let me forget my right hand
Firstly, are people able to see my master fic list? Because I cannot! When I attempt it, I get this completely unhelpful message:
Error running style: Died in S2::run_code running EntryPage::print(): Method called on null Link object at 'A Sturdy Gesture' (#19871) line 383 at /home/lj/src/s2/S2.pm line 501
I'd rather not delete and repost it (though I do have the whole master list saved on a doc, because I try to learn from my mistakes), as there are a bunch of awesome comments of people saying hi and discussions and such. Any help y'all can offer is incredibly appreciated.
*edited six hours later, with a shiny new journal style! Which is actually the default style when you click on a link, which is fine as far as readability, yes? It seems to have restored the master fic list, and changing it back to the other style kills it again, so I guess we will just be rolling with the punches here.
And then!
This is the first time, you know, the first MLB fic starring no former or current Oakland Athletics; it is like a whole new era over here.
(how was i supposed to resist!)
Bumgarner/Posey, NC-17, some large number of words (20922 if you wanna get specific).
Somewhere Between the Bus Leagues and the Bigs
By Candle Beck
And it's the strangest thing that's ever happened to Madison Bumgarner, there's no question about that.
Buster Posey hits a three-run go-ahead home run in the top of the ninth inning against the Bakersfield Blaze, a towering shot into the hollowed-out blue sky, and after he romps around the bases and crashes gleefully into the pack of his teammates waiting for him in the dugout, after they pound his bare head (helmet still spinning in the dirt near first base, one of the batboys darting out to it) and shake him by the shoulders until his huge toothy grin looks rattly and loose, after he breaks off whooping and goes to the cooler to pour about six Dixie cups of water down his throat, everybody milling around and finding their seats again while laughing and back-clapping, after all that, their manager tells Posey, "That'll do, son," and scribbles the back-up catcher's name on his card for the bottom of the ninth, so Posey grabs his guards and gear off the bench and shoves it into Bumgarner's arms, saying, "Help me out with that shit will ya," without any kind of question to it, not that Bumgarner would ever consider saying no, of course, and then Posey gathers up his bats and glove and leads the way down the stairs and into the tunnel where the guys' voices rebound, echoing, and it seems dimmer than it actually is after the nuclear glare of the sun--Bumgarner is having trouble figuring out his right from his left, and he has a few other small concerns.
But Buster Posey is the first thing to solidify, broad-shouldered in front of him, and Bumgarner follows him down the hall, the rabble of their teammates fading away behind. Posey's short hair is a dark wheat color and sticks up all over his head by the end of the game, once he's out of the mask for good.
They go into the equipment room and that's when it gets strange.
Bumgarner is still seeing spots, but also Posey slotting the bats into his cubby and whacking his catcher's mitt on the wall a few times to punch the dust out of it. Then Posey turns, bright eyes and quick smile because he just won them the game all by his lonesome, and Bumgarner hasn't been a pitcher for so long that he's forgotten what that one swing feels like.
Posey reaches to take his gear from Bumgarner, and one of the leg protectors slips clacking to the ground between them. Posey shoves the gear into the bin and then makes a move like he's going to pick up the one that fell, but instead his hand lands on Bumgarner's belt, and that's weird, so weird Bumgarner puts a hand out to push him away but then Posey licks his lips and Bumgarner gets distracted so that his hand ends up on Posey's belt, and then suddenly it's a race to get the buckles and flies open and Posey is walking him back until he hits the door, Bumgarner twisting his shoulders and gasping, zero to hard as fuck in about fifteen seconds, terrifically aware of the strength in Posey's chest and arms as he pushes his hand into Posey's jock, fumbling numb-fingered with his cup as Posey laughs breathlessly against his neck, and--bites him. Madison makes a strangled sound. Then the cup is falling between them to land with the leg guard and Bumgarner's damp palm slides hard against Posey's dick, skin to skin and Posey swears, a throaty fuck broke in half by his drawl, and Bumgarner starts panting, rubbing him off all fast and clueless, wanting to hear him make that noise again.
It doesn't last too long for either of them, Posey's warm thigh pressing in between Bumgarner's, hot breath and working mouth skidding down the line of Bumgarner's throat, and Posey sounds like he's choking as he comes, jerking against him, his grip so tight for a moment that Madison almost blacks out. Just a moment, and then Posey is back, sucking hard at Bumgarner's jaw and stroking him tight and wet and beautiful until Bumgarner finishes with a shudder, striping up the tense line of Posey's forearm.
Then there is an interval in which nothing happens. They slump against each other, weightless. Bumgarner can't even think. Every breath feels like a rag getting wrung out in his chest. His neck is slick and oversensitive where Posey did the worst damage.
Eventually Posey pries himself up, looks at Bumgarner and then down at himself, a hunched expression briefly capsizing his boyish features before he looks back up, easy smile clicking into place.
"Awright then," Posey says, clapping Bumgarner on the shoulder and quickly fixing up his uniform. He grabs the leg guard and cup off the floor, tosses the former in the bin and tucks the latter in his back pocket, smirking at Bumgarner in a way that seems vaguely foreboding.
"I'll see you up there, man," and Posey leaves just like that, like, no more to see here.
Bumgarner spends a few more minutes leaning against the wall with his hand feeling acid-burned, staring up at the pock-marked ceiling and breathing deeply. 'Struck dumb' is the phrase that seems to fit best, so he figures he'll just go with that.
*
They win the game.
Posey gives exactly no indication that he remembers their impromptu jerk-off session in the equipment room, joking and bullshitting like regular in the clubhouse, but he goes out to dinner that night with a couple of the infielders without inviting Bumgarner to come along. Not that that means anything--this is only the second road trip of the year, and he and Buster have only just recently been approaching something that resembles friendship.
But, whatever. Bumgarner tags along to a taqueria with some of the Spanish-speaking guys instead, even though they only bother to translate about a tenth of what they're saying for his benefit. It's still companionable, and anyway, Bumgarner doesn't talk much in groups as a general rule.
Back at the motel, Bumgarner watches reruns of Wipeout on ABC, and tries not to think about stuff too much. It's the first thing they told him, the first day he threw a baseball and got paid for it: quit thinking, kid.
The second thing, point of fact, was listen to your catcher, which seems particularly unfortunate in the circumstances.
Bumgarner stays up past curfew, past midnight, feeling itchy and annoyed that he's not pitching for another two days. After all the late shows are done, he shoves his feet into flip-flops, goes out to the vending machines to get a 7-Up or root beer, and out in the open air, over the rail he can see down to the motel pool, where Buster Posey is floating silently on an inflatable raft, one foot trailing in the water.
Madison stands staring at him for a moment, the picture embedding itself behind his eyes, then goes down there.
Posey is wearing his warm-up shorts and nothing else, barely lit by the shimmery blue glow of the pool, the faltering overhead lights of this shitty highway motel where the Single-A teams stay when they come to town. Bumgarner lets his flip-flops scrape along the cement as he approaches, not wanting to startle him.
"Hey man," Bumgarner says, whispering for some reason.
Posey tips his head towards him, sorta smiles in a half-asleep kind of way. "Hey."
"What. Where'd you get that raft?"
"Guy in the office," and Posey is whispering too, his lips barely moving. He's floating closer to Bumgarner's side of the pool, his foot in the water steering clandestinely. Bumgarner watches him, narrow-eyed.
"Can't sleep, huh?"
"Who needs sleep?" Posey gives it a cavalier little wave.
"Well. Everybody, point of fact."
Bumgarner rocks on his heels, taking his eyes away because he doesn't want to get caught staring; approximately sixty percent of the rooms face the pool, long L-shape of the motel bracketing them. This paranoia is new and uncomfortable, and Bumgarner wants to change the scene. He glances at the heavy muscles in Posey's arms, the cut of one hip visible where his shorts are tugged down, and yeah, this is definitely exactly the same as getting turned on by a girl. Kind of astonishing, although he's not sure why he expected it to be different. He didn't expect it to be, there's the trouble.
Posey has reached the edge of the pool by where Bumgarner is standing. His foot comes out of the water, dripping, and hooks on the cement lip, anchoring himself. The inflatable raft whines and wheezes around him, and the bizarre fluttering quality of the light from the pool makes Posey's eyes glitter, their deep color leeched away.
"You doing okay there, kid?" Posey says in a low drawl, running one hand across his bare stomach.
Bumgarner puts his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, his mouth dry as dust and his pulse hammering. He wants to get in the pool with Posey, pull him off the raft into the water, slide his hands down the slick and silk of Posey's skin, fingertips creeping into the back of his shorts as Posey's legs wrap around him, weightless again.
"Sure," Bumgarner says, and it sounds all right to him but Posey hears something in it, a darkish kinda smile creasing his face before he's sliding gracefully into the water and then hiking himself up the edge of the pool, rising with a sheet of wet falling off his body. Bumgarner stares at Posey's chest, his hard stomach and the way his shorts are sticking to him, leaving very little to the imagination.
"Look a little rough," Posey says still in that goddamn underground voice, and then he's reaching out and tugging on Bumgarner's shirt, and walking away.
Posey leaves a few wet footprints on the cement, and then they fade. Bumgarner follows him, distracted by the neon red gleam of the Coke machine in the vending alcove on the second level, stuck in the corner of his eye like a bloody hanging moon. Posey goes up the stairs and down the way to his room, and Bumgarner hangs back, freaked out and pretty sure he's into it but not exactly sure what that entails. He doesn't like going in blind.
Posey glances back at him at the door to his room, which is propped open on its lock because evidently Posey is the trusting sort. It's still mostly a smirk, that look on Posey's face. It's like Bumgarner is missing something pretty obvious.
"Well, c'mon," Posey says, sleek-wet as he disappears into the room.
Bumgarner looks back down at the pool, the inflatable raft drifting glacially from one side to the other, and then he licks his lips and follows Posey the rest of the way in.
*
On the bus, driving back to San Jose, Posey sits in the back with the rowdy guys, getting secretly drunk and louder by the mile. There's ostensibly a poker tournament going on back there, but Bumgarner's pretty sure they lost the plot on it awhile ago.
He's stationed himself in the middle, at a window seat with Darren Ford conked out next to him, headphones screwed into his ears and his mouth hanging open. Bumgarner was playing with his PSP earlier, but that got old and now he's mostly watching the scenery, and listening to the guys in the back.
"That's a fuckin' lie, how can you fuckin' lie like that," Posey says, and Runzler is firing back at him, "I told you, told you," and Bumgarner wants to know what they're talking about.
He maintains position. Outside his window the Central Valley has given way to upward-running yellow hills peppered with windmill farms. Most of them are unmoving, stalled, and Bumgarner can perfectly imagine the stillness and baking heat out there, feel it sizzling on his skin.
From behind, the back of the bus, among the general chatter and argument Bumgarner catches a sound-bite of someone calling someone else a cocksucker. He doesn't recognize the voice, doesn't know who it was directed at. Bumgarner pushes his palm down the length of his thigh, grinding hard into his kneecap. He wonders if Posey flinched at all.
Because that happened last night, among other things.
Madison closes his eyes. He lets his head tip against the window, soaking up the heavy thrum of the engine.
Last night, Posey pushed him to sit on the bed and then pushed him down flat with a hand on his chest, like he didn't want Madison to see him kneeling, as if that would have changed the impact at all, the feel of Buster tugging down his sweats and shorts and curling a hand around him, the rasp of his face so low on Madison's hip, and all that was before the blowjob itself, which has rewired something in Madison's brain because he can call up the picture of it so clearly even if he'd been flat on his back gasping up at the ceiling with his eyes screwed shut at the time--it was still there in technicolor and super slo-mo, Buster's lips parting, his eyelids drifting shut.
An elbow drills into Bumgarner's side. He snaps out of his fugue, yanking his head off the window and turning to blink at Ford.
"The hell?" Bumgarner asks with a sleepy glare.
"You done playing with your game, man?" Ford says with a grin that someone has obviously been telling him is charming (his mom, no doubt; Bumgarner's heard the guy on the phone often enough).
Bumgarner takes his time about it, sighing and stretching his arms out with his fingers interwoven before getting the PSP from the backpack tucked under his seat. Ford accepts it with a happy thanks, and settles in to play the race game with the volume muted, not that that stops him from providing his own vrooming sound effects.
There's an odd discombobulated feel in Bumgarner as he attempts to get comfortable in his seat again, like he woke up on a different bus from the one he fell asleep on. His face is hot and his stomach clenched up even though he doesn't get sick on buses anymore, hasn't for years.
From the back of the bus he hears Posey saying, "And fuck you too Tommy, I needed that goddamn seven," and Bumgarner closes his eyes again, wondering if he's supposed to be sitting next to Posey back there, playing hold 'em and calling each other truthful things that no one else will take seriously. If that's the right thing--he doesn't really have a sense of it.
