JULY
Current record: 49–39
The distinct feeling of having barely slept hangs over Gene’s morning: heavy limbs, headache, a Luis Estrada–shaped pain in his ass.
They have practice at one in the afternoon so they can get to know the guys they’ll share a roster with tomorrow. The results of the game won’t count for anything in the standings—it’s an exhibition game, played for pure enjoyment and the honor of being recognized—but no one likes to lose. If they did, they probably wouldn’t have gotten picked for this.
Even considering their bodies’ insistence on West Coast time, and the resultant sleeping in that they did this morning, they have time to kill before practice starts.
Normal people would enjoy the city. Gene and Luis, however, take the opportunity to haul their asses out to Queens a couple hours early, so Gene can show Luis Citi Field. It was Gene’s second-ever major league stadium, following Portland, and the one he spent the most time in after his dad stopped playing. When Gene was in high school, and later college, his dad would get them season tickets, and they would trek out to the stadium two or three times a week to sit in the nosebleed seats. Gene spent half his money from his first job buying them soft pretzels and cheese dip.
When they walk up to the stadium—towering, beautiful, unceremoniously constructed at the intersection of two highways and across the street from a muffler store—Gene grins, not at the brick arches but at Luis taking them in.
“Well, I mean, points docked for the Mets playing here”—Gene jabs his elbow into Luis’s ribs for that—“but damn.”
Gene cranes his head back to look up at the familiar name in big letters over the arches; they’re a couple yards away now. “Are you nervous?” he asks.
Luis gives a tight laugh, one that says Yes better than any collection of actual words ever could.
“Perfect. Same,” Gene says.
On an impulse, he reaches out to give Luis’s hand that comforting squeeze that’s been tempting him since yesterday. Before he can, Luis reaches into his pocket, grabs the ID an MLB representative gave him at the hotel, and scans it.
They’re the first ones there, as far as players go, but a whole staff of people are getting things set up. He and Luis bypass the locker room and walk down the tunnel, past the dugout Gene has seen some of his favorite players sit in countless times, out onto the field.
The dimensions are not so different from their own stadium. Just basic, expected variance. But something about the embrace of this many seats, rows and rows of them, somewhere in the neighborhood of forty fucking thousand, makes the field itself feel bigger, too. It’s the bright white of the foul lines, the perfect evenness of the dirt at home plate, the brilliant green of the grass.
“I almost want to, like. Lay down in it,” Luis says.
“So do it.” Gene gestures, an invitation.
“I don’t want to get caught.”
“Nada, they absolutely do not care,” Gene says.
To illustrate his point, he drops onto the grass, falling neatly on his ass and then tipping his body fully horizontal. The sun is warm, barely on the good side of harsh. He pats the spot next to him.
When Luis lies next to Gene, his breath evens out. Gene can almost hear the second it happens.
“Wow.”
“Fucking wow,” Gene agrees.
“I mean, it’s no Dodger Stadium”—Dodger perks up at the mention of his name— “but what can you do?”
Gene kicks his leg out until it makes light contact with Luis’s shin, but he grins up at the sun, taking it all in. The stadium and the impending practice and tomorrow’s game and his own place here, and Luis.
Neither of them starts the Futures Game the next day, but Gene can’t imagine caring. As long as they get put in at the same time, get to play at least one inning together, it could not matter less to him.
Their opportunity comes in the sixth.
The funny thing about games like this: literally everyone is good. It’s no All-Star Game, but every one of the players here has a chance of playing there someday. Gene doesn’t consider himself a part of that group, really, but when they put him in to pinch-hit, he doesn’t feel completely out of place anymore.
At his back, Luis yells, “Let’s go, Nes!”
Gene can tell by the focused sound of Luis’s voice that his hands are cupped around each side of his mouth, the O drawn out and joyous.
The pitcher throws Gene a slider, absolutely filthy, but Gene manages to drive it into the gap, a couple dozen feet away from the nearest outfielder. He slides into second, and Luis subs for the next hitter. His batting stance, once he settles into it, is easy, with very little movement. Gene uses Luis’s steadiness to even out his own breathing, wandering just far enough off second that it becomes a risk.
This guy is a nose-wrinkler. The best kind of giveaway, because it’s the kind the pitcher almost never even knows he does. The second the tip of his nose twitches, Gene takes off toward third, sliding feetfirst and not even looking up to check where the ball is. He hears it smack into the palm of the third baseman’s glove a full second after his foot touches the base.
