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He shuts Evan's front door behind him as gently as he can. He walks to the street, and then walks to the corner, and then pulls out his phone and calls a Lyft, and then he sinks down to the sidewalk and presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and sits and waits until his phone vibrates six minutes later.
When he gets home he peels off his clothes and dumps them into the washing machine. He wants to pull them out, douse them in lighter fluid, burn them in the kitchen sink. He doesn't. He wants to scour off the evidence left on his body. He doesn't.
What he does do is dig through his drawer of gym clothes and fall into something that covers him up. He makes a playlist, titles it Sad Sack of Shit, and he pulls on his sneakers and he heads out into the alley and then up the hill, setting a crushing pace, punishment for everything he drank last night, punishment for every move he made, for every word he said.
Eight miles later he's on his third lap around the park when he hears a shrill "LOOK OUT!" and doesn't look fast enough and gets a face full of something big and green.
"Oh my god, oh my god, I'm so sorry," a chorus of voices is saying when he blinks his eyes back open. He's on his back, in the grass, the dew-wet blades soaking him through his shirt. A handful of middle-school-ish girls are hovering around him wearing matching looks of concern.
"What the hell," he mumbles, and it comes out a little thick and a little garbled.
"You have a nosebleed," one of the girls says. She's pressing something to his face and he paws at it, lifts it up so he can see—it's a tie-dye hoodie. "Because Emma can't aim her pitches to save her life."
Another girl glares at her. "I said look out!"
"You're supposed to yell fore, Emma."
"That's golf, dipshit!"
"Hey, hey, chill," Tommy says, sitting up. He pulls the hoodie off his face and feels around: his nose probably isn't broken but it hurts like hell and he'll more than likely have a black eye in the morning. He's not gushing, at least. "I think I'm fine."
"Are you sure? You want us to call 9-1-1?"
He snorts, and immediately regrets it; a wad of blood lands on the ruined hoodie. "No. Don't worry about it. I'm a firefighter anyway."
"Oh my god, Emma, you almost killed a firefighter. You're going to go to jail."
"You're not going to jail," Tommy says, heading off the meltdown at the pass. He sounds ridiculous, all his consonants muddled together. He looks at the girls and then scans the park; they seem like they're here by themselves. "Are you kids waiting for your coach or something?"
They look at each other, then back at him. "That's the problem," the girl who was holding the hoodie says. She seems to be in charge. "We signed up for a tournament and all of our coaches bailed because most of our parents are lame and don't do sports and have jobs and stuff. We were supposed to be coached by Jules's cousin Rachel but she just texted and said she couldn't do it because she has a boyfriend now and coaching community softball is apparently dork behavior and Kaylee's mom said she would do it but then she got hit by a shopping cart in the Trader Joe's parking lot and fractured her leg in eight places and Mr. Gibson can't do it because they're making him do the prealgebra tutoring sessions on weekends this semester so basically we're screwed."
"Eight places," Tommy repeats. "Shopping cart? Was that last Thursday? I responded to that call."
"Oh my god," another girl says. "That was my mom. Apparently it was stacked too high with cans of bubble water and they all fell on her and crushed her."
"She's okay, though?"
"Oh, she's fine," Kaylee says. Tommy doubts that.
"Anyway," hoodie girl says, as if the interruption never happened, "we don't have a coach, and that means the Scorpions are going to get disqualified from the tournament, and none of us will make the high school team and we won't get scholarships and we'll die."
Yeah, Tommy seriously doubts that, too. "Well, that all sucks," he says. "Good luck, I guess. Sorry about the hoodie—want me to wash it and bring it back?"
"No, it's fine," hoodie girl says. She sighs forlornly. "Sorry Emma broke your nose."
"It's not broken, I'm fine." Tommy gets to his feet. "Well, see you around."
He makes it ten yards away before he stops.
"Okay," he says, turning; they're all still waiting in the grass, like they knew this would happen. "I played baseball in high school, I guess, but that was almost thirty years ago."
"That's okay," hoodie girl says. "We know the rules. We're just bad at the game."
"I've never coached anything before," he warns.
"But you're a first responder, and it's helpful to have someone who knows first aid," Emma says.
He walks back over to them. "Alright. Fine. How long until the tournament?"
"Damn, Kinard," Donato says as he rolls into work the next morning. "You lose a fight?"
After a couple tylenol and a cold shower his face doesn't feel that bad, but he was right—black eye, bruise smearing over the bridge of his nose, and a rough night of sleep because he kept rolling over onto the wrong side. "I'm fine," he says. "I got hit in the face by a softball thrown by a thirteen year old."
She winces. "I thought you were doing better after the breakup, you know? Not—not going out and getting in bar fights, or whatever."
"I didn't get in a bar fight. I got hit in the face by a softball thrown by a thirteen year old," he says, as if that's somehow better.
As if on cue Richardson pokes his head in through the door. "Kinard, there's a woman out here who wants to apologize for her daughter hitting you in the face with a—Jesus! You get in a bar fight?"
Tommy pushes past him and heads out into the main hangar. "Hey," he says, offering the woman standing there awkwardly clutching her bag his hand. "Tommy Kinard."
"Oh my gosh," she says as she takes in his face. "I'm so sorry. Emma has terrible aim."
"But she has a ton of power," he says. "She just needs practice. Anyway, no harm, no foul."
"It actually looks like quite a bit of harm," she says. "I'm Tracy. I'm supposed to be their Scout leader but they've all given up on Scouts and decided they want to do softball instead and while I support everything they want to do, I honestly have no idea how softball works."
"It's like baseball, but the ball is bigger," Tommy says. "And they pitch underhand. And there's usually only seven innings."
"Right," Tracy says. Behind her Tommy can see most of the rest of the Harbor crew inching closer, ears first. "I don't know anything about baseball, either. And we were going to have their math teacher do it, but he had to bow out last minute. Scheduling, you know. It's state testing season. And then, well, another parent was going to give it a try, but she was in a horrible accident at Trader Joe's—"
"Sparkling water lady," Tommy says, nodding. "We transported her, actually. Crazy what those pallets can do when they tip."
"Oh, it's awful," Tracy agrees. "So finally we asked another girl's cousin, she's in college locally, but I guess there were some issues with her social life, and now the girls have no one."
"Right. The girls mentioned that."
Tracy nods, pursing her lips. The rest of A-shift has moved in so close there's no way to plausibly deny they're listening. Tommy braces himself. "Did you really volunteer? Or was my kid lying? Because we would be thrilled to have a firefighter as our coach. Especially one who knows how the game works."
"Not just a firefighter but a firefighter pilot," Richardson cuts in.
"Oh!"
"Yeah, he got a medal for valor and innovative thinking last year," Donato adds.
"Oh, wow," Tracy says. Tommy feels his face heating up.
From behind him Melton comes and puts a hand on Tommy's shoulder. "Ma'am, if you were to ask me which of my crew I would trust most to take charge in an emergency, or to fly a helicopter through hurricane conditions, or to lead a group of high school girls—"
"Middle school," Tracy corrects.
"—middle school girls to a softball tournament, well, I would choose this man for all three."
"Sir," Tommy says, but Melton ignores him and guides Tracy over to his office.
"Now, being a dad, I know a little about the machinations of the community sports world myself, and I know how hard it is to get things scheduled…"
The door shuts behind them, and Donato and Richardson and every other fucking joker in this hangar pounce on him like cats on a sickly tired mouse.
"I told you," he says, pointing at his eye. "Softball thrown by a tween."
