yet MOAR fic!
Prompt from owllover711: LOL, "someone on the Orioles has sex!" )X-D Run with that one!
Argh. Prompt, prompt, prompt. Maybe something about Sean Casey and his changing teams? Or how about something related to all those commercials David Ortiz has been in lately?
See, people, you can't say things to me that you don't mean.
I'm not really sure how to label this. Brian Roberts/Nick Markakis UST? Brian Roberts/OMC? Brian Roberts/his own hand? Eh.
Brian Roberts. R.
For the record, USC here is the University of South Carolina, not Southern California.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
casted
Once, at USC, someone had asked Brian if the locker room was the reason he was on the baseball team.
It wasn't anyone important, just one of the guys Brian used to fool around with on an irregular basis. They were mostly guys in the drama department, sometimes the art department or the music department, occasionally a nervous math or chemistry student; none of them were the kinds of guys who followed the baseball team all that closely. So Brian wasn't inclined to be offended-- it wasn't like the guy had ever seen him play, had seen him running the bases like his life depended on it. And the guy had asked while they were both naked in the guy's bed, and the guy was still lazily shifting his leg back and forth so that his thigh rubbed against Brian's, so really Brian was in a pretty charitable frame of mind at the time.
"No," he had said. "That's not it at all."
"All those hot ballplayers, getting into and out of all that athletic gear... you sure?" the guy had asked, and Brian had glanced involuntarily at his equipment bag, dropped half on its side all the way across the room, all that athletic gear hidden away inside.
"Sure I'm sure. I mean, it's nice sometimes," he had closed his eyes, picturing the second baseman, his double play partner, fresh out of the showers, droplets of water clinging to the curled ends of his hair and beading up on the compelling span of his shoulders, "but sometimes it's really not," that pleasant image turning into one of the relief pitchers, the one with the overhanging belly and the weird curly hair on his back that made him look like an old stuffed animal with half its fabric worn off. He had grimaced. "Trust me, I wouldn't have stuck with it this long if that was the only thing I had to keep me going."
The guy had propped himself up on one arm, looking down the length of Brian's body. It wasn't even that great a body, back then-- still undersized, his muscles just starting to flesh out, because he was only just starting to specifically work at it, to pay attention to whether his dinner had protein in it or not. But it was the body of a twenty year old who worked out pretty much every day, which was more than could be said for most of the guys in the drama department.
"I just imagine them all looking like you," the guy had said-- and the drama kids he fucked had tended to do this, every so often, spin out scenarios for Brian with those fertile drama-kid imaginations and easy drama-kid tongues-- "I just get this picture, you know? of this locker room, and all these hot little ballplayers with their hard little muscles, all naked or half naked, in their baseball socks and jockstraps and with these amazing fucking tan lines," drawing his hand over Brian's bicep, where the sleeve of his jersey usually lay, where there was a tan line, that farmer's tan they all got, "and towels and, you know, all kinds of spandex things you guys wear under your shit, and those amazing tight pants..." he had trailed off, looking wistful. Or maybe it was lustful, but Brian hadn't been too good at reading that kind of thing back then.
"It's not like that," Brian had insisted. "Or, well, it's kind of like that, but it's not as hot as you think. It's, like, it's really not a sexy environment."
The guy had flattened his hand over Brian's chest, tripping his fingers over the nascent swell of pectoral muscle that Brian was definitely going to work more on that summer. "I guess I just don't see how you have any control, you know? like at all, around that."
Brian had thought of the second baseman, who didn't look like a drama kid, but who in another life maybe would have.
"You do because you have to," he had said.
"Mmmm," the guy had hummed, dipping his head to kiss one of Brian's nipples, which Brian had a feeling he'd been waiting to do. The guy had worked his mouth there for a while, until Brian was mumbling and arching his back a little to press his chest closer to the guy's tongue. The guy had propped himself up on his arm again, looking down at Brian, at whatever Brian looked like with one of his nipples sensitized and his face doing whatever it was doing when he wanted to get off.
"I'm glad I'm in us casted," the guy had said-- USC-CASTD being the USC College of Arts and Sciences, Theater Department, us casted being what the drama kids called it, cleverly appropriate-- "I don't think I could deal with facing this," flicking the nipple he'd been working over with a fingernail, "and being expected to have control, you know?"
