Page 5 of The Fall Classic

It’s a worn-out red paperback.

The valet brings up a sleek Mercedes SUV, and Lulabelle and her mom get in.

Georgiana doesn’t.

Instead, she leans through the open window, and the other woman seems to be asking if she wants a ride, and Georgiana shakes her head and points.

I lean forward.

She walks away from the valet stand in the direction of⁠—

I’m out of my chair before my brain has finished processing the image. I grab the doorframe on my way out. Pivot back.

“Thank you!” I call to the two men, and then I’m running.

I know exactly where she’s going. At least, I think I do, because I always cut through the parking lot when I’m going there, too.

She’s walking to Meant to Bean.

And I’m running after her into the August dark.

CHAPTER TWO

Georgie

The cicadas and crickets sing me all the way home to Meant to Bean. It’s the kind of mild August night that makes me nostalgic for summer as a child, when I would run to the coffee shop to wait in a booth and read a book while Mama was closing. She would bring me a hot cocoa or a steamed milk with vanilla in a real mug and kiss my forehead or brush a lock of hair from my face that I hadn’t noticed because I was too lost in Narnia or Avonlea or Hogwarts.

We still have all of the mugs Mama made in her earthenware kiln mounted along one of the walls in the shop. Whenever someone orders “for here,” they get to pick their mug.

Most people don’t care, but I do.

Because my mama did.

The walk home from the stadium takes me down Broad Street, past the Piggly Wiggly and the ice cream shop, and left onto Sycamore, where roots from the live oaks have buckled the sidewalk. There’s a pothole at the corner of Sycamore and Mill with an orange cone next to it that promises someone’s planning to fill it soon, but I have my doubts. I jump over it, looking at Mama’s high-top Chuck Taylors on my feet that used to be white and are now a shade of watered-down beige that Converse has never sold. I think of every stain and scratch to the canvas as patina. Something that adds character.

What they do not add, however, is about a quarter inch of space to the toe box that I would greatly appreciate.

It doesn’t matter, though. Women wear shoes that are slightly uncomfortable all the time, and these really are fine, when I haven’t been on my feet working all day and cheering all night. My mama got them just before her diagnosis and barely had the chance to wear them. I used to put patches all over them until I lost the most important one. Now, I let the shoes speak for themselves, a testament to all the places I’ve … never been.

Well, except for Phoenix during Spring Training. My one-and-only trip on an airplane. My one-and-only time leaving the South in my whole life.

It was also my one-and-only time meeting a hunky baseball player—number 49. Logan Fischer.

He grabbed my copy of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe like he had some kind of claim to it and, by extension, me. Like we were tethered together by words on pages that we both love.

The way he held my eyes while we talked …

I laugh at myself as I reach the parking lot of Meant to Bean. My long, wavy blonde hair falls in front of my face, covering a blush that the night sky is already doing plenty to obscure.

It’s not often that I have a crush, but they’re always from afar. Usually, it’s a customer—a regular who seems so thoughtful and perfect from a distance, especially if he stops by the Little Free Library I added a couple of years ago on the northwest corner of the shop.

But too often, a single conversation is all it takes to make me realize that the guys are more Mr. Collins than Mr. Darcy.

At least this time, the sole conversation I had with Logan Fischer was the opposite. He started as Mr. Darcy in my mind, and after thirty minutes of talking about books, he became a three-dimensional figure. A living, breathing man with a dry sense of humor who was a little rigid and a lot attached to The Chronicles of Narnia.

Plus so, so handsome.

As a proper dream man should be.