A Stitch in Time Pt. 06

"God, I'm sorry," I said. "I don't know where I was."

Her look was much more serious than mine, so I quickly sobered up.

"Patrick, I know you wanted to get together this weekend to make up for last Friday," she began, a tear forming in the corner of her left eye. "But my grandma took a turn for the worse during the week, and I really have to go down to see her."

"That's fine," I said. "She's your grandmother. When do you leave?"

"Tonight," she said. "The plane's at seven."

My guy was arriving at seven-thirty.

"Can I bring you to the airport?" I asked.

She smiled and looked up and down the hall. With no one in sight, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed me on the cheek.

"You are so sweet," she said.

"When do you get back?"

"Tuesday afternoon."

"Wow. You're gonna miss two days of school."

She shook her head.

"Tuesday's one of those teacher service days, so it's only Monday. Gonna miss me?"

"Of course," I smiled.

Since I wasn't going to be at the game on Saturday, Coach had no objection to my leaving practice a little early. I raced home, showered, and threw a bag with a change of clothes in the trunk. I was at Tanya's house by five-thirty, and we put her suitcase in the back seat. We got to the dinky local airport half an hour later. I parked the car and she turned to me.

"I'm sorry again about the weekend," she said softly.

"That's okay," I assured her.

"Can I make it up to you?" she asked with a gleam in her eye.

"Sure," I smiled. "Next weekend's fine."

"Can I make a down-payment?" she reached over and traced her fingers slowly up my crotch.

"A what?" I coughed.

"A deposit," she grinned. "Or maybe you can make a deposit."

Without taking her eyes off mine, she unzipped my fly and begin snaking her hand into the hole in my shorts. Now that I understood what she had in mind, I looked around the parking lot to assure myself that nobody else was around. I pushed the seat back, pushed the steering wheel up, and pushed my pants and shorts down to my thighs. Her blonde hair tickled my cock just before her lips closed around it, and I sat back in my seat. It didn't take long, and when she sat back up, she made sure I saw her lick her lips.

"Next week you can open a checking account," she said huskily.

"A checking account?" I smiled.

"You can check out how I look completely naked," she grinned. "We actually haven't done that in quite a while. Thanks, Patrick. I should go."

"Thank you, Tanya."

I pulled myself back together and walked her to the security area. We shared a brief kiss on the lips, and I waved goodbye when she headed off for her gate. Just after her plane took off, I heard my name being paged over the loudspeaker system. Perfect timing.

It was dark when we arrived at the Charlottesville airport, but Uncle Ted and Aunt Ruth were both there to meet me, and we stayed up until nearly midnight talking. The next day we had breakfast at a local diner, and then they gave me a history teacher's tour of the Grounds. Jefferson, Poe — those kind of guys. Around ten, though, they dropped me off at Coach Rogers' office in the McCue Center. The coach himself took charge of me, giving me a tour of the facilities and introducing me to the players as they trickled into the locker room for the afternoon game against Clemson.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Ted joined me in the stands for the game, and then it was time for me to sample student life. Or student-athlete life, in my case. It started with dinner at the John Paul Jones Center, normally the basketball team's home court but tonight the site of a concert by Rod Stewart. A concert for which the baseball team was given the use of one of the private suites high above the arena floor. A concert that I watched with a comely young lady sitting in my lap, fetching sodas and munchies at the tiniest indication of interest on my part. She was a great listener, letting me blab on and on about my no-hitter, and letting me whine about the team's shortcomings. And she was funny, too, snapping off one-liners about the other guys on the team. Sign me up, boys.

After the concert, we headed toward a private house that served as the residence for a number of the guys on the team. A house where the young lady was now able to obtain us both beer instead of soft drinks.

"So," she said, seating herself in my lap once again. "I'm randy."

"Hi, Randy," I smiled stupidly, taking a sip of beer. In the harsher light of the house's crowded living room, she wasn't perhaps the beauty I'd imagined in the darkened suite of the arena. She had a nice smile, and lovely green eyes, but her nose was a little crooked and her jaw a little too square.

"It's not a name," she giggled. "It's an adjective."

My smile grew even bigger.

"I always welcome the new recruits," she told me, batting her long eyelashes at me. "Would you like a welcome?"

I couldn't smile any more than that. She got up and took me by the hand, leading me to a bedroom off the kitchen.