Bumgarner crosses his arms over his chest, slumps and considers the fact that he probably won't get this right, whatever 'right' means now. No one ever told him about this part.
*
A bunch of the guys are staying in the same apartment block near the ballpark, where the ballclub has a standing agreement with the management to rent a certain number of units dirt-cheap for the ever-rotating cast of minor league talent. There's a swimming pool too, but it's been dry for as long as Madison has been here, scarred up white along the bottom from the kids using it as a skate bowl. There are a few families crowded into units not much bigger than the ballplayers', three or four little kids in bare feet and cartoon T-shirts always running around, old ladies with pinned-back gray hair leaning on the second story railings. San Jose's low-slung skyline hunches beyond the trees.
Bumgarner gets drunk at Craig Clark's place, which is two doors down from his, and then stumbles home, lying down on his bed until the spins go away.
It's about the time of night when he gets bad ideas, just about the right kind of drunk to act on them. Bumgarner opens a hand on his stomach, slides it up to his chest and presses down. He wants something steady; he'd prefer it be someone else's hand, point of fact.
Stupid and obvious but what the hell, and Bumgarner drags his phone out, fumble-fingered searching for Posey's number and hesitating, stuttering tragically over the text message, because Bumgarner never went to college and he's not a hundred percent sure how the booty call thing is supposed to go.
What's up man R U around?
Good enough, send it, go. Bumgarner watches the little screen intently, the little envelope flying away. Galloping heart, short of breath and thinking about Posey's raspy face, his soft hot mouth. Posey doesn't live in this complex, but only a few minutes away. Bumgarner has never been inside but he dropped Posey off once; he could make it there before the buzz wears off, no question about it.
He gets all caught up in the possibilities of it. Nineteen years old and all, Bumgarner is still figuring out the specifics beyond that sex is fucking awesome. He hasn't tried everything yet, doesn't know what he likes best, doesn't even know if this gay thing is gonna be all the time or if it's just Buster or just the situation or what. Bumgarner wonders feverishly about what Posey might let him do, if maybe he could try his hand at the cocksucking thing because Posey certainly seemed pretty into it, eyes closed blissfully and sorta moaning around Bumgarner's dick as he pressed his chest flush to Madison's legs and clutched his hips, how he was already hard as fuck when Bumgarner pulled him up and started jerking him off, already slick and shivering and choking with every gasp, every stroke.
Bumgarner comes back to himself after an extended interval of filthy-minded reverie. He blinks at the same off-white ceiling and picks his phone off his chest to make sure he hasn't missed a call or dozed off or anything, but the screen is blank. Seventeen minutes since he texted Posey, and is there a window for this type of thing, are you supposed to move on to someone else if you don't get a response after a certain amount of time?
Bumgarner doesn't know. He doesn't have anyone else to hit up, anyway, and possibly he's not cut out for the booty call thing as a general rule, and he gives up on it, feeling kinda awkward and ignorant.
It takes him almost five minutes to work up the motivation to rise and brush his teeth, and then he almost passes out in the bathroom, ends up face-planting on the bed with his jeans still on and his cap jammed under his body. When he wakes up it feels like he's been unconscious for approximately two hundred years.
*
They're at the ballpark at nine o'clock in the morning on the off-day, stretching in the sideways-slanted light, long shadows of the light standards cutting across the outfield.
Bumgarner is intently occupied before he's all the way awake, stuck with the other pitchers learning how to throw a major league slider. Everybody gets tunnel vision, not noticing when a stray hawk of tobacco spatters against spikes, leaning heavily on each other's shoulders. Bumgarner apes the grip, digging his fingertips into the stitches like he wants to get it branded. He's already contemptuous of that weak rubbery thing they taught him back at South Caldwell High School, sneering at his yesterday self, you call that a slider.
Posey and the catchers are working on blocking pitches in the dirt. One of the coaches is having a sadistically good time overthrowing splitters to them. They crash to their knees over and over, arms straight down, chest made into a wall, keep it in front, knock it down. Trent Kline takes a bad skidding hop directly into the balls, and almost throws up in the dirt, on his hands and knees in all his gear. They haul him over to the dugout and lay him out on the bench, and one of the bat boys, who hang around whether they're getting paid or not, commences fanning Kline's agony-wrenched face with a scorebook.
It's tough work, and everyone is panting and red by the time they take their first break. Guys sprawl on the grass, slump against the fence, sucking on water bottles and eating orange slices like they haven't seen food in a week.
Bumgarner takes a couple of wedges and screws up his courage, goes over to where Posey is lying flat on his back with his legs still guarded and hanging over the dugout steps. Bumgarner's shadow slants across Posey's face, makes him squint his eyes open.
"Orange?" Bumgarner offers.
Posey's hand comes up and grabs a wedge, fingers dirty and his knuckles scratched up. Taking that as an implicit invitation, Bumgarner hunkers down and sits on the steps, pulls off his cap to scrape a hand through his hair, already thick with sweat.
"It's fuckin' hot, huh," Bumgarner says.
Posey kinda moves his shoulders like a shrug, eyes squinted so tight against the sun they might as well be closed. He tucks the whole wedge into his mouth to make his grin brilliant orange and inscrutable.
It isn't much of a conversation topic, anyway, the weather. Surely they're not so far gone as to be stuck at that. Not to mention, Northern California's version of 'hot' doesn't have much on North Carolina or Georgia in the mosquito-thick heart of summer. Bumgarner eats his own orange slice, wanting time to think of more clever things.
The element of distraction presented by Buster Posey laid out in the sun at the edge of a baseball field is somewhat more intense than Bumgarner is really prepared to deal with. The short sleeve of Posey's jersey is twisted up on one side so Bumgarner can see the greening bruise on his biceps, comet-shaped with half of it defined by a clear curve and the other blurred as if by interstellar velocity. That bruise is Bumgarner's doing, point of fact. A fastball he hung up on the wrong side of the plate, and Buster swearing and shaking off his glove, dead-armed. That was three days ago, and Posey came out to the mound to give himself a little time to recover, scowling at Bumgarner with fantastic color in his face and one hand clapped, rubbing hard at his shoulder, saying, "You're buying me about three fuckin' beers tonight, man, that fuckin' hurt."
"Oh hey," Bumgarner says, like it just occurred to him. "Didja get my text last night?"
And then there is excruciating silence, which is the trouble with questions like that: always at least a few seconds of pure torture, no matter how it turns out in the end.
Posey lifts his arm, lets a bar of light fall across his face so he can give Bumgarner a proper look. He takes the desiccated orange peel out of his mouth with a wet slurp, lips curling up in a smirk that makes something go withering and small in Bumgarner's gut.
"Yep," Posey says.
Bumgarner waits, but gets nothing else. "Uh. Yeah. I was, ah. Seeing if you wanted to hang out or whatever."
He's careful about it and all, keeps his voice way down even though there's no one within ten feet of them and the two closest are engaged in a spirited discussion in Spanish, but Posey's eyes still thin down, nostrils flaring a little bit.
"Thanks, I think I deciphered your little code there," and fuck, this is going to go badly. Posey's smirk looks chipped onto his mouth. "Guess you need some help on your end, so here: no answer means no."
"Right," Bumgarner says, bobbing his head like an idiot. "Sure. That. That's what I figured."
Posey snorts, plainly doesn't believe him, and puts his arm down on his face, no longer interested in looking at Bumgarner or being looked at by him. "Don't be stupid, Madison."
"Okay," Bumgarner replies automatically, face hot-red with the domino-fall feeling in his chest, dozens of tiny plastic collapses, and he's aware a split second later that he should have asked how.
*
Never let it be said that Madison Bumgarner can't take a hint.
He backs off, retreats into the encompassing fold of baseball all around him. There's still an awful lot of novelty in getting paid to go to the ballpark. He's still got to work out that split-fingered fastball.
They play Visalia and Stockton at home, where for the first half of the game the barbecue tent scents the air from beyond the bleachers along the left field line, smokey sweet and all the guys in the dugout gnawing on beef jerky, starving. There are minor league shenanigans happening at every inning break, kids in oversized T-shirts recruited from the crowd for musical chairs and dizzy-bat races, chasing the foam-headed Giants mascot around the bases. One night Bumgarner draws the short straw and has to go out and throw at one of the headlights of a rigged truck, trying to smash it out before Joe Martinez can bust his own.
He pitches pretty well in his start on the home-stand, although it's slightly weird throwing to Posey now, reminded at the most unfortunate moments that he's had his dick in that guy's mouth. When Buster comes out for mound conferences, Bumgarner mostly glares over his shoulder at the batter and nods along, trying not to lean in too much. Posey doesn't seem to notice anything, smacks Bumgarner on the ass before he goes back behind the plate, all normal here.
Lots of extraneous stuff, but Bumgarner would prefer to just focus on pitching, at least for the length of time he's at the ballpark, which is most of his life, which is how he wants it.
Back home, for whatever value of 'home' the nondescript already-furnished apartment can satisfy, Bumgarner wakes up a few times from dreams about his teeth falling out and pitching naked, and then, late in the week, he dreams of Posey crowding him against the dugout wall before bending him over the bench, dry wood under Bumgarner's mouth and Posey hot as hell on his back, both of them bare-chested and he can feel the sparse hair on Posey's chest rasping, Posey's rattly huff of breath and teeth sinking into the back of Bumgarner's shoulder, and then Bumgarner jolts awake like he just fell off a fucking cliff.
That night, no more than five minutes later, Bumgarner has jerked himself off to thoughts of another guy for the first time ever, and it's pretty goddamn good. He catches his breath, rubbing his slick hand on his belly, feeling diffuse and floaty with astonishment.
He spends the next three nights up way too late on the internet. conducting research.
Turns out, he's a little gay. Maybe about twenty percent; the numbers are indistinct just now.
The evidence is irrefutable. Broad-shouldered guys do it for him, legs heavy with muscle and dark with hair, and also baby-faced college boys who stay hard by watching the straight porn in the rented room where the gay porn is being filmed, those guys who never smile.
Bumgarner takes his second shower of the day, dizzy and endorphin-high and kinda confused still.
He figures that he's just never had a reason to consider guys, not when girls do it for him too and obviously there was no point in him wanting to fuck anybody other than girls when he was back in North Carolina, high school baseball star and small-town hero and all. It still seems like he should have known, if only for himself, and Bumgarner wonders, detached and scrubbing his junk, if he's been in total denial his whole life.
But that's seems unlikely too, and not just because it makes him look kinda dumb. Bumgarner has just never had to think about gay stuff much before. He doesn't know any gay people. Maybe he still doesn't, because he's only twenty percent and Posey might even be less than that; he didn't want to do it more than twice, after all.
The fact that it happened twice is what trips Bumgarner up every time. That first time in the equipment shed, breathless and unhinged and devoid of all sense, it was quick enough and bizarre enough that they could have played it off later, adrenaline or whatever, that beautiful home run that Posey had sent into the night, all this brain-destroying baseball stuff, but the second time, the second.
Posey didn't have to take Bumgarner up to his room, that second night. Didn't have to touch him or suck him off or say anything at all; he could have pretended to be asleep on that raft and Bumgarner would have slunk away after a minute or two, not wanting to make it a big thing. Posey didn't have to do anything.
It's the difference between premeditated and just regular murder, about twenty extra years in prison. It's the crucial point, Bumgarner's sure. Whatever Posey's reasons for not wanting to do it again, they definitely stem from that second time.
At the ballpark, after a game Bumgarner is heading into the showers when he catches a glimpse of the bare stretch of Posey under the spray, his sleek shifting back and perfect ass and strong legs, tipping his face back with his hands running over his head, down the nape of his neck.
Bumgarner has to spin away, his ears on fire and one hand clutching the towel around his waist, biting down hard on the inside of his lip and praying that no one will see as he ducks into the bathroom, sliding on the tiled floor and stumbling into a stall, breathing out in hoarse relief as the door claps shut behind him and his hand comes into fumbling contact with his cock.
Bumgarner has watched more gay porn in the past few days than he ever expected to in his life, but still, nothing has gotten him off faster or harder than the very simple picture of Posey, naked and wet and seen from behind.
*
Their next trip is down to the Southland to play the Inland Empire 66ers out of San Bernadino, and the High Desert Mavericks of scenic Adelanto, California. Six hours on the bus and Bumgarner pretends to be asleep for most of it, not really interested in dealing with his teammates just now.
Posey is just a couple rows behind him, and Bumgarner hears snatches of the long cell phone conversation he's having, hears Posey describing the scenery to someone, "Yep, more cows," and laughing sometimes. The casual affection in Posey's voice makes Bumgarner think he must be talking to someone in his family, his mom or a sibling maybe. Bumgarner realizes that he doesn't even know if Posey has brothers or sisters, which bothers him a lot for some reason.
