Nothing Like the Movies
: Chapter 20

Liz

“You are?”

I was impressed by how unaffected I sounded as I managed a two-word response. I think I totally pulled off mildly amused, but the truth was that I was kind of having an internal freak-out.

Because over the past couple of years, every time I imagined running into Wes, I just wanted him to think I was cool.

Confident, successful and waaay over us.

Too cool for him.

Hell, if I was being honest, Little Liz had worked her ass off her entire life in hopes of that jackass next door thinking she was cool.

So it was really jarring to hear him say the actual words.

“I am,” he said, his eyes sweeping over me. I felt them everywhere as his mouth slid into a boyish grin. “I tried on two different shirts for today, for fuck’s sake.”

Oh God. I lowered my eyes to the empty chair across from him, pulling it out and sitting down. My face was hot as I gave him a nonchalant “That’s funny.”

“Those cheeks,” he murmured, his voice deep and quiet.

“Hey, kids!” Clark breezed into the office, dropping his stuff next to Lilith’s desk. “Am I late?”

“No,” I said, my voice a little scratchy. “Wes was early.”

“Attaboy,” Clark said, nodding and grinning before walking over and dropping a peck on the top of my head.

Gah.

I risked a glance at Wes, expecting a mocking smirk, but his self-deprecating grin had been replaced by a clenching jaw and hard eyes.

Why does he look like that?

“Did Lil finally send the questions?” Clark asked as he checked the stationary camera I’d already set up on the tripod, the one that would record the entire interview.

“She did, and don’t call her that,” I said, my stomach filled with the butterflies that had been tearing me apart since I’d opened her email. Her questions were fine, but the thought of asking them—to Wes—was stressing me out.

Somehow I hadn’t walked through just how awkward it was going to be to ask him about the worst time of his life. I read her questions and wanted to throw up, so I parlayed that tension into replaceing the most professional outfit I had in my closet.

I was going to focus on my job, on getting Lilith the footage she’d be proud to put in her film, and try to pretend I’d never heard this story before.

My hands were literally shaking as I grabbed the questions I’d just pulled off the printer before he appeared. “And just a reminder, Wes—these are Lilith’s questions. I’m just the one asking for her.”

“Got it,” he said, his face tense as he sat across from me.

He was wearing a black pullover and jeans, and for some reason they looked really good on him. Not to me personally, but as someone conducting an interview, I recognized that my subject presented well on camera.

Ahem.

“And ignore me, dude,” Clark said, looking down at his camera. “I’m just going to be moving around the room to get varied shots. Pretend I don’t exist.”

“I’m trying,” Wes said quietly, “but it isn’t easy.”

He was looking at me as he said it, and I wasn’t sure why it felt like something was hovering between us.

“Okay,” I said abruptly, inhaling through my nose and looking down at Lilith’s notes. “Are we ready?”

Clark hit record on both cameras. “Ready.”

I cleared my throat and said, “Start off by telling me some of the things that made you fall in love with baseball as a kid.”

His eyebrows furrowed together, like he didn’t understand the question, and for a second I wondered if I’d asked it wrong somehow.

God, I don’t want to screw this up. I was so worried Lilith was going to watch the interview and regret sending me. My eyes were frozen on Wes, my brain begging him to give more than a two-word answer.

“Uh… it was easy for me, I guess,” he said, seeming relieved that the first question wasn’t more difficult. He looked into the stationary camera, not at me, when he said, “Hitting the ball was fun, catching the ball was fun, and it felt like I’d always been doing it. I’d go out and swing the bat at my Little League games, not really even trying that hard, and the people in the stands would go crazy because I crushed the ball every time I was up. But it just happened for me, you know? I fell in love because I was doing what everyone else was doing—having fun trying to hit the ball—but for me, it was as natural as breathing.”

Thank you for giving a good answer, I thought, relief spilling through me as I nodded. I could still remember the way he’d run around the neighborhood like he owned it, always laughing. It seemed like life had come easily for him back then.

“So how did those specific things push you to get where you were?” I continued, looking down at the paper as I read Lilith’s question. “Coming out of high school with nearly every school in the country taking their shot at you?”

I could still remember the first time I learned he was that good. We were in the Secret Area, before we ever dated, and he offhandedly mentioned that he wasn’t sure which school’s offer he was going to take.

Was that the night we smoked Swishers together?

He made a noise in the back of his throat, like a sarcastic laugh, and said, “It was all my dad. He pushed me to not just be satisfied with what came easy, but to chase what was hard.”

“And what was hard?” I asked, mostly because Lilith had mentioned multiple times that I should follow his responses and not just stick to her questions.

“Pitching,” he said without a second of consideration. “He pushed me to pitch, pushed me to learn more pitches, pushed me to throw more pitches, pushed me to attend every pitching clinic on our side of the country—he was the driving force that led to it all.”

If I hadn’t known his dad, this would’ve seemed like a sweet father/son sports story. But I remembered how hard his dad had pushed, and I knew how much that pressure had weighed down on Wes when he started at UCLA.

“So it must’ve been huge when you got the offer to come here,” I said. “To play for one of the best baseball schools in the country.”

“We were pretty pumped, especially after I tore out my shoulder.” He nodded and started talking about his senior season, but I got temporarily distracted by his mouth. By his entire face, actually. It was an interesting situation to be sitting across from your ex and allowed to stare at the details of them.

Wes had changed, but it was impossible to put my finger on a specific thing.

