Page 11

TUCKER

I wandered into the office the next morning in dirty shorts and a sweat-soaked tank top. The warm air had finally arrived and the sun was beating down on the island. Practice would be hell after breakfast, but maybe I could figure out a way to reward the guys for all their hard work.

“You’re going to tell me what’s going on,” I said, slumping down in the chair across from Silas.

Glasses hung on his nose and he sighed as he slipped them off and leaned back to look at me. His hair was longer than usual; more greys starting to show the longer it got. His mustache had turned into a full beard that I wasn’t sure I liked any better, but it made him look tougher. He looked even more serious than before, which I didn’t actually think was possible, but under his gaze I was quickly regretting my bossy tone.

“I was trying on my Arlo voice?” I grimaced and he shook his head at me.

“What exactly is it that you want, Tucker?” He asked me, leaning forward on his desk.

“After last night I just…” I grumbled. “I need some more insight on Josh. I need to know why he’s here, and I need the real answer, not some bullshit one.”

I watched him think on it, his jaw tightening and his shoulders tensing. He was gearing up to lie to me.

“He doesn’t want to be here, Doc, and it’s causing trouble.”

“Just,” Silas sighed, “give him a chance to warm up to you.”

“It’s been a week of camp and he’s out-icing ninety percent of the world’s glaciers.” I sat forward. “He doesn’t want to warm up, he wants to run this alone and it’s going to kill our season. If I could just figure out how to relate to him, or help him…”

“Dean,” Silas started and I cocked my head at him. “Let him play baseball, that’s all you need to do.”

“No, no, no. That’s not all I need to do, Silas.” I waved my hands in the air. "I need to captain a team of guys who ruthlessly remind me I’m not Arlo. I have to win this season. I need the scouts to see this win.”

Letting my parents down isn’t an option . The statement went unsaid, but Silas knew better than anyone what it meant.

“I need Joshua Logan to be a fucking pitcher, and I can’t get him to do anything with the team that he’s meant to lead out onto the field every inning. He gets uncomfortable during family meals, he gets angry during team exercises, he doesn’t fucking talk during practice!”

“Dean, take a beat.” Silas put his hand up to slow me down.

“Letting him just play baseball is easier said than done,” I grumbled and slumped back into my chair. “It’s like bathing a cat.”

Silas chuckled. “Alright, listen. Josh had issues at Lorette—ones that couldn’t be solved with tough love or gentle nudges. He was growing more volatile.”

“So you and Coach thought ‘hey, the Hornets don’t have enough trouble, let's bring the spark to the powder keg?’ ” I said in shock.

“The problem wasn’t him , Dean.” Silas looked out the window as everyone started to flood into the mess hall for breakfast. “He was expelled for putting a kid in the hospital,” he explained, and before I could freak out, which is very much what I wanted to do, he stopped me with a hand. “But Coach and I have a reason to believe that he didn’t start the fight. We’re trying to figure out what happened but Lorette locked us out of the incident reports.”

“So you brought him here knowing what he was capable of and thought, what?” I asked.

“We wanted him under our wing until we could get to the bottom of things, find out what really happened in the locker room that night. It was Ian Peck he put in the hospital.”

“Ian? Notorious for his homophobic jokes and relentless taunts, Ian? Those two were thick as thieves on the field. There’s no way.” The words came out strangled.

Arlo had prevented more than one incident between Cael and Ian in the past. He was infamously big and played first base like a tank. He was a ruddy thing, with beady eyes and a big mouth. Ian was, simply put, a bully, he used the words of my insecurities to get under my skin until I… snapped.

“ Say they fought, I believe that, but Ian is twice his size,” I said in shock. “What was the damage?”

“Three broken ribs, two broken fingers, a shattered orbital bone and a few missing teeth.” Silas swallowed tightly. “It was bad.”

I sat in shock for a moment. Was he really capable of that kind of carnage? Beating the life out of a guy so badly they had to take him to the emergency room? The thought turned violently in my stomach, and suddenly I wasn’t hungry. I had gotten mad before, but never like that. I don’t even think I’d ever seen Cael or Arlo that mad, Van maybe, sometimes, but not…like that. Not even in defense of each other.

“Do you think Logan was protecting someone?” I asked.

Silas stared at me for a long moment. "I think Josh was protecting himself. ”

I considered what he was implying, the words unsaid floating between us and it took me too long to put the pieces together.

“You’re telling me you think Ian was targeting Josh because he’s…” I raised my eyebrows.

“You say that like you aren’t…” Silas chuckled tightly. “But yes, Ian isn’t exactly known for anything but his homophobia. I can’t see Josh going that far for anything else, can you?”

“I’ve seen him have a meltdown about the grass tickling his ankles, so at this point…” I shrugged, there was a chance Ian did nothing. “He really hates being touched, did you know that?”