And it doesn’t really matter anyway, because Luis redirects the next pitch over the outfielders’ heads.
Gene has never understood why athletes sometimes yell in each other’s faces. And then Luis crosses home plate, and it might only be the sixth inning, but Gene claps his hand together with Luis’s, and he yells, and he yells, and Luis yells, and Dodger howls from where his leash is tied up in the dugout, and their team is up two runs, and okay—Gene gets it now.
When the last out lands in Gene’s glove less than an hour later, Luis lifts him into the air, not one bit of hesitation to it, arms locked under Gene’s ass and Gene’s legs thrown around his waist, glove hoisted in the air until the rest of their team joins them.
Maybe it doesn’t matter for Beaverton that they won, but this game still mattered, still meant something; to Gene, at least, it’s his first intoxicating glimpse of something he has never let himself dream of. And maybe he doesn’t let himself want it—maybe he isn’t there yet. But with Luis holding him up and the ball shifted into his ungloved hand and guys he met yesterday clapping his shoulder in the middle of the field he used to go to with his dad? He doesn’t fully believe yet that a life this big is available to him. But he knows, now, that it’s out there. That this feeling exists, and he is capable of feeling it.
Luis’s laughter drifts up, and he doesn’t let go of Gene until he absolutely has to. Gene is, he realizes on that baseball diamond, a little in love with that laugh, and a little in love with Luis.
That feeling exists, too. He is capable of feeling it, too, so much and so thoroughly that all he can do is laugh along.
After their post-game celebrations, the hotel room’s manufactured silence is a shock to the drumming in Gene’s chest, his fingertips. Luis leans against the wall, his shoulders perfectly relaxed, and he smiles at Gene. Crooked. Heart-stopping. An invitation. Gene can imagine a dozen ways for this night to go, but in every one that he likes, it’s him and Luis, and the dizzy way he felt when Luis kissed him on his couch.
Gene steps toward him, chases the feeling of Luis lifting him on the field and holding on to him for dear life, and Luis’s smile doesn’t falter. If anything, it grows, and Gene has never felt more sure that Luis will be there, ready to make whatever play Gene has in mind.
Gene looks at Luis’s earring for a second, a reminder of the last time they let themselves be a little reckless. He nods down at Luis’s unmoving hands. “Are you going to touch me or what?”
“You’re the one who wanted to stop last time,” Luis says.
“Was I?” Gene asks, regretting that decision now more than ever.
Luis nods, nearly closing the distance between them, more than confirmation enough for Gene that he’s not the only one tiptoeing up to this precipice. With his lips almost against Gene’s, Luis says, “You gotta touch me first, Nes.”
Gene doesn’t want to find that unbearably attractive. He really doesn’t. But Luis, hands pressed against the wall behind him, his hair air-dried and curly after his post-game shower, a smug smirk slung across his lips…well, shit.
So he leans back enough to meet Luis’s eyes, willing himself to look less giddy, more confident than he is, and, with Luis watching him, he slides his hand down, cupping it against the front of Luis’s pants. Before he can ask if that’s what Luis wanted him to do, Luis tips his head back against the wall and honest-to-God moans.
“Fuck. Okay,” Gene says, whatever lingering hesitation he may have harbored chucked out the window, dispelled by Luis’s moan and the way he presses into Gene’s hand.
Gene might not let himself want things very often. He has practiced un-wanting for years, practiced tamping down every errant desire until he can ignore it.
Except, he wants Luis. He really fucking wants Luis, and if Luis’s face and voice and body are anything to go by, the feeling is mutual.
So Gene, for the first time in years, lets himself want.
He moves his hand to the back of Luis’s head and pulls him ever so slightly down. He stands on his toes and lines their lips back up, and he doesn’t need to kiss Luis, because Luis kisses him first.
If Gene thought they had moved in sync last time, this is something else entirely. When Gene opens his lips, Luis’s open just the same; when Gene laces his fingers together on the back of Luis’s neck, Luis is already stooping lower to get a better angle. When Luis moves his head to the left, so does Gene, and their mouths slot together so well, it makes Gene’s fingers curl against the nape of Luis’s neck.
It’s the same as when they’re on the field together, or an extension of it. “Easy” isn’t the right word—easy could never begin to cover the way Gene feels with Luis. That would imply that this feeling has no teeth to it; no. It isn’t easy. It’s natural—heady and hot and all-encompassing. Gene understands the way Luis thinks, anticipates the way he moves. It makes them good teammates—the best teammates—and, Gene learns as Luis finally touches him, it makes them pretty damn good at this, too.
