The Yips Pt. 02

She wandered into the house and examined first the kitchen, then the living room, then the dining room.

"Why isn't there a mess? You have a housekeeper?"

"Just me," he said. "I clean up after myself."

She turned to face him. "I heard that you played like crap tonight. You especially."

He had always liked the phrase "bum's rush". It was colorful and descriptive and he was about to use one on Ms. Lowell. He imagined her burgandy pants suit after he had tossed her from the door onto his dewy lawn.

"So. You just came here to bust my balls. As usual."

She grabbed him by the lapels with both hands. Bryan was busy thinking that baseball jerseys didn't even have lapels when she said, "Asshole."

And kissed him so hard he forgot his own name for a long minute.

'What the hell--" He managed to get out when she took her lips away to draw in air.

Then she kissed him again.

And turned him loose.

"Say something in Greek," she commanded.

Bryan could not figure out how to speak English at the moment, but then some remote part of his brain came to the rescue.

He looked directly into her eyes and recalled a few sentences, then followed with the translation.

"Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back. Those who wish to sing always find a song. At the touch of a lover, everyone becomes a poet."

He paused. "That was Plato, believe it or not."

She had somehow gotten wrapped in his arms. She shivered.

"Will you do that when you fuck me?"

"When I...? Well, sure...? I guess."

Mel took a step back and looked down at herself.

"Not tonight. You got dirt on my jacket."

Bryan's logical processors were being whiplashed. His mouth hung open in idiotic misunderstanding.

"Never mind," she said, brushing the fabric over her breasts and pushing Bryan into a deeper level of erect confusion. "I came to tell you that Owen Archer is currently married to his second wife. The first one left him because of -- you might guess this one -- his many affairs. The current Mrs. Archer is now living in Torrey Pines and will be moving to New Jersey shortly with their two small children."

"Shit." Bryan said absentmindedly, one part of his brain reminding him that his lawyer could have just called him with this revelation.

He would bet the house that Lauren had no idea her white knight already had a fair maiden. Then another thought came to him and he said, "Double shit." It was pretty much what had happened to Mel with Jaime Rodriguez.

He looked at her. She knew.

"I suppose you are a witch," he said.

She gave him a disgusted look. "What the fuck kind of thing is that to say?'

"Forget it. Bad analogy." He thought a moment, then pointed at her. "I thought you were working at your father's firm."

"Merger." She shrugged.

Even her shrug was a legal ploy.

"And you working my case -- just a coincidence? The luck of the draw?"

"As far as you know."

He shook his head. "Fucking shysters."

She pursed her lips. "Point me to your guest room. I'm not driving back up 95 at this hour."

"You--"

She stopped him with an open hand. "Don't go there. I will not be blamed every time you strike out tomorrow."

"Who said I was going to strike out?"

**********

The Red Sox and the Yankees were tied for first.

**********

Bryan was up early and set out a pregame breakfast of whole wheat toast with blueberry jam, cherry yogurt, and a blender of mango smoothie on the kitchen island. He was just sitting to eat when Melody tiptoed down the stairs wearing one of his University of Texas T-shirts. Bryan went catatonic with a slice of toast halfway to his mouth. Several thoughts elbowed each other aside like the Three Freaking Stooges as they rushed to be first out the door: he hoped that she had found a clean shirt; he wondered if this was ethical; he judged that there was half an inch of white cotton between him knowing if she was born a redhead or not.

There didn't seem to be as much oxygen in the air as there had been just a minute before.

She yawned and perched on a chair, as relaxed as if this were her natural environment, helped herself to a piece of toast, and poured out some of the smoothie.

"Where's the bacon? Where's the eggs?" She demanded through a crunching mouthful of toast.

He swallowed, staring at her nipples, which had come to attention and were saluting the cool kitchen air. "Uh... high fiber. Low fat."

"No fun," she said and finished the slice.

She got up, came around to him, and hoisted herself up on the table so her ass was just about where the next place setting would have been had there been one.

Confirmed. She was a redhead. A bushy bushy redhead.

"What are you... doing?" Bryan asked, with more quiver in his voice than he thought a sophisticated man of the world should ever exhibit.

She gave him a look that said they both knew the answer to that question and eased her legs apart.

