Javier Mendez, 53, has spent the last 12 years as a minor league baseball scout, logging 130,000 miles on his dented 2018 Ford F-150, eating more gas station burritos than he cares to count, and nodding through hundreds of post-game conversations with overzealous dads and overworked high school coaches. His biggest flaw? He’s spent his whole adult life people-pleasing to the point of invisibility. His ex-wife left him eight years prior, halfway through a dinner where he’d agreed to move to a city he hated for a job she wanted, telling him he was so busy letting other people take what they wanted he’d forgotten how to want anything for himself. He’d never argued with her. She was right.
He’s camped out at the end of a scuffed linoleum bar in a tiny south Georgia town on a rainy Tuesday, a half-empty glass of bourbon on the counter next to a crumpled legal pad full of scrawled scouting notes, when she sits down two stools over. The door slams shut behind her, bringing in a gust of rain-cooled air that smells like cut grass and wet asphalt, and she shakes droplets of water out of her shoulder-length auburn hair like a wet dog. He glances up, and she catches his eye, offering a tight, weary smile before flagging down the bartender. She orders the same small-batch bourbon he’s drinking, neat, and he raises his glass in a quiet toast. “Good pick,” he says. “Most folks around here only order light beer or sweet tea.”
She snorts, picking up her glass and clinking it against his across the empty stool between them. “My husband only drinks light beer. Says anything with more flavor than water is ‘pretentious city crap.’” She shifts a little closer, the knee of her dark wash jeans brushing the side of his work boot under the bar, and he doesn’t move away. He learns her name is Lila, she’s married to the town’s high school athletic director, they’ve been married 27 years, and she’d shown up to the bar 20 minutes prior waiting for him to show up for their anniversary dinner. He’d texted ten minutes ago saying he was stuck late at a football booster meeting. She knows he’s at the country club playing poker with his friends. He does this every year.
Javier’s first instinct is to nod politely, change the subject, not wade into territory he knows he shouldn’t touch. Married woman, small town, he’s only here for another 12 hours before he drives three hours north to scout a left-handed pitcher at a community college. But she leans in when he talks, her elbow brushing his when she reaches for a peanut from the bowl between them, and he can smell gardenia perfume mixed with the rain on her jacket, the faint vanilla of her lip gloss when she speaks. He tells her about the 17-year-old catcher he watched that afternoon, who’d hit three home runs and then ran straight to the stands to hug his disabled mom after the game, and she laughs so hard she snorts, setting her hand on his forearm to steady herself. Her palm is warm, calloused at the fingertips from the vegetable garden she tends in her spare time, and the contact sends a jolt up his arm he hasn’t felt in years.
He knows this is stupid. Knows if anyone walks in who knows her, it’ll cause a mess. Knows he should finish his drink, pay his tab, go back to his motel room and fall asleep watching old westerns like he usually does on the road. But when she leans in closer, their faces six inches apart, the neon glow of the Coors sign painting pink streaks across her cheek, and says she hasn’t had a conversation where someone actually listened to her in at least a decade, he doesn’t pull away. He lifts his hand, brushes a stray strand of damp hair off her forehead, his thumb brushing the soft skin of her cheekbone, and she leans into the touch like she’s starved for it. There’s no big dramatic speech, no over-the-top confession. They both know what this is. One night, no strings, no expectations, no one demanding anything from either of them.
They leave the bar 15 minutes later, Javier slinging his oilskin scouting jacket over her shoulders to keep the rain off, their hands brushing as they walk through the puddle-dotted parking lot to his truck. She pauses next to the passenger door, tilting her chin up to kiss him quick, soft, the vanilla of her lip gloss mixing with the bourbon on her tongue. “I won’t text you,” she says, quiet enough that the rain almost drowns her out. “No follow up, no drama. Just tonight.” Javier nods, because that’s exactly what he wants too. No pressure to be the agreeable guy who gives everyone what they want. Just one night where he gets to take what he’s been missing for years. He opens the passenger door for her, and she climbs in, the scent of gardenia wrapping around him when he gets in the driver’s seat a second later. He turns the key in the ignition, the radio cutting on to an old George Strait track, and pulls out of the parking lot, the rain tapping soft and steady against the windshield.