Luis’s hands find the small of Gene’s back, firm and steady and fucking maddening, and then, when Gene has almost recovered from that, Luis slides them farther down. Gene smiles against Luis’s lips.
“Be my guest,” Gene says. It comes out like a dare.
Luis scoops him up, the same as he had an hour earlier, his hands under Gene’s thighs, and turns, until Gene’s back presses against the wall. Luis has eight eminently noticeable inches on him, but Gene makes up for what he lacks in height with solidity. While he would not call himself brawny by any measure, no one could accuse him of being slight. He has short, strong legs and enough back muscle to hold his own in any pull-up contest. Before today, he had no doubt that he could pick Luis up, but vice versa? Color him moderately surprised and painfully turned on.
He moans about it, tips his head back about it, gets his back pressed against the wall about it.
Luis—whose kisses were focused and intense moments before—now trails those kisses along Gene’s neck. These kisses come teeth-first, a little sharp, tongue and soft lips following close behind like an apology. Gene didn’t need an apology, by any means, but he appreciates the slide of Luis’s tongue against his throat. Likes a reminder that he makes Luis desperate, too.
When Luis runs his teeth against the hollow under Gene’s fallen-open jaw, Gene’s fingers curl again, this time harder, tugging on Luis’s hair, and Luis makes that sound again—approval, or relief, or desperation. Whatever it is, Gene makes a mental note to remember that for later.
“Nada,” he says, keeping his hands firmly in Luis’s hair.
Luis doesn’t have to ask what he means. With Gene’s legs wrapped around his waist, he moves them a few feet to the right, through the door to the bedroom.
“Sorry, dude,” Luis says to Dodger when he closes the door, but Gene kisses the spot where Luis’s neck meets shoulder, and Luis doesn’t sound all that sorry.
He drops Gene—not gently—onto his bed. Gene half-bounces, something between a laugh and a gasp rolling past his lips in surprise.
The comforter on Luis’s bed has remained peeled and folded at the foot of his mattress since they arrived, and the flat sheet is smooth against Gene’s skin as he props himself on his elbows. Luis stands at the edge of the bed, nudging Gene’s bent knees apart. They each reach for the necks of their shirts, tug them over their heads, and, grinning at each other, throw them to the side.
Gene reaches out and pulls Luis in by the belt loops, tugging him until he tumbles onto the bed, a mess of limbs. When he lands on top of Gene, between his legs, arms bracketing him, Luis wastes no time getting back to kissing. He kisses with intent. His mouth open, focused, determined, the kind of kissing that makes Gene feel like he might be losing his mind one small movement at a time. Their chests pressed together, hearts going as if they just finished a run, almost the whole of Luis’s weight on top of him. Gene can feel how hard Luis is, and he pulls Luis in by the hips, in case they can get closer, somehow. When Luis rolls to Gene’s side, leaving one leg slotted between Gene’s, Gene curves his body to get the contact back, blatantly desperate.
Luis holds Gene’s face and leans back in, a smile insisting at the edges of his lips.
“Don’t laugh at me,” Gene complains. He should have known the months of half-aborted imagining would be nothing compared to the real, human weight of Luis on top of him. But here he is, shocked into shallow breaths over it.
“I’m not laughing.”
“Good,” Gene says, even though Luis is lying a little bit.
“I promise,” he lies again, but this time, when he says it, he slides a hand down Gene’s stomach and between his legs, to rest high on the inside of Gene’s thigh.
“You’re still doing it,” Gene tells him, head light and not really caring. Because no matter how much of a hard time Gene might give him about it, Gene likes that Luis laughs. He likes that Luis—this nervous man, this man who manages to be anxious about everything—laughs at this.
“Only a little,” Luis says. His hand has not moved, and doesn’t move, until Gene nods at that hand’s implicit question, and Luis moves it up.
Gene’s shorts don’t last long, and his briefs last less than a second longer. It has been nearly a year since someone saw Gene naked outside a locker room, and it has never been a constant in his life. Sex has always been so far down on his overcrowded priority list that it often gets bumped off entirely. In Gene’s experience, it has often come laced with nerves, the odd experience of sharing a body he is supposed to be ashamed of but has taught himself to love instead. He doesn’t love the way people see it sometimes, the way they judge it, but he loves how his body looks, loves its transness most of all.
