A.N. Sorry I deleted a chapter, I've decided to only post in chronological order, to make the story more clear, no matter what order I'm writing in.


„Oh, look, new recruits", Mark said, as Claire and April came down to have lunch with them, on the balcony. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm poor so no more ordering food out", Claire answered.

"What? Hubby took all the money and left you?" Mark went on. He and Claire were almost always at war, which to their co-workers, was translated into sexual tension. However, over the time they had one-too many arguments which didn't make one too popular in the eyes of the other. They could barely tolerate each other, which was very fun for those around them.

Claire decided to be the bigger person here and just ignore his snide comments. Instead of answering Mark, she decided to turn the conversation towards Kevin. "Hey, Kev, I've read your review of the last baseball season. How much did it take you to write it? I mean…it couldn't have been easy, comparing what happened this year to how championships were decades ago".

"A..About two hours or so, with proofreading and all", he answered, after doing a bit of mental math.

"You're like a baseball encyclopedia! How come you know so much? I mean, you could just Google stuff from the past now, you don't really have to know everything...I think...right?", Claire asked honestly.

"Um...I don't really know that much...I just...I grew up with this and all these info sort of stuck, I guess. With stuff in the distant past...I used to collect cards with baseball players and there was a lot of trivia on the back of those things", answered Kevin trying to make them believe that it really wasn't a big accomplishment.

„Also, the fact that you've played baseball for 13 years might've helped a bit" Mark chimed in, which made Kevin shoot him a pretty mean look.

Claire was a bit taken aback by this, more because it showed her how little she knows about the people she has been working with for years. And, even though she thought that people are allowed to have their privacy, she as curious and she loved knowing as much as she could about anyone. Their interactions over the years have been pretty light, just a few here and there conversations about work and movies. Both Kevin and Claire were on the same circle of friends from work; maybe not exactly friends, more like people who like each other enough so they can stand a few drink after work at the nearest bar. However, rarely did it happen that the two would go out with everyone else at the same time, which didn't allow Claire to know too much about him.

„13 years? Wow, you're a sports freak!" she said as she threw her head back, eyes wide open.

April wanted so much to just jump right in the conversation and start with her questions, but fought with herself thinking that would just make her sound borderline obsessive. And she'd rather keep her distant air than people qualify her as too nosy. "So something had happened to him", she thought to herself as she watched him shifting in his chair. So she just kept her fingers crossed and hoped that Claire was just the right amount of nosy to ask the right questions.

Kevin felt a bit exposed by Mark's statement. It wasn't that he didn't want people to know about his incredibly athletic former self, he just didn't like the look in their eyes. He could practically hear them thinking „so...you could've been a professional baseball player if you hadn't taken that ride, huh?" He no longer divided his life in „before and after the accident", he saw it all as a whole and like his father had said, the Kevin-now is what that little boy obsessed with sports had become.

„13 years isn't that much! I started with the little league, when I was 6, so it only got interesting long after that", Kevin dismissed his background, making it sound like it wasn't that much of a big deal, although playing sports was the most important thing for him, growing up.

„Um...13 years is a lot for focusing on same thing. I can't even follow through with a blog I keep wanting to have for the last...five years or so. And that's like...sitting on my ass, writing about what I'm interested in for 10 minutes a day!"

'That's because you're lazy!', Mark offered, smiling with contempt, which made Claire hit him in the arm.

„Jerk!" Claire had put on a few pounds after she had the baby and felt very self conscious. Whenever someone would say anything about her looks, eating habits or laziness, which made her quit going to the gym, she felt all nervous and uncomfortable.

Kevin grinned and took a bite of his sandwich, while watching them being playful. His eyes met April's, who was sitting on a small bench close to the door of the balcony. She smiled to him and starting feeling all nervous; the good kind of nervousness, the one you want to keep feeling. She knew she had two choices now: either break eye contact fast, or say something. She decided to go with the latter. The words were a bit too stubborn at first, so she stammered before she was able to get a whole sentence out. She felt ridiculous. Here she was, a social butterfly, an extrovert who had no problem flirting with just about anyone but still froze every time she was around him. She had no idea why and thought it might be because he was a very good looking guy in a situation completely new to her. Yes, that was it; the novelty of this whole thing. Still, she had to remind herself from time to time that when she first shook his hand, in that small bar right down the street, after she was getting back from a disastrous first date, she felt her knees going all soft.

"I like your shirt!", April blurted out; she kept staring at him for too long so she had to come up with something that would excuse that. So she would just lie and make him believe that all this time she was mesmerized by his shirt, a pale blue, plain shirt, that had absolutely nothing worth a stare.

Kevin looked down on his shirt and let out a confused thanks. Claire looked at her friend, with raised eyebrows.

"I've never played any sports", April said out of the blue, again, which made Kevin wonder whether she had smoked something else than cigarettes. He'd seen her with a pack of cigarettes, from time to time. "I mean…I go to the gym and have been going for…for almost ten years now, I guess, but I've never really played anything."

"Really? Not even in school?" Kevin asked, surprised.

"No, I always hated gum classes in school."

"You should definitely try sometimes. I mean…besides the exercise, there's…competition…and winning…and…did I mention winning?" Kevin explained with a chuckle.

"Yeah, all those testosterone filled activities. I'll pass, thanks", April answered.

"Well, not everyone is a sports freak like you", Claire tried to save April.

Kevin felt like giving up. "I am not a sports freak!", he let out, rolling his eyes.

"You go to the gym about three or four times a week, you play basketball and all you talk about during winter is how each year you're taking three weeks off to go skiing", Mark let out. "Dude, you're a sports freak."

After a few more moments of banter, Kevin and Claire had to go back to work. April really wasn't going to go back anytime soon so she locked up all her common sense and started doing some investigations of her own. She wasn't comfortable enough with Kevin to ask him things and since he was never mentioning his chair or what got him there, she wasn't really sure how he would react to all the questions she had in her mind. So, deciding that her nervousness around him was all because of her unanswered questions, she decided she had the perfect candidate in front of her: Mark.

So, as she slowly moved the focus of their conversation from sports to Kevin, she managed to politely ask Mark everything she had wanted to know about the object of her interest. She made sure he would think that she wants to know so much about Kevin because of sheer curiosity and not because – if she was being truthful with herself – she was attracted to him. And as she found out about his accident, about the sports scholarship he'd lost, about the things he had told Mark he has to do to stay in shape – like walking with braces and using a Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike so that he would work the muscles in his legs, things Mark knew because some while ago he had asked Kevin how come his legs looks almost normal and how come he could even move them from time to time, albeit very little - April realized that her infatuation didn't come from curiosity and that in fact she was genuinely attracted to him, a guy from work she barely knew.

If the situation were to be different, she would've been all happy about it; she would've even started making plans so that they could run into each other more, but all this scared her more than anything else.