It's a vulnerability Mike Lawson doesn't care to cop to, a chink in the armor he's built up around himself. And yet, it's always there. Lonely on the road, lonely at home, lonely in the crowded clubhouse, facing the quiet by himself, the yawning void of the future. It's terrifying, but he refuses to let anyone see that he's afraid.
And it's all his fault, really. Pushing people away, thinking that this child's game was somehow more important than friends, than family. And yes, he loves it, loves the way the leather of his catcher's mitt feels against the palm of his hand, loves the smell of the dust coming up around home plate when someone tries to slide in. Walking out onto that field is the closest thing to coming home that he's ever felt, and that foul-mouthed often foul-smelling group of teammates is the closest thing he has to a family anymore. Pathetic really. It's a lie he tells himself when the echoes of his giant house get to be too much. They're nothing more than teammates, subject to the whims of an unfeeling general manager. Any one of them could disappear at any moment.
They have families waiting for them at home, wives with sparkling smiles and children to climb all over them when they walk through the front door. Sure, they take baseball home with them. It rides along the tense lines of their shoulders, sits in the achingly sore muscles after a good workout, but it doesn't consume them. Mike wishes he could have figured out what was important before he lost it all, before his body betrayed him and took away the one thing he thought he could always count on.
His aching knees are just the most obvious problem. His conditioning isn't what it used to be. It isn't like when he was a rookie, an excited kid who never got tired, who bounced back from injuries like a rubber band snapping into place. The hurts these days, god, they hurt for a good long while, lingering like ghosts in his muscles, phantoms that never go away. And he knows he should retire, should have a long damn time ago. If there had been anything else that even remotely felt like home he might have.
And it isn't about the money. He made sound investments over the years, and his bank account is flush. He's financially solvent, as Amellia would say, free to do whatever the hell he wants. He could buy a sailboat and spend the next ten years sailing around the world, stopping in the tropics to avail himself warm thighs and sweet lips, see the sunset from every ocean. He's thought about it… and it seems about as tempting as laying down on a bed of nails and getting an ashiatsu massage.
And when he sees Ginny, it's like she's all the things he can't be anymore. Excited about the game, about the future, hopeful in ways he can't even imagine. And when she smiles at him, it's a problem. She's not just another teammate, not one of his pretend family members that leaves him in the clubhouse after the games. She's at the other end of the line when his house is too quiet, when the thought of the future makes him short of breath and he can't sleep. She's worming her way beneath the armor, her warmth seeping into his aching muscles, and he can't help but smile back. It's a real fucking problem that he has no clue how to solve.