"I do what I gotta do," Brian had said, aware even at the time that it sounded lame, was lame, but it was all he had to offer back then, and it's mostly all he has to offer now.
----
He thinks back to that drama kid, that conversation, the first time Nick Markakis walks into the locker room.
Markakis is pretty in a very specific way-- dark, sensitive eyebrows; broad, neatly delineated jawline; absurdly deep dimples; strong slender thighs and sculpted calves-- that makes Brian want to run screaming out of the room. He hears the drama kid in his head saying control, you know?, and, shit, he knows, he knows, this is the Major Leagues, he knows it so much better than he did back at USC, and he knew it pretty fucking well back then.
The Orioles locker room is not the kind of place where he usually has trouble keeping himself under control. He hadn't been lying, back then, when he said it wasn't a sexy environment. Some of the guys like to walk around naked, or near to it, and there's the usual complement of athletic gear, but it doesn't do anything for him. Despite what all his teammates would think, being gay doesn't mean he gets uncontrollably horny every time he sees cock. Team is team, bedroom is bedroom. He doesn't have any trouble keeping them separate.
No trouble at all, not for two minor league and five big league years. In his sixth big league year, Markakis shows up, and suddenly Brian's having all kinds of trouble.
"Good game, yeah?" Markakis says, his voice inflecting up at the end of most of his sentences, interrogative, just like a drama kid, and Brian can only nod, happy for the first time in years for the fact that he can drape a towel over his lap at any time, here in the locker room, and nobody will think anything of it.
----
His sixth big league year is kind of a mess. It's still a good year, a year lots of guys would like to have, but pretty much all his numbers drop from the year before. It's the first year where this thing he does, this thing he is has had any impact on his game, although by the middle of the season he's not sure which is throwing him off more-- his reaction to Markakis, or his disgust and concern over the fact that he knows he's having a reaction that affects his game.
He's better-prepared for his seventh year (year 2 AM, he takes to thinking of it, After Markakis). He spends most of the offseason working out, traveling, doing lots of things that aren't thinking about Nick Markakis.
He gets laid a lot too, more than he has in years. He doesn't exactly raid the college drama departments-- he's 29 years old, and there's a line in there, somewhere-- but he stakes out coffee shops and little nightclubs, as far from sports bars as he can get, places where the kinds of guys who hang out there might not even recognize Derek Jeter if he walked in the door. It's about as safe as it can be; not 100%, but good enough to make the odds worthwhile.
He sees a lot of Markakis at Spring Training, all long orange shorts and high dark socks. It's still distracting, in the sense that he still wants to rip Markakis' shorts off and fuck him with his socks on in the middle of the B field, but it doesn't mess with his game anymore, so it's OK.
By the time the season really starts up he's got it under control. He's got a system. He doesn't look at Markakis in the locker room more than he absolutely has to, and if the temptation starts getting to him he makes himself look at Kevin Millar until he's thoroughly unaroused. On offdays he goes into DC or up to New York City (not Baltimore, never Baltimore, he's not an idiot) and fucks some pretty boys with dark eyebrows who've never heard of the infield fly rule.
It works great. Maybe he develops a tendency to stare off into empty space while in the locker room, and his teammates start calling him on it, calling him space cadet birdie and other, less fan-friendly names. He hits, though, and so does Markakis. He's a little more patient than Markakis, walks a little more, but Markakis hits for a slightly better average, so it's good. They're good. The team-- not so good, but Brian can only worry about his little bit of it.
"Hey," Markakis says, cornering Brian after a brutal game against the Red Sox. All Brian wants to do is go home and maybe sleep for a year, or watch TV until his eyes fall out. So he's pretty unprepared for Markakis, right in front of him, in nothing but a towel.
"Hey," Markakis says again. Brian tilts his head up but closes his eyes. Markakis hesitates, but keeps talking. "Um. So. That wasn't. I mean, I was wondering if, um, that game sucked? And maybe you wanted to go get a drink?"
No, Brian thinks. No, that is a terrible idea, I want to go home and not deal with any of this.
