Do Not Fall For The Baseball Captains (Victoria and Elijah) novel Chapter 190

Confession Night

Victoria’s POV

‘Confession Nights.‘

Coach Miller had called it an exercise in honesty, a chance for everyone to sit down one–on–one, clear the air and leave whatever grudges we were carrying right here in the mountains before we packed up and headed back to reality.

Each pair was assigned a small wooden table scattered across the property.

A single lamp sat in the center of each surface, alongside two glasses of water and a bottle of wine.

The rules were simple: listen, be honest, and try to find a way to forgive.

I sat at a circular wooden table near the edge of the dark lake, wrapping my sweater tightly around my shoulders.

The air was crisp, carrying the cool scent of pine and damp earth.

Across from me sat Lexi.

She looked small in her oversized cardigan, her fingers twisting nervously around her glass.

The silence between us stretched out for a minute before she finally lifted her head, her eyes rimmed with red.

“I’m sorry, Victoria, Lexi began, her voice barely carrying over the soft rustle of the trees. “For everything. For how I treated you, for being a bitch back then… and for what I did to Caleb.”

I looked at her, searching her face for any trace of the spite she used to carry. There wasn’t any. She just looked exhausted.

“Why were you even mean to me, Lexi?” I asked, resting my elbows on the dark wooden table.

My voice was strained, but it carried a sharp edge that had been building up for months.

“I never did anything to you. Not a single thing. So really… tell me, how did it work for you? Waking up every day choosing to be mean? Being so condescending, treating me like I was beneath you… what did you actually get out of that?”

Lexi flinched as if the words physically stung.

She pressed her lips together, her fingers tightening around her glass of water until her knuckles turned white.

“I was jealous,” Lexi whispered, her eyes fixed on the wooden table between us.

“I saw the way Caleb looked at you, even when he swore up and down that he’d never love you more than a friend. I also knew you liked him, and I was terrified that if you finally pushed hard enough, he’d actually wake up and see you. So…. 1 convinced myself that if I dragged you down, if I made you look small, it would force him to choose me instead. It was pathetic, Victoria. I used him to feel important, and I turned you into my punching bag just to feel in control.”

I stared at her, letting the honesty of her answer hang in the air.

“So what changed, Lexi?” I pressed, keeping my gaze locked onto hers.

“You spent all that time fighting for his attention, but the moment he was in the hospital after the crash, you disappeared. If your feelings were ever real, how could you just turn your back on him like that?”

Lexi swallowed hard, looking down at her lap.

“My dad had a stroke,” she whispered, her voice breaking on the last word.

“It happened the exact same week. Everything home collapsed all at once. My family hit a massive financial crisis, my mom was completely unraveling, and the medical bills were just piling higher every day. I panicked, and chose to hide from the

orld. Honestly, I didn’t even know Caleb had been in a crash until two weeks later.”

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