Luke and Billy Finally Get a Clue, page 1
Cat Sebastian
Luke and Billy Finally Get a Clue
Copyright © 2023 by Cat Sebastian
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
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Contents
Acknowledgement
Author’s Note
Content Notes
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
About the Author
Also by Cat Sebastian
Acknowledgement
I’d never have written this book if Avery Flynn hadn’t asked me to join her Patreon, so I’m very grateful to her and everybody else involved in the HEA Collective, including everyone who read this book as a part of that. A million thanks to Kim Runciman for the copy editing, and to Candy Tan who saved me from my own graphic design skills by making the cover.
Author’s Note
This novella technically takes place in the same universe as the books in the Cabot series, although no Cabots appear in the pages of this book. This book also technically involves baseball, although not much baseball appears in the pages of this book either, and what baseball does appear is probably wrong. The teams and their players as they exist in this book are entirely fictional, despite a few real players’ names being mentioned.
Content Notes
This book contains references to homophobia, fear of being outed, a character with a head injury, a pregnant secondary character and mild concern related to that character’s well-being, references to the past neglect of a child, and on-page sex.
Chapter One
While the Yankees were busy winning the 1953 World Series in the top of the ninth inning, Billy Reardon was deciding whether to punch Luke Novak right on the front porch of his house. After the disappearing act that fucker had pulled, he had a punch coming, but even Billy’s rotten temper wasn’t bad enough that he’d go off and hit a guy who’d just had his skull walloped with a fastball, no matter how much of a jackass he was currently being. The problem was that if Billy didn’t punch him, he was going to do something even stupider, like kiss him.
In the end, he offered to make Luke a grilled cheese sandwich, which maybe wasn’t exactly splitting the difference between kissing and punching, but Luke really looked like he needed a sandwich, so what else could he do.
* * *
Well, Billy tried to make grilled cheese, at least. No sooner had he taken the skillet out than his mother and sister burst into the kitchen, carrying six suitcases, a hatbox, and Leo the cat between them. Billy didn’t know what in hell they thought they were going to do with a hatbox and a tomcat in a maternity ward, but what did he know.
“I told you I’d carry all that out to the truck,” Billy said. “You aren’t supposed to be lifting anything, anyway.”
“This baby is due in two days, William. If carrying a suitcase moves things along, then God help me, I’ll carry a suitcase,” Suzanne said, then turned toward the table where Luke had just sat down. “I’ll carry ten suitcases. As I live and breathe, is that Luke Novak? Listen, mister, my brother’s been at the end of his goddamn rope—”
“Shut up, Suzanne,” Billy pleaded.
Luke, Perfect Gentleman TM, was already on his feet, hugging Billy’s mother and telling Suzanne she looked beautiful. They were both hugging him back—giving him hugs that he did not deserve—and the dogs were either trying to attack all three of them or trying to join in the fun. Billy was the only one here with any sense of self-respect.
Luke grabbed a couple of suitcases, and it just figured that Suzanne let him carry her shit out to the truck.
“He’s injured, you know,” Billy pointed out. “He’s probably not supposed to haul things around any more than you are.”
Suzanne shot him a nasty look and so did Luke, so at least the part of his brain that made him a sulky bastard was in perfect working order.
“He looks like the picture of health,” Suzanne said, but she was a liar because you could still see the fading bruise on Luke’s cheekbone and he was down at least ten pounds.
Behind the women’s backs, Luke gave Billy the finger and carried four suitcases outside, the showoff.
* * *
The two weeks Billy had spent imagining Luke dead in a ditch had been the longest fourteen days of his life. All anybody knew was that Luke had been discharged from the hospital after a week, and then apparently vanished off the face of the earth. During the five years they’d played together, Billy would have said that if there was one thing you could count on Luke Novak to do, it was show up. Fucking off while the Phillies were still in the middle of a pennant race, even if he was too injured to play? Was definitely not showing up.
He talked to their teammates on the Phillies and former teammates all over the place, but nobody knew any more than the newspapers. Meanwhile, people who had never watched a baseball game in their life suddenly had opinions about things like batting helmets and wild pitches. Everybody was a goddamn expert on concussions. Billy was ready to start handing out concussions like they were sticks of gum.
Billy pitched four more times in September, the Phillies lost the pennant to the Dodgers, and still there was no word from Luke. Not a phone call, not a letter, not so much as a casual visit to the locker room. Billy called Luke’s apartment so many times he had the number memorized, but the phone just rang itself off the hook.
He tried to put it out of his mind. It wasn’t any of his business. He and Luke had played together for a couple years. That was all. He’d made damn sure that was all.
They’d met in spring training in 1948, the only rookies who made the Phillies’ roster. Other than that, they had nothing in common, and Billy suspected that it was somebody’s idea of a joke to make them road-trip roommates.
