Page 2 of Can't Help Falling

Thus began the new era. Dawn of the Age of Serafine. Jurassic, Triassic, Serafinaceous. Tyler pictured mist gathering at the opening of a cave, a man discovering fire. But then the man looked up, saw Serafine St. Romain in a bikini made of mastodon fur and promptly burned the shit out of his hand.

He shook his head at himself. This was the new era where Tyler went ten days without seeing Matty or Sebastian and when he did, there was a sexy psychic making ants crawl over his skin.

Tyler attempted to relax, smiling at the coaster car of screaming Brooklynites that whirlwinded alongside one end of the outfield. The field was right on the edge of all the Coney Island roller coasters and every three minutes or so, thrill-seekers swirled over the far outfield wall on a bendy, bright red track. Beyond that was the silvery ocean with its whitecaps and thin stretch of yellow sand.

An airplane painted a skinny line of bright exhaust over the water, cutting the sky in two. As he watched, a pop fly momentarily made it into the frame of Tyler’s vision. There was nothing more New York than that view. A baseball, an airplane, a roller coaster filled with screamers, the scent of caramel corn mixing with the briny ocean.

God, he loved Brooklyn.

“We’d like to thank everyone for their attendance this fine June day,” the smarmy announcer said over the loudspeaker, slightly slurring with what was most likely one beer too many. “But as today is our yearly Parent Appreciation Game, we’d like to particularly honor all the mothers and fathers in the crowd right now.”

The crowd clapped and cheered as tepidly as they had for everything else that had happened so far.

“Stand up, Dad!” Matty said, twirling on his knees on his seat so that he could see Sebastian.

Sebastian shook his head. “I’ll just wave at the crowd.”

“Come on, Daddy!”

Sebastian pursed his lips and stood up reluctantly, jamming his hands in the pockets of his jeans. Tyler grinned down at Matty. The kid knew the exact power of the word Daddy. He used it rarely, as if appreciating the raw wattage of it, knowing it would get his dad to pretty much agree to anything these days.

“Let’s hear it for the parents! You’ll notice behind the dugout we’ve got the parents of the players. And here, we get to see the players’ appreciation.”

At that, many of the players climbed the fence between the field and the crowd, blowing kisses to their parents and tossing balls and stuffed animals to the crowd.

“Tyler...” Matty said, a question apparent in every squished-up line of his face, so much like Sebastian’s.

“Yeah?”

“You don’t have kids, right?”

“Matty!” Sebastian said in surprise from behind them. “I can’t believe you don’t know the answer to that!”

Tyler laughed. “Matty, don’t you think that if I had a kid you’d have met him by now?”

Matty turned to Joy and the two of them shared a serious look. “But sometimes parents don’t ever see their kids. Especially dads.”

“That’s true...” Tyler responded carefully. He knew better than most just how true that was. And he suddenly had the baked-potato-sized stone in his stomach to prove it.

“So, you might have a kid I’ve never met.”

He couldn’t argue with Matty’s logic. “I guess I see what you’re saying. But I don’t have any kids, Matty.” And if I did have a kid, I’d never pretend like he didn’t exist.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why don’t you have any kids?”

Because Leshuskis aren’t meant to procreate, he thought, almost matter-of-factly. Being a good father, you had to have genes like Sebastian. Patient, selfless, willing to put up with the mess and disorder of a still-developing human. Tyler was comfortable enough in his own skin to know that that wasn’t him. It hadn’t been his father either. Arthur Leshuski had been impatient and exasperated and, on the rare occasions that he actually bothered to see Tyler, apparently always right about everything. Tyler didn’t care to have a kid and find out just how like his father he really was. He preferred to leave that particular skeleton strung up in the family closet.

“What is this, a therapy session?” he joked. “I thought we were supposed to be watching baseball.” He pushed Matty’s cap down his face again, very aware of the three adults sitting behind him, likely listening to this entire conversation. He would have had this conversation in front of Sebastian no problem, but he barely knew Via and, in his mind, Fin was still in her fur bikini, sucking his awareness into the black hole of her hotness.

“Can you have kids?” Matty asked, fixing his hat and staring doggedly up at Tyler.

“Matty!”Sebastian leaned forward and took his kid by the chin. “That is a very rude question to ask someone!”

But Sebastian’s reprimand was offset by the fact that Tyler was laughing his ass off.

---