Chapter 4 Bennett
Bennett
For somebody who had spent the better part of his life living out of a carry-on suitcase, it was a wonder I owned so much crap.
I had always prided myself on being the guy who color-coded his toiletries bag and folded his briefs before road trips. Former partners had praised me for being “minimalist” and “easy to live with.” One had even called me the human equivalent of a neatly labeled storage bin.
Yet here I was, knee-deep in joggers, protein shakers, mismatched training gear, and enough baseball caps to outfit a minor league team.
“Mi pana, how many hoodies does one man need?” Diaz asked, holding up a gray Rose City Roasters pullover like it personally offended him. “This is, what, the eighth one?”
“Sixth,” I said, taping the bottom of another cardboard box. “And don’t give me that, Mr. Cable Knit Sweaters.”
“You know that those are for my future husband,” he argued defensively. “Chris Evans is mine, whether he knows it yet or not.”
A smile ghosted across my lips. “Lucky guy.”
Diaz chucked the fabric into one of the many oversized HomeGoods tote bags Clarke had lent me for my move.
We had been at this for hours, though you wouldn’t know based on the amount of crap still littered across our living room floor.
It looked less like two grown men preparing for a move and more like the aftermath of a natural disaster.
The last two years of my life had been condensed into seven cardboard boxes, each of them labeled using the single blue Sharpie we kept in our “random shit” drawer.
Outside, weekend traffic hummed faintly.
Inside, the sound was more muted, cushioned by the last of the furniture and the thick socks I wore on the hardwood floor.
My implants picked up the low thud of music from the Bluetooth speaker in the basement and the scratch of packing tape as I dragged it across cardboard, but most of the high, sharp sounds blurred into white noise.
Traveling and being “on” around family for two weeks had fried my circuits; every noise felt like a coin dropped in a metal bucket.
“Wait, this is the same hoodie.”
Diaz held the fabric up to his chest, the hem practically hitting mid-thigh on him, the sleeves drooping past his fingertips.
“No, that one’s heathered.”
Diaz stared at me, then shook his head. “You need help.”
“You’re just mad because you shop in the youth section,” I teased.
He scoffed and tossed the garment onto a growing pile. “Please, I have normal proportions. You’re just built like a Nordic deity and a squat rack’s love child.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Next to his five-foot-nine frame, I looked like something out of a lumberjack catalog. He was twenty-five, lean and whip-fast, the ideal build for scaling the left field wall and stealing a base before the opposing team knew what had hit them.
I, on the other hand, had thighs that could qualify as concealed weapons after a decade of squatting behind home plate.
And my ass trailed close behind in notoriety .
. . literally. The equipment manager once said my catcher’s gear had “stretch fatigue,” which I was pretty sure was not a compliment.
The two of us made an unlikely pair on the field, but as roommates, we fucking crushed it.
Diaz had the whole cozy-curated-film-nerd thing going on—string lights, throw blankets, alphabetized Blu-rays, and a projector he treated with more reverence than his batting gloves.
His house had quickly become the official headquarters for the team’s Movie & Margarita nights, not because it was big or fancy, but because Diaz transformed it into a full sensory experience.
Film-themed cocktails, homemade popcorn dusted with spices most of the guys couldn’t pronounce, and running commentary that somehow made even the worst movies fun.
And me? I was the quiet balance. The cleaner. The one who didn’t complain when he paused a film to deliver a ten-minute TED Talk about how Mr. Darcy’s hand flex in Pride and Prejudice was the “most sexual, nonsexual scene” in movie history.
Even if he was wrong—everybody knew it was the toothbrushing scene from Bring it On.
The two of us fit. In that weird, opposites-attract, older-brother-younger-brother, strained-muscles-and-caffeine kind of way. Needless to say, it was going to take a while to get used to living without him in the room next door.
“Serious question.” Diaz looked up from an open wardrobe box. “Why are you packing the blender but not the air fryer?”
“The blender was mine,” I told him. “You bought the air fryer.”
“Yeah, but you use it more.”
I shrugged. “Consider it a parting gift.”
“Best roommate ever,” he said, clutching his chest.
He looked different after his month-long trip home to Puerto Rico, relaxed in a way that I hadn’t seen since the end of the playoffs.
“It’s not too late to change your mind, mi pana. You don’t really want to move to Rose City. They have like four restaurants.”
“Five,” I corrected. “Plus, the food cart pod by the stadium.”
