13. Pickleball With Hank
PICKLEBALL WITH HANK
Connor reserved summer Friday mornings to hang out with Hank.
He’d met Hank, a quiet football player from Hawaii, when they were randomly assigned to share a room in a quad eight years ago.
Most people wouldn’t have pictured a chatty cattle ranch kid on the baseball team and a grumpy homesick Hawaiian defensive end bonding as fast as they did, and that was without even adding in the gay/straight difference.
But they both liked movies, Connor’s ability to bake brownies in the dorm’s woefully understocked and occasionally squalid common kitchen, and doing laundry before the sport stench took over.
That made them compatible roommates. That they both tried their best to be decent human beings made them friends.
Then the type of friends who visited each other’s homes for breaks.
By this many years in, Connor’s mom had Hank’s number saved in her phone and invited him to dinner directly when they came to town.
So, best friends.
Today’s pickleball game might break down that history like a cheap, wet box.
“Eight-seven, server one.” Connor called the score, a narrower lead than he would have liked against two math department guys who pretended to be bad ass, but who Hank and he usually beat in the neighborhood of eleven-three.
He didn’t particularly care about the score, though, because all he could think was that yesterday at this time, the bright morning hour of nine o’clock, he’d been on his knees in front of Jonathan.
His serve sliced past the baseline without bouncing first inside the required court.
“What was that?” Unfortunately, Hank cared far too much about this game, probably because he hadn’t had a blowjob in at least three years, if Connor had to put a number on how long the most recent round of pining over their friend Emma had been going on.
“My bad, sorry.”
Hank’s role as an assistant coach at the university’s Division I football program meant that he had periods of huge recruiting activity, a frenetic fall of travel, recovery, and practices, and then some lulls in the space between the end of spring football and restarting in August. From the middle of June, when Connor’s break from teaching began, until Hank had to start preparing for training camp, they both had chill schedules.
Hank’s serve hit where it was meant to, and somehow the other guy returned it deep into Connor’s zone, and then—shit—he lined the ball back hard into the net.
Hank barked a sound that would have been laughter, if he’d been a sea lion at Haystack Rock, but was more like disbelief verging on bad sportsmanship in this setting.
A chill schedule did not transform Hank into a chill athlete.
He was mow-you-down Hank, the Hitman, Hank who was not here to play, only to demolish opponents on the autobahn to victory.
Without football, he took that lack of chill onto a twenty-by-forty-four-foot pickleball court tucked behind the campus swim complex.
That left Connor to trot up to the net, retrieve the ball he’d screwed around with, and under-hand it to the other team.
“Make that up to me by helping me move Emma’s new couch,” Hank said.
“Sure, when.”
The serve came right at Connor, and his arm moved automatically to return it as deeply as possible, then he hustled closer to the net. Hank was more than capable of covering the back half in case the dude mixed it up with a deep lob.
The next ball was a shallow drop shot, and he was totally ready to reach into the kitchen zone and dink that beauty back at a sharp angle that flipped it all the way to the far out-of-bounds line.
That was his mojo. That was good. Hank would be happier.
The second guy served, and they volleyed without talking, but eventually Hank answered Connor’s earlier question. “Tomorrow night. At Emma’s.”
Those two needed to finally start doing the dirty deed, so Hank could quit being such a charging rhinoceros and be a run-of-the-mill resting grump face who’s getting some. They were nauseatingly coupled-up, but without the sex.
“Can’t. I have a date.”
Thwack, no other word for the sound as Hank leaped and nailed the ball hard into the gap between the guys on the other side, getting the serve back.
They’d played pickleball and worked out together often enough that they were both used to the start and stop interruptions of having a conversation weave through their game.
“A date?” Hank muttered.
His turn to serve again, and he’d do better this time. “I’m sort of dating someone. Maybe.”
He glanced at Hank to see his response to the news and then swung his paddle at the ball.
“Shit!” The ball bounced in the wrong half of the court. Should not have looked at Hank first.
Hank glared at everyone.
At Connor, he assumed for being a stupid prick who couldn’t walk and talk at the same time, or at least couldn’t simultaneously serve and think about his date tomorrow.
At the guys on the other side of the net for high-fiving each other and taking forever to send the ball back for Hank’s chance to serve.
