The tape rips off the roll with a sound like tearing skin.
Colt Brennan presses it down below the deltoid and smooths it flat, three more strips crisscrossing the spot where the pain likes to bloom after forty pitches. His fingers know the pattern without his eyes. He knows that if he angles the third strip slightly off-centre he buys himself an extra ten pitches before the burning starts.
It will hold for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is enough for a bullpen session, which is enough to argue with the voice telling him he is thirty-one years old with a shoulder full of scar tissue and no future.
He has lit only the bank of lights over the mound, because he does not need to advertise that somebody is in the Loggers' indoor facility throwing before six in the morning when the training staff are not due until seven thirty.
His phone has one thread that matters. Ellie's group home. *She had a good day. Ate all her dinner. Drew a picture of a horse.* No follow-up means no emergency, which means he can think about the mound instead of his sister.
Six pitches. That is the plan.
He does not get to leave before somebody with a clipboard turns up.
*"Sadie Hartfield. Strength and conditioning coordinator. And you're done."*
She is a certified athletic trainer with a specialty in upper-body biomechanics who has worked with three major league organisations and the Olympic team, and she tells him flatly that one more pitch today tears something. Not maybe. Not probably.
Her own situation is not much better. Her office is a converted supply closet with a folding table in it, the equipment manager calls her sweetheart on the phone, and she has thirty athletes arriving for baseline testing in eighteen hours. Gage Dillard, the rookie with mirrored sunglasses pushed into his hair, has already worked out that she is the first woman to hold the job here and that nobody expects her to stay.
She also has a brother. Wes is seventeen, his aortic valve never formed right, and if the money does not come through his surgery gets postponed.
A baseball romance about two people keeping the same kind of secret in the same building: a pitcher taping himself back together at dawn, a conditioning coach who will not sign off on a lie, a rookie playing his own angles, and a clubhouse where somebody is passing information out. The romance is closed-door.