"OK," he says.
----
It's just as bad as he thinks it's going to be. Markakis' collared shirt hangs open at the throat and it's just the tiniest bit too big for him; just big enough to leave a gap between fabric and chest when he leans over to drink his beer. Brian, sitting across the table from him in the booth, can see down his shirt every time he shifts forward, and those little shadowed glimpses of skin drive him clean out of his mind.
It's worse than if Markakis was actually topless. He's seen Markakis topless. Markakis topless isn't sexy... well, OK, no, that's not precisely true, Markakis topless is pretty fucking hot, but Markakis topless in the clubhouse isn't erotic. This-- Markakis' chest appearing and disappearing like a magic show in the bad light of the bar-- is erotic in a way that's physically painful to Brian.
He ends up jerking off in the bar bathroom as fast as he can, forcibly pointing his cock away from his body when he comes so that he doesn't make a mess of his clothing. He washes his hands in a sink that doesn't look like it's ever been used for that purpose, although it looks like it's been used for lots and lots of other, much more creative purposes.
"You OK?" Markakis asks, when he gets back. "Are you sick?"
Brian smiles at him as best he can, and trusts the poor light to make up the difference. "Fine. You want another beer?"
----
In an ideal world, a perfect world, Markakis would eventually come around. He'd realize how hot Brian is (he'd been a pretty good catch back at USC, and he figures he's even better now-- more muscle, more of what his mother would call character in his face) and he'd be persuaded to give the whole guy thing a try. Oh, sure, he'd be tentative and hesitant at first. Brian would expect nothing less from someone who found themselves a first-timer at the age of 23. He'd have to do a lot of coaching. But there would be incredible sex at the end of it all, and it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
Thing is, it's not a perfect world. It's the world where he's the only gay guy on his team, possibly the only gay guy in the league-- hell, for all he knows, the only gay guy in all of pro baseball. It's the world where making eye contact with a guy in a cafe can actually be dangerous for him. It's the world that Brian lives in.
He stores up memories during the day. Markakis does his warmups in his orange shorts and high dark socks whenever the weather permits it, and Brian watches the flashes of his knees as he runs. If he's in the dugout when Markakis is up to bat, he watches the way that Markakis' ass flexes through his swing, the way the ankle of his back foot turns. In the locker room, he watches Markakis out of the corners of his eyes, gathering up flashes of back and chest and a dense patch of pubic hair that always somehow ends up half exposed when Markakis wraps a towel around his hips, because apparently Markakis never learned how to knot a towel properly, and it always slips.
At night, he curls up on his side in the middle of his bed and jerks off, eyes clamped shut as hard as he can, making a black screen where he can project his daytime memories. He warms himself up with long slow strokes to the sight of Markakis in one of the trainer's therapeutic hot tubs. He thumbs the head of his cock to the sight of Markakis soaping low on his abdomen in the showers after a game. He speeds up his hand to the sight of Markakis' lips on the mouth of a bottle of beer, pursed and wet.
He comes to the sight of Markakis bending over to reknot the laces of one of his cleats, and he feels like a high schooler.
On offdays he still goes out to DC or New York. He wears his Gamecocks hat, never one of his Orioles hats. He's not worried about running out of a stock of pretty boys with dark eyebrows-- DC and New York are big cities.
He has little scares. He accidentally hits on a straight guy, once, and in New York a Yankees fan recognizes him ("Hey, aren't you--" "No, but you know, I hear that a lot," "Wow, yeah, well, you look a lot like him," "I'll take that as a compliment," "Oh, it is," "So," "So," "You wanna--?"). It's mostly not a big deal, though. It mostly works out just fine.
----
The Blue Jays are really taking their sweet time with the pitching change. Brian stretches his legs out on the dugout bench, letting any Blue Jays who might look his way see how utterly bored he is.
Markakis thumps down on the bench next to him. He stretches out his legs in a near-exact mirror of Brian's pose (longer legs, but whatever, Brian's used to that from most everyone). Brian looks over and grins.
"What's taking so long?" Markakis asks, indicating the field with his chin.
"Dunno. Don't think their reliever was ready, so they hadda fake an injury with the starter to give him time. Something like that."
