14. Matty #2
I buried my face in his neck and came hard with a choked groan. My hips jerked helplessly as pleasure crashed through me in long, shuddering waves.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I whispered against his damp skin.
He let out a soft, breathless laugh, the sound rumbling through his chest. “Yeah. That . . . about sums it up.”
We stayed locked together like that for who knew how long, foreheads pressed closed, just breathing each other in. Diaz’s hand kept moving in slow, lazy strokes between us, drawing out every last shiver.
Eventually, he pressed a soft kiss to my temple and murmured, “C’mere.”
He guided me down beside him on the bed.
I collapsed half on top of him, one leg thrown over his thigh, my face tucked into the warm curve of his neck.
Before I could even settle, Mo let out a dramatic huff from the mountain of pillows we had set up for her beside the bed.
She stood up only to settle back down again, this time with her back to us.
“We really gotta stop fucking in front of my dog.”
At this rate, I was going to have to shell out the big bucks to send her to one of those animal therapists.
Diaz chuckled, the sound warm and rumbling under my cheek. “She’ll get used to it.”
He reached over the side of the bed for his discarded shirt, using it to gently clean us both up.
Better his than mine, I guess.
The casual tenderness of it all made something loosen in my chest. Unfortunately, my brain was anything but quiet.
“What happens when we go home?”
Diaz let out a soft huff of laughter. “Damn, Alabama. You couldn’t even wait until I finished wiping the cum off our stomachs?”
My face heated. “Sorry.”
“I’m only kidding.” He kissed the top of my head, then reached up to brush a strand of hair off my forehead. “You worried about the team?”
I nodded against his shoulder, fingers tracing idle patterns over his chest. “The team, the fans. Our families.”
“That’s the scariest of them all.”
“I’m serious. What do we tell people?”
“Nothing.” His voice was serious now. “Everything. Whatever the fuck we want to tell them. This, us, is nobody else’s business but ours.”
I stayed quiet for a moment, letting his words settle. Part of me knew he was right. What we had, and wherever this was going, belonged to us. No one else got a vote.
But it wasn’t that simple.
Not when we were two guys on the same Major League team.
Because baseball wasn’t exactly known for making this kind of thing easy.
Sure, the sport had come a long way—there were Pride Nights now and some teams sported rainbow socks in the month of June.
Some teams. The entire organization talked more openly about inclusion than they ever had when I’d been a kid.
But there was a difference between a team posting a graphic on social media and two active players showing up to spring training holding hands.
Especially when those two players shared a locker room.
And road trips.
And a dugout, six days a week for eight months out of the year.
I thought about how long I had spent in baseball, all the jokes that weren’t really jokes and the way that some guys still used words like gay as shorthand for weak or stupid without even thinking about it.
Most of them weren’t bad people.
But that almost made it harder.
Because the worst reactions rarely came from outright cruelty. They came from discomfort, awkwardness. People suddenly treating you differently because they didn’t know what to do with information they hadn’t expected.
Just ask my dad.
And then, there were the fans.
Roasters’ fans, or The Brew Crew as they had dubbed themselves, were incredible. But I had also seen them tear apart players for bad haircuts. What would happen if they found out their hotshot shortstop was dating his left fielder?
I didn't know and neither did Diaz.
That uncertainty sat heavy in my chest.
“I spent twentysomething years assuming my future was going to look a certain way,” I told him.
His fingers combed gently through my curls, slow and soothing.
“Yeah?”
“And then you happened.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Pretty sure I existed before that.”
“You know what I mean.”
He nodded, eyes soft in the low light. “I do.”
I shifted higher against him, resting my chin on his chest.
“When I got drafted, I knew exactly what I wanted. Win a championship . . . or two. Golden Glove.”
“Or two?”
I scoffed. “Buy some land and retire with enough money to pass it on to my kids and their kids.”
“But?”
I swallowed. “But I never pictured this.”
The admission came out quieter than I’d intended. Because that was the truth of it. I hadn’t spent my life secretly wishing for a boyfriend. Hell, until a few years ago, I had genuinely believed I was straight.
Straight-ish.
Then Peter Diaz had crashed into my life—first as my teammate, and then again as PeteRoseCity9, the man who kissed me like the world was ending—and every neat little box I’d put myself in had been blown wide open. It was still scary sometimes.
Almost as scary as the thought of losing him now that I finally had him.
Diaz was quiet for a long moment, just stroking my hair. Then he tipped my chin up with two fingers.
“Hey.”
I met his eyes. “Hey.”
“If all of that stuff gets scary, we’ll deal with it.”
“That’s not exactly a plan, Peter.”
“No.” He grinned. “But it's a pretty good philosophy.”
I rolled my eyes, but I couldn’t fight the smile tugging at my lips. “Only you would say that.”
His expression softened. “We don’t have to decide everything tonight, tesoro. Fuck the media.”
His thumb brushed across my cheek.
“Fuck the fans.”
Another stroke.
“Fuck the team.”
Another.
Forget being a dog dad; Diaz was going to have me purring under his fingers any second now.
“So, what do we need to figure out now?”
His grin returned, bright and playful. “Whether or not there’s enough leftover Lane Cake for breakfast.”
A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. “You’re impossible.”
“Yet somehow you’re still in my bed.”
“It’s my bed,” I reminded him, poking his ribs.
He caught my hand and brought it to his lips, kissing my knuckles. The sweetness of the gesture made my chest ache in the best way.
I closed my eyes and let out a long breath, some of the tension easing from my shoulders.
I was still nervous. Terrified, really. Not of wanting him, but of what wanting him could cost us.
The team had already been struggling this season.
The last thing they needed was relationship drama in the clubhouse.
“We’ll be careful,” Diaz said softly, reading me like he always seemed to. “But I’m not going to hide you forever, Matty. When you’re ready, we’ll figure out what that looks like. Until then, this is ours. No one else gets to touch it.”
“Ours,” I echoed, the word settling in my chest.
His arm tightened around me. “I don’t want you to ever feel rushed. If you decide this isn’t what you want, I’ll understand. But I’m hoping like hell you decide it is.”
The sincerity in his voice made my throat tight. I searched his eyes for a moment, then brought his mouth back to mine.
“I already know what I want,” I whispered against his lips.
Diaz smiled against my mouth, relief and joy plain on his face, and pulled me back against his chest.
“We’ll figure it out, tesoro. Together.”
I wanted to fight it. I wanted to overthink every possible way this could go wrong, the hundred different ways it could blow up in our faces. That was what I did best.
I planned and worried, prepared for every worst-case scenario.
But tonight, lying in the dark with Diaz’s arms wrapped warm and solid around me, I didn’t want to do any of that.
So instead, I just closed my eyes and let myself believe him.