Silas stared at me and shook his head. “No, what do you mean?”

“I mean, Cael tried to break up a fight and got punched for touching Josh. He’s jumpy and unpredictable,” I explained, shifting uncomfortably in my sweaty tank top. “Did you—” I stopped myself for a moment, thinking about the implications of the question, and steadied myself on the arms of the chair. “Did you do his physical?” I asked.

“No,” Silas shook his head. “He brought signed forms from the Lorettes’ Doc that cleared him for play.”

“You never looked him over at all?” I asked, just to make sure.

“He insisted he was good to go,” Silas said.

“And you just took his word for it?”

“I did.”

I stared at Silas wondering what else he was excluding from the conversation. I’d never once, not in the three years of knowing him, known him not to do something himself just to double check. He was thorough, direct and careful with every single one of us, but he was cautious about Josh and it made me nervous.

"He’s covered in scars."

“Everyone has scars, Tucker. It’s not exactly cause for alarm,” he said.

“Not like childhood scars, or fight scars. I’m talking…” My stomach churned at the memory of Josh’s back. “They look inflicted. I don’t know.”

“Inflicted upon him?” Silas questioned.

“Yeah, like someone hurt him, hundreds of times. They look like scratches or small cuts from a knife and they’re all about two inches long. Some overlap.” I couldn’t help the gag that surfaced from just thinking about the pain he’d felt from whatever happened.

I expected Silas to say something, anything , to make me feel better about the situation, but he slumped against his chair with a devastating look on his face. He rubbed his face over his hand and let his head fall backwards with a huff. I’d never seen him so disgruntled.

“That would explain why he was so insistent,” he grumbled.

“That’s it?” I scoffed. "No intrigue, no worry?”

“What are we supposed to do about it, Dean? He’s made it clear he doesn’t want anyone asking questions, he probably forged those clearance papers and now I have phone calls to make so go eat some breakfast and if I find anything out on my end I’ll let you know.” Silas sat up and went straight back to his paperwork, rifling through them until he found what he needed and grabbed his phone. “Tucker, go eat.”

I stared at him for a second longer before pushing out of my seat and leaving the office. Something felt wrong, like the world was off balance. If an incident like Silas was describing occurred…combined with the state of Josh’s body. Something bad had happened to turn him so cold and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to get it out of him. Or if I even wanted to know in the first place.

Maybe ignorance was bliss.

I skipped breakfast and walked my sweaty ass to the baseball field, scooping up a crate of balls and a bat before taking out my frustrations with heavy-hearted swings. Each ball cracked off the bat, loosening the tightness in my shoulders and disconnected me from my problems.

I wasn’t exactly grateful for Josh and all his issues, but the distraction from everything else going on in my life had proven to be nice. I’d barely even thought about my parents over the last few days, or the looming cloud that hung over my head over being true to myself and doing it on a public scale.

It was different now though. Would Harbor accept a gay captain? Was that any way to start the season? “Hey, we’re probably going to lose. Oh, and guess what? Your captain’s gay! Surprise!” I huffed and tossed another ball in the air, swinging hard and cracked the ball to the outfield.

“Maybe that’s for the best. Rip the bandaid off; have all of Harbor and my entire family disown me in one go…” I said to myself and swung at another ball.

I could hear my mother’s disappointment in my head, echoing around like the shrill sounds of a horror movie. “Franklin, you can’t do this to our family. What will your father’s colleagues think? What about my future grandchildren?”

“Hey, Mom, adoption exists…” I grumbled to no one. And even if it didn’t, did I even want to have kids? The problems had dog-piled and I’d never had a moment to sort out the important from the frivolous. They all just seemed so heavy when they were weighing down on my chest.

The anxiety of coming out was only worsened by the aftermath of doing something as big as announcing my sexuality to people who wouldn’t love me for it. My siblings would call–Anna would flip out and ask me how I could do such a thing to my mother, and Harvey would mail me brochures on conversion camps that his friends passed around the office as they created harmful bills to control the bodies of people they didn’t even consider to be human.

It made me sick to my stomach.

“Fuck!” I turned and slammed the bat into the nearest tree, over and over again, until the wood splintered and the handle of the bat rubbed raw against the palms of my hands. Every ounce of frustration vibrated in my forearms and across my chest as the anger and disappointment everyone felt in my presence flooded from me.

I wasn’t the golden boy.

I was a fucking failure.

A gay son without anyone to love him, watching a baseball team slip through his fingers. That’s who I was and it felt like there was nothing I could do to fix it.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I screamed and threw the destroyed bat into the woods, completely out of breath. I wiped the tears and sweat from my face and then turned around to find Josh, standing by the backstop, watching me with those endless dark eyes.