Chapter Twenty-Five #2
After a few minutes of hyping me up, telling me this was going to be our game, he started obviously flirting with me.
I took this as a sure sign he was indeed interested in me and ready to make it known.
I looked around as he leaned in, like he wanted to kiss me, and saw no one paying us any attention.
He showered me with more compliments, telling me how hot he thought I was, and then he edged even closer, his body pressed close to mine, eyes fixed on my lips.
This was it. This was going to be my first kiss. I was sure of it.
Hot and expectant, I got hard—impossibly hard, tenting the gym shorts I was about to change out of. There’d have been no denying it, if anyone were to look over and see past his body, which was thankfully blocking their view. He licked his lips and his face got close to mine.
“Can I kiss you?” he whispered, his breath hot on my lips.
I nodded and closed my eyes and waited.
…and waited…
Finally, uproarious laughter erupted in the locker room.
The hoots and guffawing echoed around the concrete and tile room.
I opened my eyes to find everyone gathered around, pointing at me—the scene in my shorts, specifically—and Gordy filming the whole thing. The whole damn thing had been a set-up.
An elaborate one at that, because then I was being mocked mercilessly for my gullibility.
I angrily started gathering my things, stuffing my gear into my gym bag in a fluster.
Shame and embarrassment made me feel nauseous.
I had been used just to be the butt of some sick joke.
As I decided to say fuck the rest of my gear—I’d come back for it later—I sought escape, stomping towards the door to the gym and not the ball field.
I wasn’t going to do this anymore. Fuck the game. I’d tell Coach I suddenly got sick, and had to go home. It might have been the last game of the season, anyway. I could take a year and recover from this humiliation, after everything blew over, I thought.
I didn’t even get a chance to get out the door, before I felt Gordy’s fist wrap around my arm and he yanked me back, shoving me up against the cold, tile wall. With his other hand around my throat, he thrust his leg in between mine, pinning me in place.
“Unless you want this video to get out, so everyone knows all about your little secret, you’ll stop trying to one up me for that fuckin’ scholarship, Waters,” he spat in my face. “I told you I’d do whatever it fuckin’ took to get it, and I meant it…”
He continued to rip on me a while longer—all while still holding me there—about how I should quit the team or else that video would be made public.
He promised me that sharing it with his girlfriend, Trista-Lynn, would only ensure that the whole school would know about it, since she was so popular.
He told me how uncomfortable I had always made all the guys feel in the locker room, though I never even so much as breathed near anyone in there, so my participation on the team was no longer wanted.
He finally released me, and just like that, I walked out of the locker room for the last time as a member of the Ternbay High Tigers baseball team.
I walked away from being the brunt of all the ‘yeah, I bet he is a catcher on and off the field’ jokes.
I walked away from my former friends turned tormentors, all of them too pussy to do anything but go along with Gordy.
I stormed out feeling like such shit for not fighting back, for not sticking up for myself.
I left, and didn’t say a damn thing about the harassment I’d been enduring, and the blackmail I was now up against.
The worst part of it all is that I wasn’t even able to explain to my parents why I’d given up on playing baseball—something I had always loved.
I was too terrified to just admit that I might be gay.
I thought I knew my dad’s views on ‘boys who liked smoochin’ other boys.
’ So, I also thought I knew that I’d be an embarrassment to him and the rest of my family—and we Waters had a reputation to live up to.
That’s just the world I grew up in.
I needed to do something to get that stigma off of me. Even without the video leaking, I’m sure word would get around that I almost kissed another guy in the locker room, and was sporting an obvious erection in a group of half-naked guys. I felt cornered again.
So, the very next week, when a bunch of my parents' friends came over for a lobster feed, I noticed Miranda making eyes at me from across the yard, just like usual. She’d frequently come to those cookouts we hosted, since her dad, Walter, and my dad were buddies.
Miranda and I were always friendly with each other—both in and out of school, being classmates who often ran in the same circles together—but I never really had too much interest in returning her flirtatious advances whenever they came up… for obvious reasons.
I liked her as a friend, that’s all. She was never mean to me, despite the rumors circulating about me. She’d often try to console me whenever she found me curled up in the stairwell at school, after a particularly rough day.
She felt like safety to me. One person, when I had so few, that I could turn to if I needed to vent. That’s why I don’t think I ever outright told her I didn’t want to date her, whenever she flirted with me. I didn’t want to estrange her too, by telling her I wasn’t interested.
So, she’d always just keep trying to get me to ask her out, oblivious to the fact that I never voiced a reciprocal attraction.
Our parents never seemed to notice that I wasn’t particularly eager to become more than just friends with her either, because they always kept saying what a ‘perfect’ couple we would make.
Gannett, however, seemed perceptive enough to see that I wasn’t returning her flirtations, so he would always give me shit for ‘being blind’ and not properly drooling over what had been dangled in front of me for years, since she’d started growing into womanhood.
“She’s a hottie! What are you blind?” he would always joke. “Sometimes, I swear it’s as if you only like dudes…”
If only he knew. I did think I liked just dudes. Liking dudes is what was making me the laughing stock of my entire class and baseball team, alienating me from everyone, it seemed.
If I had a girlfriend, however, it would be hard to keep making the argument that I was gay, wouldn’t it? If there was any girl I felt I could make myself fall for, it’d be her. Hell, maybe I could discover that I was bisexual, not gay. How hard could it be to just… appear straight?
I approached her, offering her a soda, and yeah, maybe there was a little alcohol I snuck out of Dad’s liquor cabinet, too.
She accepted, and we took a walk together, away from the boisterousness of the party.
We sat together, held hands, and watched the boats bob on the water at the marina and chatted about our plans for the summer and what was to come our senior year.
She, of course, gushed that I finally seemed to be returning her flirtations.
The more we talked, the easier I thought it would be to just—I don't know—become attracted to her. She was undeniably pretty, after all. That wouldn’t be so hard.
We would look good together on paper—Wagner and Walter’s prince and princess.
When we kissed it was my first time. Her lips were as soft as rose petals.
Dainty and demure, it was never how I envisioned my first kiss.
Her kisses would take some getting used to, but then again, it’s not like I really had another frame of reference otherwise.
Anyway, by the end of the cookout, I had a date to prom, and the rest, as they say, is history.