"So what's your name, honey?" she asked as her talented hands worked on my belt and zipper.

"Trick," I told her, sitting down on the bed with my pants around my ankles.

She dropped to her knees in front of me.

"I've never done a Trick," she smiled before leaning forward and taking my cock inside her mouth. She just stayed there for about ten seconds, and then I felt something tickling the sensitive skin around my cock. Something warm, something wet. They were tears. She was crying.

I reached down and lifted her off me by the chin.

"Are you okay?" I asked.

"I'm sorry," she sniffed. "It's just your name."

"Trick?"

"Yeah," she started tearing up again. "God, I'm sorry. It's not you."

"What is it?"

She didn't answer for a minute, studying my face instead. Then she appeared to come to some sort of decision about me and took a deep breath.

"When I said I've never done a trick?" she half-sobbed and half-laughed. "What a crock. That's basically how I stay in my house."

"Your house makes you, um...?

"My sorority," she explained. "And yeah, we have a relationship with the baseball team."

She had used her hands to put quotation marks around the word "relationship."

"And since none of them wants to date me..." her voice trailed off and she looked back down at my cock.

"Why don't you just quit?" I asked.

"Why don't you just shut up and let me finish," she said fiercely. She had a tight grip on my cock, and I really had no way of preventing her from bending her head once again, short of pulling her by the hair. She started sucking me with a fury, as if she were now determined to finish what she had started.

The door suddenly opened, and one of the infielders on the team popped his head in.

"Hey, sorry," he smiled. "I see you've met Sarah, Sterling."

I never heard him close the door, because her name was like a knife to my stomach. It wasn't the name alone, but the juxtaposition. Sarah Sterling. That was my mother's name.

"Sarah, stop," I said with no success.

I grabbed her by the chin again and pulled.

"Sarah, you have to stop."

"Why?" she asked with venom. "'Cause I'm too ugly to give you a blowjob, too?"

"No," I said. "You just have to. Look, I'm really sorry. It's nothing to do with you, but I have to go."

She started to tear up again.

"Seriously, I think you're great Sarah. I just have to go."

I stood up and pulled up my pants.

"Asshole," I heard her mutter behind me.

Actually, no. Not this time. Not anymore, anyway.

I found my way back to the Grounds and blindly wandered the campus for a few hours, alternately crying to myself and wondering what the hell had happened to me over the last three weeks. Jeanne, Tanya, Cammie, Matt — ever since my no-hitter, I had treated everyone of them less like a person and more like a tool, someone who Trick Sterling found useful or someone he didn't need. And Jill was apparently doing exactly the same thing.

Finally, around three o'clock, I fell asleep on the steps of a deserted building with a wide entrance.

"Young man?" I heard her voice before I felt her hand on my shoulder. I looked up to see the friendly, concerned face of a middle-aged woman bending over to look at me. "Are you all right?"

"I'm fine, thank you, ma'am," I said. "I'm sorry, I fell asleep. Is this your house?"

"In one sense," she smiled. "Would you like to come in?"

I looked around and realized that I had fallen asleep on the steps of the University's chapel.

"Come on," she said. "I'll make some tea. My first service isn't until eight."

"You're a minister?" I stood up and meekly followed her.

"Episcopalian," she said over her shoulder as she unlocked the door. "But I try to do a non-denominational service at eleven o'clock."

We sat and I told her a sanitized version of my life. She sipped her tea, she nodded wisely, and then she asked me to help her with the early service.

It was a sparsely attended affair. I counted twenty people when it came time to count out the communion wafers. So it wasn't until I was actually leaning forward with the chalice that I realized that one of the girls at the altar rail was Sarah. She was busy trying to dip the wafer in the wine, so she had no idea who was holding the chalice. It wasn't until I threw my robe at the minister after the service, in a nice, dignified way of course, and ran after her that she remembered me.

"Where the hell did you come from?" she asked, looking around wildly.

"Church," I nodded over my shoulder.

"You were in church?" she asked incredulously.

"I served your wine. Now can we sit down and talk?"

"What do you want?" her voice turned sullen.

"I want to explain why I left."

"I know why you left."

"I don't think you do. Do you remember when that guy came in and said, 'I see you've met Sarah, Sterling?'"

"Yeah?"

