The Yips Pt. 01

Megan's eyes widened. It was going to happen. She wrapped her arms around Bryan before he could apply the condom, trapping both of his hands between them as she pulled him close with a fierce possessive determination.

They kissed. It would be the perfect moment.

But his fingers shook with the anticipation. The latex tube would not roll on. She reached down to help. And missed. She grabbed his throbbing cock in on hand and the flailing rubber in the other and tried to bring them together.

Bryan could not hold back. He groaned in passion and frustration. His semen sprayed up onto both of them, Megan's chin and left tit, his stomach and chest, and when he finished pulsing, they stared at one another in panting shock. He was embarrassed. Humiliated and inadequate.

Then she started to chuckle. Giggles at first, she poked at the lines of his cum on her face and that set her off, guffawing from her belly, convulsive mirth. He watched her beautiful face express absolute joy and burst out himself. They clung together, laughing, sticky, wet, cooling, and happy.

Megan had no inhibitions. Whenever Bryan began to try something new, she watched him with her large brown eyes, pupils wide in the dark of the night, her face open and completely trusting. He explored the dimensions of her pussy, mapping the areas inside and out and how they responded to different stimuli from his tongue, his lips, his fingers. She moved her fingers over his erect cock like a blind person trying to memorize its three-dimensional reality. She experimented with vacuum and force and speed. They liked to lie with her on top and her bush in his face while she sucked him and he licked her and they swallowed the juices that ran from each other. They spent long periods like that making each other come, letting the other rest, teasing caresses, then ramping back up to hardness and wetness and thrashing limbs.

She was brave enough to walk into a small-town Texas pharmacy and throw a package of condoms on the checkout counter. Her mother was wise enough to put her on the pill and Megan and Bryan worked on perfecting the missionary position. Oh, they discovered quite a few other ways to arrange their two naked bodies, but the simplest was their favorite. They could go slow or fast, they could whisper secrets into their lover's ear. They could look into each other's eyes and say I love you.

Her love, her nude perfect body, her goddamn magnificent smile, made Bryan's heart feel like it was shoving other internal organs out of the way.

One night he would remember forever. She had been on the bottom, prone, and he fucked her from behind, telling her how beautiful her ass was as she cried out in pleasure. He was young and full and eager and in love and he ejaculated forcefully into her, biting her neck and grunting he was hers, she was his.

Sitting beside her a moment later, he stroked her back and smooth soft butt. His semen drained slowly from her, caught pooling in her pubic hair, opalescent gems forming from her slit, sparkling in the moonlight streaming through the shell's windows. He told her they would always be like this: happily ever after. Megan's tears streamed down her cheeks as they lay entwined in their pickup truck sanctuary.

Exactly four days later another pickup truck ended them.

So, yeah. Adjustments. He liked to drive from his Rhode Island house to Fenway Park listening to a recording of Aristophanes or Sophocles read in as close to the original Greek as scholars could recreate and wondering things like: What if I dropped my hands down just half-inch lower when I'm up two balls on a lefthanded pitcher? Could that increase my launch angle?

He would drive home after the game listening to sports radio hosts dissecting the innings he had just observed and participated in and ponder things like: What if I kissed Lauren slowly all over, starting at her big toes and covering all the surface of her legs, especially the inside of her thighs right up near where they joined? What would she be doing by the time I was blowing hot air on her trim little bush?

He actually found out the answer to both. In the first case, he hit five more home runs than the year before. In the second case, he found a quivering beauty moaning and begging for penetration.

Adjustments were good. Experimentation and continuous improvement.

His sophomore year with the Sox, he was the starting second baseman from spring training onward. The general manager traded in the offseason for a pitcher who had won the Cy Young two seasons before, and a couple of kids up from the minors had made the roster and were providing huge energy. The team started off slow, playing.500 until late in June, when they began a streak consisting of games they won with dominant pitching and long balls and games they won with tight defense and aggressive baserunning and games they won with late inning perseverance and well-placed bunts. The common thread was that they won. They found a way to win. They played with confidence that no matter what, blowout or nail biter, they could find a way to win it. By the Fourth of July, they were in first place by 5 games.