He swept his plate aside so violently that both it and his smoothie glass flew across the room in a shower of toast and jam and mango shards. He grabbed her just above her knees and spread them wide, sliding her ass closer to the edge and sinking his tongue into that fuzzy red jungle. Mel squeaked in delight and grabbed his head to pull it in more tightly. The angle was not good, so he reached up and shoved her onto her back. Now he had free access to her whole slit, and he did not ease into it. No stretches or gentle warmup. He attacked her pussy like it had offended him. He licked her hard little button with long strokes as her legs shook, and he kept the rapid tempo until she spasmed with a loud exhalation that made no words yet communicated her thoughts on the matter clearly and forcefully.

Bryan was hard, maybe harder than he had ever been. He jumped to his feet while pushing his pajama bottoms down. His engorged cock caught on the table before springing free to point quivering at her saturated gash.

They locked eyes as he sank into her.

She began to curse. Colorful strings of very unladylike vulgarity interspersed with panting and sobs of pleasure. Bryan just grunted. His vision was full of flashes of light. He drooled.

Mel cried out one last motherfucker fuck fuck and wrapped her arms around him and squeezed like a python. Every one of Bryan's muscles from his knees to his nipples contracted in sync and he began to ejaculate a prodigious volume of semen for what seemed to his fogged awareness to be an hour or so.

Somehow Bryan ended up where he had started, back in his chair, but now Mel was in his lap, kissing him, his still mostly hard prick inside her.

"What are you doing?" Bryan asked again once the train whistle in his brain had died out. "I thought you hated me."

Mel drew back and, through the curtain of her unruly just-got-fucked hairdo, looked at him in a way that made him feel, wizard or no, that he had zero clues about vagina-carrying humans.

"I did. Boy, I hated you something fierce." She kissed him in a definite non-hating way. "I know Brie told you about that asshole Rodriguez."

"She did. In confidence."

"I saw her. That day. I looked over his shoulder and saw her leaving the cabana. I didn't care. I was in love."

He slipped out of her and she shivered - and giggled like Harvard Law graduates are taught not to.

"I was a stupid kid who had never been in love before. I should have had practice boyfriends to get some experience, but I was the good daughter, the hard-working daughter who was going to Harvard so she could be a lawyer like her daddy. I was sexually retarded, so when it finally came.... Hit me like a truck."

"So he...."

"Took my cherry. Yep. Nobody had ever told me that a girl always falls in love with the prick who pops her. Stupid evolutionary pressure."

"Doesn't explain why you treated me like shit, though."

She reached down and cupped his balls. "God damn you, Monnic. I treated you like shit because you were just another stupid ballplayer who would tell me any damn lie to get laid... and I fell for you the first time I saw you. I didn't hate you. I hated myself. I hated myself because I was a weak hormonal cunt who had just found out she wasn't the dispassionate superwoman she had imagined herself to be. I hated myself because you were intelligent, kind, great to look at.... and you spoke ancient Greek, you motherfucker."

He tilted his head. "That day I translated some Homer for you I got the feeling that it made you sick."

"You are a pathetic excuse for a human," she hissed, giving his scrotum a squeeze. "I was fucking turned on. My panties were soaked when you did that.... I had to run to the bathroom and rub my bean. I came so hard I think I strained a muscle."

He started to laugh.

"What?" She said angrily, tightening her grip.

"Hey! Mercy!" He protested. She eased off, and he told her the story of how Megan Barlow would go into heat while studying Latin.

"The fucking power of dead languages, huh?" he mused. "Think we could monetize that?"

He held her for a while, kissing her neck.

"I'm sorry."

"What for?" She seemed genuinely puzzled.

"I'm technically a married man. I thought...."

"Don't think. You are paying me to think for you."

"Oh, right.... And I should have put on a rubber."

She shrugged. That simple movement made her tits bounce under the borrowed shirt in a way that Bryan found visceral. His cock sent up an alert: I could get hard again real quick, boss.

"How big is your shower?" she asked, squirming on her ass from side to side. "Let's go. I'm leaking like an old boat here."

**********

Bryan's shower was spacious, but the dimensions of his bathroom became irrelevant. In midsoap, Mel shuddered and bit her bright red lipsticked lip.

"This is not relaxing at all," she whispered.