"Hey, man, whatever it takes to get you out of this funk," Richardson says. "Glad you've got a hobby."
"I have a million hobbies," Tommy protests. "And I'm not in a funk!"
Everyone fidgets a little.
"…am I in a funk?"
Donato nods. "So it's, you know, really good to see you doing something that'll make you happy," she says.
Tommy presses the heels of his hands into his eyes, yelping when he remembers the giant fucking bruise on his face. Someone pats his back reassuringly.
Then Melton's office door is swinging open again. "Hey," he barks, "don't you people have chores to be doing?"
Everyone except Donato and Richardson skitter off to their own corners of the hangar.
"So," Tracy says. "Your, um, your boss gave me your schedule, I hope that's okay. Just to be clear, this is a volunteer thing."
"Not doing this for the money," Tommy says.
"And park rules technically say that groups of kids larger than six need two adult chaperones, and usually a parent is free, but some days we might need—"
Donato's on that instantly. "I'm so down to chaperone. I'm Lucy, by the way."
"Okay," Tracy says, typing furiously on her phone. "I think we can make this work. What are you doing Saturday?"
That's my line, Tommy thinks. "I'm free."
Scorpions Softball Coordination Thread
Maybe: Tracy added Tommy Kinard to the conversation.
Tracy: Hey everybody, this is Tommy Kinard, he's the firefighter that Emma hit yesterday. He's volunteered to coach the team.
Maybe: Stephanie: Hi Tommy! I'm Stephanie, Kaylee's mom. Thanks for rescuing me from the pallets at TJs lol!!
Maybe: Marc: Tayla's dad!
Maybe: Andrea: Kylie's mom
Maybe: Sean: I'm one of Rae-Anne's
Maybe: Nicole C: Rae-Anne
Maybe: Scott: Rae-Anne
Maybe: Janessa: Rae-Anne
Maybe: Nicole H: Olivia
Maybe: Chris: Rae-Anne
Tommy doesn't really know a lot of tweens. He'd missed most of Denny's in-between years, only met Christopher when he shifted from boy to young man. A-shift at Harbor is two guys with grown kids, Richardson with a new baby, and Lucy, Calvin, and him, ever the childless wonders. He'd felt the window open up when he met Evan, and felt it close tight when he left. Just the way these things go, but even thinking that is akin to putting a band-aid on a geyser.
He surveys his squad of warriors. Hoodie girl—Tayla, catcher, de-facto leader, loudest and largest, soft halo of blonde hair belying the raging bull within—stands to attention, front and center, cap on sideways. She's wearing the blood-soaked hoodie like a trophy. There's Emma to her left, less confident, can't aim for shit, unaware of the strength of her own arm, but once she figures it out she's going to be unstoppable. Kaylee the shortstop stands on her other side, picking dirt out from under her nails; she's got a melodramatic streak but she's better than anyone else at keeping her eyes on the ball. Kylie is third base, Olivia on first, Rae-Anne in center field, and then the team is rounded out by a trio of seventh-grade tagalongs: Annie (second base), Jules (right field), and Gonzo (left).
"Like the muppet?" Tommy asks.
"No, like the journalism style popularized by Hunter S. Thompson," she says. She pops a bubble in her gum. The other girls roll their eyes but Tommy is privately thrilled: this group is full of weirdos, just like him.
"Okay," he says. "That's really great. How about we warm up and then figure out a strategy to crush this fucking tournament?"
They cheer, and growl, and start smacking each other with their gloves before dropping them in a pile at his feet.
"Wait, Olivia," he says, as they start jogging to the end of the field for drills. He flips through the printed-out roster that Emma's mom had made for him. "What's your last name?"
"No, it's Hu," she says, and Tommy grins so wide it hurts his bruised face. "Why?"
"No reason, just wanted to check. Okay, let's start with some sprints," he says, and they all take off, giggling as they go.
Lucy's taking her chaperoning duties very seriously. She shows up twenty minutes late, pops open a camp chair, and stretches out with a can of diet cherry pepsi and an e-reader. "Yell if you need me," she says, before flipping her sunglasses down.
"Is she your girlfriend?" asks Kylie.
"Oh, god," Lucy says.
"No," Tommy says. "Uh—no. We're just coworkers."
"We're friends," Lucy says with a pout.
"We're just friends," Tommy corrects.
"Oh," Kylie says.
"Do you have a girlfriend?" asks Olivia.
"Aaahh," Tommy says eloquently.
"Or a boyfriend?"
"Emma's gay," Kaylee says. "If that helps."
"And Tayla has two dads," Emma says.
"And Rae-Anne's parents are in a polycule," Tayla says.
"And Gonzo's… well, Gonzo," Rae-Anne adds.
Gonzo simply shrugs.
Tommy rolls his shoulders back. "Great. Okay. Boyfriend," he says. "Or—well."
"Somewhat recent, painful breakup," Lucy calls from her camp chair.
"Don't spread my shit around," Tommy complains, but the girls have already latched onto it. "No, no, we're not talking about my love life. Or lack thereof. Okay. Stop. Hey!"
They all shut up at once.
"Everybody line up, we're doing catching drills."
The girls groan and collect their gloves and head back out onto the grass.
"Thanks for that, by the way," he says to Lucy. She smiles and takes a sip of her drink.
They work on throwing. They work on catching. They work on sprinting and sliding and getting out of each others' way. They have batting practice and he convinces Kaylee to do a demonstration on following the ball.
"Okay, girls," he says at the second practice, and one of them pipes up, "We're not all girls, Coach."
"Oh," he says, looking around at them. "Uh, people?"
They shrug.
"Players" is written off as boring; "comrades" goes over most of their heads. "How about Scorpions," he says, and they holler and cheer and throw their gloves in the air.
"Alright, Scorpions, get working on your sprints," he says, and the cheers turn to groans, but it's fine.
Some days Tracy joins him at the field, with a cooler full of juice boxes and orange slices and animal crackers. Some days it's one of Tayla's dads, Marc, a dentist who looks a lot more uptight than he is. Some days it's Rae-Anne's step?mother?—Tommy's really not sure how anyone in that family is related, but he's not judging. Lucy even comes back for another afternoon when all the parents are busy.
Unluckily for him it's the day after they ran into Evan on a call, loading a patient into the air ambulance and stepping back and almost tripping over the guy, Evan's eyes wide as he scanned Tommy's face and clocked the still-lingering bruise.
"Tommy," Evan said, Hen on his other side jumping to attention, "are you okay?"
"Christ, Buck, leave him alone, we're at work," Lucy snapped, and that was enough to make Evan deflate entirely. He stumbled backwards and Hen guided him away from the helicopter before Tommy could fire it up and decapitate himself and everyone in the vicinity so he never had to have this conversation again.
"I mean, don't get me wrong, he's a great guy," Lucy says from her ever-present camp chair the next day. "But he's such a bull in a china shop with relationships."
That's not true, Tommy thinks; Evan may have been clumsy, but it was Tommy who had placed his own heart inside the thinnest, most fragile glass case. It was Tommy who had unscrewed one of the legs holding it up. It was Tommy who had handed over a baseball bat and allowed Evan to go wild.
"Well?" Lucy asks, and Tommy sighs.
"He's kind. He's funny. Curious. A really good friend. Caring and empathetic and gentle and he's going to make a really good d—"
He cuts himself off, feeling strangled, feeling breathless, and Lucy's eyes go wide as she realizes what he was going to say, and she waves him away, sends him down the hill to the pond to clear his head and get his breath back and he can hear her behind him clapping her hands, calling "Hey, Scorpions, let's do some stretches! Coach is fine, he just needed to take a call, okay, let's go," and he's so grateful nobody but the tadpoles and the ducks in this pond have to witness him breaking down over the fact that he thought Evan was going to be the one to finally give him a family.