Markakis sighs. They watch John Gibbons argue with the umpires while his reliever surreptitiously warms up in the bullpen.
"So hey," Markakis says. "I'm asking around, you know, putting a cast together. If someone was playing you in a movie, who would it be?"
Brian snorts. He'd heard Markakis, Aubrey Huff and Melvin Mora arguing about that during the previous night's game. Huff had been insisting that he would be played by Ben Affleck, and Mora had been vociferously disagreeing. "Dunno," he says. "Lemme think."
Gibbons gets thrown out of the game. He continues to argue with the umpires. Perlozzo trots out sedately to see what the fuss is.
"I think I'd have to play myself," Brian says.
Markakis shakes his head. "No, c'mon, everyone says that, it's gotta be an actual actor, yeah? It's not easy to act yourself even if you're you, in front of a camera."
"Hey! I did some acting in college."
"Really?"
Depending on your definition of 'did', Brian thinks, and I'm a much better actor than you'll ever know.
"Yeah," he says. "It was fun."
Markakis looks thoughtful. Brian resists the urge to reach out and run the pad of his thumb over the stubble on Markakis' cheek.
"I think Hugh Jackman," Markakis says. "He kinda looks like you."
Brian laughs. "OK. I guess I can live with that."
Markakis grins at him. On the field, the umpires are explaining the ejection to Perlozzo very slowly, using small words to make themselves clear. Mora, on deck and bored, starts gently golfing baseballs into the dugout with his bat, sending the nearest guys scrambling away. Down at the other end of the bench, Millar makes a loud, carrying rude noise that has a couple of the rookies laughing helplessly.
Brian folds his hands behind his head, stretching his legs out further, accidentally knocking Markakis' cleat with one of his own. Markakis nudges him back. He kicks at Markakis' foot. Markakis kicks back, and soon enough they're both snickering and slapping at each other like little kids.
It's good. It works. This is all the world that Brian has, and hey, he'll take it.
Argh. Prompt, prompt, prompt. Maybe something about Sean Casey and his changing teams? Or how about something related to all those commercials David Ortiz has been in lately?
See, people, you can't say things to me that you don't mean.
I'm not really sure how to label this. Brian Roberts/Nick Markakis UST? Brian Roberts/OMC? Brian Roberts/his own hand? Eh.
Brian Roberts. R.
For the record, USC here is the University of South Carolina, not Southern California.
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. It is in no way a reflection on the actual life, behavior, or character of any of the people featured, and there is no connection or affiliation between this fictional story and the people or organizations it mentions. It was not written with any intent to slander or defame any of the people featured. No profit has been or ever will be made as a result of this story: it is solely for entertainment. And again, it is entirely fictional, i.e. not true.
casted
Once, at USC, someone had asked Brian if the locker room was the reason he was on the baseball team.
It wasn't anyone important, just one of the guys Brian used to fool around with on an irregular basis. They were mostly guys in the drama department, sometimes the art department or the music department, occasionally a nervous math or chemistry student; none of them were the kinds of guys who followed the baseball team all that closely. So Brian wasn't inclined to be offended-- it wasn't like the guy had ever seen him play, had seen him running the bases like his life depended on it. And the guy had asked while they were both naked in the guy's bed, and the guy was still lazily shifting his leg back and forth so that his thigh rubbed against Brian's, so really Brian was in a pretty charitable frame of mind at the time.
"No," he had said. "That's not it at all."
"All those hot ballplayers, getting into and out of all that athletic gear... you sure?" the guy had asked, and Brian had glanced involuntarily at his equipment bag, dropped half on its side all the way across the room, all that athletic gear hidden away inside.
"Sure I'm sure. I mean, it's nice sometimes," he had closed his eyes, picturing the second baseman, his double play partner, fresh out of the showers, droplets of water clinging to the curled ends of his hair and beading up on the compelling span of his shoulders, "but sometimes it's really not," that pleasant image turning into one of the relief pitchers, the one with the overhanging belly and the weird curly hair on his back that made him look like an old stuffed animal with half its fabric worn off. He had grimaced. "Trust me, I wouldn't have stuck with it this long if that was the only thing I had to keep me going."
