Page 32 of Triple Play

Shira grins at me, a little wicked. “Sure,” she says, “I mean, I make mine fancier—once I cook pasta, I shred my own cheese over it.”

Forsyth makes a noise of absolute outrage. “When we get to Florida, I’m cooking for you both.”

Which…sounds like a friend thing. Or at least a teammate thing. It’d be easier if he was an asshole. Yeah, easier to convince Shira to dump him. Why do some guys have to be rich and successful and, yes, the kind of handsome that’s almost hard to look at? I swallow that thought along with more garlic bread.

“Where’d you learn to cook?” Shira asks him.

“My grandma. I was always hanging out with her in the kitchen, wanting to know why she did this or that. But you know, after a while, my parents didn’t want me spending time on stuff that wasn’t school or baseball. Definitely not cooking.”

“What’s wrong with cooking?” I ask.

Forsyth goes a deep red. Whatever reaction I was anticipating—a shrug, a that’s how it goes—it isn’t that. “It’s, you know…” He trails off for a second before adding, “A distraction.” Said like he means something else.

I fill in the possibilities. That he was lying when he said he always wanted to be a ballplayer. That his family thought cooking was a waste of time. That there was something queer about cooking. Queer in a way that Forsyth, or at least his family, wanted to avoid the appearance of. Queer in a way I am, even if that’s not something I openly advertise in a clubhouse.

Whatever the reason, Forsyth shovels in a mouthful of mac and cheese, quick enough that a drop of sauce clings to his lower lip.

There is absolutely nothing sexual about someone with oven-ready mac and cheese sauce dripping from their mouth. And yet…

He took your job. He took your girl. He’d probably deck you for thinking about Shira. And he’d definitely deck me for thinking about him like this.

I take another bite of garlic bread, hoping for the scrape of it against the roof of my mouth as a distraction, but of course, Blake—Forsyth—buttered it perfectly.

After we eat, I snag my notebook from my bag. Step out onto the front porch and breathe the frigid night air. Suburban skies are always kind of disappointing. Stars are visible but only a handful, like a scattering of grain.

Still, a habit’s a habit, and I have an unbroken streak of entries stretching back into last year. So I jot down our location, the latitude and longitude. Draw a quick diagram showing which stars are the brightest.

A voice comes from the open front door. “Hey, you doing all right?” Not Shira. Forsyth, who’s looking at me like I’ve lost my mind.

I hold up my notebook. “Yeah.”

That gets his attention. He comes out, rubbing his arms at the cold. “How does this weather not bother you?” he asks.

“I like the cold—the tradeoff is I hate Florida.”

Forsyth laughs. He’s got a good laugh. “Give me heat and humidity any day.”

Why didn’t you stay in Atlanta? I can’t ask him that, not when we’re being almost civil. Not when he’s peering over my shoulder like he’s interested in what I’m writing down.

“You could just ask,” I say.

Forsyth’s cheeks are already reddened with cold, but he manages to go slightly pink like he’s embarrassed to be caught. Something about that makes me like him more. “What’re you doing?”

I aim my journal toward the thin night sky above us. “It’s a stargazer journal.”

“Anything good?”

“Not really.” But I flip open to a page so he can see my notes. “Viewing’s better on the farm. At least with baseball, I get to see what the sky looks like all over the country.”

Forsyth nods. “Yeah, that’s definitely why I play too.” It takes a second for me to realize he’s joking.

“It’s a perk,” I add. Like the money.

“You really miss being out in the country, huh?”

Every day. “Yeah.” I scramble for a better answer just in case he goes to the team with something like, Paquette spends most of his time wishing he was back in Vermont. In other words, the truth. “My sister sends me pictures.” I could leave it at that, but if Forsyth has a problem with queer people, I should probably know now. So I add, “She and her wife run the farm.”

An expression passes over his face, brief, inscrutable in the half dark. Just as quickly, it clears. “They ever come to see you play?”

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