They get in with time enough to grab a late dinner and a beer, and Bumgarner inserts himself in the cab of the guys who seem to know where they're going. It's a roadhouse-looking place, playing up the cowboy angle with a neon blue boot kicking above the sign. They've come in a crowd of fifteen, and are granted one whole side of the big empty barn-type building, the dancefloor scuffed and untraveled.
Bumgarner orders a cheeseburger because that's hard to screw up, and PBR is going for two bucks a can, so it sounds like he's getting drunk tonight. The rest of the guys are in agreement, and their tabletops become thickly forested with silver-blue empties.
Regular out-with-the-boys kind of night, and Bumgarner has designs on Villalona's onion rings, edging close with his elbows on the table, when Posey slides into the booth beside him.
Bumgarner freezes, only for a second but Posey probably notices. He glances at his catcher, lets one hand curl protectively around the edge of the table.
"Hiya Buster."
"Hello." Posey flashes his fake autograph-signing smile. "How's it going, kid?"
"Good. Uh. How's it going with you?"
"Pretty fuckin' good, although listen, I wanted to show you this one thing."
"Oh yeah?" Bumgarner says, taking a steadying drink of his beer because he doesn't know what Posey's doing, if this is some kind of secret lingo.
"Yeah c'mon it's really cool," and Posey puts his hand on Bumgarner's leg under the table, a warm shock of pressure that has Bumgarner jumping, dropping his fork on the plate. Posey squeezes his thigh, hard enough that he can feel each one of his fingers, and then he's standing out of the booth, swaying and catching himself, dazzling grin on his face that means nothing but Bumgarner likes it anyway. He gets up and follows Posey, high-pitched buzz in his ears, trying not to trip over anybody.
Posey goes back to the bathrooms and Bumgarner's pulse kicks up because the two of them would hardly fit in a stall together and half the goddamn team would be right outside, but Posey has a better idea, pushing out the back exit and onto the gravel parking lot.
It's near midnight but still itchy-hot, Bumgarner's shirt sticking to the small of his back. Posey winds between the parked cars, footsteps crunching, not looking back at Bumgarner but that's all right; Bumgarner has a feeling it's a pretty idiotic look that he's wearing right now.
Way at the back of the lot, in the shadow of a few stunted palm trees and shielded from the bar by a white van stenciled with an exterminator's logo, a cartoon rat dressed up as an angel with a harp and all, and Posey pushes Bumgarner up against the side of it, dim flash of his teeth as he bites off a smile.
Bumgarner smiles wildly back at him, so eager he's shaking, and so goddamned confused his head might cave in.
"So, so we are gonna," Bumgarner says, and makes a move to grab Posey's belt, gets swatted away for his trouble.
"Yep," Posey answers, and kicks Bumgarner's feet apart, slides one of his legs between and presses up against him from shoulder to knee.
"Jesus." Bumgarner wasn't expecting that. Posey is insanely warm and broad, his firm thigh between Bumgarner's and pushing in, rubbing so nice that all his blood rushes to his dick and he almost swoons. Bumgarner's head bangs back against the van, hollow thunking sound, and he keeps talking because otherwise he's going to lose it in his fuckin' pants.
"'cause I, I thought we weren't gonna, thought you didn't want to."
"Dumb," Posey mutters, ducking his head to lick at Bumgarner's throat, wet lash of his tongue. "Good thing you're a pitcher, man, fuckin' knucklehead."
"Hey," and Bumgarner means to protest that more because he's no dumber than any other nineteen year old kid playing professional baseball for the first time, but then Posey is tipping away and going to work on their belts and Bumgarner swallows the rest of it, because he's got his priorities straight.
Posey keeps him shoved up against the side of the van, gets both their flies open, his coarse palm making Bumgarner shiver and twist into him. Posey strokes them both together, breathing out urgently against Bumgarner's throat, sucking and biting just shy of too much, just enough to make Madison's hips jerk and mind fuzz whitely away. Buster shifts against him and the gravel crunches, and far away a car alarm is going off.
He finishes quickly again, quick enough to be embarrassing if Posey wasn't right behind him, moaning low into his shoulder with his free hand fisted in Bumgarner's shirt, pulling it up so that Posey can shoot all over his stomach, and then Bumgarner is a wreck, weak-kneed and panting with his back to the dead-and-gone cartoon rat, blown apart.
Posey leans one hand on the van, his head down for a moment, and when he looks back up his neat meaningless smile is back in place, his blue eyes not bright enough to really make out in this light.
Bumgarner stares, and thinks about kissing him, thinks that they should try that too because everything else has worked out pretty well.
Instead he says again, "I thought we weren't gonna."
An impatient edge slips across Posey's expression, that goddamn rookie look that Bumgarner gets more often than really seems warranted.
"Not when we're at home," Posey says like it should be obvious. "It's a road thing, it's not, like, real. Just fucking around, you know?"
"Yeah," Bumgarner says, because you say yeah, you nod along. His hands twitch at his sides, and he should stop looking at Posey's mouth. "That's cool."
"Yeah, so try to be cool, huh? I know it's hard for you," and Buster fixes his belt, wipes his hands on the van before finishing the job on his jeans. He reassembles, pieces fit right back into place, and Madison pushes his fingers at the sore place on his neck, wanting a bruise to form there and wishing he'd left some evidence of his own.
*
It's a road thing, makes so much more sense now.
Or, well. Parts of it make more sense, obvious parts like why Posey stayed away from him in San Jose, and why Posey keeps calling him stupid, because apparently other guys get a freakin' manual in this stuff; maybe it's another college thing that he missed out on.
Other things remain shrouded in mystery. Bumgarner isn't sure why they can jerk each other off and Posey can leave a hickey on his neck and theoretically blowjobs are still on the table, but if he tries to kiss Buster he's pretty sure he'll come out of it with a black eye. He doesn't know if Posey actually likes him, or if it's only a convenience thing. He isn't sure how gay any of this makes either of them.
In a motel room in San Bernadino, after Bumgarner takes a killer loss on seven innings of one-run ball, Posey brings his laptop over and they watch porn with their hands in each other's jeans, which works out perfectly because Bumgarner is left-handed, and it's the easiest sex he's ever had. Towards the end, when Posey's head tips back and his eyes go slitted and he makes that choked moaning sound that Bumgarner is starting to recognize, starting to look forward to, towards the end there, Posey shifts and hooks his leg over Bumgarner's to get closer, heavy weight pinning him down as Posey's bare foot bumps against Bumgarner's socked one, and Bumgarner flexes, presses into it with their toes nudging together, and for some ridiculous reason the fact that he's playing footsie with Buster at the end of the bed seems exactly as relevant as the fact that they've got their hands on each other's cocks.
Afterwards, Posey comes out of the bathroom with his hands still wet from the sink, patting dry on his T-shirt and swiping through his hair so that it spikes up in front a little bit.
"Movie's not bad, huh?" Posey says.
Bumgarner blinks at him for a second, lost until he registers the porn still running on the laptop, tinny groans and curses, badly pixelated swaths of pink skin moving obscurely. Bumgarner wasn't exactly watching the movie, but he answers, "Yeah, 's all right."
Posey comes to sit on the edge of the bed, turning the laptop a bit away from Bumgarner. Bumgarner looks at the close line of Posey's neck, the place where his hairline shaves into skin, kinda flushed now on account of the recent orgasm and all, and Bumgarner considers leaning forward and licking that spot but it seems fraught with peril and things are going pretty well, so he holds himself back.
The porn has girls in it, sometimes nothing but girls, and Bumgarner has no idea why he's vaguely surprised about that, but there you go.
"Damn, baby," Posey says low, making Bumgarner jolt, but Posey's talking to the computer, his blue eyes darkly intent on the screen.
Uncertainty itches in Bumgarner, that hateful sense that he's only understanding about half of what's going on. He doesn't know Posey's tastes in pornography, doesn't know what his favorite movie or band is, doesn't know how many places he lived when he was a kid or what his family looks like or if everybody he loves is still alive. It's a different kind of thing, being teammates first. Madison knows the kind of oil Posey prefers for his mitt, the dimensions of his bats, the sound Posey's knees make popping when he comes out of the crouch late in games. He knows that Buster likes Dr. Pepper and hot sauce on everything and candy bars with almonds. Bumgarner knows how he likes to jerk off, because Posey just showed him.
Bumgarner could catalogue this stuff all day, what he knows and what he doesn't. He's just got no idea what it's supposed to mean.
Wanting a new topic, Bumgarner says, "You wanna stick around and watch a real movie? I got that, uh, the new Batman."
Posey glances at him, and shakes his head. "Nah, I'd fall asleep halfway through."
"That's okay," Bumgarner says, picturing it really clearly, Posey sprawled out in this bed, lit by computer light.
"Some other time maybe," and Posey turns off the porn, shuts his laptop and stands up, tossing a smile in Bumgarner's direction. "See ya tomorrow, man."
"Yeah, see ya."
That's it, and then Posey is gone and Bumgarner is wondering how he might have played that differently, if there was something he could have said that would have resulted in Posey sticking around, staying over.
Probably not. It's probably another weird rule, like the kissing thing, can't fall asleep anywhere but your own bed. Keeps it from getting complicated.
Bumgarner strips down to his shorts and brushes his teeth, shaves because his scruff has been getting long enough to itch. He looks at a car magazine until his eyelids start to droop, and then tries to fall asleep.
An hour later he's still awake, wrapped up trying to remember the words of that country song Posey was singing along with in the restaurant earlier, something about Corvettes and a shotgun and someone's carelessly broken heart, something Buster liked well enough at some point to learn all the way through.
*
They go through Adelanto, and Bumgarner gives his very first blowjob in a motel room with a rattlesnake painting on the wall, which is the random detail that sticks in his mind and the trigger to this moment for the rest of his life. Brown rattlesnake coiled with a long curve of diamonds on its back, blue sand and purple sky, cheap plastic frame rattling against the wall when Posey bangs his head back.
Bumgarner is profoundly affected by the blunt press of Posey's cock over his tongue, the unthinking scratch of fingers through his hair, nails painful over his ears, the cut of muscle in Posey's hip where Bumgarner braces his hand. Bumgarner loves it, stunned to realize how much, stunned to find himself already hard when Posey comes in his mouth before dropping to his knees and jamming his hand into Bumgarner's sweatpants, three or four good tight wet strokes and game over, Buster wins on a walk-off.
They both end up sprawled on the floor, sandpaper carpet rough on the places where Madison's clothes are pulled askew. He listens to Posey's breathing settle, feels his own pulse stagger and catch and taper off to a more reasonable pace.
The rattlesnake painting is hanging crookedly now. Bumgarner's hands are shaking, and so he's keeping them pressed flat to the floor. He feels cracked open, split down seams he didn't even know he had.
"Not bad," Posey says.
"Oh. Yeah?"
"Yeah, I'd say you're about on par with a really drunk sorority girl." Posey pauses. "It's a compliment, you know."
"Okay. Thank you." The muscles in Bumgarner's legs have gone fluttery, a similar winged feeling happening in his chest, and he's dazed, flushed with draining pleasure that seeps away from his skin like lost heat.
"So polite. Nobody'd ever guess what you were just doing with that mouth."
Bumgarner's stomach flips. "Um," and he doesn't know what comes next, just kinda trails off.
"Little bit of practice," Posey says, kinda drifting tone, like he's just talking without thinking much about it. "That's all you need. Just a little experience. I could keep you on your knees for about a day, I swear."
Madison feels pinned to the floor, heat rolling through him and his dick doing all it can to make a second go of it because yeah, yeah, he can get behind that plan.
"You know a lot about it, huh?" Bumgarner says in a roughed-up voice.
"More'n you."
"Ob-obviously. That's why--I mean. You've done this before, right?"
Three seconds pass, maybe four, some small number that feels larger from where Bumgarner lies prone on the floor. He's sure in a bedrock way that that question is way out of bounds, and Posey's gonna slap him down, pick himself up and slam the door when he leaves, not come to find Bumgarner ever again, never touch him or let him go to his knees, nothing, the bad ending coming down just that quickly.
Stupid, stupid, and Bumgarner fights off a rising tide of mortification as the silence stretches, keeping his hands still at his sides. When he was a little kid he got teased and called Dumbo, which had more to do with his ears than his intelligence level, but it's the kind of thing that sticks with a person. Madison still can't stand this feeling, all this goddamn ignorance.
"A time or two," is what Buster says eventually, neutral.
Bumgarner swallows hard, staring up the vertical angle of the wall with its cactus wallpaper, the rattlesnake painting clinging to its nail so fragilely that an eighteen-wheeler trundling by outside might shake it loose.
"Like. In college?" Bumgarner asks.
"Yeah."
Nothing more from Posey, and he probably doesn't want to talk about it, probably pissed off that Bumgarner is pressing him and made just tolerant enough by the near memory of Bumgarner's mouth on him, but god knows that won't last. Bumgarner turns his pitching hand over on the carpet, rasping his knuckles and it feels like steel wool. He figures, already out on this fucking limb, and says:
"Guess this shit probably happens all the time, but, but fuck if I ever knew about it. Nobody. Nobody ever told me."