The guy had propped himself up on one arm, looking down the length of Brian's body. It wasn't even that great a body, back then-- still undersized, his muscles just starting to flesh out, because he was only just starting to specifically work at it, to pay attention to whether his dinner had protein in it or not. But it was the body of a twenty year old who worked out pretty much every day, which was more than could be said for most of the guys in the drama department.
"I just imagine them all looking like you," the guy had said-- and the drama kids he fucked had tended to do this, every so often, spin out scenarios for Brian with those fertile drama-kid imaginations and easy drama-kid tongues-- "I just get this picture, you know? of this locker room, and all these hot little ballplayers with their hard little muscles, all naked or half naked, in their baseball socks and jockstraps and with these amazing fucking tan lines," drawing his hand over Brian's bicep, where the sleeve of his jersey usually lay, where there was a tan line, that farmer's tan they all got, "and towels and, you know, all kinds of spandex things you guys wear under your shit, and those amazing tight pants..." he had trailed off, looking wistful. Or maybe it was lustful, but Brian hadn't been too good at reading that kind of thing back then.
"It's not like that," Brian had insisted. "Or, well, it's kind of like that, but it's not as hot as you think. It's, like, it's really not a sexy environment."
The guy had flattened his hand over Brian's chest, tripping his fingers over the nascent swell of pectoral muscle that Brian was definitely going to work more on that summer. "I guess I just don't see how you have any control, you know? like at all, around that."
Brian had thought of the second baseman, who didn't look like a drama kid, but who in another life maybe would have.
"You do because you have to," he had said.
"Mmmm," the guy had hummed, dipping his head to kiss one of Brian's nipples, which Brian had a feeling he'd been waiting to do. The guy had worked his mouth there for a while, until Brian was mumbling and arching his back a little to press his chest closer to the guy's tongue. The guy had propped himself up on his arm again, looking down at Brian, at whatever Brian looked like with one of his nipples sensitized and his face doing whatever it was doing when he wanted to get off.
"I'm glad I'm in us casted," the guy had said-- USC-CASTD being the USC College of Arts and Sciences, Theater Department, us casted being what the drama kids called it, cleverly appropriate-- "I don't think I could deal with facing this," flicking the nipple he'd been working over with a fingernail, "and being expected to have control, you know?"
"I do what I gotta do," Brian had said, aware even at the time that it sounded lame, was lame, but it was all he had to offer back then, and it's mostly all he has to offer now.
----
He thinks back to that drama kid, that conversation, the first time Nick Markakis walks into the locker room.
Markakis is pretty in a very specific way-- dark, sensitive eyebrows; broad, neatly delineated jawline; absurdly deep dimples; strong slender thighs and sculpted calves-- that makes Brian want to run screaming out of the room. He hears the drama kid in his head saying control, you know?, and, shit, he knows, he knows, this is the Major Leagues, he knows it so much better than he did back at USC, and he knew it pretty fucking well back then.
The Orioles locker room is not the kind of place where he usually has trouble keeping himself under control. He hadn't been lying, back then, when he said it wasn't a sexy environment. Some of the guys like to walk around naked, or near to it, and there's the usual complement of athletic gear, but it doesn't do anything for him. Despite what all his teammates would think, being gay doesn't mean he gets uncontrollably horny every time he sees cock. Team is team, bedroom is bedroom. He doesn't have any trouble keeping them separate.
No trouble at all, not for two minor league and five big league years. In his sixth big league year, Markakis shows up, and suddenly Brian's having all kinds of trouble.
"Good game, yeah?" Markakis says, his voice inflecting up at the end of most of his sentences, interrogative, just like a drama kid, and Brian can only nod, happy for the first time in years for the fact that he can drape a towel over his lap at any time, here in the locker room, and nobody will think anything of it.
----
His sixth big league year is kind of a mess. It's still a good year, a year lots of guys would like to have, but pretty much all his numbers drop from the year before. It's the first year where this thing he does, this thing he is has had any impact on his game, although by the middle of the season he's not sure which is throwing him off more-- his reaction to Markakis, or his disgust and concern over the fact that he knows he's having a reaction that affects his game.
