Do Not Fall For The Baseball Captains (Victoria and Elijah) novel Chapter 180

Can I Kiss You?

Elijah’s POV

79

55 Vouchers

I stood in the dim hallway, my hands resting on my hips, my head tossed back as I forced slow, deep breaths into my burning lungs.

Coach waited until the last bedroom door clicked shut before walking over to me.

He looked at my bloody knuckles, then up at my face, letting out a long, heavy sigh.

“I know you’re worried about your girlfriend, Elijah,” Coach said softly, his voice dropping into a quiet, fatherly tone.

“I know how much you care about Victoria. But this? This is not how a captain handles things. Your reaction… I won’t call it valid, but I understand where the anger comes from. You have to control it.”

I took a deep breath, letting the cool hallway air settle the lingering adrenaline in my system. I looked Coach in the eye and gave him a single, firm nod.

“I know, Coach,” I muttered quietly. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Coach Miller looked at me for a moment longer, then reached out, patting my shoulder with a reassuring grip. “Get some rest, son. Go check on her.”

I stood outside our bedroom door for a few seconds, taking one last deep breath to push down the remaining edge of my rage before turning the brass handle and stepping inside.

The room was quiet. Victoria was sitting on the bed, propped up against a pile of plush pillows. Adele had already left.

A worn, leather–bound notebook was sprawled open across her thighs.

I closed the door softly behind me and walked over to the edge of the mattress. I sank down beside her legs, reaching out to rest my hand gently over her knee.

She slowly looked up from the pages, her dark eyes still slightly rimmed with red from crying. A small, sad smile touched her lips as she looked at me.

“It’s my diary,” she whispered softly, her thumb brushing against the paper. “Everything I wrote… from middle school, through high school… all of it.”

She turned the worn leather journal toward me, the cream–colored pages covered in her neat, slanted handwriting.

Slowly, her fingers traced across the ink on a page dated three years back.

“He drove two hours in a rainstorm on my eighteenth birthday,” she murmured softly, a small laugh breaking from her lips even as a single tear escaped her lash line and tracked down her cheek.

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11:32 Tue, Aug 25

Do Not Fall For The Baseball Captains

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65 vouchers

“He brought that stupid, melted chocolate cake and stayed up until three in the morning watching my favourite cartoons. I wrote right here…”

She paused, her thumbnail pressing lightly into the paper beneath a line of text that read: ‘I think Caleb really

sees me.‘

“I thought he was doing all of that because he cared,” she whispered, her voice dropping until it was barely audible in the quiet room.

“I spent years writing down every smile, every time he picked me over someone else, every time he made me feel special. And the whole time… he just knew how I felt. He let me build an entire life around those little breadcrumbs because it felt good to have someone in his corner, completely devoted to him.”

She looked up from the book, her eyes fixed on mine.

“He didn’t just break my heart tonight, Eli. He made every good memory I had with my best friend feel like a

lie.”

When she finished speaking, she wiped a stray tear from her cheek and rested the notebook on the nightstand.

I looked at her, my hand shifting up from her knee to gently cover her fingers.

“Can I kiss you?” I asked softly.

Victoria stared at me for a second, her brows pulling together in confusion before a sudden, breathless giggle escaped her lips.

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