Luke was all freckles and white teeth, big blue eyes and bright blond hair. He had a bit of a twang that you rarely noticed because he rarely talked, an aw-shucks-ma’am manner, and a general air of cornfed wholesomeness. He looked like the kind of kid who hit the sack at a nice, respectable hour and went to church every Sunday, because that’s exactly what he was. One look at him and the story wrote itself: American dream, plucked from obscurity, farm boy hits it big, et cetera.
Billy was—not any of that. He swore too much. He drank far too much and stayed out far too late. A series of managers and pitching coaches had made it clear that if it hadn’t been for that sneaky fastball of his, nobody would have put up with him. But he had that fastball, and later on a curveball and a respectable changeup, so they did put up with him, and that was that.
In August of their first year, Luke was going through a hitting slump and reporters were starting to ask him stupid questions. “All I can tell you is that I really am trying to hit the ball, sir,” Luke had told a reporter after one especially ugly game. From any other player it might have sounded like a joke, but Luke’s voice was thick.
“Go away, you jackals,” Billy said, hauling Luke away by the arm. “Jesus,” he said, shutting the door to the empty trainer’s room behind them, “seeing them go after you is like watching the chickens eat one another.”
Luke stopped rubbing the heels of his hands into his eyes long enough to gape at Billy. “The what?”
“Chickens. Sometimes they turn on one another.”
“Why?”
“Because they have brains the size of marbles? Because all chickens want to do is find new ways to die? I don’t know, Novak. All I know is that they do it.”
Luke had leveled a glare in Billy’s direction, a glare with harder edges than anything Billy was used to seeing on Luke’s open face, almost like he was pretty sure Billy was pulling his leg. “You’re telling me chickens are cannibals.”
“Most animals are, if you give them half a chance.” Strictly speaking, this wasn’t true. Horses didn’t eat one another, and neither did cows, but Billy was pretty sure that had more to do with not having the right kind of teeth than it did with anything like ethics. Besides, he felt like he was imparting a valuable life lesson to Luke and he wasn’t going to let accuracy get in his way.
“Rabbits,” Luke said.
Billy opened his mouth to say that rabbits were the creepiest animals of them all, but stopped himself. He knew better than to let himself get distracted. All he’d meant to do was get Luke away from the press and then tell him that the sane thing to do was memorize a few boring lines to feed the reporters when they started asking dumb questions. But right now he was imagining Luke growing up on a farm where the animals all got along. Maybe they burst into song and protected nice princesses from evil witches. “What the hell kind of farm do you come from where the animals are all nice to one another?” Billy had asked.
“I don’t.” Luke looked around shiftily, apparently making sure nobody was within earshot. “Come from
“Well, you sure haven’t set anyone straight.”
Luke shrugged, but he never, not once in five years, corrected anyone who made assumptions about his wholesome, all-American youth. It was the closest Billy ever came to catching him in a lie.
They became friends, but they weren’t best friends or anything. Luke quickly got adopted by their older, married, churchy teammates, and Billy would rather have gouged his eyes out than spend more time with those guys than legally mandated by his contract. The feeling was, apparently, mutual.
And so he and Luke spent time together on trains and buses, in hotel rooms and the dugout. There wasn’t any actual reason for the feeling Billy got when he looked at Luke, something like a voice saying Yes. Him. There wasn’t any reason for the sense that every minute he spent with Luke he was getting away with something. He couldn’t even chalk it up to plain old attraction, because Billy was attracted to all kinds of people—he wasn’t in any kind of confusion about that and hadn’t been since Ramona Maggiano behind the bleachers in tenth grade and Hughie O’Leary in the woods the year after—and it had never yet resulted in that feeling of rightness that he sometimes experienced when he looked across the locker room and caught sight of Luke.
If it had been any other guy, Billy would have kept his distance. The last thing he needed was a crush on a teammate. Jesus. But Billy couldn’t keep his distance from Luke any more than he could keep his distance from freshly mown grass and a brand-new ball.
But that’s where it stopped. Billy hit the brakes hard. They were friends, but they were friends at the clubhouse. They were friends who went out for dinner with some of the other guys, or for drinks with half the roster. In all the years they’d known one another, they’d never seen the inside of the other’s home. They rarely saw one another during the off season.
It was safest that way. Billy might not know exactly what it meant that he looked at Luke and felt a bone-deep and totally unnecessary sense of rightness, but he knew he couldn’t let it become anything else. He had to shut it down, lock it out, keep his eye on the goddamn ball—and so that’s what he did.
Chapter Two
Finally, Billy’s mom and Suzanne got into the truck. Billy winced as he watched the truck lurch to the side, its wheels slipping a little on wet leaves on the way down the hill. He wondered, as he did every year, whether he could finally convince his mother to let him pay to have the driveway properly paved, maybe even regraded. He thought about having it done himself while she was away, and continued to let himself think about it for a full half minute before he realized he was trying to avoid thinking about the man who was standing next to him.
