Winter Ball Read Free Page B

said, nodding like Skip was slow and not catching on.
    “Wh—”
    Richie’s thumb was covered in ejaculate, and he shoved it into Skip’s mouth. Skip closed his lips around it, flattened his tongue, and sucked hard. His own come filled his senses, and oh, how bad did he want Richie’s again?
    “Tomorrow,” Richie repeated, like he was insisting. “We’ll get dinner. I’ll come to your place and watch movies afterward. Tomorrow.”
    He was nodding, so Skip nodded too.
    He pulled away from Richie’s thumb, scraping the underside lightly with his teeth.
    “Tomorrow,” he said breathily. He couldn’t seem to get a good lungful. His whole body refused to cooperate.
    He needed to get out of there.
    He leaned forward and pecked Richie chastely on the lips, then grabbed his sweater, which had fallen to the floor, and bolted out of the car. He paused with the door open, feeling bereft, feeling relieved.
    “Tomorrow?” he asked, suddenly needing to hear it again.
    “I promise,” Richie said, searching Skipper’s eyes intently.
    “Good.” Skipper nodded.
    Richie seemed to see what he’d been looking for, because he smiled, and Skipper shut the door, tugged on his sweatshirt, and hopped into his own car as Richie turned the ignition.

First Kickoff
     
     
    “YOU GOT a girl comin’ tonight?” Clay Carpenter looked at him funny, and Skipper uneasily pulled out the collar of his green polo shirt.
    “No,” he said shortly, tossing his squishy brain-shaped stress ball in the air and keeping an eye open for his phone line. He and the other IT guys all had a rhythm down—you exercised, threw shit in the air, fiddled, fidgeted, and fucked off, right until your phone line rang, and then you did all of that and answered boring questions about how Grok make computer go.
    “You shaved. You’re blond—I don’t see stubble until a week after you shave, and you have a jaw out of a DC comic book. There’s no reason for you to shave. What’s the fuckin’ deal?”
    Skipper turned to eyeball Carpenter, who was, as usual, out of standard dress code in a baseball jersey and sweats. Carpenter was a big guy—order the extra-special chair big—but he was also dry, funny, and he had a fondness for adorable kitten videos. Skip had once watched him spend a quarter of his paycheck on Doctors Without Borders when an earthquake hit Nepal, because he’d seen something in the disaster footage that had broken his heart. (Skip had never asked what, but he’d pitched in $100 himself, just to make Carpenter feel better.) Skip brought him soy lattes and bran muffins in an effort to help him slim down, but when Carpenter let out a bellow and a screech against his never-ending diet, Skip would go out and fetch his cheeseburger too. He was a friend, not a judge, and whatever Carpenter’s deep-seated emotional issues with food, he was a genuinely good man.
    But Skipper wasn’t ready to talk about the night before, even to Carpenter.
    “No girl,” he muttered. “Just Richie.” On the field, he was Scoggins. In person, as a person, he was Richie.
    To Carpenter, who was a friend, he was Richie.
    Odd how Skip had never thought of that before.
    Carpenter smiled and paused, then pushed the Talk button on his phone. “Yes, ma’am. Did you turn it off? And then on. Yes, ma’am, reboot it. No, ma’am, I don’t know why it works, maybe it needs a nap. Thank you so much for calling tech support!” Then he looked up at his screen. “Ooh! I gotta chatterer here. Why aren’t you getting any calls?”
    Skipper shrugged. Inside he was thinking that he usually walked his clients through consolidating their data, reinitializing their routers, and making sure they had compatible browsers. By the time Skipper was done with a caller, nothing on their computer would go wrong again, ever ,so he didn’t get a lot of repeat calls like Carpenter.
    “I got no idea. Go, chatter.”
    “Yeah, sure, but I’m glad your soccer buddy is coming—you guys