The eighth graders are locked in. When they're not focused on trying to suss out Tommy's dating situation—and he knows that's what they're up to, because they're always going hushed and awkward when he walks up to them—they're focusing on the tournament, on training, on getting better at the game as a whole. The seventh graders are a different story entirely.
"So, Coach," Gonzo says one Tuesday afternoon. "A couple of us watched a movie this weekend. A really old movie. Like, so old."
"From last century," Annie says.
"From last millennium," Jules says.
"It was called The Sandlot," Gonzo says.
"Christ," Tommy says, looking down at them.
"Anyway, we were wondering if you would buy us some chewing tobacco," Gonzo says.
Tommy scratches his face. "You want me to buy you… chewing tobacco."
"Yeah, or, uh, dip."
"Backy."
"Chew."
"So we can learn how to spit."
"And put some hair on our chests."
"I'm not buying you chewing tobacco," Tommy says. "You're thirteen."
"Twelve," Annie says.
"That's even worse. Absolutely not."
He watches them plod away, kicking rocks and mumbling to themselves, and on his way out of Harbor after his next shift he stops at 7-11 and picks up a bag of Big League Chew and a sack of sunflower seeds.
"Alright," he says the next day. "Time to learn the time-honored American tradition of chewing and spitting."
This is, predictably, a hit; he almost doesn't mind the amount of time he spends after everyone goes home ripping chewed bubble gum up out of the grass.
At their next practice Annie cleats Jules—on accident, she swears, and both of them are crying and Jules's nail is broken and she's got blood on her finger and the couple with their baby and their French bulldog at the picnic table are glaring at Tommy like he, personally, made all the noise happen, and Annie's working herself up into an anxiety attack, and Tommy sends the rest of the team over to Tracy and her orange slices and he leads Annie and Jules to his truck and he digs around for his first aid kit and some alcohol wipes and he makes Annie sit with her head between her knees and he cleans Jules's hand off and wraps her finger in band-aids and facilitates an apology and some forgiveness and they hug it out and all is well.
"You're good at that," Tracy says to him as they all take their places on the diamond again. "You don't have any kids?"
"Ah. No," Tommy says.
Tracy nods. Her daughter is tossing the ball, left hand to right hand, and she winds up for a pitch; Tommy watches Tracy tense up, just slightly. "Do you want them?"
Tommy breathes in, and he breathes out, and he nods once.
"Best thing I ever did in life was have Emma," Tracy says. "Middle school is a weird time, but you're really good with them."
He leans back against the chain-link fence, crossing his arms over his chest. "They're good kids," he says. "I could've used an outlet like this, when I was their age."
She hands him the bag of orange slices. There's still a few left, floating in the juice at the bottom of the ziploc bag, and he has to shake the juice off his hand when he pulls one out, but she has a napkin ready and he trades the bag for it. "Were you getting into trouble, when you were thirteen?" she asks.
When Tommy was thirteen the threatening cloud around his father that had forever been building into a storm finally broke. Sometimes late at night when he's been ruminating too long he presses his hand against his cheekbone and thinks he can still feel the fracture there, thirty years healed. "Nobody really thought I'd amount to much," he tells her, instead of all of that; but she looks at him like she knows, anyway.
"And now you're a pilot," she says. "With a medal."
He smiles to himself.
She opens up her water bottle, one of the stupid ones with the handles and the built-in straw, and pours the rest of the orange juice into it. "Emma's father passed last year," she says, apropos of nothing. "Car accident. I'm not sure how much of this she was aware of, but he and I were in the process of separating when it happened. One minute I was trying to figure out how I would explain us having to move, and custody, and all of that, and the next I'm having to figure out how to deal with her grief when it felt like I didn't have any."
"Shit," he says. On the field Emma chucks a pitch and it hits the center of Tayla's glove. Fifth time in a row, which is a new record.
"This is going to sound callous," she says.
Tommy shrugs. "I'm not going to judge you."
"You might, when you hear it." She knocks back her orange juice shot. "I realized, when he was gone, that it wasn't him that was making me unhappy, it was me not leaving him when I first knew I wanted to. I could've been enjoying myself the whole time, and maybe he and I would've been friends after getting some space from each other, and then maybe I would've been grieving him, too. But instead I was just relieved."
Jules hits one to the infield and Olivia fumbles it, lets it roll out to shallow right where there's no coverage because the right fielder is rocketing past first, turning the corner. For a second Tommy thinks she'll pull up, change tactics, but instead, like she's just getting right back on the horse, she dives into the dirt and slides into second and Annie, to her credit, leaps out of the way. "Good job," he calls, before turning back to Tracy.
"I'm telling you this because I'm getting the feeling that you're holding yourself back from the thing that you want," Tracy says. His face must betray him because she grabs his shoulder, gives him a squeeze. "I don't want you to run out of time."
She hands him the last orange slice and politely ignores the way his hand shakes as he reaches for it.
It takes three and a half weeks of every-other-day practices and sprints and batting and catching and chanting to remember who runs where and who throws to who and who does what, but as Tommy watches his kids scrimmage each other for the third time today, his hands on his hips, a wad of bubble gum in his mouth, he has to admit: they're ready. Not for the big leagues, mind you, and probably not even for high school, but unless the rest of the teams in the LA metro area are made of genetically improved Amazonian warriors, the Scorpions will do alright. He just has to figure out how to get Emma to aim the right way even when she's tired. And he should probably convince Gonzo to stop trying to call their shots—"I learned this from The Sandlot," they say. "That wasn't a documentary," he says back. And if he could do something about the way Rae-Anne keeps tossing her bat like it personally insulted her, tossing it without looking, which has led more than once to a bat-sized bruise on his thigh or across his torso; and whatever these kids are doing digging a hole in the turf at this park is most likely not kosher—
"It's a bunny! Oh my god, a bunch of baby bunnies!"
"But other than that, Mr. Kinard, how was the play?" he asks himself, and he jogs over to stop the crime in progress.
"DeLuca," Sal barks into his phone, and Tommy rolls his eyes.
"It's 2025. You have caller ID. I know who you are."
"Hey, you could be some random jagoff on the street who picked up a cell phone and dialed the emergency contact."
"You're not my emergency contact," Tommy lies.
"What, did you finally go out and make some other friends?"
"Anyway," Tommy says. "I need you to do something for me and not ask why."
"Well, I'm not going to do that," Sal says.
Tommy heaves a sigh. "There's a middle school softball tournament at Elysian next weekend. Can you look up which house is on ambulance duty for it?"
"Unexpected," Sal says. Tommy hears clicking in the background. "Thought you were gonna ask me to dump a bunch of fire retardant on your ex-boy's car. You're in luck, though, because the sweet baby-faced innocents of the 122 headed by yours truly are going to be providing this important public service."
"Oh, good," Tommy says. "I'll see you there, then."
"You got some news for me, Kinard? Like, why you're apparently going to a middle school softball war?"
"I have been drafted into the softball wars," Tommy says. "No, I, um—you know, I have an abundance of spare time right now, and—look, I'm coaching a team. I was on a run, and I got hit in the face with an errant softball, and I decided, out of the goodness of my heart, to use my free time and my vast well of sports knowledge to make sure the eighth grader who threw it never misses her target again."
