Dating What?

“THANKS, CUZ,”Pete said, hopping into Trey’s SUV almost before it had stopped. Trey glanced around the mechanic’s yard and saw Pete’s ages-old Chevy Impala crouched in the corner, forlorn and rumpled and ready for retirement.

“No worries. Sorry you missed coffee.”

Pete grunted. “Man, I was really looking forward to that place. Did you see the barista? Lena? I’ve been trying to get her to talk to me for a month, but she’s, like, a manager, and she’s really good at her job.”

“Which means she’s really bad at picking up hints from yahoos in ballcaps,” Trey said dryly. “Maybe, you know, take it off next time?”

Pete grunted and pulled his faded purple Kings ballcap off his forehead to smooth back his widow’s peak. “I was sort of hoping to get her with the big deer eyes before she noticed the thinning locks,” he mourned, and Trey patted his arm sympathetically before executing a K-turn and getting them out of there.

“Buddy, you’re a great guy. If she’s worth it, she’ll see past the hairline, but it’s hard to know if….”

“I don’t take off the ballcap,” Pete groaned. “God! So, want to come in with me tomorrow?”

Trey grunted. “Uhm….”

“No? I know you hate coffee, but it’s not awful, right? Their coffee cake is amazing.”

“I’ll try it,” Trey said. “But, uhm, your girl’s not the only barista in the place, you know?”

Pete blinked. “Well, there’s Lena, Melissa, Colin, Debbie, Andy, Gretta… who else?”

Trey resisted the urge to stare at him. “Peter Armstrong! How often have you been to that coffeehouse?”

Pete gave a throaty laugh. “They’ve got this sandwich there—it’s made at the place. It’s got pesto and mozzarella, and it’s on this soft sourdough with thin-sliced chicken, the roasted kind, not the lunch-meat kind. Anyway, that and the veggie parm and the potato-cheese bites. Dude. Those and a large latte and you won’t have to eat until dinner.”

Trey grunted. “That’s… amazing,” he said. He’d noted that the coffee shop had an actual separate kitchen behind a counter—he’d known somebody had toasted his bagel—but it hadn’t occurred to him that this was a key part of their business. “All that and no tea,” he muttered, still a little bitter. Like the coffee had been. And always would be, if his experience with the stuff held true.

“God you’re picky,” Pete teased. “My mom has totally ruined you. No coffee, no internet―”

“Everybody uses the internet,” he protested. “I use it for score updates, replay footage, to email or text colleagues—I’m not a Luddite, you know.”

Pete cackled. “I don’t even know what that means!” he crowed.

Trey rolled his eyes. Pete was a machinist at a local cabinet builder’s in south Sac. He worked four days a week, made pretty decent money, and owned a tidy little house by the levee that he improved on constantly. Pete was a catch, really—honest, hardworking, sweet as pie—but he was the first to admit he was a pretty basic guy.

“It means I use the internet for plenty, but I don’t need it to date,” Trey grumbled as Pete’s cackles got on his last nerve.

Pete’s laughter faded. “Hey, I’m just saying. I know dating is sensitive because of your job and all, but you don’t need to be alone. I mean, you dated in college. Hell, I know you got laid when you were on the team.”

“More than you could possibly imagine,” Trey told him spitefully, although he had gotten his share. Professional athletes were an aphrodisiac, and Trey was as susceptible as the next guy to “You looked really good out there. Wanna come with me and celebrate?”

He’d been lucky. No scandals had broken, nobody had outed him. He’d been just famous enough to get him some but not famous enough for being gay to be any sort of story. Some of his teammates had known—his friends had known—but that had been all he’d needed.

“Well, good,” Pete said, being generous when Trey probably didn’t deserve it. “Because you are certainly living like a monk now.”

Trey grunted. “I’m working with young athletes,” he said.

Pete shook his head. “That doesn’t mean you don’t have a love life!”