He agreed by hastily rinsing them both and carrying her to the bed and dropping her in the middle. He crawled onto her and they squirmed and slid around on each other like wet water balloons.

"I don't have any condoms." A groaning confession.

"Just fuck me, will you?"

His thrusting cock found her slit. That pinned her to one place. He began to pin her again and again and didn't even try to hold back.

It did not seem to bother her. Mel had found a pelvic angle that directed his hard flesh over her clitoris. The faster Bryan charged for his own ending, the louder Mel became until she was shouting in his ear. Nonsense sounds and obscene fragments; she fell abruptly silent and still. Her muscles locked. Bryan's body recognized what that represented, and his mating equipment instinctively swelled and gushed.

They lay on the damp mussed bedding, not touching, just staring at the ceiling.

"You could still take her back," she said at last.

Bryan rolled onto his side. "Are you my attorney or my lover?"

"Your easiest and least expensive option is forgiveness."

He reached out and caressed her. Right below her navel, where her belly was smooth above her bush.

"I have considered it," he said. He felt the slightest tensing of her muscles under his fingertips and thought it one of the best compliments any woman had ever presented him.

"I've been thinking a lot about us.... You know what the yips are?"

She shook her head, so he explained about the gremlins that could invade and infest you and turn you into a completely different person.

"Hypocrisy is a very old Greek word. Am I being hypocritical by expecting the team to forgive my yips and give me another chance if I can't forgive Lauren her yip?"

"She chose to leave you," Mel pointed out. "You don't choose to make bad throws."

Bryan winced. "I know. But we have history. If she were to come in the front door right now and apologize, I would have a hard time turning her away."

Mel stood up, covering herself modestly with a towel rescued from the floor. It was an odd modesty, Bryan thought, considering that they had fucked twice in the last hour. He wondered if she was mad at him. His wizard skills were shit today. Maybe pussy was Kryptonite to them.

"As your attorney, I recommend that course of action. Forgive her."

She reached out one finger and touched the center of his chest. Very lightly. She did not finish the traditional pairing. Forgive. And forget. She was dead certain that he would forgive the woman he loved. Had loved. She had sensed it in him the very first time she laid eyes on his kind face, and her impression had only been firmed up over time by talking to her sisters about him and observing his actions both from afar and up close. He had a good and generous heart. Of course he would forgive her. She had not heard their wedding vows, but he would without a doubt have sincerely pledged his faith to his wife. Sickness, health, richer, poorer.

Brie had told her. Poorer had been Lauren's undoing.

But forget? Not bloody likely. This man had Homer on the tip of his tongue. Part of him communed daily with minds which had been dust for centuries.

No, he would not forget, so the forgiveness would change nothing. He and his wife were done.

Some part of Melody wanted to find Lauren and wring her cheating neck for hurting him. Some other part wanted to thank her for letting him free.

She removed the finger.

He lay very still. "I have never given up on anything in my life, Melody. Am I giving her up without fighting for her? Do I owe her that?"

She pulled the towel tight around her. "Can you live in a marriage with less than full trust in your partner?"

He looked up at her, not even needing to shake his head.

She paused, considering. "Are you even sure they have...."

He lifted an eyebrow.

"Yeah," she agreed.

**********

"Don't even think about it, Damon." Bryan said to his manager.

He had found Castillo where he knew he would be -- sitting by himself at the far end of the dugout, gazing on the hypnotically-perfect green lawn of Fenway Park. The manager liked to come here when the place was quiet and review data in his binders and watch video on his tablet and think about strategy for the coming game. He went over the visiting team's hitters, defense, trends, tendencies, statistics and graphs of many kinds in all colors of the graphic arts.

Bryan knew this was when his manager took out a blank lineup card and wrote in the names of his chosen nine.

"I need to be in this game."

Damon took off his cap and scratched his head. "I...."

"I know. The yips. Look, they come and go. It's a risk. I get it. But I have been wearing Kaplan out."

It was true. Kaplan, the Yankee's number two, was scheduled to start, and Bryan was hitting.356 against him.

"I got his number, cap. Look at the rest of the team. Anybody else even at.300 against the guy?"

