Page 1 of Switch Hitter

ONE

SEAN

The stadium empties like a confessional line at midnight, slow and reluctant, the last stragglers clinging to the noise because silence makes you face yourself. I should be in the locker room showering. Or laughing with my team like a normal person who just played nine innings and didn’t spend half of it thinking about the opposing pitcher’s mouth.

Instead, I’m in the dugout.

Again.

Hands on the chain link like it can hold me up, pretending I’m stretching out my shoulders when really I’m just waiting.

Like a sinner who can’t stop coming back to the same altar.

The lights hum overhead, bright and sterile, throwing hard shadows across the benches. Somewhere out past right field, a cart rattles over concrete. A door slams. Voices fade into the distance.

And the quiet moves in.

That’s where the guilt lives.

My pulse is still too loud in my ears. My jersey sticks to my back from the heavy Queens humidity. There’s dirt under my nails, sweat in my hair, and Emiliano Guerrero’s pitches still tracking through my body like phantom bruises.

He made us look stupid tonight.

He made me look stupid.

And the worst part?

I let him.

Every time he toes the mound and stares in like he’s already decided what I am, I get angry enough to see red and stupid enough to want him. I chirp. I glare. I flip him off like I’m twelve.

He just smiles, calm and lethal, and throws heat like he’s aiming straight for the part of me that keeps trying to pretend I don’t want him.

I’m not supposed to be this kind of man.

That’s what my childhood taught me: Irish Catholic boyhood in a neat little box. Be good. Be quiet. Be strong. Be clean. Don’t want the wrong things. Don’t look too long. Don’t feel too much.

Don’t, don’t, don’t.

And yet here I am, alone in an empty dugout, waiting for him like I’m addicted to the worst decision of my life.

I swallow hard.

My grandma would cross herself if she could see me right now. My mother would cry. The voice in my head is my own version of Father O’Shea telling me to pray it away, like desire is something you can bleach out with holy water and fifteen Hail Marys.

I’ve tried that.

It doesn’t work.

Because Emiliano isn’t a thought I can banish. He’s real. A voice in my ear and a hand on my jersey. He’s heat on the back of my neck.

Emiliano is the reason my anger feels like foreplay and my guilt feels like hunger.

And I hate it.

I hate him.

I hate myself for being here.