Out of Bounds (Reedsville Roosters #5) (8 page)

“Hey,” Gary said. “I don’t think that’s the case. I mean, I’m just an outsider looking in, but I don’t think she’s that hard up that she’d marry a guy just for the dick…no matter how good the dick is.”

“I keep telling myself that.”

“You don’t believe the truth?”

“Like I said, believing is hard. I’ve had women dump me for being boring. First one was when I was seventeen, and didn’t even have the good dick thing going for me then. I was a virgin until I was twenty.”

“I was fourteen my first time, but I’m a reckless asshole that way. Fortunately nothing negative came of the coupling beyond my girlfriend’s certainly diminished sense of self-worth.”

Gary rolled his eyes. She’d tried to guilt the hell out of him about that two-minute fuck for years as if she hadn’t put
her
hand in his pants to start the whole mess.

“I think reckless is a step above boring, at least,” Dean said.

“That’s debatable. I think my parents would have preferred for me to be boring.” Gary rolled onto his back and adjusted the fall of his cock. He didn’t want Dean getting any ideas about the cause of Gary’s arousal. The truth was that it didn’t take much for Gary to get aroused if he were around the right people. He could be discussing the tax code and if the voice of whomever he was talking to vibrated the right way, he’d be harder than a flagpole.

“I feel like I have to…I don’t know. Entertain her non-stop,” Dean said. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I
want
to, I just don’t know what she needs.”

“Have you tried asking her?”

“I might have a little too much ego for that.”

“Honest to a fault, aren’t ya?”

“If I can’t be witty, I may as well be honest.”

Gary turned his head and let his gaze settle on the digital clock on the nightstand. “Nothing wrong with honest. Admirable trait. By the way, the team bus is supposed to be here in an hour to get everyone to the field.”

“They don’t trust folks to get there on their own?”

“For the most part, no. Only the guys who are super-local get to drive. The rest of us are at the mercy of the bus. At least the bus doesn’t smell anymore, I hear. They got a new one while I was away.”

Lo turned off the shower water, and a few minutes later, stepped out wrapped in a towel and combing tangles out of her curly hair. “Shower pressure sucks and the water tastes bad. I had to use extra toothpaste just to disguise the flavor.”

She made a face at Dean, who just bobbed his eyebrows.

Come on, dude. Give her something.

She was throwing him the line and he was letting it fall right in front of him without grabbing hold.

But Lo didn’t seem to mind. She walked over to him, ruffled his hair, and murmured something about gritty soap.

He looped his arms around her waist and kissed her shoulder, and she smiled a smile he couldn’t even see, but Gary could.

He put his feet on the floor, stood, and stretched his arms over his head. “Uh, we were just talking about the team bus. I guess Dean’s gonna get real acquainted with it in the next couple of weeks.

“Good thing I don’t get motion sickness,” Dean muttered.

Interesting.

It seemed to Gary that Dean could pull a response out of his ass just fine when Gary said something, but if Lo tossed out some benign comment, he clammed up.

Gary grabbed his toothbrush out of his duffel and headed to the bathroom.

Performance anxiety?

Even if Lo didn’t mind that Dean was a chronic conversation-dropper,
Dean
minded. Gary knew what being anxious all the time about misperceptions felt like. He didn’t wish that on anyone.

Dean poked his head into the bathroom while Gary was brushing his teeth.

Gary said around his toothbrush, “I’ll be out in a minute. I’m not showering. No point. I’m going to stink coming off the field, anyway.”

“Um.” Dean sidled into the bathroom and turned the shower on full-blast. He leaned in close and whispered, “Can you…talk to her?”

“About what?”

“Just talk to her. Distract her while she’s here so she doesn’t go home this weekend and think so much about why she married me at all.”

“I
really
don’t think that’s necessary.”

“I do.”

“Come on, man.” Gary spit, rinsed his mouth, and then tossed his toothbrush onto the counter. Since he was doing all that moving, anyway, he took a half-step away from Dean to put a little distance between his nose and Dean’s scent. He smelled of sweat and Lo. That potent combination could have Gary on his knees and solemnly swearing that he
normally
wasn’t that submissive, but that he’d like to have Dean’s sac in his mouth, anyway.

He swallowed hard and put some determination in his spine. “Even if I agree to help you out, you know damn well she’s gonna get suspicious. She’s not stupid. She’s gonna be wondering why I’m talking to her so much and why you’re not doing anything to rein me in.”

“So, talk to me, too.”

“What?”

