Page 87 of Checking Out the Librarian

Tonight it was Connor’s turn to provide beverages and in-game energy snacks for everyone on Queers for Beer, which meant Jonathan had also volunteered to help because at this point his Tuesday and Thursday nights belonged to the team, even though he was not a member of said team; pretty much all his other nights belonged to Connor, too.

Jonathan had considered asking Lily to join him on the sidelines. While she did not like women that way, she’d been a softball player and she liked well-curated refreshments, but she worked closing shift. Also, he could have used her assistance setting up the drinks table and positioning the coolers filled with ice.

Ribby looked at him from his usual spot in the shade of the bleachers. “No ear petting until I’m finished. Be patient.”

Ribby let his tongue hang out.

Jonathan didn’t know whether that meant sure, I understand, I can wait. Maybe it meant you’re a loser and I only put up with you because Connor does.

Probably the former. Probably.

“Hey, Jonathan.” Trixie’s partner, the person who kept the digital record book, settled in her place.

“Good evening, good to see you.” He was ninety-six percent certain her name was Michelle, but he wasn’t going to say it and make a mistake. She wasn’t one of the people who had insisted on getting his information, having let Trixie do that for the two of them.

It was strange to suddenly have a half-dozen people who lived in the same city as him, not just Lily and Connor, giving him numbers to put in his phone. All these local numbers clustered together in his contacts as Softball Trixie and Softball Danny, which wasn’t quite like the skating friends from around the world who didn’t need a qualifier, or his handful of people from New York, but it was something.

While he wouldn’t stretch to call anyone with the moniker Softball in front of their name an actual friend of his rather than Connor’s, he now knew people who lived here and wanted to coordinate things like weekend hikes and going to bars. He already felt he knew them better than the other cyclists in the group he rode with twice a month.

It did not suck.

Ribby emerged from his nest when Connor’s team trotted in from warming up on the field.

Jonathan basked in his command of the lexicon while he finished securing the lid onto the five-gallon beverage dispenser Connor had borrowed from a PTA storage room. The layers of cucumber slices and crushed mint leaves looked pleasing layered with ice in the center column of the water holder.

Connor’s responsibilities included game-appropriate hydration and light snacks during the duration of play, and then the full range of drinks after. He claimed making the birthday sign had only taken a few minutes, and he’d spent the morning making high energy snacks, which looked like rainbow-colored crispy rice treat squares to Jonathan.

For post-game dinner, a woman named Abby and her partner had brought homemade subs in three varieties, a Greek salad, and two types of chips. These were good people to know.

Jonathan straightened the tray holding the compostable plastic cups.

“Mm, fancy water.” Softball Becka in the shrunken goalie gear came to the drink table. Catcher’s gear, that’s what it was. Goalie was the wrong sport. There were a lot of similarities with the padding, although Connor had reminded him more than once not to be an ice-sport snob, so Jonathan kept that observation to himself.

Also, the goalie catcher person’s gear might be shrunken, but they were larger than Jonathan, so his baseline was always going to be polite.

“Ice and cucumbers, nice.”

“This is how Jonathan and I met, you know.” Connor dropped the solid log of his arm across Jonathan’s shoulders, pushing him into his joints firmly enough that Jonathan could sense individual pieces of gravel through the soles of his shoes. This also did not suck. “Over fancy vintage water.”

From behind them, Danny snickered. “Thought it was over iEros.”

“Nope. I was drinking water like this in the hotel lobby and almost choked on it when he asked me what it tasted like.”

“That tracks.” The catcher teased. “Connor chokes on water.”

“Connor likes to choke on all sorts of stuff.”

Jonathan wasn’t sure whether Danny’s words made him uncomfortable or not, but they didn’t seem to bother Connor.

“Jonathan’s stuff especially.”

Connor had just made him the subject of a dirty joke with his jock friends, in a way that was not making fun of him, but rather was praising him, he realized with a zing of what might be pride.

And the jocks were also queer and one of them wanted a high-five from Jonathan.

Touching someone else’s sticky hand was a thing that happened.

Then Jonathan realized he hadn’t been talking, just snuggling, fucking snuggling, into his boyfriend’s slightly sweaty—actually, more than slightly, but not across the threshold of icky—side.