by Sarina Bowen
“We weren’t supposed to buy a house at all,” Josh admitted. “We were living with friends in the country, and they would have put us up another year or two. We thought we were buying a second car so that I could commute to my classes at the college. But then I saw this place for sale and got all excited.”
“So now we have no second car, but we do have a mortgage,” Caleb finished. The words were somewhat ornery, but he put a loving hand to the back of Josh’s neck.
I wondered if I was ever going to be half of a couple like that. They were so cute together that it almost hurt me to look at them.
Right. Stay on topic, Axel. “I, uh, don’t have a car at all,” I admitted. “The walk from here to campus wasn’t too bad, but I was wondering if there’s a shortcut…?”
Josh’s eyes lit up. “That’s why I wanted this place!” He moved to the window and pointed outside. “There’s a path through the woods. This is actually the back of College Park. I never take the long way home anymore.”
“You might during mud season,” Caleb pointed out.
“True,” Josh conceded. “But walking through the woods is a pretty awesome way to get to class. I’m loving it so far. Even when it snows, I’ll just bundle up.”
“Okay,” I said. “Where do I sign?”
“Really?” Josh asked, sounding shocked. “That’s awesome.”
Caleb laughed. “Wait. Let’s ask him all the important questions. We can’t deal with pets, unfortunately. And we have to do the whole background and credit-check thing.”
“Go for it,” I said. “One benefit of leading a boring life is that I’ll pass your background check with flying colors.” I pulled an envelope out of my back pocket. “And here’s my offer of employment from the college.” I passed it to Caleb.
He opened it up and scanned the letter. “The athletic department, huh? Well, your salary seems pretty straightforward.”
“Yeah, except I’ll be the least straightforward person in the athletic department.”
He lifted his eyes from the letter. “Are you worried about that?”
“Does it show?” I asked, and he laughed.
He handed my letter back. “Come into the house and you can fill out the application.”
“My mom is willing to co-sign the lease,” I offered, following the two of them out the door.
“That probably won’t be necessary,” Caleb said.
I took one more glance at the sunny little room before I closed the door. At least one thing in my uncertain life looked to be shaping up. Even if they hated me at work, I’d have a nice place to go home to.
Chapter Three
Axel
Walking in for my first day at work was nerve-wracking—my first real job out of college.
My credit card was maxed out from purchasing a bed and a sofa before I returned the rental van. If I couldn’t fit in here, it was going to sting. And I’d be poorer than before I’d tried.
The athletic department occupied a modest suite of offices adjacent to the gym. The athletic-ops people and the marketing department shared a bull-pen style room, while my boss Arnie’s private office was a few yards away down a short hallway.
My desk was one of two along a wall. The other desk belonged to a ham-necked man-child who introduced himself as “Boz,” which was short for Jon Bosworth.
Boz had decorated our office space by tacking Barmuth Brown Bear sports paraphernalia onto every available surface. He was the other half of the sports-marketing department, so we were going to be partners.
He was, I decided, the most rabid Barmuth sports fan who had ever lived. As far as I could tell, Henning, Massachusetts was his favorite place on earth. He’d graduated from Barmuth three years ago and had come to work at the athletic department the week after tossing his mortarboard in the air.
In fact, the centerpiece of all the wall-mounted sports glory above our desks was his football team photo. Beneath his beaming face was the captain’s “C” stitched onto his team jacket.
“Welcome!” he’d said about a hundred times on my first day. He sort of galloped around the room, making sure I had a stapler and a tape dispenser on my desk. It was possible that it had been Boz inside the Barmuth Bear suit I’d seen in the basketball TV broadcast. He was a frisky human. He was the sort of jock who referred to a beer as a “brewski” and not in an ironic way.
Every hour that passed made me more worried about how he was going to react to my sexual orientation. I’d already decided not to hide. I wanted this job, but I wasn’t willing to duck into the closet to keep it.
Casually slipping my sexual orientation into a conversation with Boz the Barmuth Brewski Bear was not going to be easy. I was tempted just to shock him. Hey, would you happen to know where the nearest gay bar is? I could really use a rim job.
Luckily, I was saved from making semi-rude statements that might get my ass kicked by spending most of the day at a new-employee orientation and filling out a giant stack of forms for the human resources department.
On my second day of employment, Boz and I had our first actual conversation about sports marketing.
“So,” he began with a lazy grin. “You’ve doubled the size of my department. Dude, that’s awesome.”
“Um, yeah.” I gave him an awkward smile.
“Obviously, I’ve had to triage all the work up to this point,” he said, rubbing his scruffy chin. “The football team takes up a lot of my time. I haven’t done shit for some of the less popular teams. But I’m just one guy.”
“Gotcha.” And I really did. On any given weekend, there were three or four sporting events at least. Nobody could cover all of that.
“So, we need to divvy up the teams. I mean, I’m calling football, on the grounds that I have seniority…” He frowned.
“Of course,” I said quickly. “Football is all yours.”
“And you’re the basketball guy, right? So I should probably take hockey, because of the season overlap.”
