30. Podium Performances
PODIUM PERFORMANCES
Unless the Eugene Fast Pitch Summer Softball League awarded style points, Jonathan didn’t understand how the Swish Hitters had earned a berth against the undefeated Queers for Beers in the championship game.
However, the Queers, who should have been confidently preparing for total domination, were milling around in different stages of nerves, anger, and disbelief.
Connor was forty-five minutes late.
Lily, Hank, and Emma had arrived to spectate, but Connor, the weaver of their little friendship chain of folding canvas seats, hadn’t appeared. Or texted. Or called.
Jonathan heard someone say Connor had to be here before Trixie turned in the final batting order, or he wouldn’t be allowed to play. Everyone—and that was not hyperbole, because even Hank and Emma were texting Connor—had been trying to reach Connor.
He’d given up twenty minutes ago.
He pressed the cuff of his shirt to his mouth. He didn’t want to touch his face at the field, but also, if he didn’t press hard against his lips, he might whimper.
This morning Connor had let Jonathan know he didn’t need anything today either, and he planned on playing, so when Connor was only fifteen minutes late, Jonathan had told Trixie that Connor was fine.
Now Jonathan wasn’t sure.
Was, in fact, certain that only falling down the stairs or getting trapped under his house or having a heretofore unknown anaphylactic reaction could have made Connor this late for the championship.
He was a cook who could plan his roast vegetables to finish at precisely the moment his seared salmon reached perfection. He understood timing.
Trixie didn’t share Jonathan’s certainty that Connor must be near death, because she was slamming balls off a practice tee and yelling fuck.
He paced from their folding chairs to the bleachers to the grubby water fountain, and back, while Hank stood near the parking lot, arms crossed, glowering at cars.
The villainous miscreants Lily and Emma sat next to Pawsley’s carrier chatting with a pathologically uncaring casualness. Connor was obviously injured, or worse, and they were discussing where to get the best cardamon lattes. Sociopaths.
He could drive to Connor’s house, the thing he should have done after work instead of buying poster board and making a useless sign. His car was here, Lily had Pawsley, it would be easy. He unzipped his cross-body to find his keys, which was at least doing something.
“Connor! Move it!” Hank yelled into the parking lot.
Everyone near the dugout turned.
Jonathan recognized the silhouette of his boyfriend, his backpack with the bats sticking out like lightning rods, weaving between parked cars, and had to brace a hand on the aluminum bleachers.
The sun had heated the metal enough to be almost soothing, its warmth restoring the interrupted circulation in his fingers.
Even if he’d missed warmups and pissed off the team, Connor had made it. Jonathan wanted to squeeze him and then maybe stomp around behind the bleachers because they’d all been so worried, but Trixie would do enough stomping for everyone, and there was no time for squeezing.
He’d wait until after the game, when maybe he wouldn’t feel remotely like saying regrettable things.
“Hey, hey, sorry!” Connor called out as he trotted to the dugout. Spots of red marred his cheekbones and his baseball cap sat far back, as if he’d been rubbing his forehead.
He glanced at the row of supporters—Hank, who’d taken Ribby’s leash, Emma, Lily, and Jonathan—and lifted his hand. His expression remained as blank as an erased whiteboard, a thing empty of all but faint smears of abandoned ideas.
Jonathan understood having to focus, because that’s how he’d been before a skate.
He’d never had a full cheering section to acknowledge, but not becoming distracted with greetings before the game was logical, predictable, and definitely not a harbinger of doom anywhere other than in Jonathan’s mind.
“Get in the batting cage.” Trixie had calmed down enough to give orders. “We’re fucked.”
“Yeah, they have a different pitcher and Riley’s playing for them tonight.”
The conversation from the dugout exceeded Jonathan’s game knowledge, but he gathered that Trixie and the team didn’t expect this game to be the mercy-rule finish that the regular season match-up had been.
Jonathan lifted his water bottle. Set it down, unopened. He could drink later.
Sports championships outside of figure skating had never been an interest. He understood there was a football Superbowl in the winter, because even adamantly non-sporty gays memed about big men in tight pants for that week every year, and romance novels had explained the hockey Stanley Cup ad nauseum, thank you Rachel Reid and Brigham Vaughn and the god called Tal Bauer.