"What, you need a manual for how to get your dick sucked?"
"No. No." Bumgarner scrambles for a better way to describe it, glad that he can't see Posey right now and Posey can't see him, unless Posey's looking, but why would he be? "Just. I didn't know I was supposed to be looking at. Guys. You."
He bites his tongue as soon as the last word escapes. His ears prickle with heat as his stomach sinks, because that wasn't what he meant to say, or maybe it was and it's just more poor decision-making on his part.
Sharp movement in his peripheral vision, Posey sitting up. Bumgarner tips his head, risking a glance at him with his heart in his throat, and finds Posey looking down with a stiff-edged smirk twisting his mouth in a way that might have stung Bumgarner if he weren't so fatally distracted by the deep river color of Posey's eyes at this angle, this particular quality of light.
"You gotta take it where you can get it," Posey tells him, and reaches out towards Bumgarner's face, whose pulse abruptly jumps the rails, eyes going wide thinking that Posey might touch him carefully, fingertips tracing his lips, might lean down and kiss him slow like how people are supposed to kiss, like when it means something.
Posey flicks his ear instead. Bumgarner hisses and recoils, something shrinking inside as Posey grins, very blue eyes gone cold.
"You especially can't be picky," Posey says as he rolls to his knees and then up to his feet. "Fuckin' stringbean, I keep thinking I'm gonna snap you in half."
Bumgarner blinks, flat on the floor with Posey about ten feet tall over him, vertigo unmooring him even though Bumgarner hasn't moved.
"Don't. Don't worry about that."
"Don't tell me what to do," Posey shoots back, and that doesn't mean anything at all, it's just Posey's default punk response to direct orders, even the ones he follows without hesitation. Bumgarner tries out a wavery little chuckle, and he can't tell from this lousy perspective if Posey's response is a smile or a smirk or a sneer or something wholly different.
"You planning to sleep down there?" Posey asks.
"Um, no. That would be kinda weird."
After a moment of watching Bumgarner not move, Posey sighs, aggrieved, and sticks his hand out. "C'mon, c'mon."
Bumgarner grabs Posey's wrist, gets his feet under him and gets hauled up. He totters, too fast too much too soon, and Posey pushes him so that he falls harmlessly onto the bed, face mashing into the polyester comforter. It smells like industrial soap and really old cigarettes, and Bumgarner rolls onto his back, the world rolling with him. Posey stands alongside the bed, arms crossed over his chest, and yeah, still a smirk, loveless and cool as fucking ice.
"Thanks," Madison says. His throat is tight.
"Gotta take care of my pitchers, don't I?"
"Yeah. Good." Bumgarner closes his eyes, a low-pitched achey feeling in his gut that he's trying not to think too much about. "Night, Buster."
"Night, Mad," Posey says, and because Bumgarner is holding his breath and counting mississippis in his head, he knows that it's fourteen seconds before Posey actually moves to leave the room, fourteen quiet seconds just standing there looking at Bumgarner and Jesus H. Christ, what does that mean?
*
A couple days later they go back north, back home.
Bumgarner sits in the middle of the bus with Villalona and Zambrano and Torres, who are playing dirty hangman on the back of a pitcher report. Bumgarner learns the Spanish words for motherfucker and whoreson and dogfucker, thinking that that will probably come in handy.
There's so much less pressure on him when the conversation is in a different language. Bumgarner keeps score for the game, doodles ever-elaborate gallows for them to use. He's not listening for Posey at the back of the bus, having learned his lesson.
It's late when they roll into San Jose, gray cloud night sky, no stars or moon. In the parking lot of the ballpark where they all left their cars, Bumgarner can hear Posey talking with Martinez and Ford, saying how it's Wednesday and margaritas are three bucks at the Well.
Bumgarner closes his hand up around his car keys, metal teeth cutting into his palm. He wants to invite himself along to the bar, raise his voice a little over the cars to say hey I wanna come, and it would be a normal thing, a thing that happened all the time, because there will be beer and girls there and a guy doesn't have to need any other reason, right?
But he doesn't say anything, doesn't go with them. It hasn't even been twenty-four hours since he last had his hand on Posey's dick. They're not exactly friends anymore, if they ever were. This thing seems to require a different definition.
The first game of the home-stand is undertaken in bad twilight conditions with the dense sky looking hitched to the light standards, and in the sixth, two of their outfielders run into each other full-scale while going after a fly ball. Thomas Neal is knocked out cold for almost a minute, freaking everybody right the hell out, and then it's like the rest of the game is an afterthought, an irritating chore to be completed as quickly as possible.
After they lose, Bumgarner goes over to the hospital where they're keeping Neal and his mild concussion overnight for observation. It's way past visiting hours, which Bumgarner didn't even think about, but evidently the ballclub has a few strings to pull here, because Bumgarner doesn't have to do more than show up with a Giants cap folded in his back pocket to get waved through to Neal's private room.
Posey is already there, slouched in a institutional pale green chair by Neal's bed fiddling with his phone, and Bumgarner is immediately derailed, whatever he'd intended to say dying on his lips as he blinks at Posey, and Posey's legs, spread casually open.
"Hey Maddy," Neal says, and Bumgarner jerks his gaze over, noticing abruptly that Darren Ford is in the room too, eating a cup of red Jello with a beige plastic spork that he waves at Bumgarner in greeting.
"Hey Tom." Bumgarner hooks his foot around the leg of another one of those cheap scratched-up hospital chairs, pulls it up alongside Ford. "You feelin' okay?"
"Yeah top-notch."
Neal doesn't looks too banged up, just kinda baggy under his eyes and his hair all limp. Ford is the one who collided with him in the outfield and he shows it more, one cheekbone swollen and starting to darken and he'll be lucky if he can still see out that eye in the morning. Ford seems to be taking it pretty well, feet propped up on the side of the bed, happy with his Jello.
Bumgarner glances at Posey, who seems intent on having a text message conversation instead of an actual one, rude motherfucker. "Uh. Did they. They say if you're gonna be good to play tomorrow?"
"Like they'd bother telling me that shit," Neal says. "I want to go, I totally could. Just a headache, I can play through a stupid headache."
"Yeah," Bumgarner says, mostly believing him.
"Did you hear it in the dugout?" Ford asks. "Andres came by earlier, he said he could hear it when we hit, like, ker-aaack."
Ford bashes his fists together, exploding out his fingers like a car crash, a bomb blowing up.
"Uh, yeah, I guess I did," Bumgarner says, although he doesn't remember the sound so much as the sight, Ford and Neal streaking towards each other blindly with their faces turned upwards, and how everyone in the ballpark could see what was about to happen and how there was no way to stop it, and then the impact, and Neal dropping like a sack of flour, just suddenly boneless and unmoving on the grass while Ford groaned and rolled next to him, clutching at his face.
"It was gnarly, huh?" Ford says, having altogether too much fun with this.
"Scary," Bumgarner says, and then kinda flinches.
Ford and Neal nod along, and Posey is smirking fondly down at his phone, his thumbs tapping away.
"Yeah, lucky this kid's head is so hard," Ford says with a feint towards Neal that gets batted down easily.
"Lucky you were already ugly, that shiner's not gonna mess up your face too bad," Neal fires back, and then it's banter and insult for awhile, and Posey actually rouses himself to join in at some point, talking shit like a first language, all on the surface.
Eventually it tapers off. It's even later now, and there's a day game tomorrow. Once Ford starts yawning, Neal sends them off with Posey promising to hit a home run tomorrow for his poor sick buddy in the hospital, and Neal of course makes him pledge to two home runs instead.
It's not awkward until the three of them hit the parking lot, and Ford says, "Hey Buster, why don't you catch a ride with him, it's more on the way," and Posey says, "Whatever," and Bumgarner doesn't understand what happened until Ford says a cheery goodnight and splits off towards his car, and Posey's still following Bumgarner.
"I'm taking you home?" Bumgarner asks, and then wants to rip out his tongue because in addition to the appallingly obvious content, his voice actually cracked right there, and he shouldn't be allowed to speak anymore, clearly. He is very careful not to look at Posey, cutting between two close-parked cars so that they have to go single file.
"Seems to be the situation," Posey says.
"Right." Just a convenience thing, Bumgarner tells himself. Just because Posey lives less than a mile from Bumgarner and Ford is all the way out on Steven's Creek Boulevard, so it just makes good sense.
Inside Bumgarner's car, en route, conversation is hard to come by. Bumgarner scans restlessly through the country music radio stations he has programmed, not looking for anything specific but not liking anything he finds. Eventually Posey smacks his hand away from the dial.
"Leave it. Twitchy fucker."
Bumgarner snatches his hand back, curls it up on his leg. In the corner of his eye, Posey is sprawled like a magazine photo in the shotgun seat, his legs open again, broad shoulders turned against the door.
"Sorry," Bumgarner says belatedly, and Posey doesn't answer.
They don't talk for the of the ride, not that it's such a long time. Bumgarner is hyper-aware of Posey, eyes fixed on the road but every other sense reaching out for him, nose and ears and skin and tongue, wanting him in all ways.
It's a minor miracle that he makes it to Buster's place without killing them in a fiery wreck. Bumgarner pulls up to the curb outside Posey's apartment block, under the densely woven shadows of the trees lining the sidewalk. Bumgarner squeezes the gear shift under his hand but doesn't put it into park, keeping his foot on the brake because he assumes Posey's just gonna say goodnight and go inside, or maybe not even the first part.
But instead Posey stays slouched half against the car door, his hands loose and open, watching Bumgarner as if waiting for something.
Bumgarner licks his lips. "Um, goodnight?" and sweet merciful Christ, he didn't mean for that to come out like a question.
The corner of Posey's lip curls up, general mocking kind of thing that Bumgarner figures he probably asked for.
"You're a weird kid, Madison," Posey says.
Bumgarner blinks. "Uh. What?," because that's honestly the last thing he expected to hear. "I'm weird?"
"'s what I said."
"But. I. You." Bumgarner cuts himself off, stymied. He presses his foot down harder on the brake, feeling his whole leg become taut with strain. Struck dumb, that bad feeling again, because there's so much wrong with that Bumgarner doesn't even know where to start. He's never done anything. He's just been here. Just been reacting.
"You think about shit too much," Posey tells him. "It's not good for you."
"I don't," Bumgarner says, and that's a lie, he can tell from Posey's face. He swallows, tries again. "Maybe I do. But if you would--would tell me. Explain just a little bit, just, just help me out here."
"Nah," Posey says without even thinking about it, the bastard. "It's actually kinda fun to watch."
And Bumgarner would protest that, maybe take the swing at him that Posey so richly deserves, but Posey is as deft in the use of distraction as any black-hatted magician, and he's sliding as close as he can get to Bumgarner with the console between them, and putting his hand on Bumgarner's thigh, and skimming up with his fingertips dragging along the inner seam. Bumgarner jumps, his foot coming off the brake for a second and the car jolts forward, almost throws Posey into the dash but he's laughing, squirming around and brushing the horn with his elbow, weak little bleat that matches whatever these noises are coming out of Bumgarner as Posey reaches to yank the e-brake up and jam the car into park, and then his hands are back on Bumgarner's legs and Bumgarner mutters "holy fuck" a bunch of times, staring down in astonishment at Posey going swiftly to work on his belt and fly, Posey grinning through his eyelashes and pulling his lower lip in between his teeth, getting his mouth all ready and Bumgarner has to close his eyes then, tip his head back on the seat, think fervently and desperately about baseball instead.
Posey sucks him off and then while Madison's still shaking, Posey takes his head between his hands and drags him down, folding him awkwardly because Bumgarner's really too tall to do this with any grace in the front seat of a car, but Posey has his fingers covering Bumgarner's ears and his hips jerking, his stomach trembling, and Bumgarner finds the discomfort is entirely bearable for these kinds of rewards.
And then after that's done, Posey pulls Bumgarner up by the shoulders, pushes him away with a happy sigh, a quicksilver grin as he says, "Getting better at that, kid," before opening the door and getting out as if blowjobs are acceptable as a substitute for goodbye.
Posey slams the door shut behind him just as Bumgarner says, "But."
He stares after Posey, through the faintly fogged window, the blurry retreat. Posey goes up the outside steps and disappears onto the second level, because this is where Posey lives, this is his home, but that doesn't make any sense because Posey told him, it was only a few days ago, just a road thing, not when we're at home, he'd said that, those are the only instructions Bumgarner was ever given and what the fuck.
Bumgarner starts the car again, drives home in a daze that is half post-orgasmic and half complete bewilderment. He takes a sleeping pill because he knows immediately that he'll need it, and he has that dream again, naked on the mound and it looks like Yankee Stadium except ten times as many people, every face turned down on him as he cringes bare-assed and cold with only his glove for modesty, and Buster on his knees behind the plate, shouting, "Pitch, Madison, pitch."
