The Game From Hell: An R.L. Mathewson Chronicle

Publishing The Chronicle early tonight because of the game.

Please enjoy 🙂

The R.L. Mathewson Chronicles

The Game from Hell

Fenway Park

Boston, MA

            “I think it would be better if we communicated through lawyers from now on,” Trevor said, his jaw clenched tightly as he stared straight ahead, clearly still upset over her little surprise.

            Big baby, she thought, just barely refraining from rolling her eyes and calling him that, again. But really, the man could be the biggest baby over the littlest things.

            “Fine,” she said, sighing heavily as she gestured to Johnnie and Sebastian, their two year old twins who shared the seat between them, “but do you think that you could give the boys their bag of animal crackers while you’re pouting?”

            “I told you that you shouldn’t have married her,” Jason said in a conspiratorial whisper even as he glared at her.

            Trevor released a long-suffering sigh as he leaned over in his seat and opened the oversized diaper bag to search for the boys’ snack. “I should have listened to you.”

            “I don’t know why the two of you are upset,” Haley said as she shifted on Jason’s lap, no doubt testing his hold on her so that she could make another run for it, “I think they look cute.”

            Every Bradford sitting around them, all twenty-five of them, shifted their glares from Zoe to Haley and back before landing on the twin boys wearing the cutest little Red Sox jerseys and-

            “Where did you get those phones?” Zoe demanded, reaching over and taking the smartphones that were definitely not hers or her husbands, from the twins who she would swear didn’t have them a minute ago.

            “Damn it,” Trevor hissed, shifting nervously in his seat as he put the bag down and gestured for the boys to stand.

            Smiling innocently, too damn innocently for even a Bradford, Johnnie and Sebastian stood up, turned around and assumed the position, hands on the back of the seats in front of them, legs spread apart as they waited for a quick, and very discrete, search. Twenty seconds later, Trevor was gesturing for the boys to sit back down and holding three more smartphones.

            “Where did you get these from?” Trevor asked, not bothering to yell at the boys since they both knew that it wouldn’t do any good.

            The boys would just take the yelling as a challenge and find something else to get into, which wasn’t a good idea, especially not in a city like Boston. Just thinking about the kind of damage that her boys could do in a city this size had her swallowing nervously and sharing a horrified look with the man, who, only two hours ago, had announced that he was divorcing her when she’d refused to change the boys back into the plain, at least in her opinion, Yankees jerseys that he’d dressed them in this morning.

            “Here and there,” Johnnie said with a careless shrug that his brother matched.

            It was so damn wrong to be afraid of your own children, Zoe mused as she handed the two phones she still held over to Trevor, who was now scowling down at the boys.

            “Where?” he demanded with a look that told both boys the trouble they would get into if they didn’t tell him the truth and quickly.

            “Fine,” Sebastian mumbled as he pointed towards…..

            Zoe released a little whimper as she realized that her sons were pointing towards the players on the field. If they had been any other children, she would have rolled her eyes and explained to them that it wasn’t nice to lie and asked them once again where they’d got the phones from, but they were her children, her frightening intelligent children and she knew without a doubt that they weren’t lying. Somehow they’d managed to lift the phones of five Red Sox baseball players without anyone figuring it out.

            “Oh hell no,” Trevor said, groaning as the realization of what their sons did, hit him.

            “When did they get a chance?” she asked no one in particular as she tried to figure out how they were going to return the phones without getting arrested, kicked out or banned from Fenway Park.

            Not that her husband or his cousins would really care if they got banned from Fenway. They’d just shrug it off since they hated the Red Sox. The only reason they were here now was because Uncle Jared couldn’t get his hands on Yankee stadium tickets to watch the Yankees play the Red Sox. He’d been forced to settle for these tickets, something that the rest of the men in their family bitched and whined about, but reluctantly accepted since it meant that they had a chance of watching the Yankees cream the Red Sox on their home turf.

            Jason groaned, long and loud. “I think they did it when we were helping security drag this one away from the wall,” he said in an apologetic tone as Haley added a sheepish, “Sorry.”

            “It’s okay,” she mumbled even as Trevor cursed, grabbed the diaper bag and searched through it only to find-

            “Please tell me that’s not what I think it is,” Uncle Jared said, leaning forward to grab the black leather binder out of Trevor’s hand while he sat there, looking stunned.

            “We need to give this back,” Jason said, swallowing nervously.

          “Why would they take this?” Haley asked, looking adorably confused while everyone else looked horrified to discover that the two little boys had somehow managed to steal the Red Sox playbook.

            This was so not good…..

            “Because we were bored,” Johnnie admitted with a shrug only to have Sebastian add, “And we bet Tommy his cupcakes that the Yankees would win.”

            “So you were fixing the game?” Zoe found herself asking, when in reality, she really shouldn’t be shocked by anything that her twins capable did by this point, but she was.

            “They’re really good cupcakes,” Johnnie pointed out with Bradford logic that had the rest of the men groaning and her wondering how they were going to get out of this without ending up on the ten o’clock news……again.

 © R.L. Mathewson, 2014, R.L. Mathewson Chronicles. All Rights Reserved.