by Amy Lane
Table of Contents
Blurb
Dedication
Hatesex and Baseball
Up Against the Wall
Never Too Late
Amazing Disaster
Little Bubbles of Hope
The Moons in Our Orbit
Worse Than Paperwork
Anticipation
Double Hitter
Quiet Surprises
When the Clowns Come Home
Broken Rules
How to Always Be
Reckoning and Wreckoning
And Better or Worse
Unbroken Circles
Wearing Shades
Amy’s Light Romance
About the Author
By Amy Lane
Visit Dreamspinner Press
Copyright
Slow Pitch
By Amy Lane
Tenner Gibson has a job he enjoys, a prickly ex-wife, and an adorable daughter he wouldn’t trade for the world. With no romance, no sex life, and no other hobbies, a rec league softball team is as close as he gets to hedonism.
But life throws him a curveball when cocky Ross McTierney sets his sights on getting under Tenner’s skin.
One explosion of lust later, Tenner wonders what possessed him to have a quickie with Ross, and Ross wonders how to do it again.
Tenner has eight weeks to convince his tiny modern family that Ross is what’s best for him. Ross has eight weeks to get used to the idea that complicated doesn’t always mean bad. Their sex life is moving at the speed of light, and everything in their relationship is coming at them too fast….
But together, they might make a connection and knock it out of the park.
Calling, the usual suspects. Mate—you think I don’t pay attention, but I get why you love sports. Mary, Tenner is yours.
Hatesex and Baseball
“HEY, BATTER batter, sha-wing, batter!”
Tenner Gibson rolled his eyes. God, that guy was annoying, but Tenner needed to get his head in the game. He eyed the pitcher across from him and hefted the bat, choking up a little for control.
Slow-pitch softball—the ball went up, up, up in an arc and came down, down, and Tenner waited for it to come just right—
“Sha-wing, batter!”
And he swung too early and whiffed.
“St-er-ike!” the umpire called, and Tenner lost his patience.
“Goddammit, Pat, could you make that asshole shut up!”
“C’mon, Ten-Spot!” the catcher chided. “What’s up your craw? It’s just a little trash-talking.”
Pat Caldwell, Tenner’s friend and the asshole who had drafted him into this league, grinned from behind his catcher’s mask and chewed his bubblegum fiercely. Tenner could still hear their conversation….
“C’mon, Ten-Spot, the other team has to forfeit if they don’t get one more player. If you play for them for the rest of this season, we can grab you for next season!”
“So I’m playing with a bunch of strangers for this season?” Tenner had rubbed the back of his neck and pulled his attention away from his computer.
Pat, ginger-haired, fortyish, handsome, and very, very married to his wife and three adorable children, held up his hands in supplication. “Please, Tenner. Next season is this summer. There’s spring season, then summer, and then fall. C’mon, do me a favor, will you? I need to play. My daughters hate baseball—they want to play soccer. And my son’s in love with ballet. If this team doesn’t come up with another guy, we won’t have enough teams in the league. And I worked my ass off scraping together a team of my own. We had to grab my wife’s little brother to play for us. He’s only here for two months and he’s a self-professed asshole, and still, playing with him is better than not playing at all!”
“I don’t have cleats!” Tenner protested. “Or pants or—”
Pat had three children under thirteen. He could sense a rare but important victory a mile away. “There’s a sports store two blocks from here. Let’s go!”
“But I have to call Nina.” His ex-wife did not like her plans changed.
It didn’t matter. Pat was dragging Tenner out of the office and into the bright spring day to his car—predictably a minivan—and taking him to the store for cleats, baseball socks, and those nylon pants you could slide in without taking off skin.
And a bright yellow shirt, because who didn’t like the way they looked in bright bumblebee-wet-dream gold?
Besides Tenner, of course. He looked like he had jaundice. Even his eyeballs looked yellow.
But now he was a member of the CompuCo Sunspots, whether he liked it or not.