Dean shrugged. “I mean, she’s used to me not talking back, so…what’s one more person I’m not talking back to?”

It was a hare-brained scheme, even in Gary’s less-than-valuable opinion, but Dean was looking at him with so damned much earnestness, Gary didn’t want to tell him no.

He gave Dean’s shoulder a slight push and grinned. “All right. Don’t blame me, though, if shit doesn’t go according to plan. You’re dealing with a wildcard.”

“Sometimes, that’s the most useful card in the deck.”

Huh.
Gary grunted and went into the room to dress.

I’m fucking useful. How ’bout that?

Dean kept his seat on the bus until Cameron Moreno passed him at the aisle, cutting Gary a withering glower as he went.

Gary, pinned against the window by Dean, had his hands figuratively tied by his chaperone’s presence. Dean didn’t really want to think the two men would tussle right there in the bus aisle, but after witnessing a day of vicious passive-aggressiveness between the two, he suspected anything was possible. Seemed to Dean, though, that Cameron needed the chaperone more than Gary did. Gary would be in the dugout, minding his own business and sitting at the far end of the bench, and Cameron would be heckling him from the other end.

Dean knew that because he’d been standing right beside the damned thing for half the day and staring down into the hole. He suspected that the only reason Gary didn’t react was because Dean kept flicking pebbles at him to get him back on task.

On the field, Gary didn’t need much help, so Dean stayed back near the bleachers. It was when all the players had to clump for some reason that there were problems. And whenever there were problems, Gary’s performance hit the skids.

He wasn’t unpredictable. He was
very
predictable, at least in Dean’s opinion. Whether or not Wallace agreed, Dean didn’t know. He’d be happy if he could avoid the man for the rest of his tenure in Reedsville. Wallace was a special kind of clueless.

Cameron hopped off the bus and headed toward his motel room, casting a look over his shoulder at the bus.

Gary put his back to the window and shook his head. “Gonna let me out now?”

“Let him get into his room.”

“What if he doesn’t go in? What if he stands outside leaning against that wall, and leering?”

Charles Ecceles, a powerhouse of a second baseman who couldn’t have been much over five-and-a-half feet tall and with eyebrows so pale they were nearly translucent, paused in the aisle next to Dean, and craned his head toward the window. “Looks like exactly what he’s doing. The hell did you do to him last time you were here, Morstad? I was here. I don’t remember there being that much static.”

“’Cause most of it was in Moreno’s head,” a guy named Marcus Carter said. “He’s always been something of teacher’s pet though, right? He and Wallace are buddy-buddy.”

“I heard he was trying to hook up with Wallace’s daughter.”

“Which one?” Gary asked. “Cordy?”

“Cordy would probably be more likely to tell him yes, but nah. You know damn well Leelah isn’t going to give him the time of day, but I think he’s carrying a torch for her, anyway.”

“What does this Leelah have against him?” Dean asked. He figured knowing a little something about the guy’s preferences would help him understand the psychology behind Moreno’s antagonism with Gary. He hadn’t expected his short-term volunteer gig to come with legitimate chaperoning duties, but he was confident he’d succeed. He had brothers. He was used to keeping them apart when they needed assisted separation.

“Leelah, like her big sister Edy, doesn’t actually like baseball players, and certainly not ones who remind her of her father.” Charles scrubbed his hands over his sunburned face and guffawed. “He should have known all that kiss-assing was gonna backfire on him eventually.”

“You assholes gonna get off the bus, or should I go ahead and dim the lights for the fairy princess slumber party you’re about to have?” the driver called back.

“We’re goin’, we’re goin’,” Marcus yelled back. He waved Dean and Gary on. “Come on. We’ll walk in a clump like girls do when they go to the bathroom at nightclubs.”

“Pathetic,” Gary muttered as he stood.

Charles shrugged and started up the aisle. “Temporary measure, right? Just until you get off Cassavetes’ shit list. Then we’ll all sit back and laugh while hell breaks loose.”

“So you all knew Gary was coming back?” Dean asked. “Apparently, your captain didn’t.”

“Yeah, we knew,” Marcus said. “In fact, I’m the one who told Wallace he’d be stupid to not try to get a couple of more years out of him. If Moreno didn’t know, that was by design. Wallace wouldn’t want his favorite kiss-ass to have his fee-fees hurt.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Gary muttered as he descended the stairs behind Dean.

“This team’s got more drama than Lo’s beauty parlor,” Dean said over his shoulder.