Castillo considered, then shook his head. He had been hired with the reputation of a modern baseball manager who used analytics and statistics to their full potential. Now one of his players was asking him to trust his gut. The numbers told him to sit his second baseman out so the yips had a chance to flee, or heal, or compost. Whatever it was that yips did when they left. His gut, however, told him to pencil Bryan in, and had been doing so even before Bryan came to argue his case. Gut or math? If he guessed right he would be a genius. If Monnic tossed more balls into the stands....

"Okay," he said. "You're in."

Bryan grinned and started to belt one of his favorite songs, making the grounds crew smoothing the infield dirt with rakes look up and laugh.

You've gotta have heart

All you really need is heart

When the odds are sayin' you'll never win

That's when the grin should start....

"C'mon, cap! Damn Yankees! You know the words!"

Castillo picked up his bag of sunflower seeds, poured a handful into his mouth, and jabbed a thumb in the direction of the clubhouse.

**********

Mitch Rollins watched as the bench coach lofted the ball gently and swatted it with his skinny fungo bat towards the second base gap. He held his breath as Bryan scooped the ball and threw it. Right into Mitch's glove. Mitch did not have to move it a bit.

Rollins felt like running over and slapping his friend and teammate on the back, shouting encouragement and praise, but one did not acknowledge the existence of the yips. And acknowledging the lack of yips was to acknowledge that they existed. Which they did not. If you wanted them to stay away from you.

The team finished their infield and outfield drills, then most went to the grass in front of the dugout to swing a weighted bat or stretch, waiting for their turn in the batting cage. Bryan drilled two dozen pitches square, frozen ropes, and went into the clubhouse to have a pregame snack and put on his uniform. He was vibrating with anticipation.

Ten minutes before first pitch, the Red Sox ran onto the field while the starting lineup was shown on the big outfield screen, one huge face after another as each player either ignored the ovation or waved to the fans.

Mitch looked over with a wide smile as Bryan appeared on the screen. His smile faded as he saw that his friend was staring into the stands behind first base with dismay. Mitch had a very bad feeling. He walked over to Bryan as casually as one could with thousands of eyes open.

"What's wrong?" Mitch said, still smiling, not moving his lips. He was a ventriloquist all of a sudden.

Bryan did not reply. Mitch turned and tried to follow his gaze. He saw a familiar face sitting in the first row right behind the Red Sox dugout.

"Hey, is that your wife?" he asked. There was another fan, a large man, picking his way across the row to get to the empty seat next to the woman. "Who's the slab of beef with her?"

Bryan did not answer. Mitch looked about for help that was not coming, then had to take off his cap for the National Anthem.

In the two minutes it took for a young Army officer to sing the National Anthem, Bryan concluded he could never take her back. If she knocked on his door and begged for forgiveness and reconciliation, he would slam it shut. The cruel disrespect - appearing with her lover to distract him tonight? On national television? No, that was just too much.

The umpire cried "Play ball!" and the most important game of the season was underway - while the Boston second baseman's emotions formed a maelstrom in his head and gut so intense he wondered that the whole park was not looking around to find where the roaring noise was coming from.

Luckily, second base was not involved in any plays that half of the frame. The first two batters struck out swinging. The third ripped a towering shot into the dusk that made the home crowd gasp in horror... then applaud with relief as the left fielder settled under it three steps in front of the old scoreboard.

Before the ball had settled into the glove Bryan was sprinting for the dugout. He ran down the tunnel towards the clubhouse. He was just to the door when he felt himself being pulled backwards. He spun around, trying to knock Mitch's huge paws off of him.

"What the fuck are you doing?" Mitch yelled. "You're batting third. Get your ass out there."

"She left me."

Mitch's eyes narrowed. "Lauren?" He began to make connections. "That ape?'

Bryan nodded.

Mitch turned him loose. "That's Owen Archer, isn't it? I thought he looked familiar. What the fuck is he doing here. Why is she here?" Mitch was getting madder than Bryan seemed to be.

"She rubbing your nose in it?"

Bryan shook his head. "That's not something she would do."

"Then it's that roided out asshole showing you up."

Bryan nodded, suddenly depressed. "But why? I don't get it."

"Because he's a fucking jerk...." Mitch snapped his fingers and pointed at Bryan. It was such a cliched move that Bryan would have laughed if he were not so stunned.

"Money," Mitch growled. "It's always about the fucking money. You know?" He slapped Bryan's chest with his big flat first baseman's mitt.