He had to admit, part of him was secretly thrilled. He hadn’t played sports since college, and while he worked out daily—and was looking forward to coaching Under 8 soccer in the fall—there was something about playing competitively that just added to the joy of the whole thing.
And he’d always loved baseball.
He’d texted his ex-wife and told her he’d be picking Piper up later, if that was okay. Nina had not been pleased. I have a date, Tenner. We agreed that you’d be punctual.
He’d sighed. Please, Nina. I’m at a softball game. I haven’t played since college.
He waited for a moment, knowing their layers of anger and guilt went both ways. Fine. Remember she has gymnastics tomorrow.
Thank you. I’ll be there as soon as the game’s over.
And so, here they were, bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, tied, two outs. All he needed was a base hit—a sad, soggy little base hit—and they could win the game and he could get to Nina’s house before she even remembered she’d told him he could be late.
All he had to do was pretend the ball was this asshole’s head.
Holy crap, the entire game this player on Pat’s team had been nothing but a pain in Tenner’s ass. For fuck’s sake, had he never heard of moderation? The guy was cute—six-feet plus, blond hair that waved, stunning blue eyes—but damn, was he loud. Loud, obnoxious, and constantly taunting the other team, especially Tenner. He’d hooted and hollered when the other guys were up, sure, but with Tenner, he seemed to get a thousand times louder.
“Hey, batter batter, sha-wing, batter!”
Tenner used to be able to blow these guys off in college—and the shit talk had gotten pretty nasty then. It wasn’t just “sha-wing, batter!” eight years ago. It had been “Come suck my fat johnson, faggot!” And that had been the pretty stuff.
It hadn’t made Tenner’s life particularly easy, because he’d never wanted to be a trailblazer. He’d wanted to have a perfectly normal life—wife, kids, job, the works. Enter Nina, who’d been a baseball groupie and had a fast-and-loose definition of the truth.
Particularly the truth of whether or not she was on birth control.
And here came the ball. The big, soft grapefruit-sized ball that Tenner wasn’t quite used to yet. Slow, Tenner. It’s slow. Wait for it. Wait for it. Wait for—
“Sha-wing, batter!”
Whiff!
“Strike three! You’re out!”
“I swear to Christ, Pat, I’m going to rip off his skull and use it for a soccer ball!”
And Tenner’s friend—his best friend, the only one with a front-seat view to Tenner and Nina and why they’d really gotten a divorce—laughed so hard, he sat down in the dirt.
“Ten-Spot, dude! That was the best swing! It’s a good thing you didn’t catch a piece of it or someone on the freeway would be dead!” The freeway was a good mile away. It was clearly an effort on Pat’s part to not make Tenner quit in a fit of pique.
Tenner let go of some of his anger and held his hand out to help Pat up. “I’m gonna kill that asshole,” he said as his team, with lots of groans and resentful looks at Tenner, made ready to take the outfield.
Extra innings. He cast a glare over his shoulder at the guy—Ross Something Or Other—and seriously wished he could use his head for batting practice.
But it would sort of be a waste of a handsome bastard, Tenner could admit that. Well over six feet tall to Ten’s five-eleven, Ross had that sort of rangy body that didn’t seem capable of sinuous motion and was so much more beautiful because of it. Yeah, Tenner hated the guy—and his cocky Jake Busey smile in a leaner, prettier face—but he sure could admire his lazy blue eyes in tanned skin, with hair that was probably more brown in the winter but was bleached yellow by the sun.
God, before Nina, when Tenner had given in to his libido in college, Ross “I’m Gonna Fuckin’ Kill Him” had been right up his alley.
Sadly, for the past few years, nothing had been up Tenner’s alley but a fine assortment of medically safe novelty items with the appropriate washable lubricant, in controlled and very, very private circumstances.
He pulled his gaze away from Ross “I’m Gonna Fuckin’ Kill That Guy” to watch Pat dust himself off, his good humor unshakable.
“Oh, dude! You can’t kill him! That’s my wife’s brother, Ross McTierney.”
