Off The Field

By Van Cole

It's My First Time With A Man—And He's On The Opposing Team.

I'm a single dad, the Coach of the San Diego Coyotes.
Chris Woodgate is the star pitcher for the Los Angeles Blackbirds—and my son's hero.
He should be off-limits to me.
He's one of our rivals—and he's a man and this is pro baseball!

If only he didn't get to me the way no woman including my ex-wife ever did.
If only I didn't have these feelings about him that I've had about good-looking men my whole life.
I didn't ask for this—but when I set up a meeting with my son and Chris asks me out, I can't say no.

Suddenly there are a lot of things I'm not saying "no" to—things that excite me and things that scare me.
Is my life about to become a home run because of Chris—or the most disastrous strikeout ever?

Off The Field is a standalone Gay Romance with a HEA and NO cheating!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Van Cole
• Release date: Dec 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223585527

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Rory

When my eight-year-old son and I had a disagreement one day, I had no idea what a life-changer it would turn out to be.  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  We should begin with what the disagreement was about.  It was about the interview that I did in advance of the new baseball season. 

The season was on the way and my team, the San Diego Coyotes, was in training at Century Field.  During a break in training I went to the dugout, and there was a reporter with a microphone and a guy with a camera from one of the Cable sports channels, waiting to get some words from me as the Coyotes’ coach. 

There were the natural questions about my pitching staff and my catching staff and how well everyone was shaping up.  There were the equally natural questions about specific players and how they were looking ahead of the season. We had picked up a couple of new players in the annual draft, and I had to talk about how they were doing, becoming a part of the team. 

After all that, came the other natural questions, and these were the ones that got me into trouble. 

The reporter inevitably wanted to know my thoughts about the ongoing rivalry between the Coyotes and our arch-enemies, the Los Angeles Blackbirds.

Our two teams had been bitter foes for longer than I or mostly anyone else had been alive.  The feud between San Diego and Los Angeles, in baseball, had long been a legend of the sporting world.  No one was sure how the Blackbirds and the Coyotes got to be like Earth and the Klingons in Star Trek used to be.  Maybe it was something that someone on one team said about the other team that escalated into a feud.  Maybe a Coyote once caught a Blackbird sleeping with his girlfriend or his wife, or vice versa, and the teammates took sides against the other team.  Maybe something happened during a game that turned into a fight, and no one could forget the ugly mood that came from it. 

Whatever the reason, the Coyotes hated the Blackbirds and the Blackbirds hated the Coyotes in the same way that the Jets and the Sharks in West Side Story hated each other.  Okay, maybe not to the point of murder, but still, there was no love on either side.  That was the way it had always been and everyone knew it, and this mutual contempt was treated as the natural state of affairs in the world.  It was a given that if you were a Coyote you did not like the Blackbirds and if you happened to be a Blackbird you could not stand the Coyotes.  The fans signed off on it and could be even more rabid about it than the two teams themselves.  I’m sure that says a lot about human psychology, people learning to hate the ones they’re taught to hate.  Wherever the feud came from, the fact remained that even in the world of sports, everyone loves a story about people who would happily kill each other.  Figuratively, on the field, of course. 

So there was no avoiding the question of what I, the coach of the Coyotes, thought of our chances of giving the Blackbirds a good and thorough plucking this season.  I actually smiled, a crooked sort of smile, for the camera at the inevitability of it. 

Into the reporter’s microphone I answered, What have I said every year since I took over coaching this team?  We’ve got this.  The Blackbirds may put up a good fight.  We expect them to put up a good fight.  But they’re going down. 

The Cable sports guy said, You know the coach of the Blackbirds says the same thing about you every year.  And some years you take them down and some years they take you down. 

Yes, I said, but the Blackbirds in those black uniforms of theirs are more show than substance, everybody knows that.  They look good for the camera, but if you check the stats year by year, we have more games of winning over them than they have over us.  Looking pretty isn’t guaranteed to get the job done.

From the guys in the dugout came Damn rights, thumbs turned up, and other expressions of agreement and solidarity.

The reporter argued, That’s not what they say about Chris Woodgate. 

Chris Woodgate.  The sound of that name was always like a hot spike running through me and a cold splash down my back at the same time.  Chris Woodgate—the Blackbirds player who brought women fans out to the ball game.  Chris Woodgate, who would have women fans stampeding to get his autograph like the wildebeests in The Lion King, one of my son’s favorite movies.  Men who loved the Blackbirds hated Chris Woodgate for the effect that he had on their girlfriends and wives.  The guy didn’t look like a baseball player.  He looked like an advertisement for men’s underwear, and people would go wild if he ever walked out onto a field dressed that way.  He was blond, lean, tight-muscled, and so pretty that it hurt to look at him the way it hurt to look right at the Sun. 

But perhaps the worst thing about Chris Woodgate was that he wasn’t all looks.  The guy had talent.  He was one of the best pitchers in the Major League.  He’d struck out so many batters that a sports writer once said they should start playing the Funeral March whenever he stepped up to the mound. 

That was all true, except...late last season, something had changed.