*
read this second
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I'd rather not delete and repost it (though I do have the whole master list saved on a doc, because I try to learn from my mistakes), as there are a bunch of awesome comments of people saying hi and discussions and such. Any help y'all can offer is incredibly appreciated.
*edited six hours later, with a shiny new journal style! Which is actually the default style when you click on a link, which is fine as far as readability, yes? It seems to have restored the master fic list, and changing it back to the other style kills it again, so I guess we will just be rolling with the punches here.
And then!
This is the first time, you know, the first MLB fic starring no former or current Oakland Athletics; it is like a whole new era over here.
(how was i supposed to resist!)
Bumgarner/Posey, NC-17, some large number of words (20922 if you wanna get specific).
Somewhere Between the Bus Leagues and the Bigs
By Candle Beck
And it's the strangest thing that's ever happened to Madison Bumgarner, there's no question about that.
Buster Posey hits a three-run go-ahead home run in the top of the ninth inning against the Bakersfield Blaze, a towering shot into the hollowed-out blue sky, and after he romps around the bases and crashes gleefully into the pack of his teammates waiting for him in the dugout, after they pound his bare head (helmet still spinning in the dirt near first base, one of the batboys darting out to it) and shake him by the shoulders until his huge toothy grin looks rattly and loose, after he breaks off whooping and goes to the cooler to pour about six Dixie cups of water down his throat, everybody milling around and finding their seats again while laughing and back-clapping, after all that, their manager tells Posey, "That'll do, son," and scribbles the back-up catcher's name on his card for the bottom of the ninth, so Posey grabs his guards and gear off the bench and shoves it into Bumgarner's arms, saying, "Help me out with that shit will ya," without any kind of question to it, not that Bumgarner would ever consider saying no, of course, and then Posey gathers up his bats and glove and leads the way down the stairs and into the tunnel where the guys' voices rebound, echoing, and it seems dimmer than it actually is after the nuclear glare of the sun--Bumgarner is having trouble figuring out his right from his left, and he has a few other small concerns.
But Buster Posey is the first thing to solidify, broad-shouldered in front of him, and Bumgarner follows him down the hall, the rabble of their teammates fading away behind. Posey's short hair is a dark wheat color and sticks up all over his head by the end of the game, once he's out of the mask for good.
They go into the equipment room and that's when it gets strange.
Bumgarner is still seeing spots, but also Posey slotting the bats into his cubby and whacking his catcher's mitt on the wall a few times to punch the dust out of it. Then Posey turns, bright eyes and quick smile because he just won them the game all by his lonesome, and Bumgarner hasn't been a pitcher for so long that he's forgotten what that one swing feels like.
Posey reaches to take his gear from Bumgarner, and one of the leg protectors slips clacking to the ground between them. Posey shoves the gear into the bin and then makes a move like he's going to pick up the one that fell, but instead his hand lands on Bumgarner's belt, and that's weird, so weird Bumgarner puts a hand out to push him away but then Posey licks his lips and Bumgarner gets distracted so that his hand ends up on Posey's belt, and then suddenly it's a race to get the buckles and flies open and Posey is walking him back until he hits the door, Bumgarner twisting his shoulders and gasping, zero to hard as fuck in about fifteen seconds, terrifically aware of the strength in Posey's chest and arms as he pushes his hand into Posey's jock, fumbling numb-fingered with his cup as Posey laughs breathlessly against his neck, and--bites him. Madison makes a strangled sound. Then the cup is falling between them to land with the leg guard and Bumgarner's damp palm slides hard against Posey's dick, skin to skin and Posey swears, a throaty fuck broke in half by his drawl, and Bumgarner starts panting, rubbing him off all fast and clueless, wanting to hear him make that noise again.
It doesn't last too long for either of them, Posey's warm thigh pressing in between Bumgarner's, hot breath and working mouth skidding down the line of Bumgarner's throat, and Posey sounds like he's choking as he comes, jerking against him, his grip so tight for a moment that Madison almost blacks out. Just a moment, and then Posey is back, sucking hard at Bumgarner's jaw and stroking him tight and wet and beautiful until Bumgarner finishes with a shudder, striping up the tense line of Posey's forearm.
Then there is an interval in which nothing happens. They slump against each other, weightless. Bumgarner can't even think. Every breath feels like a rag getting wrung out in his chest. His neck is slick and oversensitive where Posey did the worst damage.
Eventually Posey pries himself up, looks at Bumgarner and then down at himself, a hunched expression briefly capsizing his boyish features before he looks back up, easy smile clicking into place.
"Awright then," Posey says, clapping Bumgarner on the shoulder and quickly fixing up his uniform. He grabs the leg guard and cup off the floor, tosses the former in the bin and tucks the latter in his back pocket, smirking at Bumgarner in a way that seems vaguely foreboding.
"I'll see you up there, man," and Posey leaves just like that, like, no more to see here.
Bumgarner spends a few more minutes leaning against the wall with his hand feeling acid-burned, staring up at the pock-marked ceiling and breathing deeply. 'Struck dumb' is the phrase that seems to fit best, so he figures he'll just go with that.
*
They win the game.
Posey gives exactly no indication that he remembers their impromptu jerk-off session in the equipment room, joking and bullshitting like regular in the clubhouse, but he goes out to dinner that night with a couple of the infielders without inviting Bumgarner to come along. Not that that means anything--this is only the second road trip of the year, and he and Buster have only just recently been approaching something that resembles friendship.
But, whatever. Bumgarner tags along to a taqueria with some of the Spanish-speaking guys instead, even though they only bother to translate about a tenth of what they're saying for his benefit. It's still companionable, and anyway, Bumgarner doesn't talk much in groups as a general rule.
Back at the motel, Bumgarner watches reruns of Wipeout on ABC, and tries not to think about stuff too much. It's the first thing they told him, the first day he threw a baseball and got paid for it: quit thinking, kid.
The second thing, point of fact, was listen to your catcher, which seems particularly unfortunate in the circumstances.
Bumgarner stays up past curfew, past midnight, feeling itchy and annoyed that he's not pitching for another two days. After all the late shows are done, he shoves his feet into flip-flops, goes out to the vending machines to get a 7-Up or root beer, and out in the open air, over the rail he can see down to the motel pool, where Buster Posey is floating silently on an inflatable raft, one foot trailing in the water.
Madison stands staring at him for a moment, the picture embedding itself behind his eyes, then goes down there.
Posey is wearing his warm-up shorts and nothing else, barely lit by the shimmery blue glow of the pool, the faltering overhead lights of this shitty highway motel where the Single-A teams stay when they come to town. Bumgarner lets his flip-flops scrape along the cement as he approaches, not wanting to startle him.
"Hey man," Bumgarner says, whispering for some reason.
Posey tips his head towards him, sorta smiles in a half-asleep kind of way. "Hey."
"What. Where'd you get that raft?"
"Guy in the office," and Posey is whispering too, his lips barely moving. He's floating closer to Bumgarner's side of the pool, his foot in the water steering clandestinely. Bumgarner watches him, narrow-eyed.
"Can't sleep, huh?"
"Who needs sleep?" Posey gives it a cavalier little wave.
"Well. Everybody, point of fact."
Bumgarner rocks on his heels, taking his eyes away because he doesn't want to get caught staring; approximately sixty percent of the rooms face the pool, long L-shape of the motel bracketing them. This paranoia is new and uncomfortable, and Bumgarner wants to change the scene. He glances at the heavy muscles in Posey's arms, the cut of one hip visible where his shorts are tugged down, and yeah, this is definitely exactly the same as getting turned on by a girl. Kind of astonishing, although he's not sure why he expected it to be different. He didn't expect it to be, there's the trouble.
Posey has reached the edge of the pool by where Bumgarner is standing. His foot comes out of the water, dripping, and hooks on the cement lip, anchoring himself. The inflatable raft whines and wheezes around him, and the bizarre fluttering quality of the light from the pool makes Posey's eyes glitter, their deep color leeched away.
"You doing okay there, kid?" Posey says in a low drawl, running one hand across his bare stomach.
Bumgarner puts his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants, his mouth dry as dust and his pulse hammering. He wants to get in the pool with Posey, pull him off the raft into the water, slide his hands down the slick and silk of Posey's skin, fingertips creeping into the back of his shorts as Posey's legs wrap around him, weightless again.
"Sure," Bumgarner says, and it sounds all right to him but Posey hears something in it, a darkish kinda smile creasing his face before he's sliding gracefully into the water and then hiking himself up the edge of the pool, rising with a sheet of wet falling off his body. Bumgarner stares at Posey's chest, his hard stomach and the way his shorts are sticking to him, leaving very little to the imagination.
"Look a little rough," Posey says still in that goddamn underground voice, and then he's reaching out and tugging on Bumgarner's shirt, and walking away.
Posey leaves a few wet footprints on the cement, and then they fade. Bumgarner follows him, distracted by the neon red gleam of the Coke machine in the vending alcove on the second level, stuck in the corner of his eye like a bloody hanging moon. Posey goes up the stairs and down the way to his room, and Bumgarner hangs back, freaked out and pretty sure he's into it but not exactly sure what that entails. He doesn't like going in blind.
Posey glances back at him at the door to his room, which is propped open on its lock because evidently Posey is the trusting sort. It's still mostly a smirk, that look on Posey's face. It's like Bumgarner is missing something pretty obvious.
"Well, c'mon," Posey says, sleek-wet as he disappears into the room.
Bumgarner looks back down at the pool, the inflatable raft drifting glacially from one side to the other, and then he licks his lips and follows Posey the rest of the way in.
*
On the bus, driving back to San Jose, Posey sits in the back with the rowdy guys, getting secretly drunk and louder by the mile. There's ostensibly a poker tournament going on back there, but Bumgarner's pretty sure they lost the plot on it awhile ago.
He's stationed himself in the middle, at a window seat with Darren Ford conked out next to him, headphones screwed into his ears and his mouth hanging open. Bumgarner was playing with his PSP earlier, but that got old and now he's mostly watching the scenery, and listening to the guys in the back.
"That's a fuckin' lie, how can you fuckin' lie like that," Posey says, and Runzler is firing back at him, "I told you, told you," and Bumgarner wants to know what they're talking about.
He maintains position. Outside his window the Central Valley has given way to upward-running yellow hills peppered with windmill farms. Most of them are unmoving, stalled, and Bumgarner can perfectly imagine the stillness and baking heat out there, feel it sizzling on his skin.
From behind, the back of the bus, among the general chatter and argument Bumgarner catches a sound-bite of someone calling someone else a cocksucker. He doesn't recognize the voice, doesn't know who it was directed at. Bumgarner pushes his palm down the length of his thigh, grinding hard into his kneecap. He wonders if Posey flinched at all.
Because that happened last night, among other things.
Madison closes his eyes. He lets his head tip against the window, soaking up the heavy thrum of the engine.
Last night, Posey pushed him to sit on the bed and then pushed him down flat with a hand on his chest, like he didn't want Madison to see him kneeling, as if that would have changed the impact at all, the feel of Buster tugging down his sweats and shorts and curling a hand around him, the rasp of his face so low on Madison's hip, and all that was before the blowjob itself, which has rewired something in Madison's brain because he can call up the picture of it so clearly even if he'd been flat on his back gasping up at the ceiling with his eyes screwed shut at the time--it was still there in technicolor and super slo-mo, Buster's lips parting, his eyelids drifting shut.
An elbow drills into Bumgarner's side. He snaps out of his fugue, yanking his head off the window and turning to blink at Ford.
"The hell?" Bumgarner asks with a sleepy glare.
"You done playing with your game, man?" Ford says with a grin that someone has obviously been telling him is charming (his mom, no doubt; Bumgarner's heard the guy on the phone often enough).
Bumgarner takes his time about it, sighing and stretching his arms out with his fingers interwoven before getting the PSP from the backpack tucked under his seat. Ford accepts it with a happy thanks, and settles in to play the race game with the volume muted, not that that stops him from providing his own vrooming sound effects.
There's an odd discombobulated feel in Bumgarner as he attempts to get comfortable in his seat again, like he woke up on a different bus from the one he fell asleep on. His face is hot and his stomach clenched up even though he doesn't get sick on buses anymore, hasn't for years.
From the back of the bus he hears Posey saying, "And fuck you too Tommy, I needed that goddamn seven," and Bumgarner closes his eyes again, wondering if he's supposed to be sitting next to Posey back there, playing hold 'em and calling each other truthful things that no one else will take seriously. If that's the right thing--he doesn't really have a sense of it.
Bumgarner crosses his arms over his chest, slumps and considers the fact that he probably won't get this right, whatever 'right' means now. No one ever told him about this part.
