Peter Cabot Gets Lost by Cat Sebastian

Day 2

Upstate New York to Cleveland, Ohio

As usual, Peter woke up two minutes before his alarm was set to go off. In the next bed, Caleb was asleep, the blanket pulled up over his head so only a few wisps of blond hair were visible. Peter would have assumed that Caleb was an early riser, one of those smug and efficient morning people. It was the sort of trait he associated with people who insisted on calculating tips in their heads to the fourth decimal place. At this point, Peter was ready to assume that Caleb had any and all annoying habits.

He dressed by the light that slipped through the gap in the motel’s heavy curtains, then headed out to the office to see if he could scare up some coffee. He wasn’t entirely sure what to expect; Cabots did not, as a rule, stay at motels. But sure enough, next to the desk there was a coffee pot, little packets of sugar, and a pint of milk.

When he let himself back into the room, balancing two paper cups in one hand, Caleb was still in bed. Before Peter could decide whether or how to wake him, Caleb mumbled something and Peter watched as a hand emerged from the covers and groped blindly toward the nightstand, finally grasping a wristwatch. Caleb then poked the top part of his head out from under the covers and squinted at the watch face. “Oh Jesus,” he said, his voice rough. “Why did you let me sleep so long?”

“Good morning,” Peter said a little too loudly. Caleb winced. “I didn’t know how you take your coffee. Or if you like coffee at all, actually. But here’s a cup with cream and sugar.” He placed the cup on the nightstand.

Caleb mumbled something that might have been thank you, and then drained half the cup in one go. “Where are we?”

“Between Rochester and Buffalo. We’ll make it to Chicago tonight.”

Caleb narrowed his eyes. “That’s north of Boston. Shouldn’t we be heading south?”

“It’s actually not that far north. We start heading south and west after Chicago.”

“If you say so,” Caleb conceded.

“Do you think I’m trying to abduct you?” Peter asked. “There’s a pay phone in the lobby if you want to call the police.”

“Ha ha. I bet the police would offer to help you.”

“Only in Massachusetts. My family’s reach probably doesn’t extend to upstate New York.” He paused, thinking about it. “Not yet, at least.”

Caleb coughed, and Peter had the distinct impression that he was suppressing a laugh.

While Caleb showered, Peter threw his things into his suitcase. Then he went back to the office and used the phone to make a call he should have made yesterday. He flipped through his address book until he found the number for his father’s secretary. “Good morning, Mrs. Simpson, if you could tell my father that I’m helping a friend move and won’t be able to meet him and Mother for a few weeks, I’d be grateful,” he said, trying to sound like he was doing something totally unremarkable by skipping out on his father’s campaign.

Mrs. Simpson wasn’t buying it. “At what number can the senator reach you, Mr. Cabot?” He could almost hear her raised eyebrows.

“I’m afraid I can’t be reached,” Peter answered, using the same line she had used for the past decade when his father was too busy or uninterested to come to the phone.

Placing the phone’s handset in the cradle, he turned around to find Caleb standing a yard away, his suitcase in his hand and a curious expression on his face. Peter wondered how much of the conversation Caleb had overheard.

It was almost ten o’clock by the time they got into the car, and nearly eleven by the time Peter stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank, get the oil changed, and buy a couple of maps.

“I said I’d pay for half the gas,” Caleb said, leaning against the passenger side door, his arms folded across his chest, probably annoyed at having been done out of a chance to do math in his head.

“And you’ll get it next time,” Peter said easily. “I thought that would be easier than dividing it up each time.”

“Fine,” Caleb said with obvious reluctance. Precisely dividing up gas station receipts was probably his idea of a good time. “I also offered to drive.” Perhaps sensing Peter’s reluctance, he put a hand on his hip and narrowed his eyes. “I can drive, you know. I’m a good driver.”

Peter didn’t want to quarrel. A lack of affinity for quarreling was the one reason he was on passably good terms with his siblings. Honestly, he was good at getting along with people—he was awkward but nice and his address book was filled with the names of people who would say exactly that: Peter Cabot turns red at the drop of a hat and sometimes stutters but he picks up the tab and keeps secrets and can be trusted with anyone’s sister. Honestly, Caleb was the outlier here in not realizing any of this.

But he really did not want to let Caleb drive his car.

