want to be as mentally and emotionally far from Roy Walker as a person could be.

Yet she was here, standing over his body, helping him to heal. If she’d wanted to, really wanted to, she could have walked away. She could have found a way to say no to Duff and still accomplish what Scout brought her home to do.

But instead she’d stayed and thrown words at him and reminded herself that he was the bad guy who hurt her.

It was the only way to hold on to the righteous hatred she had for him.

The hatred that deflected the blame for her failing marriage away from her. The hatred that kept her from looking too closely at her own mistakes. The hatred that, up close, didn’t look at all like hate—not when her first instinct was to say yes to his plea for help.

“Can I ask a question?”

“Sure,” Lane said, hoping that whatever he said would be a distraction from her thoughts. She slid her fingers deeper under his shoulder and started working there to get the inflammation to ease. His shoulder felt like it was on fire under her hands.

Just don’t ask me about the past. My marriage. Or what my feelings were for you back then. Please don’t ask that. Please don’t ask about what I’m doing now because I quit my job and I’m as lost as you say you are.

Lane held her breath.

“Why did you really agree to come back here? Everything I heard about you said you walked away from the game. Didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. You were helping veterans or something.”

“I worked...work for the VA trying to get the amputees returning from Iraq and Afghanistan rehabilitated.”

“Sounds important.”

“Certainly more important than baseball.”

“Then why are you here? Are you giving baseball a second chance, too?”

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