Bitter Taffy (14 page)

“It’s only the third inning!” Finn’s dad argued, holding his foot on the bag as the third player trotted home.

“It’s 18-2, Dad!” Finn’s older brother Peter complained. “Why didn’t you snag him for
our
team?”

“Because I have five children!” Mr. Stewart whined back. Adam didn’t even smile as he trotted in hard on the heels of a girl with a skunk stripe in her hair, whose kid was cheering from the stands. Clopper knew this kid—he hadn’t left the boy’s side since the game had begun. “And two other sons-in-law!” he laughed, swatting Adam on the backside with his glove as he passed.

Adam cracked a smile, and a part of Rico melted a little in relief. He’d been so grim when he played, like he owed it to the world not to screw up. Rico had known, though—Adam had always been the better athlete. But it took money and involved parents to participate in high school sports, and Adam had neither. So Rico had gone to college on a partial sports scholarship, and Adam had gone into the military. Watching Adam’s shy little smile, Rico wondered sometimes why Adam didn’t just explode into pain and bitterness.

And then Finn—who was playing first base—broke family ranks and trotted at Adam with flailing arms. “Adam, Dad says we can quit! You won!”

Adam gaped at him for a moment, but he recovered himself enough to be braced and ready when Finn leaped into his arms and wrapped long legs around his waist. Finn locked lips with him in a kiss that made everyone on the field feel superfluous. At the signal, Derek came trotting in from left field, and together they ran for the bleachers.

“Oh thank God for Finn,” he laughed. “There’s nothing like invoking the Daddy, Daddy Mercy Rule to keep the rest of us from dropping dead on the field.”

“Was that what that was?” Rico asked, bemused. The one thing—the
one
thing—his father had ever come to see was Rico’s sporting events. Once Rico had broken his finger in fourth grade and he’d yelled at Rico—voice thundering until Rico had been in tears—all the way to the hospital
. Any idiot knows you don’t keep your finger out of the glove.
It was showboating and tacky, and Rico deserved the pain, and he deserved not to play.

“Yeah,” Derek said, grinning. “Didn’t you ever use that one?”

“No,” Rico said, keeping his smile in place. “Never occurred to me.” His father, and that suddenly tapped rage, and the stony silences in between. No mercy there. As they moved to the infield, accepting the good-natured ribbing from the other employees at Candy Heaven, Rico had a flash of perspective, that
that
was
why working at Kellerman’s had seemed natural.

Derek muttered something under his breath, and Rico turned to him, pulling himself completely in the moment.

“What? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Derek said with a gentle smile. “Nothing—later.” He nodded toward the stands and waved. Two people who looked like they’d stepped out of a flier for Middle America waved back wildly, and Rico stared.

“Oh crap.”

“Don’t let them scare you, Rico—they’re only middle-aged people who have spawned and nurtured children.”

“Derek, they’re
your parents
!”

“They’ll love you! C’mon!”

“But Derek….”

It was no use. Derek had jogged the remaining distance across the field and was making his way through the bull pen. Rico had no time to protest that they’d only been dating for a couple of weeks or that their kisses were driving him crazy. He most certainly didn’t have time to say he wasn’t good with parents—he’d never met any as a boyfriend, actually—and that his own weren’t great examples.

There was only time, really, to follow Derek while dusting his shorts off with his glove and trying to smooth his growing hair back with his hand.

“Rico!” Derek called over his shoulder. “Come say hi!”

Oh Lord.

“Oh, this is Rico?” Derek’s mom was small and roundish. She’d let what had probably been blonde hair go silver and cut it into a short, practical cap of curls, but nothing could age the blue of her eyes, which were just like Derek’s. “Oh, honey, he’s handsome. You said he was good-looking, but you’ve said that before.”

The man next to her—fit, in his early sixties, perhaps, with thinning gray hair and a long-jawed face—nodded apologetically. “What was his name? Cameron? Derek, I’m not a great judge of these things, but, uhm….”

“Butt-face,” said Derek’s mom.

Derek’s mouth fell open, and then he winced and closed his eyes. “Uhm, Mom?”

“No? That isn’t the term?”