*
A bunch of the guys are staying in the same apartment block near the ballpark, where the ballclub has a standing agreement with the management to rent a certain number of units dirt-cheap for the ever-rotating cast of minor league talent. There's a swimming pool too, but it's been dry for as long as Madison has been here, scarred up white along the bottom from the kids using it as a skate bowl. There are a few families crowded into units not much bigger than the ballplayers', three or four little kids in bare feet and cartoon T-shirts always running around, old ladies with pinned-back gray hair leaning on the second story railings. San Jose's low-slung skyline hunches beyond the trees.
Bumgarner gets drunk at Craig Clark's place, which is two doors down from his, and then stumbles home, lying down on his bed until the spins go away.
It's about the time of night when he gets bad ideas, just about the right kind of drunk to act on them. Bumgarner opens a hand on his stomach, slides it up to his chest and presses down. He wants something steady; he'd prefer it be someone else's hand, point of fact.
Stupid and obvious but what the hell, and Bumgarner drags his phone out, fumble-fingered searching for Posey's number and hesitating, stuttering tragically over the text message, because Bumgarner never went to college and he's not a hundred percent sure how the booty call thing is supposed to go.
What's up man R U around?
Good enough, send it, go. Bumgarner watches the little screen intently, the little envelope flying away. Galloping heart, short of breath and thinking about Posey's raspy face, his soft hot mouth. Posey doesn't live in this complex, but only a few minutes away. Bumgarner has never been inside but he dropped Posey off once; he could make it there before the buzz wears off, no question about it.
He gets all caught up in the possibilities of it. Nineteen years old and all, Bumgarner is still figuring out the specifics beyond that sex is fucking awesome. He hasn't tried everything yet, doesn't know what he likes best, doesn't even know if this gay thing is gonna be all the time or if it's just Buster or just the situation or what. Bumgarner wonders feverishly about what Posey might let him do, if maybe he could try his hand at the cocksucking thing because Posey certainly seemed pretty into it, eyes closed blissfully and sorta moaning around Bumgarner's dick as he pressed his chest flush to Madison's legs and clutched his hips, how he was already hard as fuck when Bumgarner pulled him up and started jerking him off, already slick and shivering and choking with every gasp, every stroke.
Bumgarner comes back to himself after an extended interval of filthy-minded reverie. He blinks at the same off-white ceiling and picks his phone off his chest to make sure he hasn't missed a call or dozed off or anything, but the screen is blank. Seventeen minutes since he texted Posey, and is there a window for this type of thing, are you supposed to move on to someone else if you don't get a response after a certain amount of time?
Bumgarner doesn't know. He doesn't have anyone else to hit up, anyway, and possibly he's not cut out for the booty call thing as a general rule, and he gives up on it, feeling kinda awkward and ignorant.
It takes him almost five minutes to work up the motivation to rise and brush his teeth, and then he almost passes out in the bathroom, ends up face-planting on the bed with his jeans still on and his cap jammed under his body. When he wakes up it feels like he's been unconscious for approximately two hundred years.
*
They're at the ballpark at nine o'clock in the morning on the off-day, stretching in the sideways-slanted light, long shadows of the light standards cutting across the outfield.
Bumgarner is intently occupied before he's all the way awake, stuck with the other pitchers learning how to throw a major league slider. Everybody gets tunnel vision, not noticing when a stray hawk of tobacco spatters against spikes, leaning heavily on each other's shoulders. Bumgarner apes the grip, digging his fingertips into the stitches like he wants to get it branded. He's already contemptuous of that weak rubbery thing they taught him back at South Caldwell High School, sneering at his yesterday self, you call that a slider.
Posey and the catchers are working on blocking pitches in the dirt. One of the coaches is having a sadistically good time overthrowing splitters to them. They crash to their knees over and over, arms straight down, chest made into a wall, keep it in front, knock it down. Trent Kline takes a bad skidding hop directly into the balls, and almost throws up in the dirt, on his hands and knees in all his gear. They haul him over to the dugout and lay him out on the bench, and one of the bat boys, who hang around whether they're getting paid or not, commences fanning Kline's agony-wrenched face with a scorebook.
It's tough work, and everyone is panting and red by the time they take their first break. Guys sprawl on the grass, slump against the fence, sucking on water bottles and eating orange slices like they haven't seen food in a week.
Bumgarner takes a couple of wedges and screws up his courage, goes over to where Posey is lying flat on his back with his legs still guarded and hanging over the dugout steps. Bumgarner's shadow slants across Posey's face, makes him squint his eyes open.
"Orange?" Bumgarner offers.
Posey's hand comes up and grabs a wedge, fingers dirty and his knuckles scratched up. Taking that as an implicit invitation, Bumgarner hunkers down and sits on the steps, pulls off his cap to scrape a hand through his hair, already thick with sweat.
"It's fuckin' hot, huh," Bumgarner says.
Posey kinda moves his shoulders like a shrug, eyes squinted so tight against the sun they might as well be closed. He tucks the whole wedge into his mouth to make his grin brilliant orange and inscrutable.
It isn't much of a conversation topic, anyway, the weather. Surely they're not so far gone as to be stuck at that. Not to mention, Northern California's version of 'hot' doesn't have much on North Carolina or Georgia in the mosquito-thick heart of summer. Bumgarner eats his own orange slice, wanting time to think of more clever things.
The element of distraction presented by Buster Posey laid out in the sun at the edge of a baseball field is somewhat more intense than Bumgarner is really prepared to deal with. The short sleeve of Posey's jersey is twisted up on one side so Bumgarner can see the greening bruise on his biceps, comet-shaped with half of it defined by a clear curve and the other blurred as if by interstellar velocity. That bruise is Bumgarner's doing, point of fact. A fastball he hung up on the wrong side of the plate, and Buster swearing and shaking off his glove, dead-armed. That was three days ago, and Posey came out to the mound to give himself a little time to recover, scowling at Bumgarner with fantastic color in his face and one hand clapped, rubbing hard at his shoulder, saying, "You're buying me about three fuckin' beers tonight, man, that fuckin' hurt."
"Oh hey," Bumgarner says, like it just occurred to him. "Didja get my text last night?"
And then there is excruciating silence, which is the trouble with questions like that: always at least a few seconds of pure torture, no matter how it turns out in the end.
Posey lifts his arm, lets a bar of light fall across his face so he can give Bumgarner a proper look. He takes the desiccated orange peel out of his mouth with a wet slurp, lips curling up in a smirk that makes something go withering and small in Bumgarner's gut.
"Yep," Posey says.
Bumgarner waits, but gets nothing else. "Uh. Yeah. I was, ah. Seeing if you wanted to hang out or whatever."
He's careful about it and all, keeps his voice way down even though there's no one within ten feet of them and the two closest are engaged in a spirited discussion in Spanish, but Posey's eyes still thin down, nostrils flaring a little bit.
"Thanks, I think I deciphered your little code there," and fuck, this is going to go badly. Posey's smirk looks chipped onto his mouth. "Guess you need some help on your end, so here: no answer means no."
"Right," Bumgarner says, bobbing his head like an idiot. "Sure. That. That's what I figured."
Posey snorts, plainly doesn't believe him, and puts his arm down on his face, no longer interested in looking at Bumgarner or being looked at by him. "Don't be stupid, Madison."
"Okay," Bumgarner replies automatically, face hot-red with the domino-fall feeling in his chest, dozens of tiny plastic collapses, and he's aware a split second later that he should have asked how.
*
Never let it be said that Madison Bumgarner can't take a hint.
He backs off, retreats into the encompassing fold of baseball all around him. There's still an awful lot of novelty in getting paid to go to the ballpark. He's still got to work out that split-fingered fastball.
They play Visalia and Stockton at home, where for the first half of the game the barbecue tent scents the air from beyond the bleachers along the left field line, smokey sweet and all the guys in the dugout gnawing on beef jerky, starving. There are minor league shenanigans happening at every inning break, kids in oversized T-shirts recruited from the crowd for musical chairs and dizzy-bat races, chasing the foam-headed Giants mascot around the bases. One night Bumgarner draws the short straw and has to go out and throw at one of the headlights of a rigged truck, trying to smash it out before Joe Martinez can bust his own.
He pitches pretty well in his start on the home-stand, although it's slightly weird throwing to Posey now, reminded at the most unfortunate moments that he's had his dick in that guy's mouth. When Buster comes out for mound conferences, Bumgarner mostly glares over his shoulder at the batter and nods along, trying not to lean in too much. Posey doesn't seem to notice anything, smacks Bumgarner on the ass before he goes back behind the plate, all normal here.
Lots of extraneous stuff, but Bumgarner would prefer to just focus on pitching, at least for the length of time he's at the ballpark, which is most of his life, which is how he wants it.
Back home, for whatever value of 'home' the nondescript already-furnished apartment can satisfy, Bumgarner wakes up a few times from dreams about his teeth falling out and pitching naked, and then, late in the week, he dreams of Posey crowding him against the dugout wall before bending him over the bench, dry wood under Bumgarner's mouth and Posey hot as hell on his back, both of them bare-chested and he can feel the sparse hair on Posey's chest rasping, Posey's rattly huff of breath and teeth sinking into the back of Bumgarner's shoulder, and then Bumgarner jolts awake like he just fell off a fucking cliff.
That night, no more than five minutes later, Bumgarner has jerked himself off to thoughts of another guy for the first time ever, and it's pretty goddamn good. He catches his breath, rubbing his slick hand on his belly, feeling diffuse and floaty with astonishment.
He spends the next three nights up way too late on the internet. conducting research.
Turns out, he's a little gay. Maybe about twenty percent; the numbers are indistinct just now.
The evidence is irrefutable. Broad-shouldered guys do it for him, legs heavy with muscle and dark with hair, and also baby-faced college boys who stay hard by watching the straight porn in the rented room where the gay porn is being filmed, those guys who never smile.
Bumgarner takes his second shower of the day, dizzy and endorphin-high and kinda confused still.
He figures that he's just never had a reason to consider guys, not when girls do it for him too and obviously there was no point in him wanting to fuck anybody other than girls when he was back in North Carolina, high school baseball star and small-town hero and all. It still seems like he should have known, if only for himself, and Bumgarner wonders, detached and scrubbing his junk, if he's been in total denial his whole life.
But that's seems unlikely too, and not just because it makes him look kinda dumb. Bumgarner has just never had to think about gay stuff much before. He doesn't know any gay people. Maybe he still doesn't, because he's only twenty percent and Posey might even be less than that; he didn't want to do it more than twice, after all.
The fact that it happened twice is what trips Bumgarner up every time. That first time in the equipment shed, breathless and unhinged and devoid of all sense, it was quick enough and bizarre enough that they could have played it off later, adrenaline or whatever, that beautiful home run that Posey had sent into the night, all this brain-destroying baseball stuff, but the second time, the second.
Posey didn't have to take Bumgarner up to his room, that second night. Didn't have to touch him or suck him off or say anything at all; he could have pretended to be asleep on that raft and Bumgarner would have slunk away after a minute or two, not wanting to make it a big thing. Posey didn't have to do anything.
It's the difference between premeditated and just regular murder, about twenty extra years in prison. It's the crucial point, Bumgarner's sure. Whatever Posey's reasons for not wanting to do it again, they definitely stem from that second time.
At the ballpark, after a game Bumgarner is heading into the showers when he catches a glimpse of the bare stretch of Posey under the spray, his sleek shifting back and perfect ass and strong legs, tipping his face back with his hands running over his head, down the nape of his neck.
Bumgarner has to spin away, his ears on fire and one hand clutching the towel around his waist, biting down hard on the inside of his lip and praying that no one will see as he ducks into the bathroom, sliding on the tiled floor and stumbling into a stall, breathing out in hoarse relief as the door claps shut behind him and his hand comes into fumbling contact with his cock.
Bumgarner has watched more gay porn in the past few days than he ever expected to in his life, but still, nothing has gotten him off faster or harder than the very simple picture of Posey, naked and wet and seen from behind.
*
Their next trip is down to the Southland to play the Inland Empire 66ers out of San Bernadino, and the High Desert Mavericks of scenic Adelanto, California. Six hours on the bus and Bumgarner pretends to be asleep for most of it, not really interested in dealing with his teammates just now.
Posey is just a couple rows behind him, and Bumgarner hears snatches of the long cell phone conversation he's having, hears Posey describing the scenery to someone, "Yep, more cows," and laughing sometimes. The casual affection in Posey's voice makes Bumgarner think he must be talking to someone in his family, his mom or a sibling maybe. Bumgarner realizes that he doesn't even know if Posey has brothers or sisters, which bothers him a lot for some reason.
They get in with time enough to grab a late dinner and a beer, and Bumgarner inserts himself in the cab of the guys who seem to know where they're going. It's a roadhouse-looking place, playing up the cowboy angle with a neon blue boot kicking above the sign. They've come in a crowd of fifteen, and are granted one whole side of the big empty barn-type building, the dancefloor scuffed and untraveled.
