Do Not Fall For The Baseball Captains novel Chapter 27

Enjoy the Steak

Victoria’s POV

“Hey, Handlebars!” she called out, waving her hand high in the air.

“Willow, stop, oh my god,” I hissed, frantically grabbing at her sleeve and trying to pull myself as deep into the leather booth as humanly possible.

My face was instantly burning.

She still called him that because of the time he crashed his bike into our mailbox trying to do a no–handed trick for her when he was twelve.

A few people at the surrounding tables turned their heads to look at us, which only made me want to melt through the floorboards.

Caleb’s eyes narrowed at the noise, his brow furrowing as he searched the room. But the second his gaze landed on our booth, the tension in his face suddenly vanished.

His mouth parted slightly, and I could read his lips as he mumbled her name in disbelief.

He immediately left the host stand, navigating the crowded space between tables with a clumsy but determined speed.

When he finally reached us, Willow slithered out of the booth and instantly engulfed him in a massive hug, careful not to knock his crutches out from under him.

“Look at you!” Willow laughed, pulling back to look him up and down. “Since when do you use these things as fashion accessories? You look so different. Big league athlete status has treated you well.”

“You’re one to talk,” Caleb said, a genuine smile breaking across his face. He kept his hands braced on the grips of his crutches, but his eyes were bright as he looked at her.

“When did you get back in the country? You look… incredible, Willow. Seriously, you’ve gotten even more beautiful since the last time I saw you.”

As he mentioned the word beautiful, his eyes flicked down to me for a fraction of a second, a strange, unreadable weight in his gaze.

I instantly looked away, picking up my fork and focusing entirely on a leftover piece of `potato on my plate.

My stomach felt like it was tied in a knot. Listening to him use that effortless, charming tone on my sister made me incredibly uncomfortable, especially when the memory of his cold silence just days ago was still so loud in my head.

I stayed quiet, counting the grain patterns in the wooden table while Willow and Caleb traded quick updates about his leg and her new job.

Bwoy the Steak

Finally, the shadow of his figure shifted closer to my side of the booth. The playful energy left his voice, replaced by something much softer, almost tentative

“Hey, Tori. I’ve been trying to reach you.”

I forced a tight, plastic smile onto my face and finally looked up. It was a mistake.

The second my eyes locked with his green ones, a familiar, painful tug pulled at my chest.

I hated how easily my body remembered him, how my skin still recognized his voice as safety even when he had proven it wasn’t.

“I know that, Caleb,” I said, my voice coming out flat and entirely too formal. “I’ve been busy.”

He raised a single dark eyebrow, a small, frustrated line forming between his eyes.

“You’ve been too busy to send a single text back? Maybe you could have returned the call when you were a little less busy?”

The air between us turned instantly cold. Willow’s eyes darted back and forth between the two of us.

She was incredibly emotionally intelligent, and she didn’t need a map to realize she was standing in the middle of a massive emotional minefield.

She cleared her throat loudly, reaching down to grab her designer purse from the bench.

“You know what? I actually need to step outside and return a quick work call to my manager. Victoria, I’ll take care of the bill on my way out.”

“Don’t worry about it, Willow,” Caleb intervened smoothly, already reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “Slide it over to my tab. I’ll take care of it for both of you.”

“Oh, come on, Caleb, you definitely don’t have to do that,” Willow argued, a small laugh escaping her lips as she reached for the leather check presenter.

“I want to,” he insisted, his voice firm as he set a black card down on top of the receipt. “Consider it a welcome–home gift.”

Willow looked at the card, then gave me a long, lingering look that practically screamed we are talking about this the second we get to the car.

She relented with a quiet sigh, patted Caleb’s shoulder, and walked toward the exit, leaving the two of us entirely alone in the booth.

The silence she left behind was suffocating. Caleb adjusted his crutches, leaning heavily against the edge of the table as he looked down at me.

“Are you ever going to talk to me again?” he asked quietly.

“I’m talking to you right now,” I murmured, keeping my hands folded in my lap so he

2.4

Cray the Steak

wouldn’t see them shaking.

“You know what I mean, Tori. You walked out of my place, you let your new boyfriend insult me in my own living room, and then you completely vanished. You didn’t even check to see if I made it to my doctor’s appointment the next day.”

There was a raw, accusatory edge to his voice, an undercurrent of genuine offense.

He looked at me with this wounded, bewildered expression, as if I were the one who had committed some massive betrayal against him.

It was standard Caleb logic–in his mind, my sudden absence wasn’t a consequence of how he’d treated me; it was a personal attack on his comfort.

I let out a sharp, incredulous breath, my head snapping up as the anger rushed back into my veins.

“Are you seriously trying to make me feel guilty right now, Caleb? You let Lexi physically assault me. You sat on that couch and watched her drag me by my hair, and the only person you told to stop was me. You didn’t care that she was humiliating me in front of her friends. You only cared about protecting her feelings.”

“She was out of her mind with jealousy, Tori!” he argued, his voice dropping into a desperate whisper so the neighboring tables wouldn’t hear.

“She saw my hand on your leg and she lost it. I didn’t want the situation to get any worse than it already was. I was trying to de–escalate it.”

“By sacrificing me?” The words felt like broken glass in my throat. I looked at him, my vision blurring slightly as a hot tear threatened to spill over.

“You always do that. Whenever things get difficult, or whenever someone else draws a line, you sacrifice me because you assume I’ll always be there when the dust settles. You think my loyalty is a permanent guarantee.”

Caleb’s jaw tightened, his fingers gripping the handles of his crutches so hard his knuckles turned white.

“It’s not like that. You’re my best friend, Victoria. You’ve always been the one person I could count on when everything else was going sideways. When I woke up last night and you weren’t answering… it felt like the floor had been pulled out from under me.”

“Then you should have asked Lexi to catch you,” I said, my voice steadying into a cold, hard finality.

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