The thing he appreciates most about Sal is that twenty years of friendship has just made them both weirder. The guy's an ass when he wants to be, which is most of the time, but he's smart and he's good at his job and he's one of a very select group of people who has Tommy mostly figured out. And he can read between the lines, and he's not going to make Tommy spell it out.
"Noble and magnanimous of you," Sal says. "I heard there's a teacher shortage, if you want to do a Mr. Holland's Opus thing next."
"Wouldn't a better comparison be, like, The Rookie?"
"You tell me, I ain't seen either of them," Sal says. In the background Tommy can hear the bells go off. "Duty calls, Thomas. Good luck with your softball team."
"You're butch," Marc says, handing Tommy an apron and a pair of grill tongs. Tommy's not even over the threshold of this nice-ass Georgian revival situated on a double-sized lot up in the canyon. "We need you on meat duty. Nine hungry pre-teens and neither of us know what we're doing out there."
"Hi, Marc, nice to see you, lovely house you've got here," Tommy rattles off, but he settles the apron over his head and takes the tongs and lets Marc lead him through the hall and past the kitchen where his husband—Mark with a K—is rummaging through the fridge and out onto the back patio.
"Coach T's here," Marc calls.
The kids are spread out in the backyard, the seventh graders colonizing an old swing set and the rest of them sitting in the grass picking at dandelions. They mob him, briefly, then dissipate back to their various spots, and Marc hands over a plate of burgers.
"These are just burgers," Tommy says. "They're easy."
"So easy I managed to burn the first one and it was still mooing inside, so this is your job now," Marc says.
Tommy's payment is an IPA from a brewery he went to once in Santa Monica and, after some discussion, a long-handled metal spatula. Mark eventually comes out from the kitchen with some cheese options, which Tommy looks down at in despair. "You don't have any American?"
Marc wrinkles his nose. "We don't eat American in this house. What's wrong with this?"
"What about Swiss? Provolone? Cheddar slices?" Tommy pokes the shaggy chunks of aged something with the spatula. "That's not gonna melt."
"But it tastes good," Marc insists.
"Hey, I'll make you a cheeseburger with your fancy-ass cheese, I'm just warning you that it's not going to look or feel like a cheeseburger. Please tell me you have real buns and not some sourdough bullshit in there."
Luckily for him there's a 24-pack of grocery store buns waiting for him. Sure, they're multigrain, but it's the Hollywood Hills; he's honestly surprised that on a team of nine, none of these kids are vegan or allergic to wheat or doing a juice cleanse. He grills his way through the burger stack, and Mark goes back inside and finds some proper cheese and actually slices it this time, and he brings Tommy a second beer, and Tommy feels really good for a while. He's good at grilling. He's good at feeding people. This is his zone.
As the sun starts drooping down to the horizon Tayla and Emma come out of the garage armed with a ball and a bat and start taking turns lobbing it across the yard. The grill's off, now; Tommy has half a mind to fire it back up for roasting marshmallows, but he didn't see any in the pantry when he went in search of pickles earlier. He's half paying attention to the conversation Mark and Marc are having, half keeping an eye on the shenanigans in the yard, half doing perimeter checks and quadruple-checking that the propane line on the grill isn't going to split open and kill them all.
Whatever Marc is about to say next is interrupted by a shattering of glass and all the kids going silent at once and Tommy can't help his flinch. For a second he's back at his parents' house but it's over as soon as the silence is, and Marc and Mark are rolling their eyes genially, Mark heading in to grab a broom, Marc calling to Tayla that he'll have to take it out of her college fund, and just like that the yard is back to laughter.
"Thanks," Tommy says awkwardly, when all the excitement has died down. "For not getting mad at her."
Marc looks askance at him. "Why would I be mad at her? It's just a window."
"I did that once, and my dad wasn't that nice." Tommy gestures at his belt, mimes pulling it out of the loops, and as soon as the words are out of his mouth and the movement out of his hands he realizes this experience might not have been universal. Indeed Marc is now staring at him with something he can't quite name. "I mean—it was fine—"
"Tommy," Marc says kindly, "it's just a window, and my husband and I are wealthy, and even if we weren't there's still no reason to be mad at a child for an accident. Let alone hurt them."
Oh. The look Marc is giving him is pity, isn't it. He rips his face away and looks down at the beer in his hand, which is starting to swim a little bit. He feels like a tornado, on the edge of tearing through this party and ruining it for everyone. "Sorry. Jesus. I don't—"
"What's up?" Mark asks as he comes back out onto the patio.
"Tommy was just getting a little bit morbid, it's nothing," Marc says.
Tommy squints at the ABV on the label of this beer. "Oh, shit," he says.
"Yeah, those triple IPAs'll get you," Mark says, taking the bottle away. "Is this your third?"
"Fourth. I need to sit down," Tommy says. "I should probably go home?"
He takes a step toward the house and immediately stumbles.
"That's gonna be a no from me, big guy," Mark says, getting a shoulder under Tommy's arm. "Should I put him in the den?"
"Yeah, I'll be in in a second," Marc says, and as Mark steers him into the house Tommy can see the kids looking up at the commotion.
"Is Coach okay?" Emma asks.
"He'll be fine, he's just not feeling well," Marc says. Damage control. The strength of Tommy's idiocy is hitting him, as is the full force of three and a half thirteen-percents. Making an ass of himself at a kids' party; no one's ever going to give him custody of a baby. They'd have to be completely out of their minds.
Mark drops him onto the futon in a dark, quiet room. "You need a bucket?" he asks, pulling open the curtains.
Tommy kicks off his boots and pulls his feet up onto the futon with him, trying to make himself small. They're on the other side of the house, now, facing the street, and the streetlight courses a soft glow into the room. It's lined with dark wood shelves, with books, with pictures of Mark and Marc and Tayla over the years. Tommy is suddenly very close to sober. "No, I'm good," he says. But if he's good, then he needs to get out of here, to go home, to flee to safety and not infect this family with whatever caustic thing is dripping off him.
"You don't look good," Mark says with a snort.
Marc bustles into the room with a bundle of linens. "I come bearing sheets," he says, dropping them into Tommy's lap.
"It's eight PM," Tommy says. The sheets are cotton, that slightly crispy texture he prefers. "I can go home."
"You're staying here and that's final. Get up so I can make this bed."
Mark, halfway out the door at this point, pauses and leans back in. "If you really want to go, we'll get you an Uber," he says. "But you're welcome here, okay?"
"And it would be nice to have you here in the morning so we can do a soccer mom caravan," Marc adds. "Are you going to get up?"
"Yes, sir." Tommy gets up, and immediately flops into the armchair on the other side of the den. "I have a duffel bag in my truck," he says. Mark nods and leaves.
Marc pulls the futon out flat. He stretches out the fitted sheet, adds a couple of pillows, spreads a quilt over the bed. "Let me guess," he says, taking a step back to admire it. "Marines?"
"Army," Tommy says. "You?"
"Air force. Bosnia."
Tommy wrinkles his nose. "How old are you?"
"Fifty-eight," Marc says primly.
"I didn't know you flew."
"I don't, anymore. Let my license lapse when I got busy with dental school and then I stayed busy making millions of dollars. And then I met Mark."
"Whirlwind romance?"
"You could say that," Marc says. He flashes Tommy a smile, a little conspiratorial, his teeth glinting in the soft light coming through the window. "He's a decade younger than me. Tracy told us that your captain told her that you had a bad breakup."
"I would love for that to stop being a common topic of conversation," Tommy says.
"Well, obviously it's still affecting you," Marc says. "You want to talk about it?"