Bumgarner orders a cheeseburger because that's hard to screw up, and PBR is going for two bucks a can, so it sounds like he's getting drunk tonight. The rest of the guys are in agreement, and their tabletops become thickly forested with silver-blue empties.
Regular out-with-the-boys kind of night, and Bumgarner has designs on Villalona's onion rings, edging close with his elbows on the table, when Posey slides into the booth beside him.
Bumgarner freezes, only for a second but Posey probably notices. He glances at his catcher, lets one hand curl protectively around the edge of the table.
"Hiya Buster."
"Hello." Posey flashes his fake autograph-signing smile. "How's it going, kid?"
"Good. Uh. How's it going with you?"
"Pretty fuckin' good, although listen, I wanted to show you this one thing."
"Oh yeah?" Bumgarner says, taking a steadying drink of his beer because he doesn't know what Posey's doing, if this is some kind of secret lingo.
"Yeah c'mon it's really cool," and Posey puts his hand on Bumgarner's leg under the table, a warm shock of pressure that has Bumgarner jumping, dropping his fork on the plate. Posey squeezes his thigh, hard enough that he can feel each one of his fingers, and then he's standing out of the booth, swaying and catching himself, dazzling grin on his face that means nothing but Bumgarner likes it anyway. He gets up and follows Posey, high-pitched buzz in his ears, trying not to trip over anybody.
Posey goes back to the bathrooms and Bumgarner's pulse kicks up because the two of them would hardly fit in a stall together and half the goddamn team would be right outside, but Posey has a better idea, pushing out the back exit and onto the gravel parking lot.
It's near midnight but still itchy-hot, Bumgarner's shirt sticking to the small of his back. Posey winds between the parked cars, footsteps crunching, not looking back at Bumgarner but that's all right; Bumgarner has a feeling it's a pretty idiotic look that he's wearing right now.
Way at the back of the lot, in the shadow of a few stunted palm trees and shielded from the bar by a white van stenciled with an exterminator's logo, a cartoon rat dressed up as an angel with a harp and all, and Posey pushes Bumgarner up against the side of it, dim flash of his teeth as he bites off a smile.
Bumgarner smiles wildly back at him, so eager he's shaking, and so goddamned confused his head might cave in.
"So, so we are gonna," Bumgarner says, and makes a move to grab Posey's belt, gets swatted away for his trouble.
"Yep," Posey answers, and kicks Bumgarner's feet apart, slides one of his legs between and presses up against him from shoulder to knee.
"Jesus." Bumgarner wasn't expecting that. Posey is insanely warm and broad, his firm thigh between Bumgarner's and pushing in, rubbing so nice that all his blood rushes to his dick and he almost swoons. Bumgarner's head bangs back against the van, hollow thunking sound, and he keeps talking because otherwise he's going to lose it in his fuckin' pants.
"'cause I, I thought we weren't gonna, thought you didn't want to."
"Dumb," Posey mutters, ducking his head to lick at Bumgarner's throat, wet lash of his tongue. "Good thing you're a pitcher, man, fuckin' knucklehead."
"Hey," and Bumgarner means to protest that more because he's no dumber than any other nineteen year old kid playing professional baseball for the first time, but then Posey is tipping away and going to work on their belts and Bumgarner swallows the rest of it, because he's got his priorities straight.
Posey keeps him shoved up against the side of the van, gets both their flies open, his coarse palm making Bumgarner shiver and twist into him. Posey strokes them both together, breathing out urgently against Bumgarner's throat, sucking and biting just shy of too much, just enough to make Madison's hips jerk and mind fuzz whitely away. Buster shifts against him and the gravel crunches, and far away a car alarm is going off.
He finishes quickly again, quick enough to be embarrassing if Posey wasn't right behind him, moaning low into his shoulder with his free hand fisted in Bumgarner's shirt, pulling it up so that Posey can shoot all over his stomach, and then Bumgarner is a wreck, weak-kneed and panting with his back to the dead-and-gone cartoon rat, blown apart.
Posey leans one hand on the van, his head down for a moment, and when he looks back up his neat meaningless smile is back in place, his blue eyes not bright enough to really make out in this light.
Bumgarner stares, and thinks about kissing him, thinks that they should try that too because everything else has worked out pretty well.
Instead he says again, "I thought we weren't gonna."
An impatient edge slips across Posey's expression, that goddamn rookie look that Bumgarner gets more often than really seems warranted.
"Not when we're at home," Posey says like it should be obvious. "It's a road thing, it's not, like, real. Just fucking around, you know?"
"Yeah," Bumgarner says, because you say yeah, you nod along. His hands twitch at his sides, and he should stop looking at Posey's mouth. "That's cool."
"Yeah, so try to be cool, huh? I know it's hard for you," and Buster fixes his belt, wipes his hands on the van before finishing the job on his jeans. He reassembles, pieces fit right back into place, and Madison pushes his fingers at the sore place on his neck, wanting a bruise to form there and wishing he'd left some evidence of his own.
*
It's a road thing, makes so much more sense now.
Or, well. Parts of it make more sense, obvious parts like why Posey stayed away from him in San Jose, and why Posey keeps calling him stupid, because apparently other guys get a freakin' manual in this stuff; maybe it's another college thing that he missed out on.
Other things remain shrouded in mystery. Bumgarner isn't sure why they can jerk each other off and Posey can leave a hickey on his neck and theoretically blowjobs are still on the table, but if he tries to kiss Buster he's pretty sure he'll come out of it with a black eye. He doesn't know if Posey actually likes him, or if it's only a convenience thing. He isn't sure how gay any of this makes either of them.
In a motel room in San Bernadino, after Bumgarner takes a killer loss on seven innings of one-run ball, Posey brings his laptop over and they watch porn with their hands in each other's jeans, which works out perfectly because Bumgarner is left-handed, and it's the easiest sex he's ever had. Towards the end, when Posey's head tips back and his eyes go slitted and he makes that choked moaning sound that Bumgarner is starting to recognize, starting to look forward to, towards the end there, Posey shifts and hooks his leg over Bumgarner's to get closer, heavy weight pinning him down as Posey's bare foot bumps against Bumgarner's socked one, and Bumgarner flexes, presses into it with their toes nudging together, and for some ridiculous reason the fact that he's playing footsie with Buster at the end of the bed seems exactly as relevant as the fact that they've got their hands on each other's cocks.
Afterwards, Posey comes out of the bathroom with his hands still wet from the sink, patting dry on his T-shirt and swiping through his hair so that it spikes up in front a little bit.
"Movie's not bad, huh?" Posey says.
Bumgarner blinks at him for a second, lost until he registers the porn still running on the laptop, tinny groans and curses, badly pixelated swaths of pink skin moving obscurely. Bumgarner wasn't exactly watching the movie, but he answers, "Yeah, 's all right."
Posey comes to sit on the edge of the bed, turning the laptop a bit away from Bumgarner. Bumgarner looks at the close line of Posey's neck, the place where his hairline shaves into skin, kinda flushed now on account of the recent orgasm and all, and Bumgarner considers leaning forward and licking that spot but it seems fraught with peril and things are going pretty well, so he holds himself back.
The porn has girls in it, sometimes nothing but girls, and Bumgarner has no idea why he's vaguely surprised about that, but there you go.
"Damn, baby," Posey says low, making Bumgarner jolt, but Posey's talking to the computer, his blue eyes darkly intent on the screen.
Uncertainty itches in Bumgarner, that hateful sense that he's only understanding about half of what's going on. He doesn't know Posey's tastes in pornography, doesn't know what his favorite movie or band is, doesn't know how many places he lived when he was a kid or what his family looks like or if everybody he loves is still alive. It's a different kind of thing, being teammates first. Madison knows the kind of oil Posey prefers for his mitt, the dimensions of his bats, the sound Posey's knees make popping when he comes out of the crouch late in games. He knows that Buster likes Dr. Pepper and hot sauce on everything and candy bars with almonds. Bumgarner knows how he likes to jerk off, because Posey just showed him.
Bumgarner could catalogue this stuff all day, what he knows and what he doesn't. He's just got no idea what it's supposed to mean.
Wanting a new topic, Bumgarner says, "You wanna stick around and watch a real movie? I got that, uh, the new Batman."
Posey glances at him, and shakes his head. "Nah, I'd fall asleep halfway through."
"That's okay," Bumgarner says, picturing it really clearly, Posey sprawled out in this bed, lit by computer light.
"Some other time maybe," and Posey turns off the porn, shuts his laptop and stands up, tossing a smile in Bumgarner's direction. "See ya tomorrow, man."
"Yeah, see ya."
That's it, and then Posey is gone and Bumgarner is wondering how he might have played that differently, if there was something he could have said that would have resulted in Posey sticking around, staying over.
Probably not. It's probably another weird rule, like the kissing thing, can't fall asleep anywhere but your own bed. Keeps it from getting complicated.
Bumgarner strips down to his shorts and brushes his teeth, shaves because his scruff has been getting long enough to itch. He looks at a car magazine until his eyelids start to droop, and then tries to fall asleep.
An hour later he's still awake, wrapped up trying to remember the words of that country song Posey was singing along with in the restaurant earlier, something about Corvettes and a shotgun and someone's carelessly broken heart, something Buster liked well enough at some point to learn all the way through.
*
They go through Adelanto, and Bumgarner gives his very first blowjob in a motel room with a rattlesnake painting on the wall, which is the random detail that sticks in his mind and the trigger to this moment for the rest of his life. Brown rattlesnake coiled with a long curve of diamonds on its back, blue sand and purple sky, cheap plastic frame rattling against the wall when Posey bangs his head back.
Bumgarner is profoundly affected by the blunt press of Posey's cock over his tongue, the unthinking scratch of fingers through his hair, nails painful over his ears, the cut of muscle in Posey's hip where Bumgarner braces his hand. Bumgarner loves it, stunned to realize how much, stunned to find himself already hard when Posey comes in his mouth before dropping to his knees and jamming his hand into Bumgarner's sweatpants, three or four good tight wet strokes and game over, Buster wins on a walk-off.
They both end up sprawled on the floor, sandpaper carpet rough on the places where Madison's clothes are pulled askew. He listens to Posey's breathing settle, feels his own pulse stagger and catch and taper off to a more reasonable pace.
The rattlesnake painting is hanging crookedly now. Bumgarner's hands are shaking, and so he's keeping them pressed flat to the floor. He feels cracked open, split down seams he didn't even know he had.
"Not bad," Posey says.
"Oh. Yeah?"
"Yeah, I'd say you're about on par with a really drunk sorority girl." Posey pauses. "It's a compliment, you know."
"Okay. Thank you." The muscles in Bumgarner's legs have gone fluttery, a similar winged feeling happening in his chest, and he's dazed, flushed with draining pleasure that seeps away from his skin like lost heat.
"So polite. Nobody'd ever guess what you were just doing with that mouth."
Bumgarner's stomach flips. "Um," and he doesn't know what comes next, just kinda trails off.
"Little bit of practice," Posey says, kinda drifting tone, like he's just talking without thinking much about it. "That's all you need. Just a little experience. I could keep you on your knees for about a day, I swear."
Madison feels pinned to the floor, heat rolling through him and his dick doing all it can to make a second go of it because yeah, yeah, he can get behind that plan.
"You know a lot about it, huh?" Bumgarner says in a roughed-up voice.
"More'n you."
"Ob-obviously. That's why--I mean. You've done this before, right?"
Three seconds pass, maybe four, some small number that feels larger from where Bumgarner lies prone on the floor. He's sure in a bedrock way that that question is way out of bounds, and Posey's gonna slap him down, pick himself up and slam the door when he leaves, not come to find Bumgarner ever again, never touch him or let him go to his knees, nothing, the bad ending coming down just that quickly.
Stupid, stupid, and Bumgarner fights off a rising tide of mortification as the silence stretches, keeping his hands still at his sides. When he was a little kid he got teased and called Dumbo, which had more to do with his ears than his intelligence level, but it's the kind of thing that sticks with a person. Madison still can't stand this feeling, all this goddamn ignorance.
"A time or two," is what Buster says eventually, neutral.
Bumgarner swallows hard, staring up the vertical angle of the wall with its cactus wallpaper, the rattlesnake painting clinging to its nail so fragilely that an eighteen-wheeler trundling by outside might shake it loose.
"Like. In college?" Bumgarner asks.
"Yeah."
Nothing more from Posey, and he probably doesn't want to talk about it, probably pissed off that Bumgarner is pressing him and made just tolerant enough by the near memory of Bumgarner's mouth on him, but god knows that won't last. Bumgarner turns his pitching hand over on the carpet, rasping his knuckles and it feels like steel wool. He figures, already out on this fucking limb, and says:
"Guess this shit probably happens all the time, but, but fuck if I ever knew about it. Nobody. Nobody ever told me."
