The walk is still holding the day's heat. I feel it through the thin soles of my sandals, that low warmth that comes up off concrete after a long July morning, and I catch the smell of it too — dust and dry grass and something faintly like the inside of a garage. Eddie's crutches make a small hollow sound every time they plant. Tap. Tap. Like a metronome that hasn't decided on a tempo yet.

He's still looking at me. I've been watching him look at me for the last thirty seconds and I still can't figure out what it is he's chewing on, except that it's not nothing, and it's not the ankle.

"My mom's inside," he says.

I nod. I already knew that. I'd known it the whole drive over, the way you know there's a step at the bottom of a staircase even when the light's bad.

"She's been asking about you all week." He shifts his weight on the crutches, and the rubber tips grind a little against the concrete. "Like — a lot. Not in a creepy way. In a mom way."

"There's a difference?"

"Barely." The corner of his mouth moves. He glances at the BMW in the driveway — that dark blue sedan sitting there like it costs more than my whole apartment building — and then his eyes come back to me. "If we go in now, it's a whole thing. Breakfast. Questions. The works. She's gonna want to know what your major was and whether you go to church and if you've ever tried pancit."

"I haven't."

"She'll know."

I laugh — that short surprised laugh that comes out of me before I can decide whether it's allowed — and Eddie's grin widens a notch, that goofy kid grin that doesn't match the way he looked on the mound in the photos I'd pulled up on my phone at 3 a.m. two nights ago, before I made myself put the phone down and go to sleep like a grown-up.

He adjusts his glasses. Two fingers, right at the hinge, pushing them up his nose.

Eight days. I've known this man for eight days, and I already know what that means.

It means he's about to say something he's been holding since I pulled up.

"Or," he says, "we could go somewhere else. Just us."

I watch him not look at me when he says it. He looks at the BMW. He looks at the walk. He looks at a spot on the pavement about three feet to the left of my feet, and I stand there with my keys still in my hand and the July heat coming up through my sandals and my heart doing something I'm going to have to deal with later.

Where. The word comes out before I've decided to say it. "Where?"

And he grins. That grin. The one I've been hearing in his voice on the phone for eight nights, and it turns out it looks exactly the way it sounds — wide and a little crooked and completely without armor.

"I know a place. It's not fancy. But it's quiet."

He starts toward the car. Crutches swinging, weight forward, that little hop he does to keep the bad ankle off the ground, and I follow him because I've been saying yes to this man for eight days and I am not about to stop now. Not when he's standing in front of me in a Padres t-shirt that fits him like it was sewn on, not when his hair is still wet from a shower, not when he just offered me an exit from a house full of questions and I want to take it so badly my hands feel a little unsteady on my keys.

The BMW's hood is warm when I pass it. I don't touch it, but I feel the heat coming off it anyway, that low shimmer you get off a car that's been sitting in the sun since morning. Eddie gets to the passenger door and stops. He shifts one crutch under his arm and reaches for the handle, and I watch his shoulder move under the shirt, that compact pitcher's build, and I have to look at the driveway for a second so I don't look at him looking at the door.

"You don't have to —" I start.

"I got it."

He pulls the door open. The latch makes a solid, expensive sound. The interior is dark leather and clean, cleaner than my apartment has ever been, and there's a faint smell of something like cedar coming out of it, and I stand there on the walk with the door open between us and the front door of his parents' house still shut behind me.

I don't know why that matters. But it does. It matters that his mom is on the other side of that door, and she's been asking about me all week, and I'm about to get in her son's car and drive off with him instead of meeting her. It matters that I'm choosing that. It matters that he offered it like a secret and I took it like one.

Eddie is watching me. He's got one hand on the top of the door and one crutch planted, and his glasses have slid down his nose a little, and he's not saying anything. He's just standing there in the heat with the door open, waiting to see what I do.

I get in.

The seat is low and the leather is cool against the backs of my thighs, and I swing my legs in and pull the door shut behind me, and the sound the door makes when it closes is the sound of a decision I can't take back. Through the windshield I can see the front of the house — beige stucco, a little porch, a wind chime hanging still in the heat — and I can see that the front door is still shut. Nobody came out. Nobody's watching. It's just me and Eddie and the driveway and the warm hood of this ridiculous car.

He comes around the front, crutches tapping, and I watch him through the windshield the whole way. He's careful with the bad ankle. He's careful in a way that tells me he's been hurt before — not just this week, not just this ankle, but in a way that's made him learn to move like he's carrying something fragile. He opens the driver's side and folds himself in, and the crutches go into the back seat with a clatter, and then he's beside me, close enough that I can smell him — soap and something warm underneath it, that skin smell that doesn't have a name.

"Seatbelt," he says.