His parents came to visit that summer. He and Lauren dragged them all around Boston. They drove to Cape Cod, where the Lowells hosted a dinner party in their honor and his parents were introduced to their three new daughters. Melody was not present, as he suspected, but his parents were happily surprised by the enthusiastic reception their son got from the other Lowell sisters. Bryan hugged his mother and father often, and Lauren cried when her in-laws had to leave.

The next month, Bryan insisted that she invite her parents. Lauren was not enthusiastic about the idea. They're busy, she said. They don't like to travel, she said. What she didn't say, but Bryan knew, was that they could not afford the trip. So Bryan called the Red Sox travel secretary, who did him a personal favor and booked Lauren's parents on a flight.

Her parents stayed for a week. He grilled them steaks and took them to No. 9 Park. Bryan got them box seats when the team was hosting the Orioles and gave them a tour of the clubhouse before the game, took them to the Museum of Fine Arts, the Common, the Seaport. When he found out that her mother loved glassblowing, Bryan took them to the glass flower collection at Harvard, where she teared up at the beauty of the collection. It was a busy week, and when it was done and Bryan and Lauren were alone again in their home, Bryan sat on the back steps in the setting sunlight. He realized that he had not seen Lauren embrace her parents a single time other than the first day in greeting and the last in parting. She didn't cry when they left. He had no idea what this meant.

He heard her calling his name, and went looking for his wife. He found her in their bedroom, naked, standing by the window in the twilight.

"Thank you," she said quietly. He thought she was thanking him for arranging for her parents' visit, but he was wrong. "Thank you for this life."

She came into his arms. Something about what she had said bothered him, but his brain was suddenly to too busy to pick at it.

Lauren tilled the soil and planted a huge garden in their back yard where she placed berry bushes and vegetables that grew into a lush green jungle. They swam in the big pool at the club and played tennis and volleyball with their neighbors.

One day, a new face appeared in the club crowd. Lauren was lying on a lounge in the shade. Bryan, approaching her with two smoothies from the bar, saw her sit up and go wide eyed at something. Bryan turned to follow her eyes and saw a tall, very muscular man with a vaguely familiar face talking to the lifeguard. The lifeguard, a college girl, turned red as sunburn when the man bent close to speak into her ear.

It came to Bryan then. It was Owen Archer. He had played quarterback for the Chargers before becoming a free agent. ESPN had reported that the Jets signed him with a staggering package. 500 million dollars over six years, most of it guaranteed. The pundits on ESPN agreed that the Jets had way overpaid, but they were the Jets and had a long history of bad financial decisions and bad quarterback selections. The franchise was desperate for a quarterback. It was a confluence that had worked out well for Archer.

Archer was a hulk. Bryan was surprised that a quarterback, a position not known for requiring bulging muscles, had such a physique. Hell, Tom Brady had six rings and looked like he could not shake off your grandmother's tackle. Owen Archer, in contrast, looked a lot like the men in Lauren's dorm room posters. Bryan glanced at his wife and did not like the look of appreciation on her face as she took in Archer in his tiny Speedo.

A woman who lived three houses down from Bryan towed Archer over, chattering away, obviously thrilled to now have two professional athletes in her neighborhood. Archer and Bryan shook hands, then Archer took Lauren's hand and held it softly. It could not be called a shake, and Bryan resisted the urge to tell his wife to wipe the drool off of her chin.

Archer made small talk with them for a few minutes. He was renting the house for the summer, as the Jets were holding their training camp at Brown University while their facility in New Jersey was being remodeled. He left them after a few minutes to go to weight training. He shook Bryan's hand again and this time kissed Lauren's.

Later that night, Bryan held his naked sweaty wife as she leaked his semen onto a growing very wet spot.

"Do you wish I had big muscles?" He asked suddenly.

Lauren giggled. "Is that what you worry about? Do you wish I had big tits?"

"No," he said. "I love yours."

"And I love your muscles, honey. But don't tell me you never look at a woman with huge firm ones and have impure thoughts."

Fair enough, thought Bryan. It still didn't make him feel better.

**********

He would feel a lot less better shortly.

A week later the Sox were in Toronto for a day-night doubleheader. In the day game, Bryan hit a two-run triple and they won by four runs. Between games, he took a shower, ate a chicken salad sandwich, drank a ginger ale, and joined in as the team filled the clubhouse with an enthusiastic rendition of My Sharona. Bryan laughed as the guys in the shower belted the words out basso profundo over the hiss of the water.