"I was the first man he dated. Fucked. Anything," Tommy says miserably. "He was always going to want to find someone better. I was never going to be his last."
Marc snorts. "That is a weird and self-defeating thing to say. Do you conduct all your relationships like that?"
This line of questioning is making Tommy feel like a petulant crank. "No," he says. "Just the important ones."
Gently, Marc says: "I thought I was going to be alone forever. And then I met Mark, and things happened really fast, but they worked out. And your life can work out, too, if you want it. If you try. Sometimes you have to let yourself do the thing you want."
Tommy wants to sear himself so he's no longer raw. Thankfully Mark comes back in holding Tommy's duffel bag, which he deposits on the futon. "You keep your truck psychotically clean," he says.
"Army," Marc says, and Mark taps his nose. "Alright, we're in the bedroom around the corner if you need anything. The kids are all upstairs, so you might want to sleep with headphones."
"Thanks, guys," Tommy says, and he waves them out.
He waits until he hears the stampede of kids running up the stairs before he sneaks out to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He keeps two spare outfits and something to sleep in packed in this duffel, a godsend for on-call shifts, and he puts himself to bed feeling a little less drunk, a little less at-ease.
Upstairs a TV turns on. He hears the 20th Century sting, and the kids giggling over the music, and then they quiet down enough for him to hear John Leguizamo start singing.
He mashes his face into the futon, dragging the pillow up and over his head. He doesn't want to listen to this. One arm snakes out from under the blanket and he drags the duffel bag closer to the bed; there's a pair of earbuds in here, somewhere, that he uses on nights at the station when Richardson starts snoring, but they've fallen to the bottom of the bag and he can't reach them as he swipes his hand back and forth across it. He falls into a sort of half-sleep, waking up every so often when the music gets loud.
"Love makes us act like we are fools," Nicole Kidman sings.
Tommy crushes his eyes shut. What is he so afraid of? Why is he so afraid of it? He's been living within his strictly enforced boundaries for decades, and he can't step outside of them because something terrible might happen. But something terrible still happens, it always does. The boundaries that were meant to keep him safe have become prison walls holding him in.
He's suffocating on his own safety.
He startles awake at dawn with a headache building behind his eyes. The futon is just short enough that he'd had to sleep curled up slightly, legs pulled in toward his chest, and so his lower back is aching too, a little pinge radiating out from his lumbar spine. He hauls himself to his feet and pads out of the den, heading first to the little downstairs bathroom where he studiously ignores the deep circles under his eyes, and he rummages around in the drawers until he finds a bottle of ibuprofen, and then he makes his way to the kitchen.
There's a box of pancake mix on the counter. There's bacon and eggs and milk in the fridge, and a container of strawberries, and another one of blueberries. Tommy looks around the kitchen as quietly as he can, finds his tools, and gets to work.
"You didn't have to do all this," Marc says as he stumbles into the kitchen half an hour later. Tommy has a plate stacked a dozen high with pancakes; the strawberries are cut, the bacon is staying warm in the oven, and he'd found some maple syrup way in the back of the fridge.
"Consider it a thank you for putting up with me," Tommy says. He just hopes this extravagant breakfast goes down better than the last one he made.
"Are you sure you don't want us to set you up with Mark's sister's brother-in-law? Because he's not bad looking, and he makes pretty good money, and we'd love to be able to eat brunch with you every Sunday."
"Just come over to my place for brunch," Tommy says. "No setting me up required."
Marc nods knowingly. "Well, if it doesn't work out," he says, and trails off as Tayla and Emma and Kaylee pile into the kitchen in their pajamas.
The tournament starts at 11, which means with Saturday LA traffic and the fact that there's nine middle schoolers to corral they'll have to be ready to go by 10, which means even with the early-morning wake-up everything's still rushed. "Leave the dishes, I don't care," Marc says, and he doesn't let Tommy strip the futon or set it back upright or even clean up after himself, either.
"Knock knock," Tracy calls from the foyer. She pokes her head into the kitchen. "Everyone ready to go? How are we splitting up the cars? Who's riding with who? Emma, you're with me."
"Ugh, Mom!" Emma yells back. "I want to ride with Coach!"
"Oh, yeah, I want to ride with Coach, too." "And me!" "Me too!"
Everyone looks at Tommy, who was expecting to have thirty minutes to himself on the drive. "My truck can seat three," he says, and the clamoring starts.
He thinks, as he puts his duffel bag into the truck bed and then hauls himself up into the front seat, about why he shelled out for the four-door when he bought this truck, despite being single, despite living in Los Angeles. He thinks, now, with Olivia and Rae-Anne having a slap fight in the backseat and Emma—having gotten her way, with a promise to pick up her lunch from her mom when they get to the park—settling into the front, that maybe he was just planning ahead. A car seat could fit in the back, easily.
"Can I put some music on, Coach?" Emma asks, and Tommy unlocks his phone and hands it over without thinking. It's not like there's anything incriminating on there. Except, wait— "What's 'Sad Sack of Shit'?"
"Don't say that out loud," Tommy says.
"Is this your breakup playlist?"
"Sometimes a title is just a title."
She looks at him critically. "I don't think that's true."
"Alright, just put something on," he says, and pulls out of the driveway behind Tracy.
The opening notes of Comfortably Numb start playing. "This is weird," she says, halfway through Roger's first verse.
"Wait til the next guy starts singing," he tells her.
"Okay," she says, and waits. "This guy?"
Tommy nods. This neighborhood is absurdly designed; he has to take three lefts just to get off the hill.
"Cool guitar solo," Olivia says from the backseat.
"Do you ever listen to Sabrina Carpenter?" Emma asks.
"No idea who that is."
"Chappell Roan?"
Tommy shakes his head.
"Olivia Rodrigo?"
"Listen, I was in high school in the nineties," he says. "If they were born after 2000, I probably haven't heard of them."
"What about Taylor Swift?"
"I have heard of Taylor Swift."
Emma keeps scrolling through his playlist. "Do you have any girls on here at all?"
"Do I have any girls—give me that," he says, snatching his phone back. He's pulling up to a light, anyway, so he doesn't feel bad about the screen time. He's got half of The Spirit Room on this stupid playlist. "Let me introduce you kids to the queen of hopeless romantics."
The girls are nodding along, bopping their heads. And they'd better, because Tommy's weirdly protective of this album. It got him through his first deployment, funny enough, the last CD he bought before he shipped out—half as a joke, because his friend Owen was being a dick in the record store about Tommy's obvious crush on Michelle Branch, and half because he'd heard this on the radio the week before and it had hit him like a gut punch—and everyone else in his squad was homesick enough too that they didn't give him shit for it.
"I think one of my moms listens to this," Rae-Anne says. "It's kinda cool."
"This used to be my go-to karaoke song," he tells them.
"You sing, Coach?"
An overstatement. He goes out, sometimes. He sings in the shower, when he's home alone, which is all of the time these days. The timing is perfect, though; he's just merged onto the 101, and the chorus is coming up, and he sighs and lets loose and belts: "'Cause you're everywhere to me! And when I close my eyes it's you I see! You're everything I know that makes me believe I'm not alone!"
The girls are laughing hysterically. Emma has her phone out, and Tommy just knows that everyone on this team and all of their parents is going to have a copy of this in thirty seconds, and honestly it just makes him sing harder. Whatever. He's having fun.
"Hey Coach?" Emma asks, once the song's over, once he's turned the music back down. "Why'd you and your boyfriend break up?"
"Um," he says. He checks his blind spot and moves over to the right lane. "Adult reasons."
