“You just wait,” Ian said, his eyes tracking a line double into center field. “This team will become your favorite.”
Gray shook his head. It seemed like yesterday that he and Ian had been buying nosebleed tickets to White Sox games when they needed a break from studying for their Northwestern finals. Like Gray, Ian was a Midwestern transplant in the middle of Seattle’s greenery. He’d moved to the Pacific Northwest several years prior.
As two of Gray’s closest—okay, only—friends, Ian and his wife, Ashley, had been a major factor in Gray accepting a job in Seattle.
Them, and an intense desire to get away from a toxic ex-fiancée.
Ian’s son squirmed impatiently in his seat. “Dad, can I have some pizza?”
“Now? You just finished your pretzel.”
“I know, but I’m hungry again. And the pepperoni looks really good,” said the perpetually hungry-for-junk-food Ryan.
“He has a point,” Gray said, not taking his eyes off the field. “The pizza looked awesome.”
“Ashley’s going to kill me,” Ian said with a shake of his head. “She hates when he eats crap.”
“It’s a ball game,” Gray replied. “What are you supposed to feed him, kale?”
“What’s kale?” Ryan asked, thumping his baseball glove with his tiny fist.
“My point exactly,” Gray said. “Get the man some pizza, Dad!”
Ian sighed. “I’ll be back. Ryan, make sure your godfather doesn’t drink my beer.”
“Beer’s gross.”
“Totally,” Gray replied, taking another sip of his “gross” beer.
As Ian went to fetch the offending junk food, Gray watched his godson out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t know Ryan well. They saw each other every couple years or so, but that was practically an eternity to a kid. Ryan was a new person every time Gray saw him.
When Ian had invited Gray to tag along on the father-son outing, Gray had waited for the usual rush of apprehension. Small talk was hard enough without figuring out what to say to a first grader. But instead of making a polite work excuse, Gray had found himself accepting. Wasn’t this why he had moved to Seattle? To make connections with people?
“How’s school?” Gray asked, realizing he’d been brooding.
“Good,” Ryan said with a small shrug. “My teacher’s pretty cool. And I got second in the science fair.”
“That’s cool. Got a girlfriend?”
Ryan’s small body convulsed in dramatic dry heaves. “Girls are gross.”
“Cooties?” Gray asked knowingly.
“I dunno. They’re just stupid. I like baseball way better.”
Gray smiled into his beer. Sometimes he thought he liked baseball better too. There was none of the drama, and the rules of the game were straightforward. With baseball, there was no worrying about why sometimes a woman looked at you like she wanted to curl up in your arms and stay there, and other times she looked at you like you were an inconvenience she had to somehow explain to her family.
Baseball had no distractingly wide blue eyes or slim curves or smile a man could drown in.
The beer turned slightly sour in Gray’s stomach as he realized he hadn’t been thinking about Brynn.
“One pepperoni pizza, coming right up!” Ian announced, scooting past the row of knees as he made his way back to them. He plopped a small box into Ryan’s lap as he passed, and then, settling into the middle seat, handed another box to Gray.
“Am I off the hook from healthy eating too?” Gray asked, as he opened the personal-sized pizza box.
“We’re splitting it,” Ian said as he handed out napkins like the most experienced of dads. Gray nearly smiled at the gesture. Hard to imagine this was the same wiry frat boy who once refused to let anyone be admitted to his house party unless they could eat nachos with no hands.
The three of them settled into companionable male silence and watched the Mariners battle a close game. They weren’t exactly bringing in the runs, but neither were the opposing Yankees, so all in all it was a relatively well-paced game.
“How’s the job going?” Ian asked as he finished off Ryan’s barely touched pizza. “All settled in?”
“Fine,” Gray said. “A challenge. Brayburn Luxuries has genius behind it, but I’m not sure Martin was as adept at the operational aspects as he fooled everyone into thinking. I find that most of my time is spent trying to find records of previous deals and the contact information for existing clients. It’s pretty fuc—” He glanced at Ryan. “Pretty messed up.”
“You were going to say ‘fuck,’” Ryan announced disinterestedly as he blew bubbles into his Coke.
“Ryan!” Ian exclaimed. “Where’d you learn that word? Are you trying to get me in trouble with your mother?”