“Come on,” Billy said. “You’ll freeze out here.” Neither of them had on coats and the temperature had been dropping all day. As much as it pained him to admit that Suzanne might be right about anything, she had a point about the weather being strange.
“What was that all about?” Luke asked. “Are they going to the hospital?”
“No, they’re going to stay with Suzanne’s in-laws. She’s got a bee in her bonnet about getting stranded up here and not being able to get to the hospital in time. There was a blizzard a few years back real early in the season and nobody could get into town for over a week. She’s nervous about that happening again.”
“Doesn’t look like blizzard weather,” Luke said.
“Didn’t three years ago, either,” Billy said, annoyed to find himself defending Suzanne even though privately he thought that worrying about a blizzard in North Carolina in October was just this side of deranged. But Mama said it had been a foggy August, and that a foggy August meant a snowy winter. That sounded like Grade A bullshit to Billy, but all the old folks seemed to be saying the same thing, and he wasn’t dumb enough to open his mouth and fight them. “It’s her first baby and Phil’s stationed in Korea,” Billy said, instead of making his entire family—his entire county—seem utterly backwoods by explaining the fog situation.
“I forgot about Phil. Shit, I forgot Suzie was pregnant until I saw her.”
“Is that, uh.” Billy gestured at his own head. “Is it a symptom?” he asked, as casually as a person could ask whether a fastball to the skull had scrambled someone’s brains. In other words, probably not very casually at all.
Luke scowled. “No, asshole. Just because I’m a selfish bastard.”
Billy shoved his hands in his pockets and pointedly did not look at Luke. “I’m not gonna disagree.”
“I’m sorry, all right?”
“Doesn’t cost much to pick up the phone,” Billy said.
Luke shrugged. “I took it off the hook.”
“For two weeks?” Billy wanted to point out that Luke could have put it back on the hook long enough to call someone—literally anyone—on the team. He also wanted to point out that he didn’t need an apology. What he needed was an explanation. He wanted to know if something was wrong—more wrong than a potentially career-ending injury, wrong enough that Luke would let everyone who cared about him worry themselves sick.
But Billy was afraid that anything he said right now was going to careen straight past rude and into hurtful, and he didn’t want to hurt Luke. Not because Billy was a saint—Major League Baseball was filled with people he’d go out of his way to insult—but because you had to be a monster to want to hurt Luke, even when his head was in one piece. He was the kind of guy people brought casseroles to. The kind of guy teammates set up with their sisters, and if that wasn’t one step away from canonization, Billy didn’t know what was.
So Billy kept his mouth shut, unable to think of a single safe thing to say. Couldn’t ask how Luke was feeling, because the answer to that was pretty obvious—he looked ten years older than he had that summer. Couldn’t ask what the fuck had gone through Luke’s head to make him run off after getting discharged from the hospital, because Billy was afraid that would send Luke right back into hiding. Couldn’t talk about baseball for the same reason.
Billy went inside, not even sure Luke would follow him. That was the strangest thing: for the five years they had played together, Billy always knew what Luke would do. Luke was one of those players who always did the same things in the same order—and there was no reason not to, no reason to mess with perfection. He woke up early, went to the stadium early, made polite conversation in the locker room, put in extra hours with teammates who needed help, called the coaches sir without making it sound ironic, was friendly to opposing players, and went to bed at a decent hour. He had no vices, he smiled for the camera, and he signed every ball and baseball card that was handed to him. That had been Luke’s life for five years, until suddenly it wasn’t.
And now Billy wasn’t even sure what to think. Billy hadn’t meant to shape his life around Luke’s, but apparently that’s what he’d gone and done anyway. Without Luke around, that last month of the season had been bizarre. A dozen times a day, Billy had turned in the direction Luke was supposed to be, meaning to say something to him—usually some comment that was too mean for anyone else’s ears, or confirmation that they were going to get lunch later on, or any of the other moments that, it turned out, Billy’s day revolved around. Luke’s absence was like missing a stair, and Billy was in constant danger of stumbling.
But it was October now, a month after Luke’s injury, a month after he had effectively disappeared from Billy’s life. It was as if the Luke he knew—the Luke, he now realized, he had counted on—had been replaced by a stranger.
Billy hated it. He hated everything about it. He had hated missing Luke and now he hated the mingled annoyance and relief that he felt on seeing him again. It wasn’t even like they were best friends or anything. It might have made more sense if they were, because Billy was uncomfortably aware that what he was experiencing was far outside the umbrella of whatever friendly feelings someone might have about an injured teammate.
Fuck.
* * *
Billy got out the ingredients for grilled cheese, slamming around the kitchen as much as possible. Making a bunch of noise never actually made him feel better, but it also never made him feel worse, so as far as he cared, there was no reason to stop.