"My mom's name was Sarah Sterling. And after that, all I could think about was what a jerk I'd been for the past month. And here I was, letting a smart, nice, and yes, pretty girl give me a blowjob because she thought she had to."

"Kind of like me and Trick, huh?" she grinned. She walked over to a bench and sat down.

"Kind of," I said, joining her. "You know, you remind me of my mother a little."

"Great," she rolled her eyes.

"My mom was actually a very pretty lady," I said. "She died two years ago, at forty."

"I'm sorry, Trick."

"Patrick, actually."

Sarah burst out in laughter.

"You could have saved me a lot of trouble if you'd told me that yesterday," she finally said.

"Sorry. Anyway, my mom had a way of making everybody she met, at church or wherever, feel like they were the most important person in the world at that very moment."

Sarah just blinked at me.

"I felt that way last night," I told her.

I held up a hand as I watched her eyes begin to narrow.

"No, not then. At the concert. When you were telling me things and listening to me talk. About my stupid high school crap."

"It wasn't stupid," she said softly.

"Not to me," I agreed. "But probably to anybody other than you, Sarah, it would have been."

She sniffed and wiped the back of her hand across her cheek.

"Come on, Sarah, let's get some breakfast. You're last name isn't Sterling, I hope?"

"Cutter," she said.

"Well, let me buy you some breakfast, Sarah Cutter, and tell you some more about my mom. I like talking about my mom, you know?"

I told her a little bit more about me over breakfast, too, and she told me a little bit more about herself. We ended up exchanging phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and I promised that when I got to Charlottesville next fall, she would be the first person I would call.

"But not for a date," she said.

I was a little taken aback by that.

"There's this really cute guy on the lacrosse team who keeps looking at me in Chem class," she said. "The hell with the baseball team."

She really did have a nice smile.

I met up with my aunt and uncle again for lunch, and was flown back home in the afternoon. All the way there, I found myself thinking about Tanya. And the team. And Jill. And Jeanne. God, I had a lot to do. I hoped I had enough time to do it. The season was nearing an end, the dance was coming up, and the musical was right after it. Please, God, just let me know that it's possible. Just give me a sign.

I got to the airport and drove home to an empty house. I went up to the bedroom and pulled open the closet door to find a new shirt. The baseball tie that Mrs. Szerchenko had given me slipped off its hook and fell in a pile at my feet. I just stared at it. Honestly, I had been hoping for a better sign than that.

Chapter 23

I can see in my mind the sculpted image of President Lincoln on Mount Rushmore, the only one of the four looking westward. He sees a sign or a billboard. Maybe it says "TR Sucks!" or "Lincoln Rocks!" And he starts to smile. Cracks start to form on the rock face as his carved mouth slowly lifts into the smallest of grins. Little chunks of stone start falling off the face of the mountain, endangering people below.

I can see all of this because on the Monday following my trip to Charlottesville, I saw Mr. Smithson, my homeroom teacher, start to smile. He finally controlled himself with an effort, but his voice was still flecked with something not entirely unlike humor.

"That is probably the most hideous tie I have ever seen, Mr. Sterling," it rumbled through a stunned classroom.

"You think?" I smiled, fingering the yellow and blue monstrosity. "It was a gift."

His mouth twitched, threatening us all with a chuckle or, even worse, a guffaw. Once again, though, his stoicism triumphed.

"I'm glad to hear that," he said as the class started tittering.

Mr. Kennedy was similarly taken with the tie. Every time he looked back in my corner of the room, his lecture on the pernicious influence of special interest groups seemed to suffer. Finally, he just stopped and sat down on his desk.

"I hope you don't have an interview today, Patrick," he smiled.

"An interview, sir?"

"When I was in college, wearing a tie meant that someone had a job interview."

"No, sir. No interview. We have a baseball game today."

He raised an eyebrow.

"And you need to blind the other team when they show up?"

"No, sir," I smiled. "It's a sign of respect."

"For whom?" he looked quite puzzled.

"Morgan High, sir. It's an away game."

"Jesse and Hal don't seem to have the same respect," he pointed out.

"I'm sure they do, sir," I said. I knew full well that Morgan High hadn't won a game yet this year, and the last thing on Jesse and Hal's mind at the moment was respect. "But I'm the captain, sir. I have to make sure they know we respect them. You know, lead by example and all that."