He felt as happy as he had ever been. This was his dream. He was literally living in his dream. He was a professional baseball player. He had a wonderful home and a gorgeous loving wife.

It could only go downhill from here.

In the bottom of the fifth, the Jays had a runner on first with one out. Bryan saw his catcher signaling for sinking fastballs to try and induce a ground ball. With two strikes and one ball, the batter, defending an expanded strike zone, swung at a pitch he clearly could not get to with any power. The ball bounded towards short and Bryan sprinted to the bag. The shortstop plucked the ball on the hop and flicked it gently toward where Bryan would be.

Bryan looked the ball into his glove as he stepped on second, then turned his body midstride in preparation for his throw to first. But the runner was much faster than Bryan anticipated and slid in high and mean to try and break up the play. Bryan tucked his legs up in midair to avoid the collision and managed to throw the ball across his body, but one of his feet clipped the runner's shoulder. Bryan rotated sideways, thrusting his gloved hand out to break his fall. He landed awkwardly on his left knee and the force of the fall jammed his femur hard up into his hip. He felt an ominous ripping sensation and a stab of pain.

His shortstop, thinking he had simply fallen down, congratulated him and tried to pull him up. Bryan rose to his feet, but the shooting agony in his thigh sent him back to the dirt. His teammates gathered round, waving for the medical cart to come out.

**********

The Red Sox were up by 5 games over the Yankees.

**********

The plastic surface an inch above his nose was otherworldly slick and yellowish from oxidation, though the outside of the machine looked brand new. Something in the loud popping and creaking as the MRI ground through its now familiar routine must age the inside tube prematurely. The strong electromagnetic field? He didn't know, didn't have enough physics to know. He did know that claustrophobia was a real thing. He knew that his lifeless corpse would have more room in its coffin than he had in here.

Bryan found out he even had a labrum the hard way. Apparently it was the ring of cartilage that held the leg bone in the hip bone and let the two move so that the owner of said bones might run and jump. These being two essential activities in baseball, Bryan knew he was in trouble. Second base at Fenway Park was his territory. His damn job. The longer he lay on his back the longer some other sonofabitch had to try and steal it.

He had done a lot of that in the last two weeks. Laying on his back. He had time to think about the state of his leg. And then later, the state of his marriage.

The days after his injury were a drug-blurred fuzz. The team doctors and trainers had taken him to Toronto University Hospital for X-rays and an MRI and decided his injury was stable enough that he could fly. They strapped him into a brace and gave him some more pain killers. Three days after that he had been put through a battery of tests at Mass General and then was examined by the Red Sox team of doctors and also by two independent orthopedic surgeons hired by his agent.

The team doctor proposed that he be treated in Phoenix by a surgeon who was pioneering a new and minimally-invasive method of repairing and stabilizing the hip labrum. His personal bone docs told him that the new technique was promising and could do no harm. The worst that could happen was that it would not resolve his problem as fast the clinical trials had suggested and Bryan would have to recover in the offseason -- which was what the existing treatment and timeline would be. With the Phoenix technique, it was just possible he could get back on the field in time for the playoffs.

Playoffs? It was almost August. Playoffs began in mid-October. Bryan told them to get him the hell to Arizona.

Lauren had met him in Boston when he was still woozy from whatever they had given him to take the edge off of the dull throbbing pain in his hip. She was forlorn, her mascara a runny dark mess when she walked into his room and burst into sobs seeing him in the brace.

"Lauren, honey. It will be okay," he said as she knelt by his wheelchair and embraced him.

"I'm sorry, Bryan. I can't help it. The man on television said your career could be over and...." She could not speak for her convulsive sobs.

"Shit." he said. "Don't watch those assholes. They don't know anything. My doctors say I can be back in six weeks."

She wiped her eyes. "Really?"

"Really."

They flew in a small chartered jet, just Bryan and Lauren and a Red Sox trainer as passengers. In Phoenix, they were driven straight to the hospital, where Bryan was subjected to another round of poking and imaging.