“Which closes by eight,” he muttered.
I folded the flaps of the box and leaned my weight on it to make the tape stick. “Just say you’re going to miss me, Peter.”
His face soured at the sound of his own name. Hardly any of the guys used their first names. Clubhouses ran on nicknames and copious amounts of profanity. Hearing your government name aloud was basically the verbal equivalent of getting beaned.
“I’m just worried about you getting bored,” he protested, holding his hands out in front of him.
I smirked. “Somehow, I think I’ll survive.”
“You know what I mean.”
I did. For two years, Diaz’s place had been our landing pad after road series, a place to shove our gear and crash on the couch and argue about which Die Hard movie was objectively the best.
But I also knew what my chest felt like when I walked out the front door and the city hit me all at once—sirens, buses, people talking, dogs barking, cars honking.
Every sound layered on top of the others, the input crowding out the thoughts I was supposed to be having instead.
Some days I handled it fine, and some days it scraped my nerves raw.
Rose City was quieter.
“I want to be closer to the stadium,” I said. “Less time stuck in traffic, more time recovering. You know coach is gonna be up our asses this spring.”
Last season had been a wake-up call. We’d gotten shut out in the first round of the playoffs, an ugly, embarrassing crash back to earth after winning the World Series the year prior.
One bad stretch of injuries, one slump at the wrong time, and suddenly everyone was asking what the hell had happened to the reigning champs.
We weren’t going to let that happen again.
“True,” Diaz conceded. “But you’re also moving in with Pink and Nessa. I hope you’re ready for him to talk your ear off about his tomatoes’ emotional needs every morning over coffee.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Then again, you’ll also be conveniently close to his hot sister,” he added, wagging his brows. “Funny how that worked out.”
I stopped cold. “Don’t.”
“What?” he asked innocently. “I didn’t say anything. I just know that when Pink said he had a spare room, you jumped at it like I do with my abuelita’s tembleque.”
“Because it made sense,” I said, stacking the hoodie box with the others. “Closer to the stadium, the training facility. Less commuting—”
“And absolutely nothing to do with the fact that a certain beekeeper lives next door?”
I grabbed another empty box off the floor and flicked it open. The cardboard gave a little pop as it unfolded, louder than expected. My implants caught the sharpness, a brief spike in sound that made me wince and adjust the processor behind my ear.
“It’s not like that,” I said once the sound leveled out.
Diaz snorted. “Ay, pendejo.”
“Seriously.”
He didn’t press, just arched a perfectly sculpted brow.
The kind that suggested he’d been sneaking off to the same salon where Roman got waxed from earlobe to asshole twice a month.
Our first baseman treated personal grooming like a ritual, one that had made us late for the team bus on more than one occasion.
Silence stretched between us. Not uncomfortable, just pointed.
I focused on folding the next box, lining up the seams, pressing the tape, absolutely not thinking about Bella Pink or her bumblebee panties. Diaz sifted through a pile of vinyl, humming to himself.
“You know—”
“She’s my teammate’s sister and she was stranded on the side of the highway in the dead of night. What was I supposed to do, keep driving?”
I froze mid–box fold.
Shit.
Diaz blinked once, twice. Then a shit-eating grin spread across his face.
“I was just going to say that if you want, you can leave some stuff behind until the next M&M night.”
“I— That’s not—”
“But please, go on,” he encouraged, nodding sagely. “Tell me more about how you’re definitely not into Bella Pink.”
I pulled my flannel off the back of a chair and folded it, a little more aggressively than necessary. “You can forget about keeping the air fryer, you smug asshole.”
“You’re missing my point, Benito. You care. A lot. And that makes poor little Diaz extremely concerned you are about to develop main-character feelings.”
I scoffed. “My anxiety would never allow it.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I.”
He squinted, like he was trying to figure out whether I was lying to him or to myself.
“She’s Pink’s sister,” I insisted, evening out my tone. “I’m not going there.”
“Because of him or you?”
“Both.”
He nodded, like he respected that even if he didn’t like it. “Do you really think he’d freak out?”
“It’s hard to predict anything Jared Pink says and does.”
The couch gave a familiar squeak when Diaz lowered himself onto the cushions and pulled out his phone. “What about you?”
I busied myself folding a towel that didn’t need folding. “What about me?”
“You like rules, boundaries.” He wielded his phone like a sword, thrusting it in my direction. “And ‘don’t fuck your teammate’s sister’ has got to be in the top five unwritten rules of the friendship manual.”
