His mama had tousled his hair, offered a sad smile. “This is a different kind of lonely, baby boy. It’s the kind you can’t help me with.”
In time, Bo had grown into an understanding of what she meant, but he never forgot the feeling of being a scared kid. He would never subject AJ to that. For the rest of the weekend—or however long the boy was with him—Bo Crutcher would be a monk.
Yeah, right. He could just hear his friends now. People who knew him had never seen him go more than a week or two without a date.
He tried to be as quiet as possible as he moved around the apartment. Until last night, he had considered it a luxury to live in a place that didn’t require him to get behind the wheel at the end of the night. Situated above his favorite bar, where he worked most nights, it allowed him the world’s shortest commute after work. He simply went upstairs and did a face-plant in the bed.
Unless, of course, he got lucky, which he did with decent frequency. It was always a pleasant feeling, waking up with a woman in his bed. He loved everything about women. He loved their soft skin and all the good-smelling preparations they used to keep it that way. He loved the sound of their sweet voices, laughing at something he’d said or sighing with pleasure in his ear when he held them close. He’d had a lot of girlfriends over the years and he’d loved each and every one of them as thoroughly as he knew how.
And when each one left him, she always walked away with a piece of his heart. He never told them, though. Never complained. He was grateful for whatever time and whatever loving they’d given him.
Most of his girlfriends left believing he’d forget them the moment they were out of sight. They couldn’t be more wrong, though. The women he’d loved and lost were etched in his mind like beautiful dreams that never quite vanished with the morning.
Knowing how to love a woman had never been a problem for Bo. Knowing how to keep her, now, that was a different story. A lot of them left as soon as they realized he didn’t know shit about sharing his life, planning a future, keeping a bond strong enough for a lifetime. Others took off when they discovered that all professional ballplayers were not created equal. Yes, the Can-Am League was an organization of professionals. But the players were in it because they purely loved the game, not because they were being paid a fortune. To some women, this was a bit of a rude awakening.
In the case of Yolanda Martinez, she’d walked away with more than a piece of his heart.
It was only months later, after Yolanda had forced a goodbye on him, that Bo learned he’d become a father. There was no way to pinpoint the exact moment of conception because the fact was, once he and Yolanda got started, they did it all the time. They were just kids, seventeen and revved up by hormones, and they were in the first flush of tenderness and excitement.
They had met in English class, when they’d both been struggling through the leaden phrases of Last of the Mohicans, which felt like a punishment, yet gave them a feeling of kinship in their shared suffering. They took to staying late in the library to study, quizzing each other on vocabulary words no living human would ever have occasion to utter: Vaunted. Cunning. Chaste.
The study sessions were only an excuse to sit close, to eye each other over the pages of the musty tomes, to trade smiles first, then touches that escalated from accidental to deliberate, and finally whispers that bloomed into kisses. She roused in him a sense of protectiveness that made him feel as though he could take on the world. Although she was an only child of strict parents, he persuaded her one hot September day to drive out to a rice well he knew of, where cool water cascaded through a thick pipe, emptying into a vast natural holding tank the size of a baseball diamond. For people who had no money, there was no better swimming pool to offer blissful relief from the heat.
Holding hands, they leaped into the crystalline depths, laughing and paddling, kissing while the water eddied around them in a swirl of sensuality. Later, they lay together on a bed of towels in the back of his rusted-out El Camino.
Bo wondered if Yolanda knew he’d never been laid. While all his friends were getting it on, Bo had foolishly clung to some chivalrous ideal about girls. He didn’t want to be that close, that intimate with a girl unless he loved her. There were tons of reasons this made no sense, not the least of which was that he wasn’t real sure what love was. How could he, growing up the way he had? His mother drifted from fellow to fellow the way a bee gathered nectar from flower to flower, sucking one dry and then moving on to the next without a backward glance.
Bo had grown up watching this changing array of guys parading through their lives. Sometimes she admitted she liked a guy because he let her drive his nice Volvo whenever she wanted, or because he worked at a music store and gave her free CDs. When Bo was old enough to question his mother, she explained herself with a self-deprecating laugh. “Baby boy, I got to use my looks while I still have them.”
As a little boy, he’d wondered where a person’s looks went. Did they get left in a heap in the bottom of a closet, discarded like last year’s Halloween costume? And why would guys quit liking her, unless the only thing they
