Top comments:
sealionsfan82: Honestly, I don’t even care if they’re only doing it for show.They’re doing it, which is more than 90 percent of other pro sports teams.Gotta start somewhere.
SFCLions: The whole thing makes me uncomfortable.Kids that age shouldn’t be thinking about sex!The team should know better.Can’t believe they let Calabrese and Grant run off with this project.Tom Crowler isn’t in any of the promotional material, which shows the team is definitely not united about this!
Susannah Lindenberg: Good for the Sea Lions!Happy to see them taking a stance!
(From “Sea Lions launch charity scheme with local LGBTQIA+ shelter,” posted to http://sfhockeyftw.blogspot.com on 12/04/2024)
The aftermath of his first time having sex with a man as an adult confused Phil more than he’d expected.
He’d known he found men attractive, but he’d refused to follow up on it after the brief phase of hormone-fueled hand jobs in his adolescence.The sex itself was no surprise.No, the part Phil struggled with was the verbiage.His days of being “not gay” and calling it enough had come to a screeching halt, and it had nothing to do with the memory of Ben, flushed and panting, sitting splayed across Phil’s lap and coming his brains out.
Previous to this tryst, Tom Crowler had come over for dinner and told Phil he was gay—which was far more confusing than the erotic images now forever stored in Phil’s hindbrain.Phil wasn’t sure how he had never once in more than a decade of friendship considered Tom might be gay.“Failure of imagination” captured his utter blindness to the possibility, but “being a bad friend” seemed more apt when it came to the abject misery pouring off of Tom at all times.His sexuality didn’t bother Phil; of course it didn’t.Phil himself was… Well, he might as well add “not straight” to “not gay” in the list of appropriate descriptors.Still, Tom had been right beside him, suffering, and Phil had never known.
Now, he knew the much sadder and, in retrospect, much more obvious truth.Phil had put Tom’s melancholy down to the pressure of having been drafted first overall to a team that couldn’t seem to make the finals year after year.In all fairness to himself, Phil wasn’t wrong about that.It just turned out that Tom’s terror at anyone finding out he was gay only added to his career-oriented existential angst.
It also turned out that Jax Grant wasn’t replacing Phil as Tom’s best friend, which had been a latent worry.Tom had apparently had an affair with him and then broken it off because Jax wanted to be the first out player in the NHL.It sounded as if they were both losing in that deal.
Phil wished Tom had told him earlier.Maybe he could have saved Tom some of the loneliness, maybe he could have helped Tom be ready for what Jax wanted out of life.At the same time, putting the responsibility on Tom swamped Phil with guilt.He knew how awkward and shy Tom was under all the hockey gear.If Phil had been able to get his own shit together, if he hadn’t spent his whole life being too chickenshit to deal with his own sexuality, he could have started the conversation.He could have saved them both from feeling like the odd man out.
It bothered Phil all week.He went to PT, and he went to practice.He and Ben had a pretty good system running at this point, where whenever Trout wasn’t around, Phil basically led the practices.
After a few weeks of that, Phil had begun to sit in on tape review sessions as well, asking open-ended questions and offering carefully worded suggestions from the back of the room.While surreptitiously taking over Ben’s coaching duties didn’t fix Phil’s guilt about Tom or his insecurity about his own future, it made him feel like he was more part of the team than he’d been since his injury.The brief high of that realization—and with it, the crushing understanding of just how low he’d felt before—led Phil down the hall from the video review room to Michelle Horowitz’s office to make an appointment on Thursday.
But watching hockey practice and doing tape review—and talking about watching hockey practice and doing tape review with the team’s therapist—only filled so much time.Phil occupied some afternoons by taking Charlie out to the shelter events Jax and Breezy had scheduled for the week so he could hang out with other teenagers.Otherwise, Phil kept at his PT and tried not to go insane.At least he was off the crutches now.
“See,” Ben said one morning a few days after they’d had sex on the weight bench, watching Phil’s careful, crutch-less progress through the kitchen.“You don’t need me here anymore.”
For a brief moment, Phil wondered if he’d dreamed Ben sucking him off so good that he’d lost the feeling in his toes.Why on earth would he want Ben to leave after that?Especially given that he and Charlie needed somewhere to stay.
“What if I want you here?”he tried.
Ben flushed up to the roots of his red-gold hair, and Phil again remembered the unbelievable photo he’d sent—sexy without being sexual and hot in a way Phil was not used to things being hot.
“I guess we’ll see what CPS has to say,” Ben said.
Phil took the hint to stop pushing, at least until after the dreaded CPS visit.The caseworker had scheduled it for the day after the game against Seattle, or almost a week since they’d had sex, which they still hadn’t talked about.
Maybe getting his mouth on Phil’s thighs had gotten it out of Ben’s system.
Phil hoped not.The thought of Ben’s lips alone made him squirm.
He’d never felt so intensely desired before in his life.The way Ben had marked up his skin as if he hungered for it, the possessiveness with which he touched Phil, how he’d gagged himself on Phil’s cock and still made Phil feel as though Ben was the one in charge—all of it combined into an experience utterly different from anything Phil had previously known to expect from sex.
It could have been because of Ben’s gender, but in his heart of hearts, Phil knew it was because of how Ben saw him.He’d had plenty of fun, hot sex with women, but always in the role he cast himself in: the initiator.
Discovering a whole world of sexual experience available to him in which he was the object of desire blew his mind.
Phil doubted Ben felt the same.The casual way Ben said and did things that recalibrated Phil’s understanding of sex indicated he didn’t share Phil’s desperate hunger for more.If Phil had been able to think or use fine motor control in the moments after, he’d have found a better way to reciprocate than a hand job.Then, it might have been good enough for Ben to ask for more.
As it was, Phil would have to do it himself.He couldn’t let what had happened go, not when it felt like that.But he could wait for the right time.He would do it after the CPS visit, when Ben’s immediate concerns about Charlie were resolved.
CPS was scheduled to arrive at ten.Ben spent the hours between seven and ten meticulously cleaning every surface in the house.The cleaning service had been through the day before, so Phil didn’t see a need to tidy anything, but Ben seemed to find microscopic dirt everywhere he looked.Maybe Phil should get him a duster for Christmas.Or one of those kitschy maid outfits.His ass would look spectacular peeking out of a ruffled skirt.
“I wouldn’t worry about him.”Charlie sat in the kitchen, relaxed as anything, drinking coffee.“Grandma—his mom, I guess—has a whole thing about working out your feelings in household chores.It’s not a Mormon thing.At least I don’t think it is.But all her kids grew up with antibacterial spray in their hands.”
Maybe not the French maid uniform then.