The next day they operated. It was strangely about as involved as getting a filling, maybe less. The medical team gave Bryan a local and the surgeon made two tiny incisions. She fed a long thin tool into one and a camera probe into the other and spent 30 minutes fishing, cutting, trimming, gluing, and sewing. Then she smiled at Bryan while the assistants applied what seemed to him a way too small bandage.

"Mr. Monnic, you are now free to limp about the hospital."

"Just like that?" he said, amazed.

"Yes. We are done. Now all you have to do is follow your rehab and let yourself heal."

"Thanks, doc."

She shook his hand. "I did my residency at Brigham and Women's. I would appreciate it if you would get your ass back on the field and beat the damn Yankees."

**********

Lauren stayed with him for five days after the surgery. They couldn't have sex. Well, one of the nurses hinted that while they were officially discouraged from groin-to-groin activity, mouth-to-groin or hand-to-groin was low impact on the hip and was an acceptable alternative.

They tried both, but Bryan could tell that Lauren was afraid to touch him with any conviction.

They finally decided that she should return to Rhode Island and tend to her garden until he was able to come home. She protested but had to admit she could do nothing for him here except give him moral support.

"And blowjobs," Bryan had said suggestively.

Lauren poked a finger into his ribcage. "No way. My blowjobs are so awesome that you will flop around and reinjure yourself."

He had to admit she had a point.

The night before she left, she squirmed across the bed and carefully pressed her naked body against him until he rolled to face her.

"Stay still," she whispered. "Something for you to remember me."

She took his cock in her hand and stroked it until it was rigid, which took some fraction of a second. She slid down and took him carefully in her mouth. Before she could even begin, he grunted and shot onto her hot wet tongue.

She came back up and lay beside him, swallowing, and licking her lips as he caressed her ass.

"Bryan?" she said seriously.

"Yes, dear?"

"You know I have all the faith in the world in you."

"Yes?"

"But what will happen to you if... this doesn't work."

He wanted to protest that it would work, that there was no place for negative thoughts, that he had to be 100% focused on success.

Bryan forced back the darkness that had been stealing in when he wasn't looking, the helpless surrendering sense that maybe, maybe this was really the end. The fear that his hip would not ever be same again. And if his hip could not be relied upon, then the knee and the ankle would follow; his whole fucking body would be just enough off-kilter to knock him out of the top tier.

He could sense that she was deadly serious, and he owed her a frank response.

"If it comes to the worst," he said slowly. "Then I find another job. Coaching college ball, maybe. I might become an agent. I might get my doctorate and teach dead languages at Harvard while you host faculty parties and have five children."

She was silent.

"Five?" she asked.

"At least."

She wrapped her arms around him and they drifted off to sleep.

It was only much later that he remembered how she had said "what will happen to you", not "what will happen to us".

**********

He spent his mornings at the hospital getting physical therapy and his afternoons in the weight room at the Cardinals stadium in Glendale. After the doctors cleared him to drive, he rented a car. In the evenings he soaked in the hotel hot tub. At noon every day he immersed himself in a pulse-stoppingly frigid ice bath as soon as he got to the football stadium. In the evenings, he either ate in the hotel or went out to one of the local restaurants. He ate alone. He liked eating alone. He was working his way through Rawlinson's translation of Herodotus and taking notes, comparing it to the original Greek text. He had considered a reimagining of the times of the Father of History as a possible topic for the Ph. D. thesis he hoped to write one day, after his playing days were over. He hoped that day was far in the future.

He was both amused and a little annoyed that nobody ever noticed him. Not one person ever came over, asked for his autograph gushing about seeing him turn four double plays against the Rays or bang out a walk-off dinger against the Royals. He didn't know if he would trade anonymity for celebrity, but it looked like he didn't get to make that choice.

He texted Lauren almost every hour. She sent him pictures of the garden and the new curtains. They chatted by video every night. After a week, the regularity of their conversations diminished. Bryan was not concerned. He chalked it up to routine taking over. Scheduled affection was not as exciting, he knew. It was his fault as well. The Red Sox tech guy was sending him links to the detailed videos of their games, angles from centerfield, from behind the plate, from the top of each dugout. Each game might last about 3 hours but be documented in 24 hours of video. Bryan sat in front of his laptop, curling barbells and watching footage. He did sit-ups watching footage. He sat on the toilet watching footage.