"I know how seatbelts work."

"Just checking." He adjusts his glasses. Starts the car. The engine comes on with a low, quiet hum that I feel more than hear, and the air conditioning kicks in, and I realize I've been sweating a little and didn't notice.

He backs out of the driveway slow, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the gear shift, and I watch his hands because it's easier than watching his face. His knuckles are a little scuffed. There's a callus on the pad of his right thumb, and I know from eight days of phone calls that it's from gripping a baseball, that he's been throwing since he was five, that his dad used to take him out to the field behind whatever base housing they were living in and hit grounders at him until it got dark. I know that because he told me. I know a lot of things about Eddie Reyes that I probably shouldn't know this early, and none of them have prepared me for the fact that he's real. That he's sitting six inches away from me in a car that smells like cedar, driving me somewhere quiet.

"You're quiet," he says.

"I'm thinking."

"About?"

"Your mom."

He laughs. It's a real laugh, low and quick, and it does something to the inside of my chest that I'm going to have to think about later. "She's gonna be fine. She's gonna be more than fine. She's gonna be —" He shakes his head. "She's gonna love you. That's the problem."

"That's the problem?"

"Yeah. Because then she's gonna want you to come over every Sunday, and she's gonna start asking when you're gonna meet my tita, and my tita is gonna start asking when we're gonna —" He stops. Adjusts his glasses. "Anyway."

I look out the window so he can't see my face. We're on a residential street, palm trees, low houses, a kid on a bike. Normal San Diego. Normal Saturday. And I'm in a nine-million-dollar man's car, driving away from his mother, and my heart is doing something I don't have a name for.

"Where are we going?" I ask.

"You'll see."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the answer you're getting." He glances at me, quick, and there's that grin again, and then he looks back at the road. "It's about twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five. Depends on the lights."

Twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes in a car with him. Twenty-five minutes of his hands on the wheel and his shoulder moving when he turns and that soap-and-skin smell filling up the space between us. Twenty-five minutes is a long time. Twenty-five minutes is enough time to do something stupid. Twenty-five minutes is enough time to decide not to.

I put my hands in my lap and I look out the window and I let the air conditioning cool the sweat on my neck, and I don't say anything for a while, and neither does he.

The radio's off. The only sound is the tires on the road and the low hum of the engine and, every once in a while, Eddie's breathing. He's got a way of breathing that's almost silent — pitcher's breathing, I'd guess, that thing where you learn to keep your chest still so nobody can read you from the stretch. I've heard it on the phone. I've heard it in the pauses between his sentences when he's deciding whether to tell me something.

"You're not gonna ask where I'm taking you?" he says, finally.

"I already asked."

"You asked once. People usually ask twice."

"I'm not people."

He's quiet for a second. Then: "No. You're not."

I turn and look at him. He's watching the road, both hands on the wheel now, and his jaw is set in that way I've seen in the photos — the all-business face, the one he wears on the mound, the one that makes hitters step out of the box. But his glasses have slid down again, and he hasn't pushed them up, and there's something about that — something about him forgetting to fix them — that makes my throat feel tight.

"Eddie."

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you want me to meet your mom?"

He doesn't answer right away. The light ahead turns yellow and he slows down, smooth, easy, the way he must do everything on the field, and we come to a stop at the red, and he sits there with his hands on the wheel and the engine idling and the palm trees going by in the windshield.

"It's not that I don't want you to meet her," he says. "It's that I want —" He stops. Adjusts his glasses. Starts again. "I've been talking to you for eight days. On the phone. In the middle of the night. And I know your voice better than I know my own catcher's, and I know what you sound like when you're tired and I know what you sound like when you're laughing at me, and I know —" He shakes his head. "I don't want to share you yet. That's all. That's the whole thing."

The light turns green.

He drives.

I sit there with my hands in my lap and my heart doing something I still don't have a name for, and I look out the window at San Diego going by — strip malls, taco shops, a man selling flowers out of a van — and I think, very clearly, that I am in trouble. That I have been in trouble since the moment a guy on crutches looked at me across an ER bay and said you didn't ask. That I have been in trouble since 2:14 in the morning eight days ago when I texted him back. That I am in trouble now, in this car, with this man, and I am not going to do anything about it.

He reaches over and turns the radio on, low. Some oldies station. Something slow and warm, the kind of song that plays in a grocery store and nobody listens to, and Eddie hums along under his breath, and I catch myself smiling at the windshield.

"You know this song?" he asks.

"No."

"Me neither." He hums another bar. "I just like it."

I look at him. He's watching the road. His glasses have slid down again. He hasn't fixed them. The song plays on, low and warm, and the palm trees go by, and the front door of his parents' house is getting further and further behind us, and I don't look back.