“You want in?” Ollie gestured to Ty. “We’ve got room for a catcher… or a fielder… or a medic.”
Theo laughed again.
Did Ty want in?
“Absolutely. Let me see if I can find my glove.” He hoped his dad hadn’t thrown it away.
THE WHOLEfirst week living with Ollie and Theo, Ty had been on alert for disaster. It seemed like so much could go wrong. What if Theo turned out to hate him, or one of them used up all the hot water in the morning, or they didn’t like the same food? What if they somehow managed to step on each other’s toes in his dad’s rambling mansion? What if Ty had forgotten how to live with other people in his space?
And those were only the rational worries. That didn’t count things likeWhat if I run into Ollie when he’s just gotten out of the shower and he’s wet and only wearing a towel, which happened to him on that first Wednesday morning. The rest of the thought wentand I can’t stop staring or drooling and it makes Ollie so uncomfortable he moves out and I never see him or Theo again, which didn’t happen because despite what Ty’s father might have said on the subject, Ty did actually have both self-control and self-respect.
Did he also now have the image of Ollie’s muscular chest and shoulders seared into his memory for eternity? Of course, but Ty was a goddamned adult and he could deal with it.
Anyway, the point was, after that first week, it got… easy. Ollie frequently still looked so good Ty thought he was hallucinating—he spent a lot of time outdoors and that agreed with him in a way Ty couldn’t articulate—but it didn’t take long for that to become the least interesting thing about him. He read Theo bedtime stories (insisting even when Theo claimed, unconvincingly, that he was too old) and did the dishes and cut the grass and yelled at the TV when the Mets were losing, which was frequently. Three of them in the house and none of them could pick a winning baseball team. Someone should figure out the odds on that.
They folded laundry together and ate together and hung out together, and it took no time at all for Ollie to go fromthat hot guy I live withtothe best friend I’ve ever had.
And that didn’t even make sense. Ty worked ridiculous hours in a high-pressure job that basically forced you to make a surrogate family out of your coworkers because you were going to see them more than you saw your actual family. And sure, he missed his team back in Chicago—Stacey with her wry advice, the rookie’s every-other-f-bomb way of speaking, Jordan and his city-slicker homesteading and his homemade bread-and-butter pickles.
Ty had never been tempted to tell any of them about his childhood, beyondI don’t really talk to my dad. It’s complicated.With Ollie it was like he could hardly keep it from bursting out of him, like someone had filleted him open and sewed him up, but the stitches wouldn’t hold, and he just kept spilling his guts.
The thing was, he’d started to suspect his guts were poisoned, because every time he did it, he felt a little better after.
Maybe when he went back to Chicago, he could open up a little more with his team. It would be nice to have that kind of unguarded, honest relationship with them that they had with each other—to have people know he was available to babysit, and have someone he could ask to water his plants when he went out of town. This time Ty had brought all his herb pots to the station, figuring they’d get used even if they weren’t alive when he got back.
He had to hold on to the idea that he could recreate what he had now in a different setting. He liked working with kids—they kept him on his toes, they made him laugh, they made him think about things differently—but what Ty really needed, what every therapist he’d ever seen had told him, was to beneeded, and the kids didn’t. They’d be fine,or better off, in a real teacher’s hands. Real teachers knew what they were doing. Ty was a glorified babysitter, and he was okay with that temporarily, but he was his best self when he could step into someone else’s crisis.
He missed being that version of himself, but he knew he couldn’t do it here. Ty needed the trust and confidence of the people around him. He couldn’t exist in a place where he’d always be his father’s fuckup.
Which was too bad, because this town could use an experienced paramedic or six.
All this was buzzing around in the background of his brain one day near the end of April. Baseball practice had been rained out, so Ty had taken Theo with him to get a few groceries instead, figuring he had the extra time, so he’d make something special.
“Do you know what your dad’s favorite dinner is?” he asked as they picked up a cart. Ollie’d been getting home later and later, the new job obviously not what he’d been expecting. It was wearing him down, and Ty wanted to cheer him up. “Something he used to order in restaurants, maybe?”
This town didn’t have a whole lot of dining options—definitely not compared to what Theo and Ollie would’ve been used to in DC.
“He used to get buggy beef.”
Well, Ty wasn’t makingthat. “Do you know what kind of restaurant it came from? What did you order, when he got that?”
“Pad thai.”
Okay, so some kind of Asian restaurant, probably. “Bulgogibeef?” Ty asked.
Theo’s face brightened. “Yeah! That’s it.”
“Okay.” Ty steered the cart toward the produce section. “I can make that.”
Buggy beef. He shook his head. Kids were hilarious.
This early in the afternoon, the grocery store patrons were mostly older folks—people his parents’ age or older. Ty caught Eliza’s eye from an aisle over and waved; she waved back with a smile and then rolled her eyes when she noticed Mrs. Sanford giving him the gimlet.
That would’ve made grocery shopping at this time uncomfortable, but Theo provided a good buffer. Nobody wanted to outright be a jerk to someone hanging out with a kid—especially hometown hero Ollie Kent’s kid.
Theo did not protect Ty from the awkwardness of running into Jake Robinson, but Ty didn’t think anything could save you from the mortification of meeting someone who’d been caught with your dick in his mouth behind the school bleachers. A piece of you would die inside and that’d be it.
At least the encounter seemed to mortify Jake too. Ty nodded at him as they passed in front of the pears. “Jake.”
