"I had no idea this was so close to town."
Jim grinned and nodded, magnanimously, as if he'd created the stadium and its inhabitants especially for me. I socked him in the arm.
//Now batting for the Oregon Renegades, number twenty-two...// The announcer's voice spread over the field. Jim looked down at the stats sheet.
"Jesus," he said.
I craned my neck to read the small print in his lap (hey, I'm not proud). "What?"
He pointed at the DOB column. "They're so young."
It was true; most of them were born in 1980 or '81. "My students used to be that age."
"Yeah, but those were college kids. These are pro ball players, and they were born in 1980."
"They're barely pros," I pointed out. "This is class A, man."
"Still," he said, balefully. "They're professional athletes. I'm old."
I grinned. "Yep. You want another sausage?"
When I came back to our seats he was still looking over the stats sheet, in between scoring the game. The first inning was pretty painful so far - our pitcher was having some trouble locating the strike zone, and the Renegades had already put two points on the board.
I handed him his sausage and grabbed the stats sheet. "Hey," I said, a moment later.
"Mmm?"
"Look where these kids are from." Now it was Jim looking over my shoulder and nodding.
Three or four were from Japan, which makes sense, on our coast. One from Australia. One from the Netherlands (I didn't even know they had baseball in the Netherlands). And half a dozen from Central America.
"Can you imagine what it'd be like to be twenty years old and from the DR, and wind up spending the summer without a car thirty minutes outside of Cascade?" I felt bad for the kids. Had to be some kinda culture shock. "Bet the only thing that feels familiar is baseball."
Jim snorted. "Even that isn't the same. They don't sing 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' during the seventh-inning stretch in the Dominican Republic, I can almost promise you that."
"Yeah, and we don't have salsa dancers on our dugouts, either."
He looked at me, forehead skeptical.
"No, really! I was there with Naomi once when I was a kid, maybe twelve or thirteen, and we caught an afternoon baseball game. They were selling rum in the stands. And there was this group of prepubescent girls in thongs on the dugout, shaking their nonexistent asses."
"Huh, right up your alley, Chief."
I rolled my eyes at him and turned back to the field.
The second half of the inning was pretty short. We managed to get the bases loaded, but didn't score, and next thing I knew our guys were running into the outfield again.
When the catcher missed his third pitch, Jim snorted, disgusted. "I could play better than this guy."
"Yeah, whatever," I said, finishing my beer.
"I could," he insisted. "I used to catch in high school."
Live baseball games make me horny. Ball players have such good legs. Terrific calves-which those high socks show off to perfect advantage-and great butts. It was probably the fact that I was already half-thinking about sex that made Jim's comment seem so funny.
"Really?" I did my best to waggle an eyebrow, but he didn't get the joke.
"I was good at it, Sandburg,"he said, sounding affronted. "The catcher's in control of the game, he has to call the pitches-it's a tough position to play."
"I, ah, never had you pegged that way."
"Why not? I'm tall, I've got good knees, I have the build for it."
By this point I was trying hard not to laugh. "Never mind, man."
He looked at me crosswise. "Oh, for...You're not talking about the game, are you."
"Not for a minute," I confirmed.
He rolled his eyes but he was smiling. "You are such a pain in the ass." I refrained from comment.
The ump called a strike and the guy in front of us booed loudly.
Then Jim laughed, a quiet laugh, like he knew something funny I didn't. I glanced over and he was watching me, with that amused look that told me I probably shouldn't ask what was so funny, but I couldn't help myself. "What?" I finally asked.
"You didn't have me pegged that way?"
I shook my head no, wondering where he was going with this.
He reached over and patted me on the cheek as he stood. "Some observer you are," he said, squeezing past me into the aisle.
"I'm not an observer anymore," I said, out of habit more than anything. It took a second for his line to sink in. Then all I could think was, holy shit.
Holy shit.
It's not that I never imagined Jim in bed with another man. Me, generally; I'm not especially altruistic in my fantasies, why would I share him? But it never occurred to me that he might actually swing that way.
S-wing batter batter, my mind chanted, and I felt myself redden. Jim catching-I was hit by the sudden, visceral, very vivid mental image of Jim on his hands and knees, head bowed to the bed, moaning softly as my finger moved in and out of his ass.
Holy shit, my brain could go there afterall. In technicolor.
When Jim came back with a pair of beers, I was suddenly glad of the game program folded over my lap.
When he reached for it, his fingers brushed my thigh and I had to bite my tongue not to yelp.
Maybe he just wouldn't notice I was hard.
Yeah, right.
He noticed. And he was amused. The whole thing seemed to make him amused, actually. And I could have sworn he was leaning in a little closer than usual, his arm over the back of the bleacher resting just barely off my shoulders.
"You know, you really are unobservant, Sandburg." His voice was quiet and right in my ear.
On the field a group of very small kids was competing to throw balls through a holey piece of painted plywood, which I suddenly wasn't paying any attention to at all.