"Was he mean to you?"
I don't have to have feelings for everyone I sleep with echoes through his head. "No," Tommy says. "No, we just—we kept having communication issues, I think."
"Oh," she says. "Do you still like him?"
"Yeah," Tommy says. "Yeah, I do."
He takes the exit, onto the 110 and then immediately back off it. Olivia and Rae-Anne in the back are staring at something on Olivia's phone; he hopes they're not turning him into a meme and putting him on TikTok or whatever.
"Is that why you were sad last night?"
There's a long line of cars waiting to turn. Tommy looks over at her. She and her mom have the same intense stare. "I guess so," he says. "You don't have to worry about that, though. Just focus on the games today."
Whoever's at the head of this column starts turning, and Tommy takes his foot off the brake, but right as he's about to turn into the ball field parking lots he catches sight of something that makes his blood run cold and he pulls off onto the curb instead. "What, what is it?" Emma asks, pressing her face to the window.
Tommy points at the ambulance crew setting up by the gates, the shiny 118 glinting in the morning sunlight. "Speak of the fucking devil," Tommy mutters.
"Ooh, Coach said the fuck word," Rae-Anne says.
"Did you know he was going to be here?" Emma asks, and Tommy shakes his head. This cannot be happening. "It's okay," she says. "I have a plan. But I'm gonna need you to find the coolest, most badass, most hardcore song in the entire world, okay?"
Five minutes later they're back in the line of cars.
"Alright everyone," Emma says. "Windows?"
"Down," Rae-Anne and Olivia say.
"Sunglasses?"
"On."
"We're turning?"
The crossing guard signals for Tommy to turn. "Go time."
"Hit it, Coach," Emma says, and Tommy cranks the volume and presses play.
At an even five miles per hour, to the opening notes of Enter Sandman, Tommy rolls his retinue into the parking lot.
"Everyone's gonna think we're so cool," Olivia whispers, and Rae-Anne swats her with the back of her hand. "Not if you don't stay quiet!"
They drive past the ambulance.
"Is that Tommy?" he hears Hen say.
Chimney chimes in with an "Is that child giving me the middle finger?"
Bobby's there, too, chuckling a little as he unloads supplies onto the table; but over everyone's heads he can see Evan staring at him, his mouth open, a strange look on his face.
He executes a perfect back-in parking job. Behind them in the stands a bunch of the Scorpions parents have gathered, laughing at them; he hops out of the truck, helps Olivia down from the backseat, and they all head for the bleachers.
"Wow," Tracy says as they get close. "That sure was an entrance."
"Mom, Coach's ex is here," Emma says. She points at the ambulance.
Tracy assesses the situation. "Did you know—"
"No," Tommy says, "it was supposed to be another firehouse—"
"Well, here," Tracy says, and she tosses him a shirt. "You may as well give him a show."
The shirt is red, and it's printed with "SCORPIONS" on the front and "#1 COACH" on the back, and it's a size too small.
"This isn't going to fit," he warns her.
"That's fine," she says. "You better turn around while you change."
He's obedient, so he does, facing the ambulance crew with what he can tell is a deep blush growing on his face as he pulls off the shirt he was wearing and tugs on the new one. Somebody wolf-whistles and he rolls his eyes.
"Okay, here's how today's going to go," a volunteer says as she jogs over. "We've got two rounds of three-inning games to determine who's going to the championship round, then the derby break after lunch. First up you're playing the Raspberries here on this close field, and if you win you're playing either the Santa Monica Sting Rays or the Jenna Ortega Lovers—"
"Ooh, that's a good name," Kaylee says. "We should've gone with that."
"No it isn't, shut up," Tayla says.
"Then we'll need you to send up one of your hitters for the derby, and then after the derby there'll be time for snacks, and then it's championship time, okay?"
"Got it," Tommy says, knowing Tracy's writing all this down.
"Good luck and have fun!" the volunteer calls before sprinting off to the next team.
The team huddles around him, and he takes a knee. "We can do this," he starts. "Look at what we've overcome in the last few weeks. Anxiety. Aim issues. Forgetting which way to run. Aggression."
"Heartbreak," Emma says.
"Sure, yeah. Now it's time to put all that into practice. You're good, smart, incredible kids. I'm really proud to be your coach." He tries to wipe his eye surreptitiously, but he's sure they've all clocked him. "Thanks for being a great team. Now let's get out there and kick some fucking ass, okay?"
"Scorpions, Scorpions, kill, kill, kill!" they chant.
"Uh, I didn't tell them to say that," he says to the parents.
"Whatever," Marc says. "They've said worse."
The first game is a little shaky but they do scrape out a win. The game against the Jennas or whatever the fuck is less of a fight and they come out on top 5-2. When they break for lunch Tommy takes a walk around the fields, needing to clear his head; he keeps looking over at the gates and almost catching Evan's eye.
He's halfway back from the port-a-potties when he hears someone jogging up behind him. "Hey, Tommy," Chimney calls, and Tommy slows to a halt. "How long have you been coaching softball?"
"A month," Tommy says. "Hey."
"I didn't realize this was your kind of thing. How have you been?"
Tommy has to think about it. "Okay," he says with a shrug. "This is keeping me busy."
"We miss having you around, man," Chimney says.
There's a lot of things Tommy misses about being around, too. "Will you tell everyone hi from me? I gotta get back."
"Will do. Keep in touch, okay?"
Tommy nods, and heads back to his team.
They send Tayla up for the home run derby. She's the best slugger, with the most solid arm, and she looks cool as a cucumber swinging against the batting machine, one after another, popping them out to center field or over the fence. She gets six runs, comes in second place, and hocks a loogy out onto the field as she accepts her medal.
He's not surprised to see Lucy and Richardson up in the bleachers, sharing a giant bag of peanuts. He was a little surprised when he looked up halfway through the derby to see Melton and his wife sliding in next to them. He's most surprised of all when, in the bottom of the first of the championship game, he hears a booming "Swing, batter-batter-batter," and he turns around and sees Sal there raising an ice cream cone in salute.
Asshole, Tommy texts him when there's a lull in the action, and Sal responds with a wink.
Sal: Wanted to watch you win
Sal: Wanted to make that boy of yours watch you win, too
And that's—annoying, but fine. He should never have told Sal about the breakup. He should never have told Sal about the relationship at all. He leans out over the dugout fence, twists up so he can see over the roof, and waves, making sure his middle finger is visible. Sal cheerfully gives him the finger right back, until Melton's wife smacks him with her program.
Tommy steadfastly ignores the ambulance crew, and the silhouette of Evan Buckley trying to catch his eye across the baseline.
They're deadlocked at zero into the third but it takes him through the bottom to recognize the pattern. The Unicorns' pitcher is letting them walk and giving up hits like it's her job and her fielders are left getting all the outs. Emma, though—Emma's locked in. Emma's holding it down.
Emma's pitching a no-no.
She comes back from the mound after the top of the fourth in tears.
"Hey," he says, sitting her down on the dugout bench with a water and some electrolytes and a Snickers. "What's going on?"
"I'm playing too good, coach," she wails. "I just got anxiety. I don't know."
"Listen," he says. "You just keep doing what you're doing, okay? Don't say it out loud, don't even think it, just keep throwing strikes."
"Okay," she says, taking a deep shuddery breath. "Okay."
They don't get a run in the bottom of the inning, even with his sluggers Tayla and Kylie and Rae-Anne up; their hits are just going slightly shallow, Rae-Anne managing a line drive that gets everybody out of position for thirty seconds but she's held off at third and can't get home by the time Olivia strikes out.