“I don’t like rules,” I mumbled under my breath.
“Please, you’re the only twenty-nine-year-old dude I know who organizes his closet by color and shirt length.”
“Organization is not the same as loving rules.”
“Same vibe,” he countered. “The point is you’re scared.”
He wasn’t wrong. I was scared.
Of crossing a line I couldn’t uncross, of upsetting my teammate beyond repair. Of losing the fragile, careful equilibrium I’d built over the last two years—the one that kept my anxiety at a dull hum instead of a scream and my hearing fatigue manageable instead of flattening.
Rose City was meant to be a reset button, not a new problem.
“I just want quiet,” I said finally. “That’s all.”
“You’re moving in with Pink and Nessa, man. You know they have the guys over all the time, right? And Dani, the baby—fuck, you’re going to be doing couch karaoke with Coach Ward before you know it.”
He had me there.
But it was a different kind of noise.
Laughter. Netflix. Board games. A baby crying. The soft murmur of conversations I knew and voices I recognized, instead of the constant, unpredictable barrage of a city street.
“You’re still going to see me almost every day,” I soothed. “And you better fucking believe we’re rooming together on the road.”
We worked in companionable silence for a while after that. I packed up the last of my kitchen stuff while Diaz tackled the odds and ends, tossing them into a box labeled ALL THE OTHER SHIT.
At some point, his phone vibrated across the table. It happened again a few minutes later. And then again.
When he finally checked it, he smiled at the screen in a way I almost missed—small, soft, quick—before shoving it back into his pocket.
A minute later, his phone buzzed again.
“Okay, that’s like the ninth notification in ten minutes,” I pointed out.
He scowled at me, but it didn’t reach his eyes. They were too bright. Too dreamy. He pulled the phone out and turned slightly away, fingers flying over the screen.
I pretended to count the last of the forks as I watched him from the corner of my eye.
“Mom?” I asked.
“No,” he said too fast.
“Abuelita?”
“No.”
“Coach?”
He scoffed. “Fuck no.”
His thumb tapped out a reply, quick and sure, like he already knew exactly what to say.
My eyebrows lifted. “Boy?”
“None of your business,” he said, but his ears were pink now.
“Cute boy?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Still none of your business.”
My chest warmed.
Diaz didn’t date often. Or at least, not publicly. Everyone on the team knew he was gay, mostly because of his obvious obsession with Chris Evans, but beyond that, he kept things close to the vest.
I’d lived with him for two years and I’d never heard the front door creak open at 2 a.m. or seen an unfamiliar pair of shoes by the entryway or shuffled into the kitchen half-awake to find some guy in one of Diaz’s shirts eating cereal. Nothing.
If he dated, he did it quietly. Privately.
Seeing him smile at his phone like that made something settle in my chest. Hell, it made me almost stupidly protective. I didn’t know who was on the other end of those messages, but I hoped he was good to Diaz. Gentle with him, worthy of him.
“You want to talk about him?” I asked, leaning against the wall.
“No,” he replied quickly.
“Fine,” I said, taping another box shut. “I won’t pry.”
He side-eyed me, suspicious. “You won’t?”
“Nope, but if he hurts you, I’m going full catcher-mode and knocking him on his ass.”
He smiled. “If he hurts me, I’ll let you.”
I turned back to my boxes, giving him the illusion of privacy. We all had our in-between spaces, the moments before things became real enough to share. He’d tell me when he was ready.
I was a pro at patiently waiting.
Besides, I had enough knots in my own head to untangle.
We carried the last of the boxes down to my truck just as the sun finished setting. My breath puffed in the air as I hefted the final load into the bed and slid it into place.
Thank fuck for all those hours of playing Tetris.
Diaz pulled me into a quick, fierce hug, clapping a hand between my shoulder blades. “Alright, Benito. Don’t be a stranger.”
“You act like I’m dying,” I quipped into his shoulder.
“Feels like it,” he said, pulling back. “If I see you start drinking seasonal lattes, I’m staging an intervention.”
I snorted. “Shut the fuck up. We both know you love a pumpkin spice latte as much as I do.”
“And per our roommate agreement, that’s a secret that stays between us.” He jerked his chin toward the driver’s side. “Now, get out of here before I chain you to the radiator and refuse to let you leave.”
“Damn, Diaz. Who knew you were such a kinky bastard?”