The Taking

I was relieved that the fields were deserted, since it was still softball and baseball season and there could have been a game or late practice. I stepped out onto the empty field, walking straight to the pitching mound, facing my ghosts head-on.

It was unsettling to stand there again. It was the same place I’d stood dozens, hundreds, thousands of times before. I pressed my fingers alongside the stitching on the ball and closed my eyes, letting memory and reality collide.

When I reopened them, I zeroed in on home plate and envisioned the ball’s trajectory, the point at which I wanted it to leave my hand, the way it should arc—just so—and where it would cross the plate. I rolled my neck and my shoulders, loosening my muscles. And then, taking a breath, I drove off the mound, swinging my arm and rotating my shoulder, all the way around, and released my pitch.

It was so natural, the rhythm so familiar, that it was utterly impossible to believe that five years had passed since the last time I’d thrown a ball. And when I saw it—that very same championship ball—hurtling across its mark, faster maybe than I thought it should have gone, I knew . . . I believed at last what Dr. Dunn had told my parents: I was still sixteen years old. Because there was no way, no possible way on earth I was any older than I had been just six days ago. My body, my muscle memory, hadn’t changed a single iota. My body remembered the same way I did.

“Holy shit.” The voice behind me whispered in awe. “I knew you could play, I mean, I’d heard stories, but damn, that was impressive.”

I whirled around to find Tyler standing right there, and I wondered how he’d managed to sneak up on me. I grinned in response because I knew what I’d just done was impressive, more so even than using words like metropolis or having a killer dimple. “You ever play?” I inquired over my shoulder as I left him standing there while I went to retrieve my ball.

I knew he was trailing after me when he spoke, his voice low and playful. “Softball? Nah. I tried out once, but they said the other girls felt uncomfortable with me in the locker room, so I didn’t make the cut.”

Bending at the waist, I reached for the ball where it had landed near the backstop. Gingerly, I brushed away the dirt as I stood again. “I meant baseball, or just sports in general, smart-ass. Aren’t you ever serious?”

His hand shot out, covering the ball as if he meant to take it from me, but he didn’t, and his hand curled over mine. I inhaled sharply. “I’m serious about plenty of things,” he told me solemnly, his gaze intense. He took a step closer, and without thinking or meaning to, and because I suddenly couldn’t breathe with him standing in my space like that, I took one tiny step back. I let go of the ball, and it dropped back to the ground with a solid thud. It was so much quieter than the pounding of my heart. He took another step. I tried to hold my ground, but my throat grew thick, and my body temperature had risen at least twenty degrees. “There are more important things in life than games, Kyra.” His eyebrow lifted, and his mischievous gaze raked over me.

I couldn’t tell if he was mocking me, or toying with me, or whatever this was that he was doing. I hated even more that it was his fault I couldn’t catch my breath, and I felt suddenly unsteady.

I shoved his chest, trying to give myself some space. “Yeah, well, I’m sure you and your books will be very happy together.” It didn’t escape my notice, the way his muscles felt beneath my fingers, and the solidness of him made me out-and-out feverish.

He caught my hand again, but this time I wasn’t holding the ball, so I couldn’t kid myself that he had some other motivation for his actions. When his thumb moved over my palm, heat burst in the pit of my belly and spread outward, curling the tips of my toes. “I’m serious about other things too.”

I wanted to swallow, but my tongue felt like baked asphalt. “Stop,” I insisted.

“Stop what?”

“Saying things like that.”

His half smile made him look all wolfish, and completely daring. “Like what? That I’m serious? That I like you?” He moved a quarter of an inch closer, and involuntarily my lips parted.

“Yes,” I confirmed, scowling because it was easier and far less obvious than gaping at him. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

His thumb skated up to my wrist. I was sure he had to know how he affected me, that the thrumming of my pulse would totally give me away. “Then you stop.”

I blinked once and then again. “Me? What did I do?”

He let go of my wrist and lifted his hand to my face. When his thumb feathered over my lower lip, so lightly it could have easily been a figment of my imagination, I shivered.

I saw a show on Animal Planet once about these fainting goats whose muscles froze up when they were startled, and they passed out. Like, they literally fell over if you scared them.

That was me, right now.

I was terrified and exhilarated and frozen all at once.

If I passed out, too, I would surely die of embarrassment.

We stood like that for fifty-five straight heartbeats. Our eyes remained locked in a game of chicken. His palm cupped my chin, and his thumb stayed right on my lip while I tried to find my next breath.

And for fifty-five heartbeats everything inside me begged him to kiss me.

“Being stubborn,” he said at last, and I had no idea what he was talking about, or when he’d even been talking at all. He shook his head, breaking the spell, or whatever it was I was under—we were both under. “You’re so damned stubborn. If you’d just admit how you feel, then we could stop pretending there’s nothing between us.”