He expected to be nervous, falling into bed with the first man he’s ever slept with who doesn’t have a body like his own. But he isn’t. It’s different, but it was always going to be different; with Luis, at least, that doesn’t feel like a bad thing. With Luis, it feels like he has exactly the body he should, because it knows how to move with Luis’s. It has nothing to do with any of the mechanics and everything to do with Luis himself, and with Gene, and with their uncanny way of understanding each other. And that’s what matters, really.
Lying there, as naked as he’s ever been, next to Luis—who’s propped on an elbow, his pants unzipped and pushed halfway off his ass, looking Gene up and down with ease and interest—Gene has never felt better about himself.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Gene asks, not because he doubts him but because Luis likes to be teased, and because he likes to tease Luis.
“More or less,” Luis says. He runs a hand up the inside of Gene’s leg.
“So, more, or less?” Gene tries to say it like a test, but it comes out more like a shiver.
His hand has strayed higher, teasing at the coarse hairs at the highest part of Gene’s thigh. “Well, will you let me know if something is bad for you?”
“Yes.”
“And will you let me know”—he pauses and waits for Gene’s nod again—“when it’s good for you?”
What Gene means to say is, You’re so full of yourself.
But when Gene nods, Luis moves his hand to where Gene has been wanting it for months. With Luis watching Gene’s face as he runs his thumb against Gene’s clit and slips a finger in, slowly, to the second knuckle, gauging Gene’s reaction before he really throws himself into it, Gene possesses no thoughts whatsoever other than okay, but in all capitals, yelled with the most enthusiasm he has ever felt in his life.
Like: OKAY! FUCK! OKAY!
Because, as far as Gene is concerned, Luis does know what he’s doing. Gene can’t tell if it’s because Luis actually is that good, or just because Gene has never in his life wanted someone so badly, but it makes no difference. When Luis curls a second finger inside him, their next-door neighbors must hate them, but Luis grins at the sound Gene makes, and fuck the neighbors, actually.
It doesn’t take long for Luis to get Gene off the first time that night, and Gene would be embarrassed by how quickly it went if he had any capacity at all to be embarrassed about anything at the moment. Instead, he laughs, relieved and a little dizzy, and holds Luis’s face a bit too tight.
“Shit,” Gene says. “Yeah, okay, you can keep doing that.”
Luis, in flagrant disregard of Gene’s request, removes his hand. And then, with no trace of the hesitation or nerves he usually has, he says, “Do you want to sit on my face?”
And, okay, now Gene has never felt better about himself.
He nudges Luis onto his back and peels off Luis’s jeans and briefs—Calvins, navy blue, the same as they’ve looked every time Gene has seen them in the locker room, except tonight they strain, indecent and perfect.
He gets his first real, full-bodied look at Luis then. He takes the time to pause, to marvel at him. The best part isn’t even his long legs, or the comfortable set of his shoulders, or the barely raised mole on his hip that Gene will kiss as soon as he gets the chance. The best part isn’t Luis’s dick, though Gene does plan to enjoy it. No, the best part is how his laughter has morphed into a soft and tentative smile, waiting for Gene’s reaction, and how he looks nervous but not anxious. That distinction is a miracle for Luis, and Gene wants to live in the feeling of being trusted like this.
“Can I?” Gene asks, wanting to get his hands on Luis and to get it right.
Luis, propped on his elbows, his cheeks impressively red, nods. “I don’t know what you’re asking for. Whatever it is, yes.”
Gene grins and straddles Luis’s thighs so he can reach between his own, just long enough to slick his hand. He reaches for Luis and raises his eyebrows.
Luis’s jaw goes slack when he nods, when he circles his fingers around Gene’s wrist and pulls his hand closer. Gene wraps a loose hand around him and matches the rhythm of Luis’s hips, tests a flick of his thumb and wrist and watches Luis’s head tip back against the pillows.
“Fuck, Nes,” Luis gasps. Luis’s voice gets higher and a thousand times more expressive during sex, and Gene will probably spend literal hours touching himself to those two syllables later. Luis is also louder than he looks like he’d be, and what a pair they make.
“Wait,” Luis says when another gasp stutters its way through his lungs. He moves his hand back to Gene’s wrist and stops it with a bitten-off gasp.
“Bad?” Gene asks, but it obviously wasn’t.
“God, no. Come here?”
