Manny Ortega, 51, has been a minor league baseball scout for 22 years, and he hasn’t dated anyone even tangentially connected to the sport since his ex-wife left him for a rival scout who poached his highest-ranked prospect back in 2015. He’s got a scar along his left eyebrow from a college ball collision, a habit of twisting the worn silver championship ring on his right hand when he’s nervous, and a strict rule: never mix scouting work with anything that could make his job feel less like the escape he needs it to be.
He’s perched on his usual stool at the dive bar two blocks from the Class A stadium, post final game of the season, when she sits down two stools over. The bar smells like fried peanuts, burnt bourbon, and the damp wool of fans who’d sat through the ninth-inning rain delay. The jukebox spits out a scratchy Johnny Cash track, and Manny’s got a half-drunk bourbon neat in front of him, his scouting notebook open to a page of scribbled notes about the 19-year-old shortstop who’d hit two home runs that night. He recognizes her immediately: Lila, the new park operations manager, the one he’d watched haul a 50-pound bag of diamond mix across the infield between innings last week, the one who’d fixed the broken dugout rail mid-game when the rest of the crew called out sick.
She knocks her knee against his when she shifts to set her heavy canvas tool bag on the floor, and she apologizes, her voice rough from yelling over the crowd all day. Manny glances up, notices the smudge of infield dirt on her left jaw, the calluses along her knuckles, the way her hazel eyes crinkle at the corners when she smiles. He makes an offhand joke about the dugout rail still wobbling when the shortstop slammed into it in the eighth, and she snorts, ordering a bourbon neat, same as his. She says she’s fixing it first thing tomorrow, but right now she’s off the clock, and she’s not thinking about loose rails or dead grass or the broken floodlight above the left field stands.
They talk for an hour, first from their separate stools, then she moves one closer when a group of rowdy college kids pile into the booth behind her, her shoulder brushing the sleeve of his faded team jacket every time she reaches for a peanut from the bowl between them. She tells him she’d found his scouting notebook when he dropped it by the dugout earlier that week, flipped through a few pages before she tracked him down to return it, and thinks his take on the shortstop is dead on—most scouts only care about exit velocity, but he noted the kid stayed late every night to practice fielding grounders with the 12-year-old bat boy, that kind of grit matters more than any stat. Manny’s chest tightens; no one’s ever commented on the little notes he scribbles in the margins, not even his boss.
When she reaches for her bourbon glass a little later, her knuckle brushes his, and he feels a jolt he hasn’t felt in almost a decade, warm and sharp, settling low in his stomach. The bar empties out, the bartender starts wiping down the counters, and she leans in so she doesn’t have to yell over the jukebox, her breath smelling like peppermint and bourbon, her hair brushing his cheek when she tilts her head. She asks if he wants to walk back to her place, three blocks over, she’s got a bottle of 12-year bourbon she’s been saving for a good excuse, and she wants to hear the story he mentioned about scouting a kid in the Dominican who ended up making the All-Star team three years later.
Manny freezes for half a second, his fingers twisting that old championship ring on his hand, every wall he’s built over the last 8 years screaming at him to say no, that mixing work and personal only ends in heartbreak, that the team’s unwritten fraternization policy will get him side-eyed at the next regional meeting. But he looks at her, at the dirt still on her jaw, at the way she’s biting her lip like she’s half-expecting him to turn her down, and he thinks about how empty his two-bedroom house is, how he hasn’t had anyone to tell his old scouting stories to in years. He nods, closes his notebook, tucks it into his jacket pocket.
The October air is crisp when they step outside, the sidewalk still damp from the earlier rain, fallen oak leaves crunching under their boots, and their hands brush three times in the first block before Manny finally laces his fingers through hers. Her hand is warm, calloused, fits in his like it was made to. They stop on her porch steps, and she fumbles in her coat pocket for her keys, laughing when she drops them on the wood, and Manny leans down to pick them up, and when he stands back up he kisses her, slow, tastes like bourbon and the peppermint she’d been sucking on earlier, and she kisses him back, her hand tangling in the hair at the nape of his neck.
She pulls back for half a second to unlock the front door, tugging him inside after her, the warm smell of cinnamon and cedar wrapping around them before she kicks the door shut behind them.