Gary walked beside him and draped his cleats, knotted at the laces, over his shoulder. Dean had asked why he hadn’t left them in the field house, and Gary had mumbled something about a past incident involving shaving cream and thumbtacks. “Well, don’t start popping the popcorn yet. We’ve still got two hours until curfew. Who knows what’ll happen?”

“I won’t let anything happen. At least nothing that Lo could see.”

“And after she leaves?”

“Depends on the circumstances. Some things, I might turn a blind eye to.”

“Careful,” Marcus said. “Moreno might overhear. You wouldn’t want him to go tattle.”

Dean already wanted to shake the hell out of the man for that. He
had
ran to Wallace first thing in the morning and told the manager that there was a girl in Gary’s room. Of course, that girl was Lo, and Lo was Dean’s, and Wallace already knew about her. Dean wished he could have seen the egg on Cameron Moreno’s face when Wallace had informed of that. Instead, he’d had to rely on second-hand commentary from Charles, who’d happened to be in Wallace’s office at the time.

The sweaty foursome poured onto the walkway at the wall’s opening, and Marcus and Charles surged Cameron—catching him in a headlock and mussing his telenovela star-quality hair aggressively as Gary fumbled to get his room door open.

“How does he get every single hair to stay in place through an entire day of workouts?” Marcus asked.

“Maybe he shellacs it.” Gary finally got the door open, and stepped in without another word with Dean on his heels.

Dean shut the door behind him, watched Gary flop onto his bed, and then quickly scanned the room for signs of Lo.

No Lo.

“I’d better call her,” Dean muttered. “I wonder where she is.”

Gary expelled a tired-sounding gust of air through his open mouth and strained to sit up. “Maybe that cousin she was trying to get in touch with called her back.”

“Maybe.”

Dean rooted the phone out of his pocket, typed in her number, and then hovered his thumb over the call button. “I could just text her.”

“Call her. Those ‘Where are you?’ text messages are creepy as hell.”

“You know that from experience?”

“I was a manservant, and occasionally a man-
whore
when I was really broke. I’ve had more phone numbers than all the Kardashians and Jenners combined because the needy ladies wouldn’t stop hounding me.”

“Man-whore?”

“High-priced one, naturally.”

Dean blinked at him. Not even Lo with her quick wit would have had a good response for that.

“Don’t worry,” Gary said airily. “I don’t have cooties. No more than most folks, anyway. I’m cleaner than a nun’s virtue, not counting the jock itch I’m certain is going to be burning my crotch by tomorrow. Was fucking hot out there today, man, and I forgot how much wearing a cup sucks.”

“You were scratching a lot, that’s for sure.”

“Only because Cameron was watching.” Gary shuffled into the bathroom and turned on the shower. “Call your wife.”

Dean hit the button before he could talk himself out of doing so.

“Deeeeeean!” she answered in her usual characteristic chirp.

“Shit, I can hear her all the way from over here,” Gary said from the sink.

“Tell Gary to shut up,” she said.

“She says to shut up,” Dean said.

Gary leaned into the doorway and made a turning motion with his hand—telling Dean to get on with it.

“What should I say?” Dean mouthed.

Gary laid his head to the side and mouthed back, “Really?”

Dean shrugged.

Gary put his mouth close to the phone and said, “Where are you? We’re hungry.”

Dean hit the speaker button in time to hear Lo say, “So go eat. I’ll be back after your curfew.”

“You, uh, met up with your cousin?” Dean asked.

“
Cousins
,” she corrected. “Three of them, and they talk even more than me. The only reason you can’t hear them right now is because they went to the bathroom.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re at a drive-up annoying the carhops by taking too long to eat. So much to catch up on, you know? Nice seeing them.”

“Well, you’ve got a few more days,” he said.

“Yeah, but…I don’t know. I came down here to be with you.”

“You’re still sleeping with me, right?”

“Damn right I am. Keep Gary on his side of the room.”

Dean chuckled. “I’ll try. Don’t rush back. We’ll figure something out for dinner.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you keep the miserable wretch out of trouble today?”

“You know you’re on speakerphone, right?” Gary asked.

“No,” Lo said, “but I would have said the same thing even if I had known. So
there
.”

“You’re so mean to me.”

“You owe me, so deal with it. Bye, Dean. Love you. Gotta go. My cousins are coming back, and if I’m on the phone, they’ll want to talk too, and they barely know you.”

Dean shuddered, and somehow managed to say
love you, too
before she disconnected.

“Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Gary stepped into the bathroom and pulled his sweaty shirt over his head.

“No, but you were standing there filling the voids.”

“Most of that was all you, bud. Good job. I’ll grade you a B-minus for that performance.”

“What do I have to do to get a B?” Dean asked.

“Being the first one to say ‘I love you’ wouldn’t hurt.” Gary stepped out of his shorts, taking his briefs down with them, and then toed off his socks.

Dean rustled up a little common sense and moved away from the door. There was no damn reason for him to be standing in the doorway ogling, even if Gary didn’t seem to give a shit.

“God
damn
.” Gary’s voice echoed in the small room, and Dean suspected he must have stepped into the shower. “Lo was right about this soap. It’s like sand encased in slowly dissolving plastic.

“Says ‘luxury’ on the wrapper,” Dean said.

“You believe everything you read?”

“Maybe I’m too trusting.”

“Shit’s gonna scratch me up and draw blood,” Gary whined. “I’d skip the suds, but I don’t think anyone should have to be so close to me under-bathed after a workout.”

“You don’t smell that bad.”

“I think that’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever said to me, Dean.”

Dean chuckled, then flopped back onto his and Lo’s bed and closed his eyes. The sun had been beating down on his head since it’d done its peek-a-boo from behind a large cloud at around ten a.m. He was utterly drained and could probably sleep for a day.

He closed his eyes, and was about to start doing just that when Gary called out from the bathroom, “Is this a tick? For fuck’s sake, Dean. Look at this. Tell me this isn’t a tick.”

“Where the hell would you have picked up a tick?”

“Did you see how high the grass was in the outfield?”

“It was high, but not so high you would have picked up a tick anywhere unusual.”

“Except those two times I dove for balls. I was practically swimming in the grass, and doing all that damn nut scratching.
Please
come look. I’m going to go crazy if I don’t know. I won’t be able to stop thinking about it, and you’re going to get mad if I don’t shut up. You don’t understand.
Please
.”

“Ugh.” Dean rolled off the bed, padded back to the bathroom, and found Gary poking his head out of the shower curtain.

“Thanks. Since I stopped taking my meds, I fixate on shit sometimes and I can’t let go of the compulsion unless someone helps me.”

“Your
meds
?”

Gary waved him over. “This’ll take just a minute.”

“All right.” Dean pulled the curtain aside.

Gary put one foot up on the tub’s edge, put his hand over his junk, and then lifted everything. “Check the crease, please.”

Dean bent and leaned a bit sideways looking for any sign of an insect intruder, but he wasn’t seeing anything that wasn’t supposed to be there.

“Why are making that face? There’s a tick there, isn’t it? Oh my God. Get it the fuck off me!”

“Gary, there’s no tick.”

“Are you sure? Look closer.”

“Hard to get much closer without my eyes crossing.”

“Touch the skin there. See if you can feel a bump, or find me a couple of mirrors or something and I’ll try to eyeball it myself.”

Sighing, Dean ran his index finger along the seam between Gary’s thigh and balls and felt not a damned thing besides a little raised freckle. He poked at it. “You mean this?”

Gary put his finger beside Dean’s and wriggled it. “Yeah! Wait. You’re pushing the tick in. Quit that!”

“That’s not a tick. That’s a freckle, or a mole, or whatever.”

“Why’s it so bumpy, then?”

“Probably because you’ve been scratching your junk all day.” Dean flicked a little water in Gary’s frowning face and leaned against the narrow stretch of wall between the shower and toilet. “I think you were right about getting a rash.”

Gary dropped his hand, sucked in his gut, and jutted his hips forward, staring at his crotch. “Fuck. Gonna have to go out and get some cream or powder or something. I can’t believe I don’t have any.”

Itchy crotch or not, his cock was in a semi-erect state that indicated that either Gary wasn’t as uncomfortable as he let on or that he had a hair trigger.

Dean closed his eyes. He didn’t have to look. He didn’t
have
to think about Gary’s hair trigger and whether or not Dean had caused it to go off.

“Maybe one of the other guys have some,” Dean said.

“Can you go ask them? I’d go, but…”

“Yeah. I’m sure Cameron’s got his door wide open, waiting for you to creep past. Think about what you want for dinner while I’m gone.”

Dean opened his eyes in time to see Gary’s comically wide grin.

“What?” Dean asked, although he wasn’t quite certain he really wanted to know.

“Thanks for the tick check. I might actually be able to sleep tonight, assuming I’m not being itched to death by crotch fungus.”