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Chapter One

“I’ve seen better swings on your grandma!”

The razz sounded good to my ears. I sat back down on the bleacher, grinning with pride, then felt a tiny poke in my side. Ripping my sight from Phil on third base after hitting a triple—I think that was the right term—in sexy as hell baseball pants, I glanced at Roxie on my left.

“Baby boy, it’s ‘I’ve seen better curves on your grandma’,” she gently corrected then took a sip of my passion fruit boba. Scowling, I snapped my fingers for my drink. She handed it over then flung her braids over her shoulder. Her bare shoulder. I mean, sure, the off-the-shoulder Liverswell baseball jersey was cute, and Ty always raved about her shoulders being so sexy, but it was April. In Massachusetts. I was doubled up in a sweater and Phil’s football letterman jacket plus wool socks that Monique—Yeye’s main squeeze, his words, not mine—had knitted just for outdoor sports events. “Try just yelling the line I actually taught you.”

“Nope, I refuse to shout something about a belly itch.” A man had to have some scruples. I wasn’t six. I stared down into the cup now back in my hand. It was empty. How had she knocked back half a boba so quickly? I’d never seen a person inhale large beads of tapioca with such veracity. It was like Roxie absorbed those fat, squishy beads at record speed.

“Itcher. Belly itcher. Oh! Did you see Ty’s line drive to bring home Phil?” She rocketed to her little boots. “That’s my man!”

I clapped because go team. I’d not seen it. I’d been too busy looking into my empty boba cup. I really loved being one of the baseball backers, since the women who dated the ballplayers were pretty much the same type who dated the football players. Bubbly, sporty, well-versed in hair and makeup, and making engaging posts on TikTok. Well, okay, so I was not exactly sporty, or bubbly, or versed in social media. Right. So I was nothing like them at all, but they had accepted me into their ranks without question as Phil’s sig other. Not everyone was so open to same-sex couples.

Also, they were smart as hell. Most were slugging away at getting degrees while working part time and being social butterflies. Whereas I was a mediocre student trying my best to get a degree in Asian studies so I could be a translator or some such thing in the diplomatic department of the government. Speaking Mandarin was the easy part. Yeye and I spoke it at home all the time. It was the rest of the courses that kept me buried in books. And I love books, but these weren’t the fun, exciting ones. These were dry, boring, coma-inducing textbooks. Sighing with guilt over being here instead of home studying for finals, I looked at the young women around me to see if any of them seemed worried about grades. Nope, not one student at this baseball game looked like they were worrying over Ancient and Medieval Philosophies.

Not Roxie and definitely not Candy Cairngorm, who was new to the backers brigade and a transfer from Pepperdine U in Malibu, and, while being utterly adorable—living-breathing Barbie adorable—was even worse at sports knowledge than I was. Candy was on my right, shivering in a glittery sweater and shorts. Cute outfit. Totally unwise for the first game of the Lions’ season. Then again, she was from Cali, so they probably played baseball in shorts and a glittery sweater year-round.

“Hey, do you know if this period is over yet?” Candy asked, swinging her long golden hair over her shoulder in a move that made me envious not only of her hair but also of her ability to use it as punctuation. I could tell she was getting antsy. Probably frostbitten too. There was so much hair flipping in this group. Instead of flipping, I pushed my glasses up my nose. “When is Cody going to hit the ball?”

“They have five more innings yet,” I explained since Roxie was too busy searching on her phone for something that was not her boyfriend playing baseball. Ty would be crushed if he knew. I now had my eyeballs firmly on my man playing second base, adjusting his cup and waiting for LU’s pitcher to throw the next pitch to the batter. Oh-kay, well, not as sexy as he could be, but since I knew the amount of meat his cup held, his moving it aside was pretty erotic. The moving of said junk, not the cup. The cup was nasty.

“Right, innings. I wish Cody had decided to play basketball. That’s indoors. I could have cheered on the squad for basketball. Why don’t they have a cheer squad for baseball?”

“I don’t know.” God, Phil had amazing thighs. And calves.

“You should bring it up when we have a booster bash night.”

“Not sure what a booster bash is exactly.” She blinked her huge blue eyes. “But when we have one, I’ll bring up cheerleaders at the baseball games.”

“Peachy!” she gushed, shivered, and turned from me to take a selfie to share with her followers.

“If she says peachy one more time…” Roxie growled low in her throat. Candy and Roxie had a unique relationship. Maybe unique was a poor choice of words. I wasn’t sure how to describe them, to be honest. They’d gotten off on the wrong foot, as the old folks like to say.