He's better-prepared for his seventh year (year 2 AM, he takes to thinking of it, After Markakis). He spends most of the offseason working out, traveling, doing lots of things that aren't thinking about Nick Markakis.
He gets laid a lot too, more than he has in years. He doesn't exactly raid the college drama departments-- he's 29 years old, and there's a line in there, somewhere-- but he stakes out coffee shops and little nightclubs, as far from sports bars as he can get, places where the kinds of guys who hang out there might not even recognize Derek Jeter if he walked in the door. It's about as safe as it can be; not 100%, but good enough to make the odds worthwhile.
He sees a lot of Markakis at Spring Training, all long orange shorts and high dark socks. It's still distracting, in the sense that he still wants to rip Markakis' shorts off and fuck him with his socks on in the middle of the B field, but it doesn't mess with his game anymore, so it's OK.
By the time the season really starts up he's got it under control. He's got a system. He doesn't look at Markakis in the locker room more than he absolutely has to, and if the temptation starts getting to him he makes himself look at Kevin Millar until he's thoroughly unaroused. On offdays he goes into DC or up to New York City (not Baltimore, never Baltimore, he's not an idiot) and fucks some pretty boys with dark eyebrows who've never heard of the infield fly rule.
It works great. Maybe he develops a tendency to stare off into empty space while in the locker room, and his teammates start calling him on it, calling him space cadet birdie and other, less fan-friendly names. He hits, though, and so does Markakis. He's a little more patient than Markakis, walks a little more, but Markakis hits for a slightly better average, so it's good. They're good. The team-- not so good, but Brian can only worry about his little bit of it.
"Hey," Markakis says, cornering Brian after a brutal game against the Red Sox. All Brian wants to do is go home and maybe sleep for a year, or watch TV until his eyes fall out. So he's pretty unprepared for Markakis, right in front of him, in nothing but a towel.
"Hey," Markakis says again. Brian tilts his head up but closes his eyes. Markakis hesitates, but keeps talking. "Um. So. That wasn't. I mean, I was wondering if, um, that game sucked? And maybe you wanted to go get a drink?"
No, Brian thinks. No, that is a terrible idea, I want to go home and not deal with any of this.
"OK," he says.
----
It's just as bad as he thinks it's going to be. Markakis' collared shirt hangs open at the throat and it's just the tiniest bit too big for him; just big enough to leave a gap between fabric and chest when he leans over to drink his beer. Brian, sitting across the table from him in the booth, can see down his shirt every time he shifts forward, and those little shadowed glimpses of skin drive him clean out of his mind.
It's worse than if Markakis was actually topless. He's seen Markakis topless. Markakis topless isn't sexy... well, OK, no, that's not precisely true, Markakis topless is pretty fucking hot, but Markakis topless in the clubhouse isn't erotic. This-- Markakis' chest appearing and disappearing like a magic show in the bad light of the bar-- is erotic in a way that's physically painful to Brian.
He ends up jerking off in the bar bathroom as fast as he can, forcibly pointing his cock away from his body when he comes so that he doesn't make a mess of his clothing. He washes his hands in a sink that doesn't look like it's ever been used for that purpose, although it looks like it's been used for lots and lots of other, much more creative purposes.
"You OK?" Markakis asks, when he gets back. "Are you sick?"
Brian smiles at him as best he can, and trusts the poor light to make up the difference. "Fine. You want another beer?"
----
In an ideal world, a perfect world, Markakis would eventually come around. He'd realize how hot Brian is (he'd been a pretty good catch back at USC, and he figures he's even better now-- more muscle, more of what his mother would call character in his face) and he'd be persuaded to give the whole guy thing a try. Oh, sure, he'd be tentative and hesitant at first. Brian would expect nothing less from someone who found themselves a first-timer at the age of 23. He'd have to do a lot of coaching. But there would be incredible sex at the end of it all, and it wouldn't be a problem anymore.
Thing is, it's not a perfect world. It's the world where he's the only gay guy on his team, possibly the only gay guy in the league-- hell, for all he knows, the only gay guy in all of pro baseball. It's the world where making eye contact with a guy in a cafe can actually be dangerous for him. It's the world that Brian lives in.
