David turned to see two more guys walking up: one, a white guy in a team uniform; the other, well, maybe white, but his nose was kind of like Farzan’s, and he had piercing green eyes. Farzan jogged over and gestured for David to join.
“David, this is Todd, he plays first base.” David offered a hand to the white guy. “And this is Ramin.”
“Nice to meet you, David,” Ramin said, shaking David’s hand while having an entirely silent conversation with Farzan using only his eyes.
“You too.”
“I’m going to grab a seat. Good luck.” Ramin turned and kissed Todd; Todd reciprocated by goosing Ramin’s ass.
Ramin just laughed, showing off an impressive set of dimples, waved toward Arya—who was already leading warm-up drills—and lugged his lawn chair over to the side of the field to claim a spot. He tugged the hem of his shirt down and took a seat.
“Hey, thanks for doing this,” Todd said as they followed Farzan back to their team “dugout”—really just an area marked off with orange traffic cones. Todd was brown-haired and brown-eyed, with a round nose and a short, well-kept beard. “This is the championship.”
David bit his lip as, ahead of him, Farzan pulled his ankle back and up into a quad stretch, which exposed more of his brown thighs. David wondered what Farzan had on underneath. Briefs? A jock strap? David had just gone with compression shorts.
Shit, Todd was talking.
“Say again?”
“You play much?”
David laughed. “Yeah, when I was twelve. Sorry if I’m not that good.”
“Don’t be. Neither are most of them,” Todd admitted, gesturing toward the team. It wasn’t just queer men: it was an all-gender team, cis and trans and nonbinary, white and brown and now (with David’s appearance) Black. But everyone was smiling and laughing, even thoughit was clear, from watching the warm-up kicks, that most didn’t have an athletic bone in their body. “The main thing is to show up and trash talk the Gryphons.”
“That’s the other team?”
“They’re from Lawrence,” Todd spat, and Farzan nodded sharply from Todd’s other side, glowering.
“Oh, you a Tiger?” David asked. He’d been glad to leave behind the ridiculous rivalry between the Mizzou Tigers and KU Jayhawks when he moved to Chicago—only to wind up listening to his coworkers endlessly fight about the White Sox and the Cubs. He’d gone to UMKC himself, and he’d never cared much about basketball anyway.
“Technically,” Farzan said. “But only really on kickball days. I wasn’t into much of the sportsball when I was in college.”
David snorted. “Same.”
On the field—pitch? diamond?—Arya blew a whistle.
“Come on team, let’s huddle up,” he shouted.
Todd jogged out, but Farzan hung back with David.
“What did I just get myself into?” David asked softly.
“Come on,” Farzan said. “It’ll be fun. I promise.”
Farzan kept his promise: David couldn’t remember the last time he laughed so much.
When he was in school, kickball had been just another thing to do at recess: a game you could get in on if the tetherball courts were full and the hopscotch squares had been taken. He’d never given much thought to how utterly ridiculous it was.
But now, watching twenty grown-ass adults kicking an enormous inflatable red rubber ball, it was hard not to feel like a giddy kid again. When Todd took a blow to the face with said ball and dropped like a rock, David laughed so hard he got a stitch in his side (once it was established that Todd was all right).
Arya, as team captain, was the most serious one there, shoutingencouragement, complaining to the referee about bad calls (even though David didn’t know what calls there were to be made, other than if someone crossed the neutral zone illegally), and trash-talking the Gryphons. Farzan got in on some good-natured heckling, but when it was his turn at bat—at ball?—his face got deadly serious. Turned out he was a hell of a kicker, and a good runner, too, those legs of his pumping hard, those shorts showing even more of Farzan’s delicious skin.
David made himself concentrate on the game instead of on getting Farzan out of those shorts, but fuck!
David wasn’t half-bad himself. He at least consistently kicked the ball, getting on base more often than he got out, and doing a decent enough job chasing down balls in the outfield. Xavier, a burly nonbinary player with a shock of bright green hair, had filled in at third base, since ze was more experienced, much to David’s relief.
In the end, the Lions won, twenty-one to eighteen. You’d think they won the Super Bowl, the way they shouted and cried and hugged each other, the way their friends and families and partners rushed the field to share in the euphoria.