They change over for the fifth and then Emma's back up on the mound, one last handful of sunflower seeds before she goes.
"Hold it at zero," Tommy calls to her, and she nods.
Getting the yips this late in the game is inevitable. Of course it is. The first two strike out like usual but the third batter's where the meltdown starts. Emma throws three balls and then the batter fouls back one, two, three; the fourth ball is almost a relief. Whoever's fourth in the lineup is walking out and Tommy sees Emma drop into a squat, her head resting on her glove, and he calls time and jogs out to meet her.
"I can't do this," she mumbles.
"You absolutely can. You've been doing it all day. You've been doing it for weeks."
"No, Coach, I can't, I'm gonna—I'm gonna hit someone again, I'm gonna hit someone and kill them or break their wrist or throw it at the stands and hit my mom. I can't do it."
"Emma, that's not going to happen."
Tommy remembers something his CO used to say, a million years ago, when they were out in the desert getting blasted by sand. "If you want someone to think you respect them, get below them," he'd barked, before dropping to one knee. Weird guy, Tommy had always thought, but he takes the advice now, kneeling in the dirt in front of her.
"Listen," he says. "What do you see over there?"
"Batter."
"Behind her."
"Um, Tayla."
Tommy nods. "And Tayla's got her glove on, right?"
"Yeah."
"You just have to look at the center of Tayla's glove, okay? Like flying a helicopter. You look at your target and you send it home."
"Okay," Emma says, taking a deep breath.
"You can do this, kiddo."
"I can do this."
She stands up, and Tommy jogs back to the dugout, and she no-nos the inning. Zero-zero. He feels like he's on the edge of a cliff.
They're at the tail end of the batting order at the bottom of the fifth. Olivia's out on a line drive, and Kylie's out on strikes. For all the effort he's put into keeping the game tied at nothing, this might backfire on him. He's scanning his team in the dugout, trying to decide who to switch around and pinch, when he hears a hubbub behind him.
He turns around and sees Gonzo, tiny Gonzo, standing at home plate, bat on their shoulder, enormous wad of sunflower seeds in their mouth. They hawk the shells out into the dirt and stance up, and then right as the Unicorns' pitcher starts to wind up, Gonzo lifts their arm and points somewhere center-left.
"What are they doing," someone up above them asks.
"Holy shit," Tommy breathes.
"They're calling their shot," Tayla says in disbelief.
A hush falls over the dugout.
The pitch comes. Gonzo swings. With a deafening crack the ball lets loose and flies over the pitcher's head, over the shortstop's head, way up over the center fielder's head, off into the stratosphere, and right out of the fucking park. Gonzo looks back at the dugout and flashes a toothy grin and a thumbs up before jogging lackadaisically around the bases.
"And that's a walk-off homer from Scorpions fielder, uh… says here the name is just Gonzo. Okay," the announcer calls. "That makes the Scorpions your 2025 junior softball jamboree winners! Round of applause for the Scorpions, everybody."
The rest of the team streams onto the field, arms aloft, jumping for joy. Gonzo manages to tag home before Kaylee and Tayla are lifting them up onto their shoulders and parading them around like royalty.
"Good job, Coach," someone says, and he barely even hears them, too busy grinning so hard he's got tears in his eyes.
They get the trophy, and they do the photo-op, and they spray him down with cans of Sprite, and he tosses his soggy shirt into the truck bed and pulls his spare back over his head. They're all heading out to some pizza bar with an arcade in the back, but before they pile into their vehicles Emma shouts for them to hold up and sprints back across the field.
"Where's she going?" Tracy asks.
Tayla shrugs, but she's got a look on her face that says she knows more than she's letting on, and Tommy can see Emma's ponytail bouncing over to the ambulance crew.
He drives alone to the barcade; he puts his playlist back on, turns it up, runs through every play his kids made, every run today, every catch. When he gets there he parks next to Tracy's Mazda, tries to slip in unnoticed, doesn't do a very good job. There's an IPA and a slice of pepperoni waiting for him on the table with the parents and they congratulate him again, try to get him to sit and chat, but he promises maybe later, posts up in the corner next to the bulletin board, takes another minute to decompress. He's been decompressing for the last forty five minutes, of course, but he's still feeling tightly wound like a guitar string on a cracking neck.
Marc comes up and hands him a water, takes his empty paper plate. "You doing okay?"
"Fine," Tommy tells him, and it is the truth. "Just needed—"
"I get it," Marc says. "You did good today. We're all really grateful for everything, Tommy."
Tommy gives him a real smile.
"You come get us if there's anything you need, okay? Or want."
"Thanks," Tommy says, and he's alone again.
He looks out at the kids, all nine of them, wearing paper crowns and leis and stickers all over their faces. They're re-enacting Gonzo's homer, stuffing tickets into the games, trying to dunk their skee-balls.
And then out of the corner of his eye, out of the depths of his imagination, two more kids join the fray: younger, taller, genetically improbable; one is his daughter, named after his aunt who gave a shit about him, and she's gentle as she leans down and picks up her brother; they shift and change and she's his son, she's his daughter again, she's neither but she's still his; the other kid is wild and playing with wholehearted abandon; she's inherited his sarcasm, she's inherited her other father's kindness, his good humor. Someone brushes against his shoulder and he pulls in on himself to make room but he can't look away, even as tears swim in his eyes, can't for one moment take his eyes off this vision, these children that he could have. He feels the pit in his stomach open up into an endless yearning chasm. He knows who he wants to be standing by his side. If he blinks he might create a facsimile of Evan here, holding his hand, grinning in wonder at their kids.
This could all be yours, the universe says, with the volume of a thousand helicopters, and Tommy has to turn his face away before he loses it right here in the middle of the barcade.
He looks at the vision of Evan standing next to him. He wonders who he would have to be to make this Evan real. "I want this," he says to it, because he needs to give it a name before it consumes him fully.
"Wh-what?" the vision responds, and Tommy blinks. He's not dreaming. It really is Evan, still in uniform, squished against the wall like he's been waiting there for a while.
Tommy scrapes a hand down his face. Shit.
"Tommy," Evan says. "What do you want?"
He could run away. He could cut and run and save himself again. He could build his walls up higher, make the prison cell smaller, keep himself safer.
He lets his hand drop.
"I want a family," he says. "I want kids. I want to coach softball and soccer and debate team and whatever the fuck else my kids want to do. I want to give them everything and I want them to tell me I'm embarrassing and I want them to trust me and I want to make them breakfast and I want them to have all the love I never had. I want it."
Evan nods. "I want all that too, Tommy," he says, tentative. "Do you think you could want that with me?"
"Evan," he says, desperately and honestly, "since the day I met you I've only wanted it with you."
Evan grabs his hand, pulls it up toward his mouth, and Tommy lets it go willingly. He would let Evan take any part of him right now. "Then let's do it."
"I broke up with you," Tommy says.
"So we get back together."
"But I hurt you," Tommy says.
"I hurt you, too," Evan says. "It's okay. We fix it. I think that's love."
Tommy stares at him. Evan's face has been burned into his retinas for months, now, but every time he looks he finds something beautiful and new within it. "Love is hurting each other?"
"No, love is making it better," Evan says. "It's not something perfect you find."
"There's a lot in here that needs to be fixed," Tommy says. He feels like he's being dissected, the whole barcade a surgical theater.
But Evan, lovely Evan, only says: "You think you're the only one?"