"Yeah? What was I supposed to be observing?"
"That when I worked in Vice I looked like one of the Village People?"
I couldn't help snickering; okay, he had a point there.
"That I've spent my entire life surrounded by men, generally men in uniforms in excellent shape?"
Dear God, I wasn't sure my jeans could get any tighter. He was doing this to me on purpose, wasn't he? There'd better be some fucking payoff to this torture session...
I gathered my wits weakly. "What about Carolyn?"
He pulled away and finished his beer; I gave in and watched his throat move. "Think outside the box, for once, Chief."
With some effort, I refocused my eyes on the field and realized I'd completely lost track of innings, balls, strikes and outs. The setting sun was in my eyes and I couldn't read the scoreboard.
"Where are we?"
"I have no idea. I stopped scoring a while back."
"Much to my chagrin." Whoops. Did I just say that out loud? Hoping like hell I'd been interpreting this whole exchange correctly, I glanced over at him.
He was smiling, Lazily. Like he knew there was nothing I'd rather be doing than licking the beads of sweat off of his body. And just when I thought the heat suffusing me couldn't get any worse, he let his program and scoresheet slide to the stadium floor and I realized he was hard, too.
Thank you, Jesus.
"This game's getting a little long, Chief." The gravel in his voice made me want to sing praises. "Maybe we should head home."
I grinned back and stood, enjoying the way the crowd made us press together as we worked our way to the aisle.
My second surprise of the evening came when we reached the truck and, instead of unlocking my door, Jim moved in until I was leaning on the cab and kissed me. Hard.
He tasted like sausage and beer and it was everything I'd ever wanted, his body on mine, his dick solid against me.
I ground against him, gently, and he pulled his mouth away to gasp. The sound almost undid me.
Holy shit. Four years of waiting and I was about to come from hearing him gasp in my ear.
"We're in a public place, Jim," I managed.
"They're all in the stadium," he said, biting my earlobe. "Trust me - there's no one out here."
I gave a cursory glance down the rows of trucks and SUVs and then gave up. He's the one with the senses; let it be his problem.
Besides, I was rapidly not caring whether anyone saw us or not.
"I want to touch you."
He pulled back enough to let me fumble with the buttons on his fly. When they popped loose I slid my hand inside, down his underpants, to clasp his dick. He braced himself on the truck, arms on either side of me, and let his mouth open slightly. I rubbed him with the heel of my hand, reaching down for his balls, and he bit his lip. When my hand returned up to pump him again, he muttered "fuck" and pushed against me.
Some other time, some other place, I might have had some finesse. Not this time. All I could think of was that Jim Ellison's dick was in my hand and he was moving restlessly under me, and I stepped up the pace, and then his face tightened and he was pulsing hard. I was so mesmerized I think I forgot to breathe.
His head fell forward for a minute, forehead resting on mine, like his neck could no longer hold him up. "Jesus," he muttered.
And then, a split second later, he was on his knees yanking my jeans down and I was stuffing the side of my hand into my mouth to keep from shouting as he took my dick in. I tipped my head back against the truck and looked at the sky and felt my entire body melting from the delicious friction of Jim's mouth.
And then I took my hand away because I couldn't stand not talking. "Oh God," I said, fervently, as quietly as I could. "Oh fuck. Oh. Fuck, Jim, I-"
He pulled back and blew on me lightly and I moaned. "Look at me," he said, quietly, urgently, and when I did he pulled me back into his mouth again. The sight of my cock disappearing into Jim Ellison's mouth - his eyes half-closed, cheekbones standing out from the suction - combined with the feel of his tongue on me was too much. I choked out a startled "oh!" and came in his mouth.
We were sweaty and sticky and rumpled when we got in the car, but I don't think either one of us cared. We had matching ridiculous grins.
Jim turned on the radio as he backed out of the parking spot. "Now batting for the Astros, number seventeen..." the announcer sang through the speakers of the truck.
"I can't believe we just. Ah. Did that. In public."
"Yeah," Jim agreed, his voice calm - maybe too calm. "What were you thinking?"
"Me?" I sputtered. "You're the one who," and then he started laughing out loud, and then I did, too.
"What, are you complaining?"
"Not hardly," I said.
The Astros got a single off a bunt. We got on the highway.
"All right, so maybe we shouldn't do that again." His voice held a hint of guilt.
I looked his way, suddenly almost panicked. Here I thought we were all good -
"Keep your shirt on, I meant the public lewdness part."
"Oh. Right."
"The rest of it I thought we might keep working on." He was grinning again. I don't think I'd ever seen so many shit-eating grins on Jim Ellison's face, not in all the years I'd known him.
"Practice makes perfect," I agreed.
"Much more perfect than that and you're gonna kill me, Chief."
I grinned back. "I plan on trying."
No need to shift gears on the highway, so he let his right hand rest gently at the edge of my seat. I traced patterns on the back of his hand with my thumb. We listened to the game the whole way home.
The End