Page 62 of Checking Out the Librarian

Jonathan

They are merely T-shirts. And they’re huge.

Connor

You can knot it at the waist

Jonathan

Why don’t I get a pair of scissors and cut the thing off?

Connor

And show your midwife!

My drift

Midrift

Fuck you know what I mean

Jonathan

No, I don’t think I do.

Connor

I meant that sexy part of your body that surrounds your cute lil belly button that I want to snack on. Your midriff

You can cut up my tshirt and show it off

Jonathan

Was I referring to the shirt?

On Tuesday, Jonathan went to Connor’s softball game.

He and Lily had concluded that the appropriate attire for this event was neither librarian casual nor shorts with a four-inch inseam, so instead he embraced dorky dad aesthetic. Before he left work, he changed from his summer-weight gray wool and linen blend trousers into a pair of navy blue shorts long enough to only reveal a hint of his quadriceps.

Oddly placed tan lines were a risk he was willing to take for Connor.

He paired the navy shorts with a slim white polo, a bucket hat in quilted squares of blues and grays, and a cross-body water bottle carrier from his favorite K-Town home goods store. Today’s charms on the strap buckle were a stack of books, a coffee mug, and a smiling apple. Not that the collection was specifically meant to be for a teacher, but it wasn’t not inspired by the teacher he was here to see.

Then he had to do the thing he’d so carefully dressed for: drive to the park and walk into a sports facility alone. Sure, it was an outdoor public park, but it was still a place where jocks could throw basketballs at people’s backs and laugh about it when they stumbled.

That had only happened once, in middle school, before he switched to the athlete home school program, and it might have been an accident, but as a not-tall, not-white, not-straight person, he was always going to listen to the internal voice of distrust. Always.

Unfortunately, his personal warning system was a chatty bitch.

Nothing like that would happen tonight. Connor’s teammates would be like Connor; they would accept his funny hat and his water bottle charms.

Tonight Connor’s team, called Queers for Beers, played against the Swish Hitters, a thoroughly better team name but which Jonathan acknowledged was not as inclusive as the former. Connor said his team was mostly lesbians and nonbinary people, a handful of gay men, and a few straight allies who played with them because it was allegedly less drama than the other teams in the league, but Jonathan couldn’t see that, because Connor had shown him the team Discord.

The refreshments schedule had sublists and a definitions page.Nothing with definitions could be less drama.

Trixie, who Jonathan remembered from the concert Saturday night, came out of the fenced cage that was filled with people and gear. Connor followed on her heels.

Jonathan’s brain belatedly supplied one of the words Lily had drilled into him. Dugout. That was a dugout.