He stores up memories during the day. Markakis does his warmups in his orange shorts and high dark socks whenever the weather permits it, and Brian watches the flashes of his knees as he runs. If he's in the dugout when Markakis is up to bat, he watches the way that Markakis' ass flexes through his swing, the way the ankle of his back foot turns. In the locker room, he watches Markakis out of the corners of his eyes, gathering up flashes of back and chest and a dense patch of pubic hair that always somehow ends up half exposed when Markakis wraps a towel around his hips, because apparently Markakis never learned how to knot a towel properly, and it always slips.
At night, he curls up on his side in the middle of his bed and jerks off, eyes clamped shut as hard as he can, making a black screen where he can project his daytime memories. He warms himself up with long slow strokes to the sight of Markakis in one of the trainer's therapeutic hot tubs. He thumbs the head of his cock to the sight of Markakis soaping low on his abdomen in the showers after a game. He speeds up his hand to the sight of Markakis' lips on the mouth of a bottle of beer, pursed and wet.
He comes to the sight of Markakis bending over to reknot the laces of one of his cleats, and he feels like a high schooler.
On offdays he still goes out to DC or New York. He wears his Gamecocks hat, never one of his Orioles hats. He's not worried about running out of a stock of pretty boys with dark eyebrows-- DC and New York are big cities.
He has little scares. He accidentally hits on a straight guy, once, and in New York a Yankees fan recognizes him ("Hey, aren't you--" "No, but you know, I hear that a lot," "Wow, yeah, well, you look a lot like him," "I'll take that as a compliment," "Oh, it is," "So," "So," "You wanna--?"). It's mostly not a big deal, though. It mostly works out just fine.
----
The Blue Jays are really taking their sweet time with the pitching change. Brian stretches his legs out on the dugout bench, letting any Blue Jays who might look his way see how utterly bored he is.
Markakis thumps down on the bench next to him. He stretches out his legs in a near-exact mirror of Brian's pose (longer legs, but whatever, Brian's used to that from most everyone). Brian looks over and grins.
"What's taking so long?" Markakis asks, indicating the field with his chin.
"Dunno. Don't think their reliever was ready, so they hadda fake an injury with the starter to give him time. Something like that."
Markakis sighs. They watch John Gibbons argue with the umpires while his reliever surreptitiously warms up in the bullpen.
"So hey," Markakis says. "I'm asking around, you know, putting a cast together. If someone was playing you in a movie, who would it be?"
Brian snorts. He'd heard Markakis, Aubrey Huff and Melvin Mora arguing about that during the previous night's game. Huff had been insisting that he would be played by Ben Affleck, and Mora had been vociferously disagreeing. "Dunno," he says. "Lemme think."
Gibbons gets thrown out of the game. He continues to argue with the umpires. Perlozzo trots out sedately to see what the fuss is.
"I think I'd have to play myself," Brian says.
Markakis shakes his head. "No, c'mon, everyone says that, it's gotta be an actual actor, yeah? It's not easy to act yourself even if you're you, in front of a camera."
"Hey! I did some acting in college."
"Really?"
Depending on your definition of 'did', Brian thinks, and I'm a much better actor than you'll ever know.
"Yeah," he says. "It was fun."
Markakis looks thoughtful. Brian resists the urge to reach out and run the pad of his thumb over the stubble on Markakis' cheek.
"I think Hugh Jackman," Markakis says. "He kinda looks like you."
Brian laughs. "OK. I guess I can live with that."
Markakis grins at him. On the field, the umpires are explaining the ejection to Perlozzo very slowly, using small words to make themselves clear. Mora, on deck and bored, starts gently golfing baseballs into the dugout with his bat, sending the nearest guys scrambling away. Down at the other end of the bench, Millar makes a loud, carrying rude noise that has a couple of the rookies laughing helplessly.
Brian folds his hands behind his head, stretching his legs out further, accidentally knocking Markakis' cleat with one of his own. Markakis nudges him back. He kicks at Markakis' foot. Markakis kicks back, and soon enough they're both snickering and slapping at each other like little kids.
It's good. It works. This is all the world that Brian has, and hey, he'll take it.