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Mike comes to visit the night after her surgery, rapping lightly on the door of her hospital room before easing it open, his boots squeaking on the linoleum. “You decent?” he says, instead of hello.
Ginny sits up in bed. “What if I wasn’t?” she asks, her throat raw and scratchy. Her first thought, embarrassingly, is that she probably looks like shit. “Hey.”
“Hey yourself,” he says, dropping his backpack on the windowsill and fishing a bottle of grape soda out of his jacket pocket, cracking the seal and handing it over like some kind of peace offering. “How you feeling?”
Ginny musters a smile. “Fine,” she lies. Actually she feels like hot garbage, groggy from the painkillers and achy all over. Her arm hurts.
“Okay,” Mike says in a voice like, we’ll go with that, then. He sits down in the plastic visitor’s chair, stretches his long legs out like he’s making himself comfortable. Ginny gazes at him across the room. She has no idea what he’s doing here—she definitely was not expecting him to show up by himself after everything that happened—but the truth is she’s grateful for the company. Her mom doesn’t land until after midnight. She hasn’t been in a hospital since her dad.
“What did the doctors say?” he asks, looking around the room like the answer might be on one of the walls.
Ginny shrugs with her good shoulder. “Too soon to tell.” Mike knows the stats as well as she does: 85 percent chance of a complete recovery, up to a year to rehab. The surgeon flat-out told her he’d never done Tommy John surgery on a woman before. “Why, you wanna see my MRI?”
Mike looks at her. “Yes, honestly,” he says, and Ginny’s stomach flips once.
“I don’t know where it is,” she says, forcing herself to take a sip of soda. “But you can check my chart.”
Mike surprises her by actually doing it, hauling himself to his feet and standing by the foot of her bed as he flips through it. “Yeah, I don’t understand any of this,” he says after a minute, flashing her a tight grin. “Where’s your nurse?”
“You want to talk to my nurse?” Ginny asks, and her voice sounds dangerously high even to herself.
“Baker,” Mike says quietly. Ginny covers her face.
“You think this is all because I said the words ‘no-hitter’?” she asks after a minute. “Are the baseball gods mad at me?”
“Yes,” Mike says, so serious that Ginny looks up in spite of herself. He’s sitting down again, feet planted wide and sturdy. “Are you kidding? This is absolutely because you said the words no-hitter, rookie. That’s the last time I ever let you make a speech, I promise you that.”
Ginny grins. “You didn’t like the speech?” she asks, then shuts her mouth with a snap.
Mike’s eyebrows jump, but he doesn’t flinch. “No,” he says steadily. “I didn’t.”
Ginny touches the corner of her lip like a reflex, her cheeks getting very warm. “Fine, then,” she says, her voice too loud in the quiet room. “What would you have said, huh?”
For a second Mike just gazes at her, looking more tired than she’s ever, ever seen him. Ginny swallows hard. “Let me guess, actually. I’m a great girl, you respect the hell out of me, and I look marginally better in a dress than Salvi, but we’re teammates so we gotta punch each other in the bicep like men and move on?”
Mike smirks at that, broad body relaxing a little. “Eh.” He shrugs. “You're not that great of a girl.”
“Fuck you,” Ginny says, but she's laughing. She remembers being surprised by that at the beginning of the summer, how funny he was in real life. On TV he always seemed so serious. “I’m awesome.”
“Also, don’t underestimate how good Salvi looks in a nice pair of heels.” Mike grins again, tipping his head to the side. “That was the gist of it, though. Think there was a line in there about life being long, maybe.”
Ginny bites her lip. “Oh yeah?” she asks. There’s something hiding under his grin that has her holding her body very still. “What was it?”
Mike’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly. “It’s not like I have the whole thing written out in triplicate before I deliver, Baker, it’s an improvisational thing.” He shifts in his chair. “Just something about life being long, baseball careers being short.”
“Were you gonna tell me about the sound of one hand clapping too?” Ginny asks, but her voice is too shocked for the joke to land. “Mike.”
“Ginny.” His eyes are so serious. Ginny’s heart is beating so hard she can feel it in the tips of her ears. She wishes he were closer. She wishes they hadn’t stopped after Oscar’s phone call. Even if it was just going to be once, even if it was immediately all going to go to hell, Ginny wants to know. He seems—well. She glances down, her whole body going warm inside her hospital gown. He has always seemed, even back when he was just a poster on her wall, like a person who knows how to kiss.
Mike sighs. “Rookie. Help me out here, all right?”
Ginny thinks about reaching her hand out. She bets he'd take it. “Yeah,” she says instead, squaring her non-busted shoulder. “Of course.”
Mike clears his throat. “So,” he says, and just like that he’s himself again, teasing her about Drake and her shitty batting average, letting out huge Gatorade burps in the dugout. “Are you really spending your off-season globe-trotting with the teenage billionaire?”
“I mean, not now,” Ginny says, motioning to her elbow. Then, because it feels important to say it: “Not that I was going to anyway.”
He shrugs. “Would make sense if you wanted to.”
“Well, I don’t,” Ginny says, and she knows she sounds like a stubborn little kid. She leans back against the pillows, head starting to feel fuzzy. She thinks she’s like, pretty doped up. “What about you?” she asks quietly. “You getting back with your wife?”
Mike’s face doesn't change, but Ginny sees him swallow. “Probably not,” he says.
“Okay,” Ginny tells him, pulling up the sheet and settling in. “Good. I mean—” She sits back up abruptly. “Not good-good or anything, just like, good to know.”
Mike’s laughing at her. “How high are you?” he asks, getting out of his chair and walking over. Ginny covers her face.
“Fuck off,” she says. “You know what I meant.”
“I do, actually, I just can't believe you said it to my face.” His grin is unbearably fond. “Is now the time to ask about that poster? You gonna fess up?”
“For the last time, I didn't have your stupid poster.” She can feel herself blushing, hot and obvious, but she doesn't exactly hate the way he's looking at her. He’s standing by the edge of the bed with his hands shoved into his pockets, close enough to smell. Ginny bites her lip. She thinks again about reaching for him—about pulling him down onto the mattress beside her, about resting her head on his chest. Instead, without meaning to, she yawns.
Mike makes a face. “All right, Baker, geez, I can take the hint.”
“No no no,” Ginny says, laughing. “That’s not—”
“Yeah, yeah. I should go anyway,” he says, swinging his bag over one shoulder. “Let you get your beauty sleep, for all the good it’ll do you.” Then, the tips of his fingers brushing the side of her good arm so lightly she almost can’t even feel them: “Take care of yourself, will you, rookie?”
“Yeah,” she says quietly, nodding into the pillows. “You too.”
Mike nods, gazing at her for another wordless moment. He taps the wall beside the door like a good luck charm as he goes.