Chapter 4
The Jenkins family clock had a different relationship with time than most.
I’d made it to the parking lot behind the stadium with fifteen minutes to spare. By my father’s math, that meant I was almost late.
The lot was still dark. Around me, players materialized out of the early morning, duffel bags hanging off their shoulders, coffees steaming in their fists. The bus was a fifty-seater, but the team only filled about half of it.
Guys had already claimed their space, using their bags as barricades on empty seats and sprawling across rows in their usual cliques.
Petrie and the rest of the staff had claimed the back rows.
The outfielders were mid-bus, dealing cards on a textbook balanced between seats.
The infielders scattered themselves in pairs near the front.
My scowling father ignored the patchwork of empty seats and pointed me to row seven, left side.
Evan had taken the window seat. His knees were shoved into the seat back in front of him, his shoulders filling more than his share of the row.
His eyes were closed. His expensive noise-canceling headphones were on.
He wore a gray hoodie with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows, revealing forearms roped with veins that I absolutely did not catalog.
I dropped into the aisle seat and crossed my arms over my chest. Between us was maybe four inches of vinyl armrest. “Hey,” I said.
Nothing.
“I’m Tommy. Coach’s son, and your roommate for the foreseeable—”
His thumb, blunt and calloused, brushed the volume control on the side of his phone. The muscle in his forearm flexed as he cranked it.
Message received.
The team finished boarding in a mess of shoves and laughter and inside jokes that I wasn’t part of. The most acknowledgment I got was when one of the guy’s hollered Reed’s name. He turned on his heel and I got a face full of his ass.
It was a good ass. Big and round with enough jiggle to keep people hypnotized. But it didn’t compare to Evan’s. No ass could.
The bus lurched forward at 6:02, and within twenty minutes, we were on the freeway, headed for Florida Atlantic and three days of sunshine, baseball, and close-quarters hell.
I pulled the blank sketchbook from my backpack and pressed the pencil to the page.
The bus hit a bump, and my hand jolted sideways, leaving a jagged slash across the paper.
I tried again, drawing a loose oval for a head, a curved line for a spine. The bus shuddered over another bump, and the oval sprouted a horn.
On the third attempt, I braced my elbow against the armrest and held the pad steady with my left hand. For a few glorious seconds, the pencil moved smoothly. Then the driver changed lanes, and the entire bus swayed. My careful line shot off into the margin.
I flipped to a fresh page, then another. Each attempt was a new disaster—a quick brake created a slash, a swerve created a meaningless scribble.
It was fitting that a violent, meaningless mark was the only thing I was capable of creating.
I slammed the book shut and threw my head back, staring at the flickering bus lights.
Evan’s music thumped beside me. My gaze drifted sideways and snagged on his mouth, the bottom lip slightly heavier than the top, pushed out a little by whatever his jaw was doing in sleep.
I turned a page and drew the first thing I could think of—a lamp.
But the shade came out lopsided, and when I tried again, I wasn’t drawing a lamp anymore.
It was the back of a neck with the hood of a sweatshirt pooled just below it.
I flipped to a fresh page—a bicycle wheel. The spokes kept wanting to be fingers.
After forty-five minutes, I gave up, shoving the sketchbook into my bag with enough force to bend the corner of the cover. For the next two hours, I faked an intense interest in the scenery outside, watching Virginia bleed into North Carolina.
At hour three, the driver’s voice crackled over the intercom. “Rest stop. Fifteen minutes.”
The bus erupted with the sounds of guys groaning and cracking their knuckles.
Evan’s startlingly blue eyes opened as he pulled his headphones down around his neck.
He rose to his feet, becoming a towering wall of muscle.
He slid past me, putting his crotch directly in my face, and I instantly went into cardiac arrest while fighting against every impulse to thrust my face forward.
His thigh brushed my shoulder, leaving a trail of body heat and the scent of his laundry detergent.