“Nice whiff, man!” Ross said, smirking his way toward them. “You gonna go out to right field and see if you can smell that one sailing by?”
“You wanna make a bet,” Tenner muttered to Patrick. “I could slit his throat in a church.”
Pat rolled his eyes. “Go get your glove, Hamlet. We’ve got another inning to go.”
Tenner turned on his heel so he didn’t have to even look at Ross McTierney’s grinning face and snagged his glove from the dugout. He was getting his team back to bat if he had to make every damned out himself.
HE LITERALLY had to make every damned out himself.
Their captain—a little, rather quiet guy in his twenties named Hanford Birmingham—had taken one look at Tenner lacing up his new cleats and been transported with glee.
“You can catch the ball?” he’d asked. “Like, if it comes at you? Our last first baseman used to just sort of scream and drop it. I think that’s why he quit after one game.”
Tenner tried not to sigh and reminded himself that he would get to be on Pat’s team in eight weeks. And at least those guys appeared to know what they were doing.
“Yeah,” he said gamely. “Catch, throw, hit occasionally. I can do it all.”
He’d thought that Hanford was being… well, unassuming was the word that came to mind. But then he’d played the first inning and had seen firsthand how bad it was. The team’s only real asset was Kipp Harding, the pitcher, who could lob a softball up at a perfect rate of slowness. A guy could wear himself out swinging at the damned thing and right when they thought they could connect with the ball, it would crash the last four feet to the ground.
Uncanny.
Between Kipp striking guys out, Danny, who was about twenty years old and could run like the wind and maybe catch, playing center field, and Tenner on first, they were almost not awful. Unfortunately, Tenner was the only one who could hit, and thanks to Ross “Whose Head Would Make A Good Soccer Ball,” he’d just blown the chance to win, five to four.
Tenner was late to pick up his daughter, he’d left a project on his desk that could get him a healthy raise, and he was stuck in the outfield or his team would forfeit when they were that close to a win.
“Piss in His Dead Skull” Ross McTierney was not going to fuck this up.
Fortunately, he wasn’t hitting first.
The first guy—a fiftyish, semi-in-shape engineer—nailed the ball right toward Tenner’s face. Tenner would have taken exception to that if he hadn’t been able to block the ball and make the out.
The second guy lobbed a pop fly up, up, up, until Kipp—in a stunning burst of honesty in the heat of the game—had blurted, “Dude, I’m not catching that. Tenner, get over here.”
And he had.
And then Ross Fuckin’ McTierney got up to bat. He took a few practice swings, spat on the plate, and then, oh God, winked right at Tenner before sizing up Kipp’s thirtysomething runner’s body with a few lazy sweeps of those blue eyes.
And then he swung at the ball and tried to knock it clear to the freeway.
But Tenner was pissed, and he held a grudge, and dammit, he was due. He ignored poor Hanford, looking like a light-struck deer in right field, and hauled his ass toward the back fence and leaped, just as the ball arced down.
And he caught it, his glove raised in triumph, shouting, “Motherfucker, whiff this!”
“No!” Ross screamed, although he sounded more impressed than mad. “No! Oh my God, who does that!”
“I do,” Tenner called back, grinning fiercely as he ran to the dugout. “I do.”
He figured that was it. All they had to do was make one run. One lousy run. He hadn’t made the other four. He’d batted them in, sure, but he was the ninth batter up this time. What were the odds they would fill the bases and get sent to the outfield—twice—without either team scoring?
What were the odds?
What were the odds?
What were the goddamned motherfuckin’ odds?
Nina was texting him the entire time he sat in the dugout. He was only about a half-hour late; he knew that. He knew that picking Piper up in his baseball clothes wasn’t the worst thing in the world. He even knew Piper’s favorite TV show was on right now, so she wasn’t going to wonder where he was.
But every ten seconds his phone buzzed, and by the time he got up to bat, he’d sent Nina a picture of the guys on the field so she could know he wasn’t missing their daughter’s future because he was lazy or lying or in a bar picking up a guy just so he could break the three-year-long dry streak he had going.