Roxie had thought Candy made a play for Ty when she first arrived from Pepperdine. Things got heated one night in a local pub during a March Madness game. Phil and I were making out in a booth when Roxie and Candy got into a shouting match that involved bowls of pretzels and purse-walloping. Ty broke it up at great peril to his health since Roxie had a purse which could stun a rhino. Pulled from our groping sesh by the sounds of women screeching, Phil and I sat up in our booth, belched loudly from our consumption of the two trays of salsa and chips we’d eaten in unison, and watched as Cody slipped in to guide Candy to a table while Ty carried Roxie outside like a sack of irate spuds.

Came to find out later that Candy had been asking Ty about his knowledge of the power of gemstones and then told him he had the effervescence of fire agate. Ty, being a dude, kind of basked in it until Roxie emerged—staggered—from the bathroom to find some new chick talking rocks with her man. Roxie was more than a bit tipsy when all this took place, so her leaping into it with Candy was over the top in my humble opinion. Roxie, shamed and humiliated, offered Candy a half-assed apology the following day. Candy, being Candy, took it with a bouncy hug for Roxie and a giggly “Peachy!” before larking off to her lapidary arts class. I was still stunned by the fact that Liverswell even had a lapidary arts class. This college continually amazed me.

Anyway, Roxie now had these mixed feelings about Candy. She felt bad for swinging at her with a purse while flinging accusations, but she also harbored a tiny bit of jealousy, I felt, over how Candy was this natural magnet to men. Most men. Not this man. I was too gay to be affected by the winsome cloud of fruity goodness and bubbles that was Candy Cairngorm. But I did like her. So Roxie was stuck in this odd place anytime Candy was around, which was all the time now, it seemed.

“Anyone want to go to Papa Paul’s after the game for some stromboli?” I asked as the pitcher struck out the batter from St. Martin’s College. Our guys jogged to the dugout for their turn at bat as the other team took the field. We were up 5–2 in the fourth and feeling pretty confident so far. Phil was new to baseball but seemed a natural. I was probably biased, though, but even the coach had said he was a slugger.

“Can we try out that new loose-leaf teahouse over by the cemetery?” Candy asked, lowering her phone to glance at Roxie then me. “Honestly, and this is no jab, but so many carbs are totally bad for your digestive system. Teas are amazingly chill for the colon and tummy! I just got a job there, so I’m super trying to get my friends to visit!”

Roxie and I exchanged looks. I was fine with tea. We drank tons of it at home, but Phil and the guys on the team were more of the doughy-cheesy-saucy-baked-treat-washed-down-with-pitchers-of-beer sorts.

“We always meet at Papa Paul’s,” Roxie countered, whipping her braids with such veracity that one hit me in the cheek. “Sorry,” she whispered.

I nodded as my cheek stung. There had to be a moratorium on hair flips soon, or someone would lose an eyeball.

“Change is good for the soul. Let me ask Cody!” Candy chirped and started typing madly on her phone. Roxie rolled her dark eyes. I sat between them like a dumpling. “Oh yay! He’s totally down for tea. Oh, double yay! He says the rest of the guys would love tea! Peachy!”

The others around us chimed in in favor of the teahouse. Roxie mumbled under her breath about bimbos as a small kerfuffle at the main gate erupted. Leaning up as Roxie snarled and Candy beamed, I watched a small group of big men in dark suits enter the Rupert G. Primrose Stadium. They spread out slightly to allow a couple to enter: the man taller than the woman at his side, he in a suit and she in a spring coat with a dark skirt. Both blond and lean, with sunglasses, they scanned the field. My sight touched the man in the suit. He pointed a finger at me then two men with shoulders as wide as I was tall climbed the steps. Two peeled off to head to the dugout.

“What did you do?” Roxie asked in a whisper as I did my best imitation of a turtle. I had lots of practice in turtling. Skinny, gay, Asian guy who spoke to spirits no one but him could see…yeah, I had grown up being targeted.

“Nothing.” I had a moment of concern over the little tussle I’d had with Professor Hayashi, my Asian studies professor, over nationalism versus globalism in our last class. She’d been pretty vocal, but was she so mad she’d sic mobsters in Gucci suits on me? I kind of doubted it, but Professor Hayashi didn’t mess around either.

My sight darted from the guys heading toward me to the field where Phil, of all people, was exiting the dugout like a steam engine. Chugging to the couple now in conversation with Coach Inez, the head coach of the team, Phil pushed past two burly suited dudes to storm up to the power couple. Words were spoken. Tense words, given by the tautness of Phil’s jaw. As soon as I saw him with the mature couple in designer clothes, I saw the resemblance. Man, how dumb. I’d seen pictures of them online but never imagined seeing them here, in Liverswell, at a baseball game. Phil looked a lot like both of them. All three seemed to be incredibly upset.