19. Sports With Balls Do Not Always Suck
SPORTS WITH BALLS DO NOT ALWAYS SUCK
Jonathan never expected that he would think a sporting event would be a good place to celebrate his birthday, but here he was at the softball field.
He’d researched the game, nothing worthy of a master’s degree because most of his effort had been directed at reading baseball romances by KD Casey and trash-talking with Lily, who had a thirst for sports exceeded only by her thirst for sportsball players.
But it made him more comfortable at the field, and he enjoyed watching the man he was dating play this game.
Yes, Jonathan had started using that word, although only in his own head.
It had been a month, so why the hell not.
Okay, it had been three weeks. Which was almost a month. But he had a paper with medical test results in his car that he would show Connor tonight and that felt like the most dating type of thing he’d ever done.
And Lily had insisted this morning’s drop box stunt was “Big Dating Energy,” as she put it.
Tonight it was Connor’s turn to provide beverages and in-game energy snacks for everyone on Queers for Beer, which meant Jonathan had also volunteered to help because at this point his Tuesday and Thursday nights belonged to the team, even though he was not a member of said team; pretty much all his other nights belonged to Connor, too.
Jonathan had considered asking Lily to join him on the sidelines.
While she did not like women that way, she’d been a softball player and she liked well-curated refreshments, but she worked closing shift.
Also, he could have used her assistance setting up the drinks table and positioning the coolers filled with ice.
Ribby looked at him from his usual spot in the shade of the bleachers. “No ear petting until I’m finished. Be patient.”
Ribby let his tongue hang out.
Jonathan didn’t know whether that meant sure, I understand, I can wait. Maybe it meant you’re a loser and I only put up with you because Connor does.
Probably the former. Probably.
“Hey, Jonathan.” Trixie’s partner, the person who kept the digital record book, settled in her place.
“Good evening, good to see you.” He was ninety-six percent certain her name was Michelle, but he wasn’t going to say it and make a mistake. She wasn’t one of the people who had insisted on getting his information, having let Trixie do that for the two of them.
It was strange to suddenly have a half-dozen people who lived in the same city as him, not just Lily and Connor, giving him numbers to put in his phone.
All these local numbers clustered together in his contacts as Softball Trixie and Softball Danny, which wasn’t quite like the skating friends from around the world who didn’t need a qualifier, or his handful of people from New York, but it was something.
While he wouldn’t stretch to call anyone with the moniker Softball in front of their name an actual friend of his rather than Connor’s, he now knew people who lived here and wanted to coordinate things like weekend hikes and going to bars.
He already felt he knew them better than the other cyclists in the group he rode with twice a month.
It did not suck.
Ribby emerged from his nest when Connor’s team trotted in from warming up on the field.
Jonathan basked in his command of the lexicon while he finished securing the lid onto the five-gallon beverage dispenser Connor had borrowed from a PTA storage room. The layers of cucumber slices and crushed mint leaves looked pleasing layered with ice in the center column of the water holder.
Connor’s responsibilities included game-appropriate hydration and light snacks during the duration of play, and then the full range of drinks after.
He claimed making the birthday sign had only taken a few minutes, and he’d spent the morning making high energy snacks, which looked like rainbow-colored crispy rice treat squares to Jonathan.
For post-game dinner, a woman named Abby and her partner had brought homemade subs in three varieties, a Greek salad, and two types of chips. These were good people to know.
Jonathan straightened the tray holding the compostable plastic cups.
“Mm, fancy water.” Softball Becka in the shrunken goalie gear came to the drink table.
Catcher’s gear, that’s what it was. Goalie was the wrong sport.
There were a lot of similarities with the padding, although Connor had reminded him more than once not to be an ice-sport snob, so Jonathan kept that observation to himself.
Also, the goalie catcher person’s gear might be shrunken, but they were larger than Jonathan, so his baseline was always going to be polite.
“Ice and cucumbers, nice.”
“This is how Jonathan and I met, you know.” Connor dropped the solid log of his arm across Jonathan’s shoulders, pushing him into his joints firmly enough that Jonathan could sense individual pieces of gravel through the soles of his shoes. This also did not suck. “Over fancy vintage water.”
From behind them, Danny snickered. “Thought it was over iEros.”
