Page 111 of Last Night Was Fun

Her phone hadn’t offered up any messages and as much as she wanted to forsake it all, ditch work, and go find Gabe, she forced herself to partition her personal and professional lives. She couldn’t bail five minutes into her new job, nor could she be distracted with so much new responsibility.

Being an adult was unfairly distressing at times.

By the time Emmy had boxed up her old desk and Ken from IT relocated her computer for her, the morning was half gone. And she still had no messages from Axe Murderer.

“All set,” Ken said, and brushed his hands together when he finished positioning her computer on her new desk.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Any questions?”

“No—actually, yes,” she said with a hint of trepidation in her voice. “Is it possible to recover a deleted email?”

He nodded. “Sure. As long as you deleted it in the past thirty days, it’ll be in your trash.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

She had in fact deleted Gabe’s email yesterday in a fit of anger and wondered if she had the nerve to read it now. She sat at her new desk and entered her password. The screen shone to life, and she noted her inbox number had significantly jumped in the past hour. She had messages from HR, colleagues in different departments who’d heard about her promotion, and an intimidating number of data requests now that she held a senior position. The number pinged higher four times in the ten seconds she spent staring at it.

“Okay, guess we’re doing this now...” she muttered and opened the first request.

The work instantly sucked her in. She was so in flow, crunching numbers, aggregating analyses, reporting out results, that she skipped lunch. She hadn’t realized how late it had gotten until she had a moment to look up, and her stomach noisily growled. It was after 3p.m.

She had thought of visiting a vending machine but the thought of hunting down Gabe’s deleted email weighed heavier. She’d been working up the nerve to read it all morning but then welcomed the excuse of being too busy. Now she finally had a moment. She took a breath and navigated to her trash folder.

There amid the spam, ads, and phishing scams sat a message from Gabe Olson, sent at 11:15a.m. yesterday. Subject line:Please read.

My Bird Girl,

I don’t know what you heard in the hallway this morning, but I would never lie to you. I know how much you wanted the job and how much it means to you personally, and you absolutely deserve it. The truth is, you’ve always intimidated the hell out of me. I had my baseball careertaken away, and then when you came along and were unstoppable at your job, I thought I was going to have this career taken away from me too. But this job was never mine to lose. I can’t stand in your way. You’ve shown me that I don’t need to win to be happy. You’re better than me and you deserve the job, and I’m happy. I want you. I don’t even care about the job if it means I get to be with you, and that’s how I know what matters. It’s you.

I wasn’t sure if my plan was going to work, so I wanted to make sure I could put it in motion before we got our hopes up. I should have told you sooner. I’m sorry. I know I’ve done things in the past to make you question your trust in me, and I have a reputation I’ve never dispelled working against me here, so I can take some blame for your reaction, but I swear, I would never be dishonest or joke about anything that matters this much.

On that note, here’s some more honesty.

That fake number is the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Like I said the other day, I would trade anything to have a shot at being with you. What you said in the hallway about the way you feel, the truth is, I feel the same. I have for a long time. Because of you, I’ve figured out how to quantify my feelings in more ways than one. I know writing messages to each other is kind of our thing, but I’d rather say how I feel to your face than here. I’m going to come over at lunch. I hope you’ll let me in so we can talk.

—Your Axe Murderer

Emmy read the email twice, the second time through a flood of messy tears. Her heart was positively broken in half but somehow beating stronger than ever.

“Oh no,” she said, sobbing into her hand. He’d sent the message before he’d come over, and before she’d said awful things to him. The likelihood he still felt the same seemed slim. Another hard sob burst from her throat as she ached all the way to her toes.

Quantify my feelingsmade her think of the equation he’d written her; the complex model that he claimed accounted for the intuitive feelings he had from being on the field. She didn’t think it was possible to do such a thing, but she also didn’t think it was possible to feel like her heart was beating on the outside of her chest like a battered wound.

She clicked out of his email and found the file she’d sent herself with his equation in it when she’d transferred it from the napkin. With a few more clicks and some keystrokes, she pulled it into the platform they used for analyses and called in a dataset to test it out. She found Hollander’s recent game data, as Gabe instructed, and hitrun. It spit out a series of numbers and symbols that her trained brain knew how to interpret, and she gasped. The model used on Hollander’s data from the last week predicted his stats from this week, give or take a reasonable margin of error, and more accurately than if she’d used her own equation. Gabe was right. He’d figured out how to quantify a feeling.

“Holy shit,” she whispered, half in awe and half in despair. He was so goddamn smart, and he’d done this for her. Forher, to give her the same advantage he had.And she’d messed everything up. She threw her hand to her tearing eyes right as someone knocked on her open door.

“Congrat—” Pedro’s voice began to singsong before it sharply cut off. “What’s wrong?”

Emmy looked up to see Pedro and Silas standing at her door. Pedro held a giant cupcake bedazzled in pink frosting and golden sprinkles. It looked like something a unicorn would regurgitate, or what two men would pick out to fit the description ofcongratulatory cupcakefor a woman. With a flush of embarrassment, Emmy wiped at her eyes and tried to compose herself. “Hey, guys,” she said with a strained smile. Her voice came out clogged with tears.

They suspiciously eyed her and stepped inside. “Jameson, I don’t know if anyone has ever told you this before, but there’s no crying in baseball,” Silas said.

Emmy choked out a laugh and wiped her eyes again. Good thing she wasn’t wearing much makeup. “Is that for me?” She pointed at the cupcake. At the sight of it, despite being surprised they’d thought of her, her famished belly propelled her out of her chair.

“Um, yes—” Pedro hardly had the words out before she snatched it out of his hand and took an aggressive bite. It was divine. A blob of much needed pink confection. “Sooo, everything going okay with the new job?” Pedro cautiously asked. Notably, both he and Silas had leaned back toward the door.