One more run, he texted. And I’m on my way.
They can’t make it without you?
They’ll have to forfeit the game. For all her flaws, Nina had a vicious competitive streak. He knew this.
Fine. You owe me.
He wanted to ask her, what else? Alimony? Child support? He paid double, on time, every month. The lost years he could have been happy? She had those too. His solemn promise not to go out and be gay? Well, he couldn’t make it, but he’d promised not to let the worst parts of his “lifestyle” affect Piper, and he assumed that meant dating. Because whatever.
But he didn’t ask her what else, because he had this. He had lights on a warm spring night, and a bunch of guys gamely trying to hit the ball, and he’d made four hits out of five at bats and one helluva play in the outfield.
Sitting there, hoping at least one of these guys could make a run before the final out, he allowed a little peace to seep into his soul.
God, he’d missed this.
And then Hanford made the second out of the inning, and Kipp went up and made it to third base, and it was Tenner’s turn to hit the ball again.
“Hey, batter batter, sha-wing, batter!”
But Tenner had that peace in his soul this time. This time when Ross “Fuck You” McTierney shouted “sha-wing, batter!” he paused a breath, just a breath, before he swung.
The ball never fucking landed.
TEN MINUTES later, he was still trying to pack up his bag to leave, after dealing with congratulations and thank-yous from his team. And, he had to admit, they felt pretty damned good.
Man, sometimes when life was stressful and you were getting homicidal, it was good to nail the crap out of that grapefruit-sized white ball and relieve some frustration! His shoulders and chest still rang with the force of the swing that had sent the ball out into the stratosphere, and he was going to take the win.
“Thanks so much for playing with us,” Hanford said, extending his hand tentatively. Now that he’d shown the damned ball who was boss, Tenner could relax enough to appreciate Hanford for trying to coach a disparate bunch of nonathletes in a game he wanted to play for fun.
“Thank you for letting me,” he said sincerely. “I look forward to playing for you the rest of
the season.”
Hanford’s face—small, sort of plain, round with a pointed chin—lit up like a Christmas tree. “Until June? Oh, that’s wonderful.” He bit his lip. “You wouldn’t want to….” His eyes darted to the parking lot. “We don’t have a budget or anything. It’s just, you know, recreational. But I would love it if you could practice with me and the guys on Sunday. Like, give us some pointers?” His eyes, big and limpid and brown, were his best feature, and they sent a faint tingle to Tenner’s gut. “Please?”
Sunday. “Can I bring my daughter?” he asked, thinking there was a playground he could see from any of the four diamonds at the park. There was even a fountain mat for water play.
“Absolutely.” Hanford really was sort of adorable when he smiled. “My sister’s bringing her kids. They can play together.”
“Your sister?” Tenner asked.
Hanford shrugged. “We all have dinner at my parents’ Sunday night. We’re kind of a tight family.” He gave another one of those puppy-dog looks from those big brown eyes. “I can’t wait to see you Sunday. Bye!”
“Bye,” Tenner called a little wistfully. Sweet kid. Tenner was getting a definite playing-for-Tenner’s team crush vibe from him, and man, didn’t some admiration feel good?
He turned back to put on his regular tennis shoes and shove his cleats in his new equipment bag, shucking his hitting gloves off with them. He still smelled like sweat and dust, but man, had he missed that stench in the last eight or so years.
He’d missed a lot of things.
But at the moment, baseball was the only thing he could have, so he was going to enjoy it.
The last five minutes with Hanford had given the rest of the players time to clear out. He stood up and swung the bag over his shoulder, looking for his car beyond the field in the empty parking lot, when a deep voice behind him almost made him trip.
“Nice fucking catch.”
Oh God. Not this asshole. “Nice fucking chatter,” Tenner told him, coming out of the dugout and barely squeezing by Ross “Stealthy As A Cheetah” McTierney.
