“Somehow, in my head, when we first made out, it was way cooler than that.”
Cully let out a fractured laugh and buried his face against Dante’s throat. He wasn’t replete—wasn’t anywhere near replete—but the climax had taken the edge off, so to speak.
“We’ll get a chance to make that better,” he said, the words muffled. Oh, Dante’s skin smelled delicious! “We have to. I just… I need you so bad. I still need you. My skin’s on fire, even if my batter needs to walk off an inning.”
Dante chuckled weakly. “Baseball. Did you just make a baseball metaphor?”
“I’ve been paying attention,” Cully mumbled, weariness sweeping over him. His body was suddenly tired, sprouting aches and pains he couldn’t remember. He wondered bitterly if the spell over the house had kept him and Dante working nonstop for the last month, because his back, neck, and joints felt as though he’d been hunched over his sewing machine without respite—not a run, not a swim, not even walking Glinda. All the physical things he and Dante had done together, had worked into their daily routines, seemed to have disappeared, and his body had gone from twenty-five to fifty in the span of a month.
“Yeah?” Dante said. “Good. ’Cause I can tell you who won the Tony Award for the last seven years, and I have to tell you, in my family that’s not a thing.”
Cully laughed softly, thinking about Dante’s good-natured efforts to learn about Broadway and his patience teaching Cully about baseball.
Remembering.
“C’MON, Princess. We need to get you out of here. You’re gonna die all curled up like a dead bug if you don’t get some sunshine.”
Cully yawned and stretched, backing away from his sewing machine in relief. In the past two years since graduation, he’d learned how to pace himself, how not to stress so much about deadlines, and more importantly, how to loosen up a little and have some fun.
“You got anything in mind?”
Dante had peeked his head around the corner of the doorframe to look into Cully’s room, and Cully had never been able to resist those twinkling brown eyes.
“Well, do you want to play baseball or watch baseball?” Dante asked, and Cully could feel his heart and shoulders grow lighter, simply from the question.
“You got tickets to tonight’s game?”
“Yup, Princess. Just you and me. Everyone else is out and about tonight. Whaddya say?”
“Well, my social calendar is pretty full,” he lied, mostly to see Dante laugh. They both marked dates on the calendar in the dining room, and Dante knew as well as he did that neither of them had marked a date on there for months.
“Well, you let me know,” Dante said. He winked then and moved off to pack sunscreen, hats, and a blanket to fight the chill breeze off the river.
Two hours later, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with a denim jacket much like Dante’s in his lap for later, Cully sat in the shade behind home plate and checked out the stats on the players while Dante went to fetch them some beer. He noticed that the home team—the River Cats—had a bunch of new guys but a really great record.
“What do you think happened?” he asked as Dante handed him a beer and sat down.
“They were midseason replacements at the show,” Dante told him, surveying the field again. “Wow, would you look at all the fresh meat. They’re gonna lose and lose big, you bet your ass they will.”
“So they just… just send them up and leave the team to struggle on without them?” Cully asked, dismayed.
“Well, yeah. See, in baseball—minor league, at least—the one goal is to get to the majors. The minor league team, well, that’s a nice place to play, and some guys know that’s their entire careers. But for the guys who’ve got a shot? That’s all they can think about.”
Cully stared at him for a moment. “Didn’t you say you almost played ball in college?”
Dante hiked his shoulders, like he was trying for this to not be a big deal. “Yeah, I was a prospect. They would have played me in college and then probably drafted me into a farm team in the minors, but I wasn’t… spectacular. I wouldn’t have made it to the major leagues. I knew that. And I wanted a chance at a degree, at a job. Something that wouldn’t make me feel like second-best.” He blew out a breath, and Cully felt all his unspoken frustration for working a job he didn’t really feel called to.
“You’ll find your thing,” he said, not sure if Dante wanted to talk about this or not.
“Right now, Princess, my thing is watching a game and having a beer with my bestie. It’s all good.”
He gave this smile then, this sweet smile, like he knew all the things he wanted to change about his life, but if he had to give up this moment right here to do that, they would have to remain like they were.
Cully opened his mouth then, unsure if he wanted to protest or even to kiss that terrible sad smile off his friend’s mouth, but the loudspeaker came on and they had to stand up while a local middle school choir came out on the field to sing the national anthem.
When they sat back down again, Dante devoted all his attention to the statistics, and Cully was left, watching the game, wondering how someone as awesome as Dante Vianelli should feel like he was always stuck at second-best.
“YOU’RE not second-best,” Cully mumbled now into Dante’s neck. “You’re first. How do you not know you’re first?”
He opened his eyes then and realized that he was in bed and talking to his pillow.
Oh, this was the fucking end. He rolled out of bed, his pubic hair sticking to his briefs because the come had glued it there, and he was past caring.
Dammit.
“We were having afterglow!” he shouted to the house. “We weren’t done talking. Goddammit! I’m not going to forget we kissed or that we came, you fucking worthless piece of stucco. Why couldn’t you let us hold each other?”
Oh, he was mad. He stomped out to the living room as he yelled at the house and came into the living room hoping Dante could hear him, Dante could find him, from his volume alone.
And then he got into the living room and screamed.
Dante hurtled from the hallway, looking frowzy and rumpled and frightened.
“Princess? What’s wrong? What—where’d the fucking couch go?”
Cully launched himself into Dante’s arms, not wanting to let him go, not now. “We kissed, right?” he demanded. “That was real. We kissed. We came in our shorts. It’s stuck there like glue and it’s rank and gross and I need a shower, but it happened. Right?”
“Right,” Dante murmured. “And then someone stole our couch. And our chairs. And our bookshelves.”
“Moving.” Cully took a breath and pulled back. “Moving. They told us they’d be moving us out a bit at a time.” Without releasing Dante’s hand, he pulled him toward the dining room, which was still there, by the way, with Cully’s shabby-chic contact-paper decorations and his beautiful pink enameled pots hanging from the rack over the stove.
And there, behind the table, was their calendar, Ryan Ramczyk still prominent, one more day x’d off in bold Sharpie with Kate’s initials in the corner—and a little heart, because she was Kate, Cully thought fondly.