“No, it’s… well, it’s a horrible term, and it’s for women, and it’s ‘butter face.’ But don’t use it. Don’t ever use it.”

“But your brother uses it all the time!”

Derek’s voice pitched to that of a scandalized twelve-year-old. “Well, make him stop! Oh my God! He’s thirty-five years old! He can’t afford to be an asshole like that—he’s your only chance for grandchildren.”

“There’s always Kevin! And what about your sister?” his mom asked, seeming genuinely surprised. “She just got married.”

“She should
never
be allowed to propagate,” Derek said darkly, and his mom just laughed.

“So, Rico, we saw you make some beautiful catches—Derek said you played ball in college?”

Adam was passing by at that point, and he looked up. “Yeah, he was real good. Good game, Rico!” Then Finn grabbed Adam’s arm and tugged him up to the grill, where apparently things were getting dire, because a crowd of kids with dirty cheeks and worse hands looked with doleful expressions at the hot dog plate.

“The hell of it is, he means that,” Rico said dryly to Derek.

Derek rolled his eyes and laughed. “That’s Rico’s cousin—”

“The boy who should go pro?” Derek’s father asked. “He’s good—damn good. Did he play in college too?”

“No, he went into the military,” Rico said, trying not to sigh. “But I don’t think he’d be happy playing organized sports, really. Adam’s sort of his own guy.”

Derek snorted softly and they all saw Finn’s dad gesturing toward Rico, fading ginger hair peeking out from under his ball cap, apron stained with everything from ketchup to coleslaw. “So hey, Rico’s got to man the grill, but come meet the Stewarts—they threw this shindig. We’ll drag him away when we’re ready to eat, okay?”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Huston,” Rico said formally, and Derek’s mother didn’t let him down.

“Oh, call me Sylvie, and this is Edgar.”

Rico shook hands with them both and then nodded at Derek as he was leaving. The whole time he was thinking that his mother, should she ever have met one of his friends, would have insisted on Mrs. Gonzalves-Macias.

His father would have insisted on Mr. Gonzalves, and not tolerated any mistakes.

And Adam’s mother would have screamed “Faggot!” and had her current boyfriend beat the friend off the property.

So Derek’s parents might have been a little out of touch, but they were better than the alternatives. Rico would know.

F
INALLY
EVERY
available hot dog and hamburger had been grilled and Rico and Adam sat down with what amounted to their prospective in-laws.

Rico caught glimpses of Adam every now and then, regarding everyone with big eyes and with the corners of his mouth only slightly turned up.

Nobody seemed to expect too much more from him, though, and Finn’s family talked animatedly around him.

Lucky bastard.

Rico himself was in the hands of a master inquisitor, and she had marshmallow cheeks and twinkling blue eyes.

“So, Rico, you’re in sales and marketing. Derek tells us you’re just back from New York?”

Okay. Softball. “Yes, ma’am. I had an internship in the marketing department for a fabric company. The position ended a little early and I came home.”

“So how long did you live in Sacramento?”

Rico swallowed, thinking about his white-walled apartment and how Finn and Adam had added more color to it in four months than he had the entire time before that.

“About six years.” The shadows were growing longer, and there was just enough chill in the air to make him wish for the hoodie Derek had bought for him, which he’d left in the car. Or Derek’s arm around his shoulder, which he was painfully aware he hadn’t earned yet.

“Are you going to stay in the area now?”

Sitting there in the park, you could smell the newly mown hay of some of the outlying areas, the mustard flowers that ran riot for this exact
two-week period, and even the river smell from the delta and feeder streams and sloughs that marked the area. The orange and purple of the sunset was tinted amber here in a way that he had seen nowhere else
he’d lived—not the Bay Area, not SoCal where he’d grown up, not New York.

Suddenly the pit of his stomach ached to call this place home.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said thoughtfully. “I… I mean, my whole life was up in the air until I took that internship. Once I got back here, I realized that however things fell out, I wanted to land here.”

Sylvie smiled, pushing the apples of her cheeks up under her eyes, and he thought that Derek got that expression from her too. “You should come visit our place in Woodland,” she said enthusiastically. “Before it gets too hot in the summer. We used to have about ten acres of farmland around it, and I farmed that while Edgar was running the hardware store, but when the kids all hit college, we sold that land off for a
fortune
to the university, and now they use it for experimental farming.”