“That’s cool.” I liked hockey, but he was right about the schedule. “And it goes without saying that we should each cover the men’s and women’s teams for each of our sports. Otherwise, it’s just too confusing.”
“Sure.” His grin morphed into something naughty. “We might have to flip a coin for volleyball.”
“Why?” I thought volleyball was awfully lame. He could keep it.
His eyebrows shot up. “Dude. Tall girls jumping around in short shorts?”
Shit. This was my opening—the moment I was supposed to tell him. If I let this opportunity pass, I’d be stepping into the closet, which was ridiculous. I’d been out since high school, for God’s sake. “Uh, Boz?”
“Yeah?”
“Women’s volleyball isn’t really my thing. Actually, women aren’t really my thing.”
His monobrow furrowed. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.” I braced myself for a clarifying slur or a fit of disgust.
“You mean…”
You’re a faggot, is what I thought he would say next.
“You mean I can have volleyball and maybe also cheerleading?”
A surprised bark of laughter escaped my chest. “It’s all yours, man. And field hockey. And gymnastics if you want it. But you should let me take soccer. I don’t have a fall sport yet.”
“Deal.” He grinned like a kid on Christmas. “Let’s make a list.” He reached for a pad of paper, but then checked his watch. “Dude, it’s gettin’ towards quittin’ time. What if we made this list over at Bruisers? If I don’t eat regularly, I get cranky.”
“Okay?”
“I mean, if I’m going to work overtime, there needs to be a burger or a beer involved. One or the other, preferably both.” He stood up and yanked the Barmuth Football jacket off the back of his chair. I stood up to follow him.
And that was the whole story of my coming out at work. Or rather—I thought it was. The messy part wouldn’t come until much later.
* * *
I spent the rest of that first week learning how our mailing list and social media accounts were organized. As Friday approached, I started to get excited for my first men’s basketball game. I was really looking forward to it.
Boz had given me a little talk about our hours. “You’ll be working late on Friday. The game won’t end until 9:30, prolly.”
“Right?” That didn’t bother me at all. Because basketball.
“So you gotta take the afternoon off. I mean, this job has irregular hours. If you work your forty hours plus hit three sporting events a week? Boom! All of a sudden you’re working a fifty-five hour week. Don’t set that precedent, man. It’s not good for morale.” This speech was delivered with a big, bear-like Boz grin.
Unlike Boz, I had no life in Henning. A fifty-five hour week wasn’t much of a hardship, but I didn’t want to be the new guy who showed up the older guy. So I took his suggestion and left work a little early on Friday, hitting the gym for a quick workout. And when game time came around, I was itching to get down to business.
Henning was a small school, and the basketball arena only seated three thousand people. But I still felt like I’d won the lottery by getting this job. Taking a courtside seat at the officials’ table felt as glamorous to me as walking the red carpet on an awards show.
I was getting paid to tweet about basketball. Pinch me.
Since my set-up was crucial to my success, I checked and re-checked my Internet connection, and I made sure that the graphics and the video snippets I’d assembled were in the folder where I’d left them. This had to go well. I wanted the guys in the athletic department to say, “I’m so glad we hired that marketing guy. He is such a stud.”
Okay, that last bit was a stretch. But I wanted to do well.
And there was nothing like a live sporting event to get my blood pumping. The seats began to fill behind me and across the gym. We were playing Princeton, which was a major Barmuth rival.
Directly beside me, the announcer picked up his mic. “All rise for the national anthem, sung for you tonight by Barmuth’s very own Barmuth Baritones.”
As I rose, a group of twelve guys wearing tuxedo jackets formed a half-circle on center court. One of them raised his hands, and they all began to sing the Star-Spangled Banner in four-part harmony.
Okay, so maybe this town had a few other guys who weren’t straight.
I filed that away to think about later. Because after the anthem and a few announcements, the game began. I put a hundred percent of my attention on the players in front of me. A minute after the tip-off, a Barmuth player scored on a breakaway, and I made my first ever post to the @BarmuthBBall account. It’s game time here in Barker Arena, and #14 Josh Bramer puts Barmuth on the board! I followed that up with a tweet linking to the radio station covering the game and another link to the live-stats website.
Just like that, I was on the board, too.
Hunkering down, I watched the action as if my life depended on it. I was so invested in getting things just right that I actually forgot to look around for Cax. I didn’t think about him at all for the first ten minutes of play. The game paused for a media time-out, and I sat back in my seat, actually sweating. That’s when I heard it.
His laugh. Goosebumps broke out on my arms. Rich and hearty, it was amazing how well I knew his laugh. As if I’d heard it just yesterday. He might have been laughing at a fart joke I made when I was twelve, or some silly thing I whispered during the church service. The sound of him was so achingly familiar that I had to close my eyes just to take it in.
And he was sitting somewhere behind me.
Welp. There went my concentration. Luckily, tweeting a basketball game isn’t exactly neurosurgery. I’d prepared so ridiculously well ahead of time that I had plenty of material. Princeton led for a while, but when we retook the lead, I tweeted a little video clip of a tiger running into a wall.
The most difficult thing, though, was keeping my face forward. I wanted to turn around so very badly. I was like Orpheus in that Greek myth where he has a chance to lead his love out of the underworld, but it will only work if he doesn’t turn to see her face.