Chris Woodgate had not finished the last season.  He was sidelined and out of the last couple of games because of a shoulder injury.  All the sports writers talked about how the mighty had finally fallen.  We sent the Blackbirds away with their tail feathers properly clipped last season, because they’d lost Chris Woodgate and they didn’t know whether they would get him back.  Their prospects for this season were uncertain.  And the women who loved him wept. 

Skeptically, almost sarcastically, I asked the Cable guy, What is it they’re saying about Chris Woodgate?

They say he’s coming back, said the reporter.  He’s coming back and he’ll be as powerful as ever.

I almost snorted at that, and I’m not the uncouth, snorting kind.  Right!  He’s coming back! I scoffed.  Well, he can come back if he wants, but it’s not going to be the same.  The Blackbirds this year, heh, they’re going to be like the Avengers without Thor, if you know what I mean.

But Woodgate has had surgery on that shoulder, he argued.  They say when he gets back into training he’ll pick up where he left off before the injury, and he’ll be back with a vengeance. 

With a pucker of my lips and a shake of my head, I said, I don’t see that happening.  The kind of injury that he had changes a player’s career.  He can come back to the game, but he’s not coming back from that.  This will be a ‘down’ season for the Blackbirds.  We’ve got ‘em.  And we’ve got Chris Woodgate.  Nodding at the camera, I said with certainty, Chris Woodgate is no threat to us or anyone else.  His best days are over.  He should think about retiring now while he’s still got the good memories behind him. 

So there, I’d done it.  I had answered the reporter’s questions with confidence in the strength of my team and the weakness of our old rivals, and one of them in particular.  I thought I’d set a tone of optimism and good feelings about the Coyotes’ performance.  I thought I’d done a good job as Coach for the morale of my team.  I finished the day’s training and sent the guys to the showers feeling damn good about everything. 

As I would soon learn, my son had a different opinion.

Cody slept over with his friend Jeremy Bonner a lot.  You might think letting a kid have sleepovers all the time is somewhat less than responsible parenting, but it was somewhat compatible with my work and my lifestyle.  Being a coach in Major League Baseball, I traveled a lot.  My ex-wife lived about forty miles away in Oceanside where she had gotten a job as a fashion buyer, so sending Cody to stay with his Mom was a bit of a job in logistics.  It worked out great both for Cody and for me that he and Jeremy were as thick as thieves and Jeremy’s family loved my boy and could be trusted.  Jeremy’s home had become pretty much Cody’s second home, which made me feel a lot better when I had to be away.  That’s all by way of preface.  What happened was that I got a very uncomfortable vibe from my son after that interview, when I pulled up to the Bonners’ driveway to pick him up.  He came trudging out of Jeremy’s house, his backpack in hand, looking at his feet as he walked, seeming a little upset. 

That concerned me.  Had he and his best friend had a fight?  Was it something I should call the Bonners about?  Cody climbed into the back seat of the car without a word and slammed the door in a way that made me apprehensive.  He didn’t look at me when I pulled away from the driveway and got onto the road.  What could be on his mind?

Son, are you okay? I called back from the front seat. 

In the most half-hearted tone—perhaps even less than half-hearted—Cody replied, Yeah, Dad, I’m fine.  But he still didn’t look up.  He seemed to be staring at his backpack in his lap. 

You don’t sound fine, I said.  Did something happen?  Is everything okay with you and Jeremy?

We’re fine, Dad, he said, sounding irritated and totally uninterested in talking to me.  I was getting a worse vibe from this every minute.

Then what are you so down about?  If there’s something wrong, son, you can tell me.  We can’t fix it if you don’t tell me what’s wrong.

There’s nothing to fix, Dad, said Cody, now looking up, not at me but out the window at the houses that we passed on the way home.  He’ll be all good as new soon.

Who? I wondered.  Is it Jeremy?  Did he get sick?

Still staring out the window, Cody said, No, not Jeremy.  Jeremy’s fine.

Well, son, you’re worrying me a bit here.  This doesn’t sound good.  If you’re fine and Jeremy’s fine, who is it that will be all good as new?

Finally, my son looked forward in my direction, probably into my eyes in the rear view mirror, and in a voice that now sounded more angry and offended, he snapped at me—actually snapped at me, Chris Woodgate, all right?  Chris Woodgate!  He’ll be all healed up from his hurt shoulder soon and then you can find out if he’s really a threat to you and if his best days are over and if he should retire!  Okay?  Chris Woodgate! 

My teeth clenched from the sting of my son’s words and tone.  This was serious, I knew.  There are few things as grievous to a little boy as someone, especially a parent that he’s meant to respect, attacking one of his heroes.  Little boys need heroes to look up to, and it was sometimes to my dismay that my son’s hero happened to be one of the people that I wasn’t supposed to like.  In fact Chris Woodgate was, by virtue of his team and his talent, someone that I was absolutely meant to despise.  But whatever attitude I was meant to have about him, because of my own position with my team, was irrelevant to my son.  The painful fact was that my son loved and admired Chris Woodgate perhaps even more than he did his own father.  His father who, by the way, had divorced his mother and ripped apart his family. 

Without thinking, because of my need to give good soundbites to a