The Ninth Inning

The spinach leaf clung to Marcus's lip like a stubborn secret, and Sarah found herself fixating on it instead of his question. Her iPhone lay face-up on the linen tablecloth between them, its dark screen occasionally flickering with notifications she refused to check.

"I said, do you think we can still make this work?" Marcus asked, his voice cracking on the last word.

Sarah swallowed the expensive salad she'd barely tasted. The restaurant around them hummed with the privileged clinking of glasses and low, intimate conversations. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows, the city stretched outward, forgiving and indifferent.

She thought about baseball—about how her father had taken her to Dodgers games every Sunday during that last year before he died. The rhythm of it. The ninth inning, two outs, bottom of the ninth, and anything could still happen. Until it couldn't.

"Remember when we flew to Chicago for that playoff game?" Sarah said instead of answering. "When you caught the foul ball?"

Marcus smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "That was three years ago, Sarah. Before the promotion. Before the iPhone became your fifth limb."

Her phone buzzed—work, probably, or maybe her mother checking in again. She didn't reach for it. Instead, she reached across the table and brushed the spinach from Marcus's lip with her thumb. His skin was warm, familiar. The intimacy of the gesture caught them both off guard.

"I'm sorry," she said, and the apology encompassed everything: the unanswered messages, the nights she'd fallen asleep with her phone in her hand instead of his, the way she'd stopped noticing the small moments that made a life worth living.

Marcus caught her hand. His palm was rough from the weekend batting practice he'd started taking up again, trying to reconnect with something simpler.

"Extra innings," he said quietly. "We could try extra innings."

Sarah looked at him—at the silver threading through his temples, at the way his eyes still held that impossible hope she'd fallen in love with seven years ago. Her iPhone lit up with a new message, casting a pale blue glow across their dessert plates.

She turned it over, face down, and squeezed Marcus's hand. "Extra innings," she agreed. "But I'm pitching first."