Orpheus fucked that up and lost the girl. But I stayed strong. I knew that if I started staring at my teen crush, I wouldn’t be able to stop.
The game seemed to last about a hundred years. Near the end, I hadn’t heard Cax laugh for a long time, and I actually convinced myself that he’d left. So I held out until there were only two minutes left on the game clock. Barmuth had a seven-point lead, and Princeton took a time-out, which followed on the heels of a media time-out.
My job here was nearly done. So I finally turned to look.
Chapter Four
Cax
“Why can’t I have Skittles? They’re only two bucks,” my youngest brother said for the seventeenth time.
“Because you had a soda. That’s enough sugar,” I told him yet again.
“I wouldn’t have had the soda if I thought I could have Skittles,” Scotty argued. He was twelve years old and a junk-food hound.
“Next time,” Amy said, mussing Scotty’s hair.
He wrinkled up his freckled nose and turned away. But he didn’t complain about the hair mussing, because Scotty liked Amy.
Everybody liked Amy—my brothers, my asshole father. Amy was a real crowd-pleaser. “Are we going out for a beer after I drop the boys at home?” I asked her. I’d had a long week, and I was looking forward to gossiping with her.
I heard a snort from my other side, where my seventeen-year-old brother Jared sat. “‘Out for a beer?’ Is that what we’re calling it these days?” He said this without raising his surly face from his phone.
Amy and I exchanged an amused glance. It was hard to decide which assumption was the funniest. That everything I said was a sexual reference? Or that Amy and I would take any opportunity to have sex?
The reality was that we hadn’t had sex in years, and we’d only done it twice before she’d very gently pointed out that we didn’t seem the least bit compatible.
I sure as hell wasn’t ever going to correct my brother’s assumptions, though. The fact that everyone thought Amy was my girlfriend made my life a lot easier.
But we were just very good friends. With us, “out for a beer” really meant out for a beer. But when basketball was in season, we could often be found here on game nights, in the company of whichever of my brothers wanted to get out of the house. Tonight we had Scotty and Jared—two out of three—because Mark was at a middle-school dance.
Jared had barely said a dozen words all night. Seventeen was a surly age, to be sure, but I wondered if something was bothering him. I’d have to remember to ask him later in private.
Amy nudged me.
“What?”
“That guy…”
I looked to see where her attention was focused. But the man I thought she was looking at turned his head sharply back toward the game. “What about him?”
“Well, I’ve never seen him sitting there before.”
“Uh-huh.” I’d never paid much attention to the guys at the officials’ table. Not when there was a game to watch.
“And he was staring at you.”
I said nothing. Because I didn’t know anybody who worked the games, and I didn’t want to say even one word that put “guy” and “staring” in the same sentence.
Our team scored a three-pointer, and the crowd went nuts. With just a couple minutes left in the game, our lead suddenly felt more comfortable.
“Did you see that?” I asked Jared, nudging him with my elbow.
He gave me a teenaged caveman grunt, which was all you could get out of Jared sometimes.
On my other side, Amy grabbed my wrist. We’d been friends a long time, and it was obviously a signal. My eyes flicked immediately to the man she’d pointed out earlier.
And my heart absolutely stopped.
For a long moment I locked eyes with none other than Axel Armitage, the only boy I’d ever kissed. But
he wasn’t a boy anymore. Not by a long shot. I was staring at a man—a very attractive man with dark, wavy hair and big eyes. He’d filled out over the years. His shoulders were square and muscular, and a five o’clock shadow highlighted the contours of his masculine jaw.
I forgot the basketball game. I forgot Amy and my brothers. There was only the memory of his smile in the summer sunshine and an ache in my chest for what had happened the one time I’d acted on my longing.
The sound of a whistle shook me out of my stupor. Axel’s head whipped back toward the game, and I tried to swallow the giant lump in my throat.
Amy nudged me. “You know him?”
“Later,” I said. There was no part of the story I could tell Amy in front of my brothers.
* * *
When the final buzzer sounded, I stood up like a shot. “Let’s go, guys. It’s a school night.” I grabbed Scotty’s coat and held it out for him.
Scotty looked up at me like I was crazy. “It’s Friday! Duh.”
“Um, I knew that,” I snapped. “But it’s late. Let’s go.”
Amy gave me the side eye, but she didn’t argue. In fact, she helped me herd my brothers out to the car.
“Are we having that drink?” she asked as I cranked the engine.
“Oh hell yes.”
Jared snickered in the backseat.
Whatever. I drove my brothers to the home they still shared with my asshole of a father. “Night, guys,” I said as I pulled into the driveway. “Give Mark my love. And if you need anything before I see you on Monday—”
“—call,” my littlest brother finished. “We know.”
“Love you both,” I said as they climbed out.
“Love you, too,” Scotty said. “Thanks for the game.”
“Anytime.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Jared muttered. He did not say “I love you, too,” of course, because he was too cool for that. But I didn’t mind. I said it to him because I needed him to know that I cared, and because my father didn’t do emotion. (Unless anger counted.)