“Nope. I was drinking water like this in the hotel lobby and almost choked on it when he asked me what it tasted like.”
“That tracks.” The catcher teased. “Connor chokes on water.”
“Connor likes to choke on all sorts of stuff.”
Jonathan wasn’t sure whether Danny’s words made him uncomfortable or not, but they didn’t seem to bother Connor.
“Jonathan’s stuff especially.”
Connor had just made him the subject of a dirty joke with his jock friends, in a way that was not making fun of him, but rather was praising him, he realized with a zing of what might be pride.
And the jocks were also queer and one of them wanted a high-five from Jonathan.
Touching someone else’s sticky hand was a thing that happened.
Then Jonathan realized he hadn’t been talking, just snuggling, fucking snuggling, into his boyfriend’s slightly sweaty—actually, more than slightly, but not across the threshold of icky—side.
Letting others talk while he stood here breathing and enjoying the flow was oddly comfortable.
Connor turned and rested his cheek on the top of Jonathan’s head, but through the bucket hat he could only feel the weight of Connor’s head, not the contours of his face. “I would have asked you out right there at the water table if I hadn’t already had a date that night.”
“With me. That date was with me too.” He felt that his clarification added one more layer to the story, but it was also the opposite of snark.
“I want to throw up,” a short person said, and sipped their cucumber water.
Jonathan might possibly share the feeling. A moment ago, he’d been vibing off Mister Romance McMillan’s electricity, but he’d lived in New York City long enough to fear the third rail.
“I want to throw my bat at them, but I’m too lazy to go get it,” a tall woman said.
“Violence is never the answer,” Connor said.
“I want to win this game, assholes.” Another woman yelled from where the dugout gate opened on to the field. “Connor, you’re on deck.”
Connor swore and dashed back into the dugout, looking for the helmet that crushed his cute hair while pulling on the neon yellow gloves he wore when it was his turn to bat, and then grabbed his bat out of the rack.
By the time Connor completed his circuit of the bases, Jonathan had only missed recording a few at bats in the book-keeping hieroglyphics system he was supposed to use during games. Today he’d drawn one blocky space alien and a few, but not many, angry birds into the blank grid squares.
An hour later, it seemed like it was the next-to-last inning and the Queers had never lost their lead. When the game ended, the subs and salad would be offered around and it would be another summer Thursday night in his new life.
Twenty-seven was going to give Jonathan everything he wanted.
His brain knew he shouldn’t dwell on how long it had taken him to get to this point.
The pandemic year had happened; he couldn’t and shouldn’t hold himself to some standard of achievement that wasn’t remotely possible because of an epic global disaster.
He’d spent a lot of time at school in New York working on accepting that skating had been on balance, positive.
It had been a good thing that he gave it a serious try, because he’d proven to himself that he could.
Not being as successful as his idols or his competition didn’t mean he wasn’t good, nor did it mean he tried less hard or he was unlucky. Not making the cut was just a thing.
It happened to athletes everywhere, had certainly happened to Connor and probably to everyone playing here today, but they’d shaken off their disappointments. Now they ran the bases for fun.
“Way to go Abby!” Next to him, Michelle boomed. “Make that ball your bitch!”
That wasn’t going to come out of his mouth, so he went with a generic but loud yay and assumed from Michelle’s tone that he should append a positive notation next to Abby’s name.
He hadn’t skated in more than a year but watching these people enjoy their sport gave him a glimmer of something that might be the urge to get on the ice.
Maybe then he’d stop with the stupid bloody dream.
Skating had been a good thing for him. Mostly. Mostly good, even if all he had left were some second-tier pieces of crystal, a video site that hadn’t been updated in five years, and ugly toes.
He could skate for fun the same way Connor ran the bases.
Not actually the same way, because he didn’t think he would ever thump his chest with his fist and mouth what appeared to be the phrase bite me to Trixie, not ever, but he could be his own version of exuberant. He could twirl.
He didn’t have to be perfect. He could just skate.
A moment later, Lily appeared, carefully carrying a large pink box and a bag that contained suspiciously bright-colored paper plates, and Jonathan knew exactly what was going to happen after three more outs.
“Girlfriend, what deep betrayal have you perpetrated on me?”