Seventh Inning Goodbye

The papaya margarita sat sweating on the concrete between us, its bright orange slice curling at the edges like a dying promise. Sarah wouldn't meet my eyes. She kept adjusting her baseball hat—my baseball hat, the one I'd given her three months ago when we pretended this could be casual.

"You're doing that thing with your hair," I said, gesturing vaguely at the stray pieces she kept tucking behind her ear. A nervous tic I'd once found charming.

The stadium roared around us. Someone hit a home run. Everyone stood. We remained seated, two statues in a sea of motion.

"I can't do this anymore," she said finally. Her voice carried surprisingly well over the crowd noise. "You want something I can't give."

"What, exactly?"

"A version of myself that doesn't exist."

I remembered the papaya fields we'd driven past on our first weekend getaway—how she'd rolled down the windows and let the humid, sweet air fill the car, her hair wild around her face, singing along to the radio like she hadn't a care in the world. That version of her. The one I'd fallen for.

I took off my hat. Ran a hand through my own hair, suddenly exhausted. "You know what hurts? I thought we were building something real."

"We were." She placed the hat on the seat between us. "That's why it has to end now. Before we resent each other."

The kiss cam panned over our section. Couples mugged for the screen, exaggerated embraces. When the camera found us, Sarah stood up and walked away, leaving the hat and the unfinished margarita and me sitting there as forty thousand people waited for something that wasn't coming.

I watched her climb the stairs, not looking back once. The papaya slice had fallen into the melting ice. I finished the drink anyway, tart and sweet and strange, the taste of an ending I should have seen coming from the first pitch.