“Remember Carl Lowell?” Trey told him, because the story of the divorced dad who’d been told not to coach his daughter’s team anymore had made the local news.

“Remember that he got caught screwing another man’s wife, and she claimed it was nonconsensual? Yes, Trey, yes I do.”

The woman had recanted when her husband hadn’t been there, ranting about killing them both, but the damage had been done. Carl had suddenly been too polarizing, and all his daughter’s teammates now knew about his sex life. It hadn’t been appropriate for him to remain.

“He hasn’t been able to coach since,” Trey said. “And that was a heterosexual relationship!”

“That was sticking your dick in crazy!” Pete argued. “Which you absolutely should not do. But having a nice romantic relationship with a grown-up—that shouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility. You’re a good guy. I mean….” He gestured toward their present situation, which was Trey taking Pete to his house, where he would uber to his job before his car got fixed. “Witness! And you’ve always been a good guy. Unless you’ve got any meth-snorting orgies out there that I don’t know about.”

“I’d tell you,” Trey told him, laughing because they both knew that had never been his scene.

Pete patted his arm. “You’re a good cousin. I do like a good story. But see? You are a good guy, and you need a good friend. A sexy friend. A friend who will put up with your obscene obsession about sports and still see that you’re a good guy—and also give you head.”

“Aww. Oh God, Pete, you had to go there!”

Pete cackled again, and Trey laughed too, because his cousin was the good guy he kept talking about, and even bailing him out of a jam was a good time.

TREY DIDN’Thave time to linger after dropping Pete off. He had afternoon practice with his U-14 team, and he had to hustle to make it to the school in Carmichael where they practiced so he could set up. Cones, minigoals, his list of drills—all of it was go before the parents began to pull up and let their offspring out, some of them trying to put on their pads and socks and cleats, all while scrambling across the parking lot and to the field.

Trey didn’t give them crap for being late; they were coming after school, and their parents had obligations too. But he did give the plum assignments to the kids who got there on time. Sure, the B-team kid who got put on striker for scrimmage was bound to be replaced as the scrimmage went on, but for five minutes, that kid got to play with the best kids in the team, and Trey thought he could see the improvement in the kids who wanted it the most already. And it kept the A-team kids from getting too cocky and too confident and bagging on their teammates. Every practice was a chance to shine, but you had to show up. If you showed up late, you had to work harder. For kids in a competition league, it seemed to work. Trey had some friends who coached recreational soccer who needed to structure their practices much more tightly, but then, rec team coaches did it all for the fun of it. Trey loved his job, but he still got paid.

Trey was pleased as he put the kids through their paces, built them up when they were working hard, chivvying them along when they weren’t, but he glanced around the field, concerned.

“Where’s Corbin?” he asked his assistant coach, Don. Don was a parent—and a decent athlete in school—but he was also a steadfast guy who, like Trey, was there to help the kids learn skills and enjoy sport. Trey had coached this team for four years, and they’d both bonded over enough beers to know the secret that few comp coaches ever told. The odds of 98 percent of the kids going through a soccer program, even at competition level, who would get a free ride into college and then rocket into the pros were not great.

Trey had done it, but he’d been the kind of athlete who had run circles around the other kids in the playpen, and he’d still had to work his ass off for the scholarship and the spot on the team. Once they’d established that little meeting of the minds, he and Don were able to work quite well. They humored the parents who thought their reasonably gifted athlete was the next Messi or Altidore, and urged the kids to be the best they could be, not what anybody else thought they should be.

“That I do not know,” Don murmured, scanning the parking lot behind them. Trey was keeping his eye on the field, with the imposing two-story buildings of the new middle school behind it, and he was the one who spotted their best striker limping determinedly from the shadows of what he thought was the school’s gym.

“Oh shit,” Trey said, his mild voice betraying his panic. “Don, you got them?”

“Go get him,” Don said tersely before blowing the whistle and gathering the kids on the other side of the field.