"What, you need a manual for how to get your dick sucked?"
"No. No." Bumgarner scrambles for a better way to describe it, glad that he can't see Posey right now and Posey can't see him, unless Posey's looking, but why would he be? "Just. I didn't know I was supposed to be looking at. Guys. You."
He bites his tongue as soon as the last word escapes. His ears prickle with heat as his stomach sinks, because that wasn't what he meant to say, or maybe it was and it's just more poor decision-making on his part.
Sharp movement in his peripheral vision, Posey sitting up. Bumgarner tips his head, risking a glance at him with his heart in his throat, and finds Posey looking down with a stiff-edged smirk twisting his mouth in a way that might have stung Bumgarner if he weren't so fatally distracted by the deep river color of Posey's eyes at this angle, this particular quality of light.
"You gotta take it where you can get it," Posey tells him, and reaches out towards Bumgarner's face, whose pulse abruptly jumps the rails, eyes going wide thinking that Posey might touch him carefully, fingertips tracing his lips, might lean down and kiss him slow like how people are supposed to kiss, like when it means something.
Posey flicks his ear instead. Bumgarner hisses and recoils, something shrinking inside as Posey grins, very blue eyes gone cold.
"You especially can't be picky," Posey says as he rolls to his knees and then up to his feet. "Fuckin' stringbean, I keep thinking I'm gonna snap you in half."
Bumgarner blinks, flat on the floor with Posey about ten feet tall over him, vertigo unmooring him even though Bumgarner hasn't moved.
"Don't. Don't worry about that."
"Don't tell me what to do," Posey shoots back, and that doesn't mean anything at all, it's just Posey's default punk response to direct orders, even the ones he follows without hesitation. Bumgarner tries out a wavery little chuckle, and he can't tell from this lousy perspective if Posey's response is a smile or a smirk or a sneer or something wholly different.
"You planning to sleep down there?" Posey asks.
"Um, no. That would be kinda weird."
After a moment of watching Bumgarner not move, Posey sighs, aggrieved, and sticks his hand out. "C'mon, c'mon."
Bumgarner grabs Posey's wrist, gets his feet under him and gets hauled up. He totters, too fast too much too soon, and Posey pushes him so that he falls harmlessly onto the bed, face mashing into the polyester comforter. It smells like industrial soap and really old cigarettes, and Bumgarner rolls onto his back, the world rolling with him. Posey stands alongside the bed, arms crossed over his chest, and yeah, still a smirk, loveless and cool as fucking ice.
"Thanks," Madison says. His throat is tight.
"Gotta take care of my pitchers, don't I?"
"Yeah. Good." Bumgarner closes his eyes, a low-pitched achey feeling in his gut that he's trying not to think too much about. "Night, Buster."
"Night, Mad," Posey says, and because Bumgarner is holding his breath and counting mississippis in his head, he knows that it's fourteen seconds before Posey actually moves to leave the room, fourteen quiet seconds just standing there looking at Bumgarner and Jesus H. Christ, what does that mean?
*
A couple days later they go back north, back home.
Bumgarner sits in the middle of the bus with Villalona and Zambrano and Torres, who are playing dirty hangman on the back of a pitcher report. Bumgarner learns the Spanish words for motherfucker and whoreson and dogfucker, thinking that that will probably come in handy.
There's so much less pressure on him when the conversation is in a different language. Bumgarner keeps score for the game, doodles ever-elaborate gallows for them to use. He's not listening for Posey at the back of the bus, having learned his lesson.
It's late when they roll into San Jose, gray cloud night sky, no stars or moon. In the parking lot of the ballpark where they all left their cars, Bumgarner can hear Posey talking with Martinez and Ford, saying how it's Wednesday and margaritas are three bucks at the Well.
Bumgarner closes his hand up around his car keys, metal teeth cutting into his palm. He wants to invite himself along to the bar, raise his voice a little over the cars to say hey I wanna come, and it would be a normal thing, a thing that happened all the time, because there will be beer and girls there and a guy doesn't have to need any other reason, right?
But he doesn't say anything, doesn't go with them. It hasn't even been twenty-four hours since he last had his hand on Posey's dick. They're not exactly friends anymore, if they ever were. This thing seems to require a different definition.
The first game of the home-stand is undertaken in bad twilight conditions with the dense sky looking hitched to the light standards, and in the sixth, two of their outfielders run into each other full-scale while going after a fly ball. Thomas Neal is knocked out cold for almost a minute, freaking everybody right the hell out, and then it's like the rest of the game is an afterthought, an irritating chore to be completed as quickly as possible.
After they lose, Bumgarner goes over to the hospital where they're keeping Neal and his mild concussion overnight for observation. It's way past visiting hours, which Bumgarner didn't even think about, but evidently the ballclub has a few strings to pull here, because Bumgarner doesn't have to do more than show up with a Giants cap folded in his back pocket to get waved through to Neal's private room.
Posey is already there, slouched in a institutional pale green chair by Neal's bed fiddling with his phone, and Bumgarner is immediately derailed, whatever he'd intended to say dying on his lips as he blinks at Posey, and Posey's legs, spread casually open.
"Hey Maddy," Neal says, and Bumgarner jerks his gaze over, noticing abruptly that Darren Ford is in the room too, eating a cup of red Jello with a beige plastic spork that he waves at Bumgarner in greeting.
"Hey Tom." Bumgarner hooks his foot around the leg of another one of those cheap scratched-up hospital chairs, pulls it up alongside Ford. "You feelin' okay?"
"Yeah top-notch."
Neal doesn't looks too banged up, just kinda baggy under his eyes and his hair all limp. Ford is the one who collided with him in the outfield and he shows it more, one cheekbone swollen and starting to darken and he'll be lucky if he can still see out that eye in the morning. Ford seems to be taking it pretty well, feet propped up on the side of the bed, happy with his Jello.
Bumgarner glances at Posey, who seems intent on having a text message conversation instead of an actual one, rude motherfucker. "Uh. Did they. They say if you're gonna be good to play tomorrow?"
"Like they'd bother telling me that shit," Neal says. "I want to go, I totally could. Just a headache, I can play through a stupid headache."
"Yeah," Bumgarner says, mostly believing him.
"Did you hear it in the dugout?" Ford asks. "Andres came by earlier, he said he could hear it when we hit, like, ker-aaack."
Ford bashes his fists together, exploding out his fingers like a car crash, a bomb blowing up.
"Uh, yeah, I guess I did," Bumgarner says, although he doesn't remember the sound so much as the sight, Ford and Neal streaking towards each other blindly with their faces turned upwards, and how everyone in the ballpark could see what was about to happen and how there was no way to stop it, and then the impact, and Neal dropping like a sack of flour, just suddenly boneless and unmoving on the grass while Ford groaned and rolled next to him, clutching at his face.
"It was gnarly, huh?" Ford says, having altogether too much fun with this.
"Scary," Bumgarner says, and then kinda flinches.
Ford and Neal nod along, and Posey is smirking fondly down at his phone, his thumbs tapping away.
"Yeah, lucky this kid's head is so hard," Ford says with a feint towards Neal that gets batted down easily.
"Lucky you were already ugly, that shiner's not gonna mess up your face too bad," Neal fires back, and then it's banter and insult for awhile, and Posey actually rouses himself to join in at some point, talking shit like a first language, all on the surface.
Eventually it tapers off. It's even later now, and there's a day game tomorrow. Once Ford starts yawning, Neal sends them off with Posey promising to hit a home run tomorrow for his poor sick buddy in the hospital, and Neal of course makes him pledge to two home runs instead.
It's not awkward until the three of them hit the parking lot, and Ford says, "Hey Buster, why don't you catch a ride with him, it's more on the way," and Posey says, "Whatever," and Bumgarner doesn't understand what happened until Ford says a cheery goodnight and splits off towards his car, and Posey's still following Bumgarner.
"I'm taking you home?" Bumgarner asks, and then wants to rip out his tongue because in addition to the appallingly obvious content, his voice actually cracked right there, and he shouldn't be allowed to speak anymore, clearly. He is very careful not to look at Posey, cutting between two close-parked cars so that they have to go single file.
"Seems to be the situation," Posey says.
"Right." Just a convenience thing, Bumgarner tells himself. Just because Posey lives less than a mile from Bumgarner and Ford is all the way out on Steven's Creek Boulevard, so it just makes good sense.
Inside Bumgarner's car, en route, conversation is hard to come by. Bumgarner scans restlessly through the country music radio stations he has programmed, not looking for anything specific but not liking anything he finds. Eventually Posey smacks his hand away from the dial.
"Leave it. Twitchy fucker."
Bumgarner snatches his hand back, curls it up on his leg. In the corner of his eye, Posey is sprawled like a magazine photo in the shotgun seat, his legs open again, broad shoulders turned against the door.
"Sorry," Bumgarner says belatedly, and Posey doesn't answer.
They don't talk for the of the ride, not that it's such a long time. Bumgarner is hyper-aware of Posey, eyes fixed on the road but every other sense reaching out for him, nose and ears and skin and tongue, wanting him in all ways.
It's a minor miracle that he makes it to Buster's place without killing them in a fiery wreck. Bumgarner pulls up to the curb outside Posey's apartment block, under the densely woven shadows of the trees lining the sidewalk. Bumgarner squeezes the gear shift under his hand but doesn't put it into park, keeping his foot on the brake because he assumes Posey's just gonna say goodnight and go inside, or maybe not even the first part.
But instead Posey stays slouched half against the car door, his hands loose and open, watching Bumgarner as if waiting for something.
Bumgarner licks his lips. "Um, goodnight?" and sweet merciful Christ, he didn't mean for that to come out like a question.
The corner of Posey's lip curls up, general mocking kind of thing that Bumgarner figures he probably asked for.
"You're a weird kid, Madison," Posey says.
Bumgarner blinks. "Uh. What?," because that's honestly the last thing he expected to hear. "I'm weird?"
"'s what I said."
"But. I. You." Bumgarner cuts himself off, stymied. He presses his foot down harder on the brake, feeling his whole leg become taut with strain. Struck dumb, that bad feeling again, because there's so much wrong with that Bumgarner doesn't even know where to start. He's never done anything. He's just been here. Just been reacting.
"You think about shit too much," Posey tells him. "It's not good for you."
"I don't," Bumgarner says, and that's a lie, he can tell from Posey's face. He swallows, tries again. "Maybe I do. But if you would--would tell me. Explain just a little bit, just, just help me out here."
"Nah," Posey says without even thinking about it, the bastard. "It's actually kinda fun to watch."
And Bumgarner would protest that, maybe take the swing at him that Posey so richly deserves, but Posey is as deft in the use of distraction as any black-hatted magician, and he's sliding as close as he can get to Bumgarner with the console between them, and putting his hand on Bumgarner's thigh, and skimming up with his fingertips dragging along the inner seam. Bumgarner jumps, his foot coming off the brake for a second and the car jolts forward, almost throws Posey into the dash but he's laughing, squirming around and brushing the horn with his elbow, weak little bleat that matches whatever these noises are coming out of Bumgarner as Posey reaches to yank the e-brake up and jam the car into park, and then his hands are back on Bumgarner's legs and Bumgarner mutters "holy fuck" a bunch of times, staring down in astonishment at Posey going swiftly to work on his belt and fly, Posey grinning through his eyelashes and pulling his lower lip in between his teeth, getting his mouth all ready and Bumgarner has to close his eyes then, tip his head back on the seat, think fervently and desperately about baseball instead.
Posey sucks him off and then while Madison's still shaking, Posey takes his head between his hands and drags him down, folding him awkwardly because Bumgarner's really too tall to do this with any grace in the front seat of a car, but Posey has his fingers covering Bumgarner's ears and his hips jerking, his stomach trembling, and Bumgarner finds the discomfort is entirely bearable for these kinds of rewards.
And then after that's done, Posey pulls Bumgarner up by the shoulders, pushes him away with a happy sigh, a quicksilver grin as he says, "Getting better at that, kid," before opening the door and getting out as if blowjobs are acceptable as a substitute for goodbye.
Posey slams the door shut behind him just as Bumgarner says, "But."
He stares after Posey, through the faintly fogged window, the blurry retreat. Posey goes up the outside steps and disappears onto the second level, because this is where Posey lives, this is his home, but that doesn't make any sense because Posey told him, it was only a few days ago, just a road thing, not when we're at home, he'd said that, those are the only instructions Bumgarner was ever given and what the fuck.
Bumgarner starts the car again, drives home in a daze that is half post-orgasmic and half complete bewilderment. He takes a sleeping pill because he knows immediately that he'll need it, and he has that dream again, naked on the mound and it looks like Yankee Stadium except ten times as many people, every face turned down on him as he cringes bare-assed and cold with only his glove for modesty, and Buster on his knees behind the plate, shouting, "Pitch, Madison, pitch."
*
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