Page 28 of Untouchable Player

I just wanted to help him loosen up. To thank him for helping me with my essay and to remind him that there’s a big world outside, and that he should probably move every now and then.

I hold my hand out to him and he looks at it like it belongs to an alien. Making sure I’ve got a non-threatening smile on my face, I tell him to come here.

After a second’s hesitation, he takes the bat from me. I make sure he’s not in the direct path of the machine while I help him get his posture right and another ball comes flying out and hits the wall behind us.

He has no idea what he’s doing and I have to tell him everything, from the position of his feet to his stance.

“Square your shoulders, like this,” I say, putting my hands on his back through his jacket. I’m not going to tell him to take it off, he already looks stressed out. “And bring the bat back like this. Okay, now step a little to the right and wait for the ball.”

This close, I can smell that shampoo from his shower. Feel the shape of his body through his jacket. I pause for a second withmy hand on his shoulders and catch him glancing my way from the corner of his eye. I drop my hands and tell him to get ready.

Nate looks terrified, and when the ball comes at him, instead of swinging, he drops the bat and jumps out of the way.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

I burst out laughing.

“Nate, have you never done this before?”

He nods, “years ago, with my dad and Harrison, I was terrible at it then as well.”

He looks so sad, like I’m going to shout at him.

“Listen Nate,” I walk back over and put my hands on his shoulders so he lifts his head to look at me, “you don’t have to be good at it, that’s not the point. The point is to have fun.”

“How can you say that when you literally play sports competitively?”

I shrug and drop my hands, “I don’t play baseball competitively. And neither do you.”

Nate looks back at the bat on the floor.

“Do you wanna have another go? We have another twenty minutes on the clock, take your time.”

He frowns and it’s kind of funny how conflicted he looks over picking up a baseball bat.

When he picks it up, I celebrate internally. What the fuck happened to him to make him so scared of sports? I guess if his dad was anything like my dad when he was teaching me stuff like this, then yeah, I get it. At least I was kind of good at this stuff. I can’t imagine how pissed my dad would have been if I’d been bad at it or shown no interest and wanted to read a book instead.

He kind of gets the stance I showed him and this time, when the ball comes at him, he doesn’t drop the bat and run away. He doesn’t hit the ball either, but that’s okay.

He looks at me and I must be grinning like an idiot, because he smiles.

“I told you I was bad at this.”

“You’ve got it, go on, here comes another one.”

This time, he hits the ball. It doesn’t exactly hit the bat in the right place and it doesn’t go very far or make a very satisfying noise, but he hits it and that’s an improvement. The next one is better, and there’s thatthunkand the ball almost reaches the other side of the cage. When Nate looks at me again, he’s beaming and my heart starts to pound.

“That was… actually kind of fun.”

“Why do you sound so surprised?” I laugh.

We’re waiting to catch our bus back home and it’s getting cold and dark. Nate’s hands are stuffed in his jacket pockets and I have to resist the urge to put an arm around him to warm him up.

“It’s just that sports have never really been fun to me.”

He looks down at his shoes and I wait to see if he’s going to say anything more.

“When we were kids, dad took us to every batting cage, every ice rink, football field, you name it, looking for the sport we were best at. Harrison was pretty good at everything, but hockey was his biggest strength. Me…” Nate smiles but it doesn’t reach his eyes, “I was terrible at everything. I’m uncoordinated and I’m not athletic. I was bad at playing in teams…”

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