you won fair and square,” I insisted. The only thing worse than thinking about what the asshole gossip bloggers and my total dickhead teammates would say about me sharing a romantic dinner with Nate was the idea of shirking on something I’d agreed to.
The fact that I hadn’t actually agreed to any of what was promised was beside the point. He had won the auction and deserved every bit of the prize. Besides, it seemed like a good way to guarantee I’d see him again.
“It was never about winning for me,” he admitted. “That’s what I was going to tell you over dessert. I didn’t know for sure, but you looked uncomfortable up on the stage and I thought it might be that you weren’t into women.”
“Am I that obvious?” I’d gotten this far in life because I was good at not acting like a gay man, whatever in the hell that meant.
When I’d come out to my parents, they’d been cool with it, but that was the night my dad started pounding it into my head that it was okay to be gay, as long as I didn’t act gay. Then again, until a few years ago, no one would’ve assumed anyone in baseball was gay.
“Not to most people, no,” he assured me. “But I have a lot of experience with guys who pretend they’re someone they’re not. You looked about as happy to be up there as Zach did.”
I knew it was going to sound stupid, but that didn’t stop me from asking. “Are you saying he’s gay?”
“Yep,” Nate confirmed. “And like you, he’s doing everything the people around him tell him he’s supposed to do to keep that a secret. For him, it’s because of the media circus when that other guy came out before the draft. He wanted to make sure he was drafted because of his ball-handling, not because of who he was screwing at night.”
A snort of laughter filled the elevator. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing at his comment, partly because I knew he hadn’t meant it to sound dirty. Nate had simply repeated what his brother probably said to him, but it was funny.
“What?” he asked, sounding a bit annoyed by my outburst.
“Sorry, apparently my inner-child wanted to come out and play,” I said through the laughter.
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” I said dismissively. “Okay, so your brother is gay, and you figured out I was, too. So tell me… Did you bid on me because you wanted the chance to say you’d spent a night with me or because you thought I needed saving and you wanted to be my white knight?”
Now that he’d put the thought in my mind that he’d done it to rescue me, I was ticked off. In the afterglow of that blow job, I’d thought maybe he’d done it because he was attracted to me and had big enough balls to go after what he wanted. Now, everything he’d done to me felt cheap.
“Would it be wrong if I say it was a bit of both?”
“No,” I assured him, leaning in to place a tender kiss to the side of his head. It was a good thing I’d be heading back to Miami in the morning to get ready for spring training, because being around Nate could be dangerous. It felt good, right, to have him wrapped around my body. Kissing him was the easiest thing I’d done in a long time. “As long as it wasn’t only to get me out of a bad situation.”
The voices and clanging metal got closer. Nate’s phone rang and I listened as his brother told him everyone was waiting outside the elevator for us. It sounded more like a warning than reassurance that help was on the way.
When he hung up the phone, he held it up so I could get dressed using the light from his phone to make sure I didn’t screw up the buttons or anything. I returned the favor and melancholy washed over me as our night together came to an end, one pearl button at a time.
4
Nate
All good things must come to an end. No matter how many times I’d heard that phrase, it had never seemed as final as it had when it echoed in my mind as a team of firefighters managed to pry open the doors to the elevator.
Zach hadn’t exaggerated when he said everyone was milling around in the lobby of the banquet floor waiting for us to get out. That put a quick