From the skee-ball machine Tayla and Emma shoot him a surreptitious thumbs up. "Christ," Tommy says. "We have an audience."
Evan waves shyly. The parents at the table are a little more lecherous, not even hiding the way they're watching this all play out.
"Can I take you home?" Tommy asks.
"I hoped you would," Evan says. "I had Hen drop me off in the ambulance. If you said no I was going to have to call her back in disgrace."
Tommy squeezes his hand. "I should go tell the peanut gallery we're leaving."
"I'll come with," Evan says, and he strides right up to the parents' table, knocking twice on the wood between Tracy and Mark. "Hey, I'm Evan."
"We know," Mark says. Tommy should maybe tell him to tone it down.
"We're glad you came," says Tracy, laying a hand on Evan's forearm. "You take care of him, okay?"
"I'm gonna," Evan says, and he's staring at Tommy as he says it, and every neuron in Tommy's body is warning him to flee, to shut down, and for the first time in a long time Tommy ignores the message. Instead he takes Evan's offered hand, and he gives Tracy and Mark and Marc and Stephanie a wave, and he leads Evan out to the truck.
When Tommy turns the engine over Michelle Branch starts blasting. "Shit," he says, diving for the volume knob, while Evan giggles helplessly.
"For a second I thought this was that Avril song," Evan says. He snatches Tommy's phone out of the cupholder, types in the passcode, scrolls through the Sad Sack of Shit playlist. "You know? You were everything, everything that I wanted! Surprised it's not on here. It's on mine."
"Yours?"
Evan waves his own phone, then starts poking the truck's touchscreen. "Oh, good, you didn't unpair me. I mean, mine's not called—what—Sad Sack of Shit? Tommy."
"Felt appropriate at the time," Tommy says. He watches Evan's phone connect, because he's right, Tommy never did unpair him, and then Avril Lavigne is playing through his speakers. "I was already getting discharged from the army when this came out."
"That's crazy. I dated a girl in high school who loved this album. She wore a tie as a belt. Were people doing that in the nineties? You graduated in '99, right? Sometimes I see pictures of people in 2006 and—and I can't believe any of our parents let us out of the house like that. With, with the tie belts, and the really long pants, and—"
Evan's waving his hand around as he talks, and Tommy reaches across the center console and grabs it. He takes it and he holds it and he squeezes it, and he squeezes his eyes shut for a long moment, and when he opens them Evan's still and quiet and staring at him. "Sorry," Tommy says.
"For…?" Evan lets it trail off.
"Fuck, Evan, everything. Breaking up, not trusting you, getting too deep in my own head, walking out, shutting down."
Evan shakes his head. "I said, once, there's a lot we don't know about each other, and—and Tommy, this is it. We're learning. You and me, together."
Tommy exhales a breath he didn't even know he was holding. He doesn't want to watch Evan's face fall when he realizes they're still them, that they still have to fix whatever they keep breaking. "This feels like it was too easy," he admits. "The rest of it's going to be so fucking hard."
"Why does it have to be hard?" Evan counters. "Look at me, Tommy."
Tommy does.
"It's not—it's not hard, or easy, okay? It's just work. And it's going to take some time. But we can figure it all out together. Okay? That's the first thing."
"Okay," Tommy says. "What's the second thing?"
Evan nods out the windshield. "Your whole softball team is staring out the window at us."
Tommy chances a look. So they are.
"Should we give them a show?" Evan asks, waggling his eyebrows, and Tommy rolls his eyes and puts the truck in gear.
"Need to leave something to the imagination," he says, and he pulls out of the parking lot.
They barely make it into the house. They don't make it past the couch at all, and even that was a close call. Evan has his uniform pants off halfway through the living room and Tommy picks him up by his hips, hefts him up and feels his thighs securing themselves to his ribcage as he carries Evan across the room and drops him down onto the couch. He drops to his knees then pulls himself back up into a squat as Evan digs one of the throw pillows out from behind his back and drops it onto the floor. By the time Tommy gets his mouth on Evan's achingly hard cock Evan's got his shirt unbuttoned, thrown it over the couch back.
His mouth belongs here. It feels like a stupid thought until Evan says it too, whisper-shouting it to the ceiling, his head dropped back in a way that looks uncomfortable. It's also true: Evan fills him up, knocks against the back of his throat, weeps a little as Tommy chokes on it and tongues at it and drinks him down. He's nose-deep in Evan's pubes, the scent memory flashing him back to the last time they did this, on Evan's bare mattress in his un-made new place. He wriggles his hand up, gets it under Evan's thigh, crooks his thumb behind Evan's balls and they're so warm in his hand. Evan tries to buck his hips, fuck himself deeper into Tommy's throat, and Tommy just presses him back down into the couch with his head as he swallows Evan's cum.
"You smell like Sprite," Evan says, and Tommy bursts out laughing.
He gets probably thirty seconds to enjoy the afterglow, cuddled up next to Evan on the couch, and then: "I'm going to ask you a couple questions, and I want you to try really hard not to run away," Evan says, and Tommy's about to say something bitchy in response until he sees the look on Evan's face.
"Okay," Tommy says. He sits up and steels himself: feet flat on floor, shoulders rolled back, chin up, hand wrapped in Evan's.
"When you think about your future. Our future. With kids. Are—Are you picturing that in this house?"
Tommy forces the panic back. It's a softball of a question. He looks around his house with a critical eye, buying himself some time: the tiny front bedroom, the much bigger back bedroom, the bathroom in between them; the kitchen, behind them, and the little dining nook and the sliding door out into the backyard; the narrow hallway with the laundry and the utility sink, the door to the garage, a luxury which will be the thing that pushes this house into the seven figures when it, eventually, sells. He's lived here for thirteen years. There's blood and sweat and tears quite literally patched into the drywall of this house. "It's a little small," he concedes. "Kids would probably want their own rooms."
Evan nods. "Not something we have to think about right now, but something to think about eventually," he says. "Do you, um—do you have a timeline?"
"No," Tommy says.
"Do you have, like, an age you want to be a dad by?"
"I barely—"
Tommy stops and breathes and practices his zen skills. He needs something to fidget with. His hands cast about, adrift, and Evan comes to his rescue, grabbing a pen off the coffee table.
"I don't. I, uh, thought I was out of time, but someone knocked some sense into me about that last night, so. No." Evan looks at him curiously. Tommy clicks the pen and keeps going. "My friend Marc is 58. And his daughter's 13. And his husband is, uh, in his forties."
He watches Evan do the math, and he watches a shy little smile make its way across his face. "Okay. Marc was the one at the barcade? With the glasses?"
Tommy clicks and spins the pen like there's no tomorrow. "Yeah, and his husband was the guy who was kind of rude to you."
"I didn't notice," Evan says. "Okay, so you like that timeline? It's, you know, not too quick?"
If Tommy squeezes this pen any harder it's going to snap. One click, two clicks, in time with his inhale and exhale. "He told me last night that sometimes you just have to let yourself do the thing you want."
"It's true," Evan says, an air of mock-sadness settling on him. "Carpe diem, and all that."
"I'm sorry," Tommy says, again, this constant refrain, the soundtrack to his life. "Will you forgive me?"
"There's nothing to forgive," Evan says. "And I'm sorry too."
Tommy presses his nose into the crook of Evan's neck. "Will you take me back?"
"I already did," Evan says, and he kisses Tommy's forehead. "Let's start giving each other what we want, okay?"
Tommy takes a deep breath in Evan's embrace, and he sees the future laid out in front of him, and he pushes aside the barricades that were keeping it from view, and he thinks: okay.