"I see," Mr. Kennedy nodded before continuing in a patronizing tone. "You might want to pick a different tie next time, though. I'm not sure that one really sends the message that you want."

"No?" I asked, pulling in out to look at it. "Well, thank you, sir."

No kidding, butthead.

The tie got the same reaction the rest of the morning. It wasn't until lunch time that somebody said what everyone else had been thinking.

"Are you crazy?" Cammie asked. "They're going to think you're making fun of them when you walk off the bus."

I gave her my best offended look.

"This was a gift from Tanya's mother," I said self-righteously.

"Oh, God, Trick. I'm sorry," Cammie clapped a hand over her mouth.

"It is pretty ugly, though, isn't it? I actually don't plan on wearing it when I get off the bus."

"So all this shit about respect and all...?" Rabbit asked.

"Oh, no, I brought another tie for that."

"Then what's with this tie?" Jeanne asked.

"This is just to get the attention of my team," I explained. "I am the captain, you know. It's worked pretty well so far, too."

The table broke out in laughter.

"You are such an asshole," Cammie shook her head, smiling all the while.

"I know," I grinned.

When the bus pulled into the parking lot at Morgan, I was wearing a very conservative blue tie. Before anyone could move, I jumped up and took the two steps that put me at the front of the bus.

"All right. Listen up, guys."

Nobody had done this before, at least not this year, so the effect on my teammates was exactly what I had hoped for: paralysis.

"I'm sure you all heard about me wearing this other tie today, and you probably heard why. First off, I'm sorry I wasn't here for the game on Saturday. Tough loss, guys."

We had been blown off the field.

"Right now our record is 8-7. Our league record is 5-4. If we want to make the league playoffs this year — forget the state playoffs — we need to do better over the next couple of weeks. And that means we have to start taking ourselves a little more seriously. Now, to me, that starts with taking our opponents more seriously. If we lose a game because they just played better than us, fine. If we lose because we didn't respect them, because we didn't understand that any team in this league is capable of beating us on any given day, we should be ashamed to call ourselves the defending state champions. That's all, guys. Have a good game."

I led the team off the bus to the locker room. I led them out of the locker room and onto the field. And then I led them to a 6-0 shutout of Morgan High School. It did help that Cary pitched a five-hitter. I could have pitched, but Coach wanted me available on Thursday for the rematch against McKay. But I did my part with a homer and two RBIs.

Probably the most important thing in the game happened in the sixth inning. They had a guy on first with two outs, and the next guy up lined a sharp single into right. I scooped it up, reared back, and unleashed a rocket toward Mattie at third base. Eddie, the cutoff man, was so surprised to see me throw it there that he ducked. That turned out to be fine because Matt, at third, was too stunned to tell him to cut it. Instead, Matt took it on a short hop and swept his glove down for the tag. He just stood there for a few seconds after that, taking in the sight of the umpire with his fist raised high in the air to signal an out.

"That'll teach 'em to make the third out at third base, huh, Matt?" I smiled as I went by him into the dugout.

"Uh, yeah. Sure, Trick."

I was also the first one to the bus after the game, and made the incredibly corny gesture of waiting at the bottom of the steps so that I could shake hands with, and thank, each guy on the team as he got on. Coach Torianni was the last one, and he thanked me before I could thank him.

"Well, we'll see," I smiled. At least step one was complete. Our second step, as a team, would come on Thursday, when we had a home rematch against McKay. They were probably going to take us a little more seriously this time, after we had given them a spanking on their home field.

My second step, as a person, came on Tuesday morning. With no school, and no practice, I was planning on devoting my day to Tanya, even though her plane wasn't due until three that afternoon. We had talked briefly on Sunday and Monday evenings by cell phone, but I really needed to see her in person. Jill gave me an opening that I simply couldn't refuse, however. With Jeanne still up in her room, Jill sat down to eat breakfast with me.

"So what was with that tie yesterday?"

"Did you like it?"

"Well, um..."

"Yeah, I know. Why didn't you ask me yesterday morning in the car?"

"'Cause Jeanne would have made some snippy remark, and we would have started fighting."

"True," I nodded. "Do you remember when I was like, twelve and you were nine, we went to this amusement park, and you and I were going to go on this ride together all by ourselves?"

"Yeah, sort of," she tilted her head and began twirling a strand of hair.