He’d just become the man version of the boy that he’d been. It was like everything had been photoshopped to be slightly bigger, slightly harder.

“So we were definitely thrilled with the offer,” he finished, his eyes still on the stationary camera.

“I bet.” I looked back down at Lilith’s questions and wanted to do just about anything other than ask the next one. I was trying my hardest to listen to his story like he was a stranger who I knew nothing about, but the next question—and his answer—was going to ruin that.

There was no way it couldn’t.

I kept my eyes on the paper, my pulse pounding in my ears as I asked, “When you initially got to UCLA the first time, walk me through some of the feelings early on—especially those first few days.”

As the words left my mouth, my brain played an unwelcome montage of our road trip out to California. The world had been ours as we’d laughed through the mountains and kissed through the desert, and neither one of us would’ve ever guessed how close we were to the end.

Wes made that noise again, the one that sounded like I was asking him about something ridiculous. He looked down at his hands and said, “I mean, it was everything an eighteen-year-old baseball player dreams about. I was at this big-time campus and everyone was treating me like I was the man. It was exciting and it felt like I was on top of the world with a shiny new life. It was literal perfection, every single piece of it.”

It was, I thought, remembering the day we moved Wes into his dorm. There were baseball players all over the place, laughing and trash-talking, and I don’t think either of us stopped smiling the entire afternoon. We walked to In-N-Out for lunch and lost our minds over how cool LA was, over the surreal amazingness that we were both there, together.

It was literal perfection.

For two weeks.

“I mean, there was baseball hell week, and I kept getting lost on campus,” he said with a little smirk, and it felt like I couldn’t breathe as I remembered teasing him about his terrible sense of direction.

It kind of felt like yesterday.

“But I was head over heels in love with everything in my life.”

He was looking into the stationary camera, but I couldn’t stop staring at the brown eyes that I’d been head over heels in love with.

Clark cleared his throat—thank God—pulling me out of my own head. I went back to the questions, but my stomach dropped when I read the next one.

“Th-then you got the news of your father’s passing,” I said, my voice barely there because my mouth didn’t want to form the words. “How did you replace out initially?”

Pain crossed his face like a storm. His jaw clenched, his nostrils flared, and his Adam’s apple moved around a thick swallow. I wanted to tell him not to answer, that he didn’t have to answer, but this was only the third or fourth question; I couldn’t.

I needed to pull this off for Lilith.

“My mother called,” he said, his voice a little raspy. “We were working on pickoff plays at Jackie, the day before our exhibition game, when Coach Ross came out to tell me I had an emergency call.”

I couldn’t look away from his face, even though I knew the story.

“And she told me he was gone.” He shrugged, looking out the window like the scene was playing out on Bruin Walk. His voice was hollow, matter-of-fact, and I felt like he’d forgotten about Clark, the camera, and me.

“Just like that. ‘Wes, your dad is gone.’ I actually asked her where he went, like an idiot, because I couldn’t comprehend her meaning. I mean, I’d just talked to him that morning.”

I didn’t know this part. My side of the recollection was of him walking into my dorm room when he was supposed to be at practice. Of me saying What are you doing here? and of him saying My dad died and then breaking down a little.

Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d ever even known exactly how he found out.

“Next question.”

“What?” I said, blinking fast, unaware that I’d drifted away.

“What is the next question?” Wes repeated, his face a tight mask, his eyes still not on me.

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” I inhaled through my nose and looked down at the sheet, hating myself for asking him to do this. “Um, what was it like to process that news at that time?”

“Come on,” he mumbled, exhaling and sitting back in the chair. I didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t think he was going to give me an answer (and I wouldn’t blame him for passing), but then he said, “Um, it was terrible, but processing the news that he was gone—while I was still in LA—was, uh, incorrect, I guess you could say. I processed it in a kid-loses-his-father way, devastated that he was gone, but the gravity of my situation hadn’t hit me yet. It didn’t occur to me at all that I would go home for his funeral and never sleep in my dorm room again, y’know?”

I didn’t want to do this anymore. I knew the story—I was there, beside him, for this part of the story—but I didn’t think either one of us should revisit it together. I opened my mouth to comment, because these film packs were supposed to be moderately conversational, but I couldn’t force myself to speak.

Or even move on to the next question.

It felt like a lie, like we were acting out the most depressing play in the world, because I knew the answers before I asked them.

“I—I don’t think I can do this,” I heard myself say, and I struggled for any rational explanation that would make sense to Clark or Lilith. Wes was looking at me in confusion, and I felt Clark’s eyes on me as I stood and managed to come up with, “I think someone who didn’t know your family and your dad is probably better at—”

“I’ve got it,” Clark interrupted, lowering his camera and coming over to my side. “Why don’t you take off, Liz, and I’ll finish? We can connect afterward.”

I glanced at Wes and had no idea what he was thinking, or what Clark was doing. I only knew that I couldn’t do this. I managed to say, “Um, okay…?”

“Yeah, just go,” Clark said, smiling as if this was normal. “And the three of us can coordinate the rest later.”

“Um, okay. Thanks.” I turned and walked over to the door, and as I pulled it open, Clark asked the next question as if there hadn’t been the world’s biggest hiccup.

“What made you understand that it wasn’t the right time to be playing? How did you decide to pack up and leave?”

I didn’t know if Wes would answer him at first, but when I looked back over my shoulder, he swallowed and looked at Clark. For the first time since the interview began, he was speaking to someone when he said, “When my mom left and wouldn’t come home.”