My legs were stiff, my ass numb, and a sharp, insistent pressure deep in my bladder had been building since we’d crossed the state line. But I waited until the bus was nearly empty before standing, too afraid that someone would notice my hard-on.
The restroom was a single trough bolted to the wall, forcing you to stand elbow to elbow with whoever fate assigned you.
My bladder was screaming. Three hours of interstate and gas station coffee had turned it into a water balloon one pothole away from catastrophe.
Evan materialized on my left, tugging down the front of his gray sweats, and I froze. We’d never been in this situation before.
You can do this, I told myself. You’re an adult male with functioning plumbing and a God-given right to urinate in a public restroom next to your crush.
Then the universe, which had clearly been saving its best material for this exact moment, delivered my father to my right side.
His elbow brushed mine as he settled into position. The brass buckle of his belt clinked. His stance was wide, proprietary—the stance of a guy who’d been pissing at trough urinals since before I was born and had zero existential baggage about it.
I was in hell. A very specific, very niche circle of hell that Dante forgot to write about because even he couldn’t conceive of something this psychologically devastating.
Suddenly, my father groaned. Actually groaned. The sound was guttural and involuntary and so deeply satisfied that it bordered on pornographic.
“Jesus,” he muttered under his breath, and I wanted to dissolve into the tile floor.
Meanwhile, Evan stood with his chin slightly lifted, one hand braced against the wall above the trough, the other doing its job holding his cock.
I was jealous of his hand.
His fingers were long and thick. And I hated that I noticed.
My father sighed again and shifted his weight. The movement brought his shoulder closer to mine. I could smell his aftershave, the same cheap drugstore brand he’d used since I was six, and something about that detail made me want to laugh and cry simultaneously.
No man should have to hear his father achieve urinary nirvana. No man should have to stand between the object of his most depraved fantasies and the man who raised him, cock in hand and trying to perform the most basic biological function.
Dad cleared his throat, and for one insane, hopeful second, I thought he was going to say something to me. Acknowledge me. Maybe a “Hell of a drive, huh?” or even better, a grunt in my direction.
Instead, he craned his neck around my frozen body and said, “Brock, how’s that shoulder feeling? Are you icing after you throw?”
I was furniture. A partition. A flesh-colored divider between coach and player.
Evan’s spoke quietly, respecting the sanctity of public restroom decorum. “Yes, sir. Feels good.”
“Good. I want you loose for tomorrow. Don’t let me catch you overthrowing in the pen.”
“Won’t happen, Coach.”
The flicker of hope that had sparked when Dad opened his mouth died somewhere behind my sternum. It landed harder than it should have—harder than any outright insult ever could—because at least an insult meant you were seen.
Evan finished first. The sound of him shaking off was something my brain immediately, traitorously filed away in a folder labeled DO NOT OPEN. He tucked himself back in with one hand, pulled up his waistband, and walked out without so much as glancing at the sink.
That’s disgusting, I told myself.
That’s so fucking hot, my brain replied, completely ignoring me.
My father finished a moment later with one final, satisfied exhale, zipped up, and clapped me once on the shoulder as he passed. “Don’t dawdle, Thomas. Bus leaves in ten.”
The clap rattled through my bones. It was the most physical affection he’d shown me in weeks, and it happened at the worst time, in the worst place.
The door closed. I was alone.
Another batch of guys from the team instantly stepped up to take their place. They had no idea that my dignity was a puddle on the floor, right next to a stray splash of what I really hoped was water. I finally managed to go once the room cleared out.
As I washed my hands, I risked a glance in the mirror. My cheeks were flushed a humiliating red, and my eyes were wild and dark with about 90 percent terror.
After buying a bottle of water from the vending machine, I walked back to the bus on unsteady legs and slid into my seat. Evan was already there, headphones on, eyes closed, volume cranked.
I pulled out my phone, opened my text chain with Hunter, and typed nothing.