“In high school, making varsity as a freshman meant I was respected, but it didn’t make me any real friends. Maybe it could’ve, but by that time, I was…” He shook his head again, searching for the right word.

“Jaded?” Sierra tried.

“You could say that. The guys invited me to do stuff, go to parties, hang out, but I knew they only liked me because I was good at baseball.”

“You didn’t even let them get to know you,” she said. “Maybe they would’ve liked you for you.”

Cole shrugged. “Wasn’t going to give them the opportunity. I’d spent a lot of years not fitting in.”

“And what happened to get you kicked off the team? Junior year, right?”

Cole laughed, but there was no humor in it. More of a scoff. “The varsity coach was a good guy. Always trying to get through to me, make me a better person, but I was so pissed off at the world.”

He swallowed and looked over at Sierra, found her watching him intently, enthralled, not showing any signs of disgust with him as she should. “I’m not proud of any of this, just so you know.” He hated it, all of it, wished he could go back and do it all over. God, how he wished that.

Sierra nodded, obviously waiting for him to finish the story.

“I argued with Coach one too many times. I showed up for practice late—yet again, because I was a shithead—and he’d had enough. Told me they didn’t need me at practice that day, that I should sit it out and figure out what was important to me. Like an entitled little bastard, I shot the F bomb at him, and that was it. He booted me for the season.”

“Ouch,” Sierra said.

“Now you know why I don’t tell people any of this.”

“We all do stupid stuff when we’re growing up.”

“I did more than my share. There’s no sugarcoating it.”

“You needed something that you weren’t able to find,” she said, and he closed his eyes, a little dumbfounded that anyone could find it in them to be empathetic to his former asshole self.

“I needed a kick in the ass. Which my dad tried to give me that night when I got home. Coach had called him, told him what had happened.”

“Oh, no.”

He nodded dully, his gut churning so hard he wondered if the half burger might come up. “I’m sure you won’t be surprised when I tell you I wasn’t open to that kick in the ass.”

“Angry teenagers usually aren’t.”