Elias Voss, 52, has spent the last 18 years as a minor league scout for the Dayton Dragons, logging 40,000 miles a year in his beat-up 2016 Ford F-150, crumpling scouting notes into the cupholder and skipping family holidays to catch tryouts in small-town Ohio fields. His biggest flaw, the one his sister nags him about every Thanksgiving, is that he’s built a brick wall around any part of his life that doesn’t involve radar guns and pitch count logs, ever since his wife left him for a high school football coach eight years prior. He doesn’t do casual drinks with coworkers, doesn’t date, doesn’t let anyone sit close enough to read the messy scribble in his notebook.
It’s 10 PM on a humid August Tuesday, he’s perched at the only empty stool at Miller’s Tap House, the bar two blocks from the stadium, nursing a $3 PBR and crossing out the name of a 19-year-old pitcher who blew out his UCL in the sixth inning that afternoon. The air smells like fried pickles and burnt pretzel salt, the jukebox is stuck on a Johnny Cash deep cut, and the only other people in the room are the bartender folding napkins in the back and a group of teen kids loitering on the sidewalk outside. He doesn’t notice when someone slides into the stool next to him until their denim jacket brushes the sleeve of his faded red flannel, warm through the thin fabric.
He looks up, half ready to tell the stranger to pick another seat, and stops. It’s Mara Hale, the new athletic trainer the team hired three months prior, the one he’s only exchanged 12 formal work emails with, the one he watched carry a 220-pound catcher off the field last week without breaking a sweat. She’s got a smudge of athletic tape adhesive on her left cheek, her dark hair is pulled back in a messy braid, and she’s holding a glass of bourbon on the rocks, the ice clinking when she sets it down on the bar top between them. “Your notes are garbage,” she says, nodding at his open notebook, no preamble, and he snorts before he can stop himself. She leans in to point at a line of scribble about shoulder rotation, her shoulder pressing into his, and he can smell her perfume, cedar and sweet orange, not the flowery stuff his ex used to douse herself in.
He’s caught off guard, already off kilter, because he’d spent the last week hearing rumors that the upcoming minor league realignment would cut half the Dragons’ front office staff, including either the scouting or athletic training department, and he’d been avoiding everyone on staff to skip the awkward “will you still have a job next month” small talk. He wants to lean away, remind himself that mixing work with anything else never ends well, that he’s better off alone, that he’s an idiot for even noticing how her laugh crinkles the corners of her eyes when he tells her about the kid who showed up to a tryout last month in cowboy boots and threw a 92 mph fastball. He’s disgusted with himself for letting his guard down, for not grabbing his notebook and heading straight for the door, but he stays planted on the stool, his leg brushing hers under the bar, no space between them now.
She tells him she’s got a job offer for a training position with a Tampa minor league affiliate, already signed the paperwork last week, but she’d been debating turning it down, even though the pay is 20% higher and the winters don’t involve scraping ice off your car at 6 AM. He freezes for half a second, because he’d got the same offer for a scouting position with that exact same affiliate three weeks prior, had left the offer letter sitting on his kitchen counter unopened, because moving to Florida alone sounded worse than staying in Ohio alone. When she reaches across the bar to wipe a fleck of beer foam off his chin with her thumb, her skin warm against his stubble, he doesn’t flinch.
He pulls the crumpled offer letter out of his flannel pocket, the edges folded over from being carried around for three weeks, and slides it across the bar to her. Her eyes widen when she reads the header, and she looks up at him, holding eye contact for three full beats, no smile, no joke, just quiet recognition. He covers her hand where it rests on the bar, his palm calloused from years of gripping radar guns and turning truck door handles, her hand soft but with a faint scar on the knuckle from when she cut herself wrapping a sprained ankle last month, the injury he’d run to the concession stand to grab ice for when no one else could find any.
They stay until last call, the bartender locking the door behind them when they leave, the air thick with humidity and the sound of crickets chirping from the oak trees lining the street. He walks her to her small rental house three blocks away, doesn’t overthink it when she pulls him down for a kiss on her front porch, the taste of bourbon and mint gum on her lips, doesn’t pull away when she invites him inside. He wakes up at 7 the next morning, no alarm, no scouting report to rush to, and watches her pull mugs out of the kitchen cabinet, sunlight gilding the edges of her hair. He reaches across the counter to grab the pen he left next to his notebook, and circles the “accept” box at the bottom of the Florida offer letter before she hands him a mug of black coffee, exactly how he likes it.