Gene knee-walks his way up to Luis’s waiting face, pausing with his legs on either side of Luis’s neck, such that he sits more on Luis’s chest than his face. He has kissed those lips and tried his best to commit their particular way of moving to memory. He loves how uneven their pressure is, nearly all concentrated on Luis’s right-hand side but all the more enthusiastic for it. What Luis wants is more intimate, though, far closer than kissing, far more dedicated than two exchanged handies in a hotel room. The craziest thing, the thing that hitches Gene’s breath, is not that Luis wants him, but that Gene wants to let himself be wanted.
He couldn’t put that into words if he tried, so he says, “You’re fucking gay.”
The look on Luis’s face—one part thrilled and two parts unabashedly impatient—is certainly that.
“Yes,” Luis agrees.
Gene wonders, for the few seconds he takes to get situated, whether this moment is something Luis has imagined, if Luis has spent nights wanting this the way Gene has. That possibility alone makes Gene’s knees weak, and then Luis is plucking Gene’s hand up from where he has it braced on the headboard and sliding Gene’s fingers into his hair, and then he pulls Gene closer, his hands on the backs of Gene’s thighs.
His mouth is warm, and wet, and so is Gene. The sound is absolutely absurd in its dedicated loudness, but Luis’s eyebrows lower in concentration, and Gene could stay here for as many hours as Luis would let him, for as long as Luis wanted him.
When Gene’s legs start to shake, and he laughs again, he tightens his fingers in Luis’s hair; at that, Luis gasps against him. Luis’s shoulder starts to move, and without looking, Gene can tell he has wrapped a hand around himself. Luis doesn’t slow in the slightest, his tongue and lips insistent—and God, yes, enthusiastic.
For the next however-long, nothing else matters. Just Luis and his hand on Gene, and his hand on himself, and his tongue in Gene—and the feeling of his voice, desperate and pressed close, when he lets himself come.
Gene lies on top of Luis, head on his shoulder and their legs a tangled, wet, sweaty mess. In the corner of Gene’s line of sight, Luis swipes the palm of his hand on the—admittedly already- filthy—sheets, and Gene wrinkles his nose.
“Nada. Gross.”
Luis laughs, and Gene feels it in his ribs, and it’s a beautiful, musical thing. Looser and happier than Luis usually sounds.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” Luis says.
“Well, I did, and you’re nasty.”
Gene props himself up to look Luis in the eye and God, what a sight: Luis—face wet and sloppy, lips darker than usual, beard looking like he lost a very enjoyable fight with Gene’s pussy. His hair stands straight up, clumped together where Gene grabbed it.
“Oh my God,” Gene says.
“Do I look good?”
“You look like a hot mess.”
But he scoots far enough up to kiss Luis, to taste himself on Luis’s lips, and now that he’s allowed himself this, he’s not sure that he can unlearn how good the last hour felt. And he’s quite positive that he doesn’t want to forget anyway.
“Wash your face,” Gene says, into their kiss.
“You want to take a shower?”
He shouldn’t. He really should not give himself one more thing to love about Luis, not when things are this complicated and this unbearably good.
But, he justifies to himself as he nods and rolls off of Luis, nothing is set in stone. Never mind that Luis will get called up and Gene won’t. Never mind that one of them could get traded to another team, and they have no say in the matter. Never mind that Luis has shown no interest in coming out, and that Gene has never been much good at hiding anything about himself. Never mind that the short drive from Beaverton to Portland will feel a lot longer when they have near-opposite travel schedules and a three-hour game nearly every single day, six months of the year. Never mind that Baker told him to get a distraction, not to fall in love with the worst idea imaginable.
Never mind all that.
Because Gene rolls out of bed, and he slips one arm under the crooks of Luis’s knees and the other arm underneath Luis’s back, and he hefts Luis in one easy motion, carrying him to the bathroom as Luis throws a halfhearted, fake-annoyed fit.
Because Gene thinks—as he leans his cheek against Luis’s back in the shower, as Luis washes clean his beard and the hair on his stomach, as they collapse into the clean bed, wrapped in their towels and each other while they debate what food to order—he is in love with this man. Luis—neurotic and talented and kind and terrible at first impressions. Luis—concerningly sweaty and unbelievably, unfairly gorgeous. Luis—who Gene didn’t want at all and now can’t imagine losing. He can try to logic that away as much as he pleases, but there it is—the fact of it, warm and steady and, in the end, not at all surprising.
And Gene wants every weird, complicated bit of that.