“Yeah?” he asked, curious. “What do they farm?”

“Well, from what we can tell, they’re working on advanced crop rotation, to see exactly how much
of what kind of nutrient each crop pulls out. So they grow
everything
.
Sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, okra, sunflowers—it just matters what experiment they’re doing.” She laughed delightedly. “The best part is that after every harvest, they offer us some of the produce they don’t need for testing. It’s a lot like running the farm, except without all the work.”

Rico laughed, liking her very much. “So what do you do with all of that time?”

Derek’s snort of disgust vibrated his slightly sweaty body against Rico’s arm. “They
garden
!” he said, outraged as only a happy child could be by happy parents. “Garden. My whole childhood I heard Mom complaining about the harvesting and the weeding and the planting and the stupid combine—every summer it was a choice, right? You can go work the farm or you can go help Dad in the hardware store. And as soon as we hit college, they sell the lot of it and start
gardening
.”

“Flowers, Derek,” his mother said mildly. “There’s a difference.”

Rico laughed harder,
loving
the way Derek’s cheeks flushed and the way these two seemingly mild people could reduce his Captain of the Universe boss to a flustered little kid.

“Yeah, well, I can think of worse things,” Rico said, grinning. His eyes were full of Derek in that moment, and in a sudden breath, Derek’s eyes widened back, and he knew it. The moment lengthened, stretched, until Derek’s father ran it over with a clumsy segue, which probably meant it was getting uncomfortable.

“So, Rico, has he talked in his sleep yet?”

Derek’s cheeks pinkened in mortification, and Rico knew his did the same.

“Uhm, no, you guys, we’re not, uhm,” Derek said at the same time Rico said, “Uhm, we haven’t, I mean, we just started to, uh….”

Derek’s mother turned to his father and smacked him on the back of the head. “Edgar, what in the hell were you thinking?”

Edgar looked down into his plate, which had been cleaned of hot dogs and potato salad for about ten minutes. “Sorry, Sylvie,” he mumbled.

“I
told
you not to ask until Derek couldn’t hear.”

Derek buried his face in his hands.

L
ATER
,
NEITHER
of them could remember how they got away from the dinner table. Rico had vague memories of Sylvie shooing them to “go walk off dinner,” but that was just a guess. It was one of those moments of complete and total humiliation that seemed to jump time, and as they ambled away from the noisy group of Stewarts and friends cleaning up from the barbecue, Rico couldn’t apologize fast enough.

“Man, I’m so sorry—I—”

“
You’re
sorry?” Derek snorted. “I’m the one with the parents.”

“Yeah, but your parents are awesome, but, you know, it’s been a couple of weeks, and probably everyone assumes we’re sleeping together, and I didn’t think about how you’d explain that—”

Derek shook his head and turned, grabbing Rico’s hand in the cooling twilight. “We’re doing fine,” he said, his usual smile wiping away some of the embarrassment. “Yeah, I’ve had relationships that have lasted as long as it’s taken us to get
back
to third base, but you know what?”

Oh Lord. “What?”

“I couldn’t talk to those men for hours. None of them wanted to ride in my car the way you do. Those guys? They didn’t go out for a baseball game and a beer, and they didn’t play on a losing softball team, okay?” Derek brought Rico’s knuckles to his lips and then laced their fingers together as he lowered their hands. “We’re doing fi—”

Rico kissed him. Oh God. He was so earnest. So much a product of his happy parents. So very, very kind. And
damn
, he was cute. Rico wanted to devour all of that, to fill his soul with it, to be able to just laugh and smile that easily about what seemed to be the most embarrassing of things.

And the feel of his mouth under Rico’s was…
amazing
.
It transcended hot dogs and soda, even transcended hot and wet. Derek tasted like dust and joy and baseball and
Derek
, and Rico let go of his hand so he could cup both cheeks and plunder and taste and taste and plunder some more.

Derek groaned and pulled back, and their bodies plastered together obscenely close in the middle of a public park in the lowering evening, and Rico’s aching erection gave an impatient throb in his Under Armour.