At the territorial crow berating them from on top of the garbage can.
Hank nailed all of them with his tight mouth, flared nostrils, and narrowed eyes.
Hank served, Connor kept his head in the game for ninety whole seconds, and they scored.
When they rotated sides for Hank to serve again, he grumbled at Connor. “You didn’t tell me.”
Maybe his buddy was more pissed at being left out than at Connor’s lack of game today. “Well, I am now. His name’s Jonathan.”
“Nine-seven, server two.” Hank said the score like it rhymed with fuck you.
Maybe Jonathan would be willing to play pickleball sometime. He probably had quick reactions.
And that shot bounced twice in front of Connor, once more than allowed, ending their opportunity to score because he’d spaced out and hadn’t run to the kitchen line after the serve return.
No question, Hank was mad about the pickleball, but his teenaged hissy fit wasn’t going to bother Connor, because Connor had a date tomorrow night that would, if prior performance was any indication of future outcomes, lead to hot sex.
Hank did not have a date. Moving a couch with Emma was nothing like sharing a picnic at a concert in the park, so Hank could crap himself for all Connor cared at this moment.
The guy on the other side whose turn it was to serve fiddled with his shoelaces.
“He’s a librarian, can you believe it?”
“Who?”
“Jonathan.”
“What’s he want with you?”
Connor shifted his weight between his feet, staying ready, staying loose. “Asshole. I read all the time.”
The other team’s serve came to Hank, who blew it back with a wicked reverse spin that Connor envied.
“Garbage.” Hank wasn’t muttering. He’d be doing better playing alone this morning instead of with a partner who couldn’t think of anything but his dick.
“Thrillers and romance and, like, Murderbots, are not garbage.”
“Not talking about books.”
Since they’d scored, the other team switched places for the next serve. Hank moved back to the receiving position and Connor shifted forward to the kitchen line. “Yeah, I’m playing like dogshit today.”
“No lie.”
“And you know why.” He wiggled his ass at Hank, who stood behind him at the baseline. “Wait, I guess you don’t know why! Ha!”
The serve came to Hank, imminently returnable, but then the ball hit the back of Connor’s upper thigh with the sting of a yellow jacket, or maybe one of those murder hornets.
“What the hell, Hank!” He rubbed at the spot, and the other team celebrated the point Hank had given them to tie the game at nine each.
“Oops.” His partner was stone cold expressionless.
The smackdown from Hank did, somehow, focus Connor on the game and he didn’t miss another play, and suddenly they were shaking hands over the net on an eleven-nine win.
Connor looked at his sports watch. Not as many steps as usual, which maybe reflected him mostly playing in his head instead of on the court.
“You want to go get something to read? I mean, eat?” Maybe Hank wouldn’t notice the slip. “Taco truck breakfast burrito?”
“Bud, what am I going to say?”
“That my playing sucked.”
“The other thing. That I always say.”
He swallowed and looked down. Why was the toe of his right shoe more scuffed than the left? Did he drag his foot weirdly?
“Conman?” Hank’s voice was calmer.
“Hitman.” The nicknames settled him into their routine. A one-two, they were smooth criminals.
Not at all, actually, both of them awkward fuckers despite their athletic success and the frequency with which women called either or both of them nice, which reaped no benefits for either of them, although for radically different reasons.
So they were Conman and Hitman pretty much only to each other.
“What do I always say when you start something new?”
“No smothering.”
Hank nodded.
“This time I’m not going to. I’m not.” Jonathan had worn his shirt.
Jonathan had responded immediately, the within-fifteen-minutes type of immediately, to the pics of Dicks who were authors, not pleasure-seeking appendages.
Jonathan had liked his stuffies. Those were things Hank didn’t know, but that maybe meant Connor was in the clear on the overwhelming attention issue.
Also, he wasn’t sure Hank was such a great source of advice on dating. He wasn’t actually dating Emma, even though he spent every weekend with her, he and Connor had re-roofed her garage, and he’d been a greeter for both her grandparents’ funerals.
Hank was doing all the relationship parts with Emma except the fun parts, and Connor was already doing the fun stuff with Jonathan, so maybe he should listen to Hank but also…
…not listen to Hank.