Bromosexual

“Thankfully, neither.” Ryan gives me a tiny smile, then turns away to grab his keys off the kitchen counter.

Five minutes later, we’re in his car. My dirty clothes are balled up in my lap and the radio’s blasting some dumb shit with a dumb repetitive beat. Ryan keeps his eyes on the road, and I listen to the crap without complaint. For all I know, it’s his new favorite band.

I catch myself tapping my thighs to the rhythm, then stop.

The parking lot looks vastly different during the daytime. Thankfully, my truck wasn’t towed. I hop out of Ryan’s car and fish my keys out of my dirty clothes to unlock my truck.

“You good?” calls Ryan, who’s gotten out of his car and leans against the hood of it, waiting.

I spot a loose baseball in the bed of my truck. I pick it up and, without warning, pitch it his way.

Completely by reflex, Ryan raises a hand and catches the ball perfectly. The healthy smack it makes in his palm reverberates across the parking lot like a crack of thunder. From the wide-eyed look on his face, even he’s shocked that he caught it.

Apparently, he’s still got it, too.

06

RYAN

The ride home is lonely and painful.

That’s for about a hundred reasons I don’t have to name. They are all obvious, and each reason has Stefan Baker’s face all over it.

And also his glorious pectoral muscles, which were on perfect display in my torture-racked red polo.

And his cock, the outline of which was painfully visible in my jeans. Yes, I noticed. Yes, he’s packing.

And then there were his agonizingly kissable lips, which I couldn’t stop staring at every time he spoke.

It’s so sick, how into him I am. I feel like I just picked up a hot guy at a bar, didn’t have sex with him, and then he rejected me and went home because I wasn’t his type.

Well, I guess I’m not Stefan’s type. I don’t have a vagina.

The way he was teasing me in my bedroom was driving me insane. If only he knew what he was doing to me, whipping off his towel and then taunting me to look at him. Maybe he did know what he was doing. Maybe he’s known all along how much I crave him, and that’s why he gets a kick out of it.

Some guys—even straight guys—just like another dude to love them. That breed of guy likes being admired. They like attention. They like the feeling that they matter to someone.

Well, Stefan Baker, you matter like fuck to me.

I nearly miss the turn onto my street, I’m so distracted.

When I pull into my driveway, I kill the engine, sit there, and shut my eyes. Birds are tweeting in the trees. A lawnmower is buzzing somewhere in the distance. And my slow, deep breathing fills the car.

I miss him already. I miss him so badly.

I feel like there was so much more I could have said to him. We had so much to talk about, and yet it feels like we talked about nothing at all. Is he single? Is he married? I still don’t know the answer to those questions, and I even thought to ask while he was here. Is he planning on living at home for much longer, or is some second house he didn’t mention in the Florida Keys awaiting him? What exactly is he doing with his life now that he isn’t playing baseball anymore?

I’m kicking myself so hard right now. I should have set up a future date at the very least. “Let’s hang out,” I mutter at the odometer as if it was his face. “Maybe tomorrow? Or grab lunch later today if you can’t wait. I’m all yours. Let’s make this happen. I’m open all day. I’m …”

I clench shut my eyes. You are such an idiot, Ryan. Idiot, idiot, idiot! I smack the steering wheel on thinking that last “idiot”.

It honks back.

When I get inside, the whole fucking house smells like him. Of course it does. I clean up our breakfast dishes, which I had just left sitting out. I take an annoyingly long time washing off his plate in the sink since I catch myself daydreaming about what he looked like sitting at my table in nothing but a towel. He may not have played any professional baseball over the past year or so, but he obviously still hits a gym every day, if his swole, firm, sexy bod is any indication.

I go to my room and find myself struck all over again with the disarray my bed sheets are in. The blue and white fleece blanket is in a ball on the floor by the foot of the bed, and somehow that totally resembles my feelings at the moment. I guess Stefan got too warm and crowded, so he kicked it off of him in the night and didn’t give it a second thought.