Not once had he cared about the outcome of an actual event.
And then, after all the drama before the start, the championship game was anticlimactic, a phrase Jonathan had never thought he would think.
A secret, bad, part of him wished this game was closer. Blow outs were boring.
Not salon blowouts, but he hadn’t had one of those since he left New York. However, absolute annihilations like this game, which had reached 7-1 in favor of Connor’s team by what Jonathan thought was only the fifth inning, were exceedingly boring.
Lily was speaking across him to Hank, muttering about the permutations of the mercy rule and which regulatory body’s counting rules applied, which Jonathan was vaguely surprised to learn differed.
“What does that even mean? Ten after the fourth, eight after the fifth?”
No one explained, probably because the batter before Connor was running to second base and someone else was coming into home plate and scoring. Scoring was happening.
He scratched exclamation points next to their names in his book. Also, the tone of his question had probably indicated scorn, rather than confusion, and he couldn’t be bothered to ask again because now Connor was batting.
His hands were still too dirty to touch his face, so once again he used his linen sleeve to cover his mouth.
If the consensus from the bleacher experts was to be believed, they only needed one point—one run—to automatically end the game.
Connor was taking his practice swings next to home plate.
If he made a hit that drove in the person standing on the base, they would be the winners and get to eat dinner and cake earlier than usual.
If he made a hit.
A man with more self-preservation would look away from Connor, but he couldn’t.
He didn’t understand most of what the fans around him said, but he understood body positioning and what his eyes showed him.
Despite all the scoring, Connor hadn’t been on base yet during this game.
His warmup swings were fast and jerky, not fast and smooth.
He wasn’t balanced on his legs, and his shoulders weren’t moving through the motion like other players’ bodies did.
And earlier, when a ball went between his legs, Michelle had muttered something about a “third fucking error on Connor.” So.
Connor was all sorts of messed up today, and he hadn’t told Jonathan why, hadn’t shared even a hint.
The pit that had opened in his stomach had no source in the warm July evening or in the winning game unfolding in front of his seat.
It was more like the feeling that settled in his body when he looked up at four-thirty on a day off and realized he’d forgotten to eat lunch, but it was too early for dinner, and his stomach wanted to revolt but his mind didn’t know whether to snack, eat or unhappily do none of the above.
Watching Connor walk to the plate definitely put him in none-of-the-above territory.
The first pitch came in, and Connor watched. Ball One, which was better than swinging at what the team called low cheese.
Jonathan understood that if the pitcher threw four of those, Connor would get to walk to first base, like a coupon for having to endure a bad pitcher.
Connor swung and hit the second pitch high and backwards into the fence, creating a tooth-rattling noise that made Jonathan flinch.
Those bad hits, the ones that went into the fence or the stands, counted as a strike, the same as swinging and missing the ball completely, but not if it was the third strike.
Or maybe fourth. Sometimes the number of foul balls crept towards infinity.
Jonathan didn’t really understand that footnote to the counting rules and reminded himself to watch another video explainer. Perhaps it was the season to make a baseball romance rec list for the library. Too bad Tal Bauer didn’t write baseball books, but he could start with KD Casey.
People cheered, calling Connor Big Mac and Mac Truck and making engine sounds, presumably because no one knew how to make a hamburger sound.
In his carrier, Pawsley mewed until Jonathan bent to put his finger through the screen opening, which made it harder to watch the game. Hank and Emma were stealing all the Ribby love, and Lily was muttering profanity-filled imprecations.
There was an instant where the spectators quieted and Jonathan could sense the thump of his heart. He heard the huge cracking noise and the roars, like a soundtrack.
By the time he jumped up, Connor was heading for first base.
Emma and Lily yelled, but he held his breath.
Don’t catch it. Catching it would be bad.
Connor kept running, and two of the pin-stripers in the far away part of the field were also running, but the ball was really high. And moving really fast. Over the orange plastic hurricane fence!
“Out!” The shout popped from Jonathan’s chest, then he remembered that outs are bad, but when the ball goes out past the back of the field, it’s a home run, a wonderful, excellent, game-winning move.
Everyone was screaming and jumping, in the bleachers and in the dugout and in the spare chairs along the fence.
Lily hugged him, and on his other side Hank was lifting Emma in the air.