Trey’s knees may have been blown in his midtwenties, rendering him too slow to play pro, but he still ran, in better shoes and not making the quick cuts that soccer required. He raced across the field to where the slender boy—brown hair and green eyes like half the kids playing out there that day, but with a graceful, Saluki-like running gait—was two feet away from wandering into another team’s scrimmage and trying desperately to keep his shit together.

“Whoa there, chief,” Trey murmured, throwing his arm around the boy’s shoulders and guiding him around the scrimmage. “Wow. What truck hit you?”

Corbin took a ragged breath and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing blood from his nose and snot and tears across his cheek. He had a black eye, and his practice clothes were ripped and bloodied. So were his knuckles, indicating he’d given what he’d gotten in whatever dispute had taken place.

“Can I not talk about it?” Corbin muttered, his voice breaking.

Oh, if only, Trey thought. Long gone were the days when responsible adults let kids talk about stuff in their own time. “You got half an hour,” Trey said crisply. “We’ll clean you up, call your folks—”

“Call my folks!” Corbin protested.

“Yes, son, call your folks, and probably your school principal and the president of the soccer club as well. I don’t know if you know this, but you appear to have been assaulted, and we need to keep that from happening to other people, do you understand?”

“I know I was assaulted,” Corbin snarled. “I was there.”

“Looks like you gave a little back there,” Trey said as they continued limping around another practice. “Nice job.”

Corbin took a shaky breath. “Thanks, Coach Novak,” he said, sounding proud again. “Fuckers. Sorry.”

Trey managed to keep his expression even. “No harm no foul,” he said. “Now do you want to practice it on me on our way to the team, or do you want to tell everybody at once?”

Corbin let out another shaky breath. “You gotta,” he muttered. “You gotta promise not to hate me.”

Trey gave the boy another look. “I don’t think I could,” he said, honestly surprised. “You’re a great kid.”

Corbin turned his fight-ravaged, tear-streaked face up to Trey’s and fought back another sob. “But will you still think that?” he asked. “I… I got caught kissing somebody, somebody I shouldn’t have kissed. He barely got away, but—”

Oh. “Oh, oh, oh,” Trey murmured, then turned the kid to really assess him. Corbin was tall—only a few inches shorter than Trey and probably going to be well over six feet, which might kill his chances at going pro as it was. “Corbin, you looking at me?”

The kid nodded miserably.

“You are a great kid. No matter who you kiss. No matter what anybody says to you from here on out—and I mean anybody—you remember what I’m saying now.”

Corbin nodded, staring at Trey like he was the kid’s last, best hope.

“You are a great kid, and the only thing you’ve done wrong here is cut my practice to get a kiss. But that’s the cutting practice and not who you were kissing, do you understand?”

That got him a faint smile, which was good.

Trey took a breath. You weren’t supposed to get personal with kids, but you were also one of their trusted adults, and Trey took that seriously. In the past three years, he’d had to report abuse once and help a kid’s family get on a food program in another instance, because that was the role you took, right? You were stepping up to help people in your community. This was the same. Trey knew—knew from experience—that you didn’t just hear a confession like this and turn a kid loose to face their parents.

“Corbin,” he said, allowing his voice to soften, “the good news is, the world is getting better for boys who want to kiss boys. The bad news is, it’s still not great, especially in sports. You get that, right?”

Corbin nodded, lower lip trembling. “Yes, Coach.”

“Now I will back your play, however you want to do this. What do you think your parents will do?”

Corbin shrugged. “I got no idea,” he said softly. “I think they’ll be okay. They don’t yell or hit or anything, if that’s what you mean?”

“Well, thank God for that,” Trey replied, because that could have been a whole other ballgame. “We need to tell them you got into a fight. Do you know names?”

Corbin nodded grimly.

“We need to give them names. And if you think the kissing thing is going to come out, it’s best coming from you, don’t you think?”

Corbin nodded again, but this time he hesitated. “Do I have to tell them who I was kissing?”

