No one saw Ginny walk in. And definitely no one saw her wind up for a fastball that was sent straight into the tv monitor that hung in the middle of the room.
All eyes immediately turned towards her, but all that was seen was the door as it closed, her figure having fled from the room.
“Girl’s got some aim,” Mike hears, and he gives a sigh, running his hand through his beard, before he takes off after her.
Glancing in the hallway, he doesn’t immediately see her, but he has a feeling he knows where she’s taken off to.
At a slow gait, he moves steadily towards his destination, his knees protesting with each step, the game having taken its toll on him, and his joints begging to be soaked in a tub of ice. Instead he was trying to track down Ginny.
Finally seeing the doorway he needed, he opened the door, to see her sitting on a box, the heels of her palm digging into her watery eyes, her hair having been yanked from its ponytail now stood in wild disarray.
“How did you find me?” Ginny asks, glancing around, making sure no one else was around, before he moved completely into the closet, shutting the door, and leaving them in the dark.
His eyes wait to adjust to the lack of light, only the crack from the bottom of the door offering any chance of seeing anything.
“You know, the thing about secret hiding places is you don’t tell anyone about them,” he says, stumbling over to her. A loud groan escaping him as he moves to sit down next to her, his knees screaming at him to stop.
“I didn’t think you were listening,” she admits, making a sniffling nose, as if trying to hide that she had been crying. The hiding in a closet, and outburst of a broken TV not enough evidence to the contrary.
“Well, I was. So next time you want to hide, let’s pick somewhere a little less…here,” he finishes, extending his legs in front of him.
Before he knows it, she’s leaning her head against his shoulder, and he’s audibly sighing at what he’d gotten himself into.
“They all think I’m a joke,” she mutters into the darkness, as if hoping that her admission will be swallowed, unseen and unheard. “And you’re somehow the hero.”
“I don’t know, I think one of them suggested I was a creep,” he jokes, hoping she’ll find the old man insinuation amusing, given how often she called him that herself.
He can’t see her face in the dark, but he can hear her horsey laugh at his attempt to cheer her up.
Her arm comes to wrap around his, pulling herself closer to him.
“I knew this would happen,” she groans, the inevitability of their relationship being outed, one that they had anticipated. But not right after a game, and certainly not in the way in which it was. Pictures of them from the night before smeared across the screen, the judgment thrown almost immediately. Landing in silence only at her ball slamming into the screen.
This had been the reason they’d teetered on the edge of whether or not this was a good idea. Only to discover that as inevitable as it had been that they would end up in this situation, their relationship just as sure. For as hard as they tried to fight it, hide in the relationships of others, they always seemed to find each other.
“So I guess that’s it,” he sighs, knowing that for all that they tried, he wasn’t the least bit willing to jeopardize her career even more.
“You breakin’ up with me?” She asks, a bit of a southern drawl to her words.
“Are you?” He throws to her.
“I probably should, you are a bit of a creep, old man” she teases back, and he doesn’t fight the smile. Her pitching the joke right back to him.
“But you are not even close to being a joke,” he assures her, reaching for her hand in the glow of the outside light, their hands entwining, as they continue to sit together, the darkness, letting their last few moments of scrutiny linger before they went out to face the world.
Leave the first sentence of a fic in my ask box and I will write the next five sentences.
