Page 78 of Serving Bunt

Diaz chuckled, the sound warm and rumbling under my cheek. “She’ll get used to it.”

He reached over the side of the bed for his discarded shirt, using it to gently clean us both up.

Better his than mine, I guess.

The casual tenderness of it all made something loosen in my chest. Unfortunately, my brain was anything but quiet.

“What happens when we go home?”

Diaz let out a soft huff of laughter. “Damn, Alabama. You couldn’t even wait until I finished wiping the cum off our stomachs?”

My face heated. “Sorry.”

“I’m only kidding.” He kissed the top of my head, then reached up to brush a strand of hair off my forehead. “You worried about the team?”

I nodded against his shoulder, fingers tracing idle patterns over his chest. “The team, the fans. Our families.”

“That’s the scariest of them all.”

“I’m serious. What do we tell people?”

“Nothing.” His voice was serious now. “Everything. Whatever the fuck we want to tell them. This, us, is nobody else’s business but ours.”

I stayed quiet for a moment, letting his words settle. Part of me knew he was right. What we had, and wherever this was going, belonged to us. No one else got a vote.

But it wasn’t that simple.

Not when we were two guys on the same Major League team.

Because baseball wasn’t exactly known for making this kind of thing easy. Sure, the sport had come a long way—there were Pride Nights now and some teams sported rainbow socks in the month of June. Some teams. The entire organization talked more openly about inclusion than they ever had when I’d been a kid.

But there was a difference between a team posting a graphic on social media and two active players showing up to spring training holding hands.

Especially when those two players shared a locker room.

And road trips.

And a dugout, six days a week for eight months out of the year.

I thought about how long I had spent in baseball, all the jokes that weren’t really jokes and the way that some guys still used words like gay as shorthand for weak or stupid without even thinking about it.

Most of them weren’t bad people.

But that almost made it harder.

Because the worst reactions rarely came from outright cruelty. They came from discomfort, awkwardness. People suddenly treating you differently because they didn’t know what to do with information they hadn’t expected.

Just ask my dad.

And then, there were the fans.

Roasters’ fans, or The Brew Crew as they had dubbed themselves, were incredible. But I had also seen them tear apart players for bad haircuts. What would happen if they found out their hotshot shortstop was dating his left fielder?

I didn't know and neither did Diaz.

That uncertainty sat heavy in my chest.

“I spent twentysomething years assuming my future was going to look a certain way,” I told him.