Trey gave a faint smile. “That is the hundred-thousand-dollar question,” he said. “If you want to say, ‘I was, uhm, kissing someone behind the gym,’ and they say, ‘who?’ and you say, ‘I’d rather not say to give them privacy,’ I think that’s valid. Did the person you were kissing get into the fight too?”

Corbin shook his head. “He, uhm, got away. We heard them coming.”

“Did the people who hit you see him?”

Corbin shook his head again. “They just saw, uhm, he was a he.”

Trey nodded again. “Okay, kid. I don’t want to tell you to lie to your parents—that would be bad. But this… this is something you may need to take your time with, and we don’t have a lot of time. We need to tell the principal so people don’t go around beating other people up. We need to tell the SRO officer. We need to tell your parents, but we don’t need to tell everybody the exact why of things unless you’re comfortable with it. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

To his relief, Corbin nodded. “I… I do. You want me to come out in my own time.”

Oh, thank God for kids who had the internet. “If I could give you one thing, Corbin, I’d give you that. But I don’t want you to risk getting hurt again either.”

Corbin nodded slowly and then straightened his shoulders. “Do I have to tell people who I was kissing?” he asked, making sure.

“Nope,” Trey told him soberly. “But kid, you know that shi—erm, stuff’s going to change some when this happens, right? And some of it’s going to be for the good. You’ll know who your friends are and who you can trust. But some of it….”

“Not everybody I think I can trust is going to be on that list,” Corbin said softly.

Trey nodded. “Yeah. Sorry it had to happen not on your own time. You ready for this?”

Corbin gave him a solid smile. “It’ll be fine, Coach. Don’t worry. I’ll be okay.”

Trey had to laugh, because kids—they often surprised you in the best of ways. “Then let’s get it done.”

THE NEXTtwo hours were long and unpleasant and awkward. Corbin’s parents had yelled a lot at first when they saw Corbin had been hurt on the school campus, and then they’d cried a lot, and then there’d been hugging, none of which Trey had wanted to be there for. Distance, right? He was supposed to maintain distance. The principal had been called in, the culprits had been named, and then while the grown-ups were doing what grown-ups do—including Trey calling Mike, the president of his club, to report an assault on campus because there was paperwork he had to fill out—Corbin wandered over to his team, an icepack on his nose, a beauty of a black eye emerging, and a solid expression of determination on his face.

“I got beat up for kissing a guy,” he told his teammates. “Does anybody not want to play with me now?”

He’d said it just as parents arrived to pick up their kids, and that’s when the fun really began.

BY THEtime Trey got home to his neat little house on Robertson, he had a splitting headache, could have eaten an entire side of beef, and to make matters worse, had a college coaching staff Zoom call that started about five minutes before he walked through the door.

He sat down in a flurry of crackers, cheese, and a glass of milk and tuned into a conversation about—hey!—the very thing he’d just left.

“Oh my God, Trey, did you hear about that kerfuffle on the middle-school campus? Kid came out to his entire team. Some parent caught it on camera, and it went viral.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Trey muttered, shoving a cracker in his mouth and staring at their physical therapist, Casey Nguyen, as he tried to wrestle a Great Dane while on the screen. “There’s a video?”

Casey stared at him in confusion, and then his eyes widened—and the dog panted. “Oh my God. Was this your team?”

“Trey?” said Head Coach Harold Frantz, “This was your team?”

Trey nodded and tried to swallow a mouthful of cheese and crackers. “Just got home,” he said. “And yes, it was a mess, but it could have been worse.” Under his desk he kicked off his shoes, and yikes, there was Beckham, his cat, called by the siren song of wiggling toes.

“Why worse?” asked the other assistant coach—and Trey’s best friend besides—Russell Jeffries. “What was the good part?”

