“Um, alright.”
Tucker scrubbed a hand across his jaw, scraping over his whiskers. Every journalist worth their salt knew how to read between the lines—we spoke subtext fluently. Thebestjournalists, and yes, I was one of the best, also knew a little something about body language. Tucker’s told me he had been sitting on his question for a while now.
“You said you were taking the week off from the paper, and I know that you record your podcast in a bougie studio on the east side—”
“You sound like a fan, Johnny.”
“—so, what exactly is this interview for?”
Ah, there it is.
“You know,” I told him. “If baseball doesn’t work out for you, you might make one hell of a journalist.”
I was being honest. It was what I would have asked.
“Answer the question, Heller.”
“Eat your potato, Tucker.”
He raised his bushy brows, issuing a playful challenge. It would take a lot more than that to get me to back down.
“I’m toying with the idea of writing a book,” I told him. Surprisingly, it was the first time I had said the words aloud to anyone.
“About me?”
You wish.To nobody’s surprise, the man’s ego was almost as big as his ass.
“Fiction, actually.”
I could have left it at that, but sometime between ice cream and waffle fries, Tucker had opened a valve. There was no stopping the words that poured out of me.
“It takes place in an alternate universe where aliens and humans coexist, and two baseball players on opposing teams—one human and the other alien—fall in love during an intergalactic tournament that’s basically their version of the Olympics.”
He stared back at me blankly. Apparently, I’d cracked the code—all it took to render Johnathan Tucker speechless was the mere mention of a queer, alien romance novel.
“That sounds fucking awesome.”
I reeled back with surprise. “Really?”
“Fuck yeah. I would read it in a heartbeat.”
“Are you telling metheJohnathan Tucker is a romance reader?”
He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Well, this is strictly off the record, but we have a team book club.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah, Pink has a major thing for Rose City’s romance bookstore owner. He got us into reading the store’s book club picks.”
Now that he mentioned it, I had seen the Roasters’ rookie pitcher, Jared Pink, reading in the dugout during more than one game this season—a sports romance novel, no less. I made a mental note to ask him about that after the All-Star break.
“And?” I prompted.
“And even though I’m definitely more of a sci-fi or fantasy kind of guy, I do enjoy the sexy stuff.”
“You know,” I hedged. “There’s plenty of sci-fi and fantasy out therewithsexy stuff.”
I had the Kindle to prove it.
