Page 72 of Diamond Ring
Jake sighs into the back of the couch. “I probably should have.”
“Nah, you were gonna be who you were if everyone was looking at you or no one was. Takes guts, I guess.”
“Wow, that almost sounded like a compliment, Angelides.”
“You’re also the only person on this team who says my name right.”
“You know they’re just doing it to wind you up? When you’re not around, everyone calls you Angle.”
And Alex laughs, despairingly, encompassingly, a laugh that leaves him flopped against the back of the couch next to Jake. “What’d you say about me for your list?”
Jake flushes at that. “Remember that time you made me feel your ear in a bar?”
“That’s what you thought of?”
“You were always yourself. I guess I admired that. I was trying so hard to please everyone. There you were with a bunch of piercings and three words to say to anybody. If I got two of those, I could live on that for the rest of the day.”
He turns to Alex as he says it, light catching his eyelashes, lips soft. He didn’t taste like cherry ChapStick when they kissed three days before, but he could now, and Alex wants to know, a burning want he should snuff out.
“I have an idea,” Alex says. “Feel free to tell me to go fuck myself.”
Jake’s eyebrows rise, though his mouth has an amused tug.
“I miss your fastball.” A statement that feels weirder than telling Jake he misses his voice and his legs and his smile.
Jake frowns slightly. “I miss it too.”
“It’s not coming back.”
“No”—Jake shakes his head—“probably not.”
“So we could try maybe going slower or varying up your velocity a little more.”
Jake gives a deliberative nod, like he doesn’t want to say a flat-out no.
“That’s the part where you can tell me to go fuck myself,” Alex says.
“Let me think for a minute.”
Alex waits, coated in a vague embarrassment like playing a new song for a friend.
“Okay,” Jake says finally, but doesn’t say anything else.
“Justokay—that’s it?”
“Now you know how it feels when you do it.” Jake laughs, and Alex wants to kiss him, a want echoed in Jake’s smile, which gradually fades, in how he wets his lower lip with his tongue. In how he whispers, “I want to try.”
“That kind of pitching takes finesse.”
Jake nods and moves fractionally closer, air between them going warm.
“We’ll have to work on it,” Alex says.
Another nod. Another shift, a slow gravity pulling them together.
“You might have to listen to me.”
Jake smiles. “You might have to listen to me too.”