“The parents were nice,” Trey said, kicking the cat off gently. “The kid’s parents, that is. And the team itself was one hundred percent supportive. But the kid sort of announced it right when all the parents got there to pick their littler darlings up, and there were a lot of pearl-clutching looks, if you know what I mean.” In his pocket, his cell phone buzzed with a text, and he sighed. “I have the feeling I’m going to be answering the pearl clutchers for a while. It’s a shame. The kid was so brave—a real trooper. And it sucked because this wasn’t how I’d want anybody to come out, but….” He shrugged. “There’s always a good and a bad, that’s life.”

His staff all nodded soberly, and he appreciated them. He’d come out to them early on in his career; he hadn’t wanted to hide, and he hadn’t wanted to switch pronouns should he ever happen to date. Everybody had been supportive. He’d asked them not to tell the team, that was all, because he hadn’t wanted it to be a factor in how the team dealt with him, and so far the staff had honored his wishes.

“So what’s the good?” Harold asked him, and Trey gave a tired smile.

“The good is the president of the recreational club just emailed the whole world that the club is safe for LGBTQ children, and any parent or child who uses hate speech is banned from the club for an entire year.”

That felt good to say. Trey had gotten the notification as he’d pulled up in front of his apartment.

“That is good,” Harold murmured, looking troubled.

“What’s up?” Russ asked. “You don’t sound so sure.”

“Oh I am,” Harold replied. Then he gnawed his lower lip. “I feel like the college team needs to make a similar statement. In support of the kid, in support of the club, in support of our athletes. I… we all know the culture of sports in this matter. It’s not as open as it should be. I’d really like to be part of the voice to change that.”

“Sounds great!” Russell said. “Casey, thoughts?”

“I’m all on board,” Casey said, and Trey had to plow through another mouthful of cheese and crackers because they were all staring at their screens, waiting for him to talk.

“I am not the voice of gay,” he managed, trying to suck the crackers off his teeth.

Russell laughed. “No, but you are somebody from the community we can consult with in this matter. Would an email to the college and the athletes bother you?”

“There’s going to be bitching, moaning, and whining,” Trey warned. “I mean, it all sounds great on paper, and there’s nothing like being proactive, but we should be prepared, is all.” He grimaced and told the truth. “Of course in the long run, it might make it easier for me to date, but that’s purely a selfish consideration.”

And they were all staring at him again.

“Wha’?” he asked, in the middle of shoving more Goldfish crackers in his mouth.

“That’s why you haven’t dated since you started?” Harold asked, sounding wounded.

Trey shifted uncomfortably. “I didn’t want it to be an issue—”

“Oh, that’s it,” Harold said. “I’m drafting the letter tonight, having the wife proofread it, and it’ll be out in the morning. Be prepared for questions at the morning practice. I don’t care who objects—we need to get Trey a boyfriend, stat!”

Trey stared back at his coworkers, all of whom, he was aware, had wives or girlfriends waiting for them to be done with their work meeting so they could start their evening. On the one hand, he hated being the center of attention, but on the other?

The sparkling green eyes of Dewey the barista had been the one bright spot in a really rough day. In the back of his mind, Trey wondered if Dewey would like to go hiking or to the movies or to a car show or something.

Anything.

Anything at all.

“Thanks, guys,” he heard himself saying, but his heart was definitely in it. “Thanks. I appreciate it.” He cleared his throat. “Now can we talk about equipment orders so I can eat something besides cheese and crackers?”

And like the repressed male specimens they were, they moved on.

But Trey knew morning practice would suck with the college team, and so would afternoon practice with the kids. He liked coaching soccer, not practicing politics, but damn if making the team safe for kids like Corbin wasn’t part of his job too.

Still, after a morning of focusing college-age adults on soccer and reminding a few of them that if they couldn’t find their better angels for their team, they should find those angels for themselves,because being an asshole would get them booted from the team and lose them their scholarships and FAFSA money, Trey thought he might like… say, a break.

A break at a shop that apparently served good sandwiches and pastries, even if it didn’t serve tea.