Stephanie Doyle - Scout's Honor

Heartbreak.

“Have you?” His tone was sharper than it should have been, but it was a particularly sore subject for him. “In these past four years since I’ve been gone, have you? Because I sure as heck know you didn’t take them before.”

“Really? Are we seriously going to have this fight again?”

Jayson didn’t want to fight. Fighting her was not what he was supposed to be doing. He was here to support her, pull her out of the hole she was in, get her back on her feet.

Fix her because she’s broken.

That, too. He found himself angry all over again. He remembered the anger. It had lived side by side with the heartbreak. Now he was realizing, like the pain, it too had dulled to an ache. But it had never really gone away.

“You know,” he said slowly, carefully, as if this next sentence might be the most important of his life. “I don’t think we ever had that fight. I remember the words. I remember asking you to go with me and you saying no. I remember asking why. I remember knowing why, so I stopped asking when you stopped giving me answers. I remember goodbye. You know what I don’t remember? I don’t remember the fight.”

* * *

“HAVE YOU LOST your mind?” Scout asked him.

Jayson had pulled over to a gas station in the middle of nowhere. He’d stopped the car and gotten out as if to suggest they weren’t going anywhere until they had it out.

Now Scout was out of the car and looking at him as if he had lost his mind.

Maybe he had, but after checking his anger while Duff was dying he suddenly found he couldn’t hold it in anymore. No doubt Scout wasn’t ready for this showdown, but it was hard to know if she ever would be. And they needed this.

“I loved you,” he snapped. “You knew that. But you wouldn’t take the smallest chance on us. Not the smallest chance and come to Texas with me. I mean, seriously, what was the worst that could happen? If it didn’t work out between us, you could have always come back home.”

Scout looked stricken. So much so that Jayson considered taking it back and telling her to forget it. She wasn’t ready for this confrontation. He knew that now, but he just wanted her to admit that their breakup had been her fault and not his.

“You were the one who left me!”

The shrill sound of her voice hurt his ears. Jayson imagined if there were any dogs within earshot they would be howling.

“If you loved me,” she continued, “really loved me, you never would have done that!”

“It was a managing job. This is baseball. You know that’s how this business works. You have to go where the openings are. What was I supposed to do? Sit around and wait for something to open up in Minotaur Falls?”

“You’re here now,” she grumbled.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t be back as the team’s manager. With a chance to make an impression on the Rebels’ GM. You know where I’m going, right?”

Scout nodded tightly with her arms crossed over her middle.

“And you, more than any other person, know what it means for me to get back there. One day. I had one damn day and it wasn’t enough. Every decision I made, everything I learned was all about giving me one more shot. You knew that. Tell me you knew that.”

“Okay. I knew it. I knew how important it was to you, although you really never gave yourself credit for getting to the majors the first time.”

Jayson didn’t want to think about that. “You knew why I had to leave and take that job. It was either that or effectively give up my career. Is that what you wanted? For me to give up baseball?”

She shook her head, again tightly as if these answers were hard to give.

“Now tell me why you wouldn’t come with me. I told you I loved you. You told me you loved me. Was that the truth?”

“Yes,” she said softly. So softly he almost didn’t hear her, but he did and it hurt him all over again to hear it.

“You couldn’t take a chance on us, though. You couldn’t have just a little bit of faith in me.”

Scout opened her mouth as if to argue, but this time he shook his head.

“I used to blame Duff. I told him he must have messed with your head to make you think you could never leave his side. But it wasn’t him, was it? You were just too scared to change your life.”

“You were asking me to change everything!” Scout screeched. “We had been dating for seven months. It was the first time I’d been in love and everything was already changing and then you wanted me to pick up everything and move with you. What about my career? My future? My family? None of that mattered to you. You never once considered staying for me, but you were mad at me for not jumping up and following your command. How is that fair?”

Maybe it wasn’t. Jayson felt deflated. He hadn’t convinced her four years ago and he wasn’t going to convince her now that she was wrong. He’d wanted Scout to prove to him he was more important than anyone else in her life.

Now she never could.

“We should go,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

“What do you want from me?” Scout shouted at him. He could see the tears welling in her eyes and knew he’d torn something open in her. Their wounds clearly hadn’t fully healed.

“What do you want me to say?” she continued to shout. “That I made a mistake. That I regretted my decision every day. That even after four years I still think about you and wonder what if?”

She advanced on him, her eyes still red with tears, but there was anger there, too. “Because if I did that, if I made that admission, then I would have to wonder what if I had followed you four years ago. And that would have meant that I wouldn’t have had these last four years with my father. Because that was all the time he had left. So, no, I’m not going to admit that.”

“Scout, I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“You do nothing but hurt me!” she howled.

The blow was more devastating than anything he’d ever felt before. It hurt more than running into a brick wall or finding out he would never play baseball again.

The only woman he’d ever loved and he did nothing but hurt her.

I should go. The thought came to him immediately. They couldn’t easily stay in the same space without causing each other pain. It only made sense for him to leave.

Never thought you were a quitter.

There it was again, hearing Duff in his head. And of course he would say the one thing that would annoy Jayson enough to not leave.

“Come on,” he said, offering his hand. “We need to get on the road.”

They both got in the car, silence now sitting heavy between them.

“Well, that was worth it,” Scout muttered.

He knew she’d said it facetiously, but he didn’t agree. Those were things they had needed to say to each other. Now it was done, and the bottom line was he was either going to have to let her go and move on with this life...

Or he was going to have to find a way to stop hurting her.

Five years ago...

DAMN, HE WAS NOT going to be able to take this slow. Scout was in his arms and the need to bury himself inside her was like nothing he’d ever felt before. Jayson knew what sex was—he’d had plenty of sex—but this felt different.

This was the first time he’d waited for something he wanted. And the wait had nearly killed him.

The moment he’d laid eyes on Scout, Jayson knew he wanted her. Something about her edginess turned him on. But he’d also sensed a vulnerability about her that was equally intriguing. The one thing he knew for certain was that he was going to have to move slowly with her.

Instinctively, he knew if he asked her out that first week he would have scared her off. So instead he let their friendship develop naturally. Which made things even harder because not only did he want to screw her brains out, but also the more they hung out together the more he liked her.