“Keys, Cabot.”

Peter glanced at his car with a desperate appeal, as if it might speak up and object to this plan. He had what he freely acknowledged was an unhealthy fondness for this car. It had been his older brother’s college graduation present, but it turned out that Lawrence didn’t want a sky-blue Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible, so now Peter had a car that was four years old and which he treated like an infant.

It occurred to Peter that nobody had considered giving him a car when he graduated college. In fact, his parents had made it clear that Peter ought to be grateful that they had managed so much as an appearance at his graduation, given the demands of the campaign. Graduating college wasn’t such an accomplishment, after all; it was the bare minimum, as his father reminded him often enough. He hadn’t even graduated with honors or captained the football team or done anything interesting. At the time, this hadn’t struck him as unfair—he was used to the fact that Senator and Mrs. Cabot weren’t going to be terribly impressed with anything ordinary. And since everything Peter did was resoundingly mediocre, he was never going to impress them. It was fine. He was used to it.

Looking at this car, he felt something displace the guilty shameful dread that usually accompanied his thoughts of his family. He felt something almost like anger, but he quickly shoved it aside.

He tossed the keys the short distance to Caleb and slid into the passenger seat.

Caleb was a decent driver, or at least he was after getting turned around twice on the way from the gas station parking lot to the highway, which Peter attributed to the strangeness of being behind the wheel of a new car. Confident that his car wasn’t about to get wrecked, Peter skimmed through the headlines of the newspaper Caleb had picked up at the motel. There was the usual stuff about Khrushchev, some more about Khrushchev, and then some things that Eisenhower had to say about Khrushchev. That had been the sum total of the news for days. He had to flip to the third page to even find a mention of his father, which had to annoy the old man something fierce.

“You’d think that was all that was happening in the world,” Caleb muttered.

“Hmm?” Peter asked, confused.

“The summit,” Caleb said, taking a hand off the wheel to gesture at the newspaper. “The Soviets. It’s the entire front page, every goddamn day. You would honestly think that nothing was happening in this country worth reporting on.”

Peter didn’t bother responding that the fear of nuclear war was something very much happening in this country, partly because he didn’t want to argue, and partly because he agreed. “Yesterday there was a whole paragraph on the front page of the New York Times about the autoworkers’ union,” he said. “That was fresh and exciting.”

Caleb snorted, and Peter felt wildly proud of himself.

After stopping to buy a box of donuts, Peter announced that it was his turn to drive. When he turned the radio on, there was only static, and Peter guessed they had already lost the Rochester station. “Would you find something to listen to?” Peter asked. They were on a long, straight stretch of road, and Peter let part of his attention drift to the sight of narrow fingers turning knobs, the little sounds of irritation Caleb made when he determined that a station was unsatisfactory for some reason or another. When the car’s speakers crackled with the sound of a booming male voice, Caleb stilled. It took Peter a moment to understand that the voice belonged to a radio preacher.

“Good grief,” Caleb said, turning the radio off entirely. “I didn’t realize they had that this far north.”

“Had…religion?”

“Had people yelling about it.”

“I think that’s everywhere, pal.”

“You’re Catholic, though.”

Peter couldn’t say he was surprised that Caleb knew that. It wasn’t exactly a secret. Francis Cabot, Catholic senator from Massachusetts—that was how his father was still described sometimes. “You think Catholics don’t yell?” he asked, faintly amused by the idea.

“I imagine it’s a different type of yelling than that,” Caleb said, gesturing to the radio. He shuddered. “Makes me whatever the opposite of homesick is.”

“Where is home?” Peter had been wondering about that since the Intro to Philosophy class they both took freshman year. The distinct lilt in Caleb’s accent left no room to doubt that he from someplace in the South, but Peter wanted to know more.

“Tennessee.” And that, apparently, was the end of the conversation, because Caleb snapped open the newspaper and began reading it, the radio evidently forgotten.

They stopped for what was either a late lunch or an early dinner at a roadside diner just outside Cleveland.

“It’s just that it reminds me of my father,” Caleb said, after he had finished his own hamburger and fries and started in on Peter’s. “The man on the radio.”

“He’s a clergyman?” Peter asked, certain as soon as the word left his mouth that clergyman was not the word.

“A preacher.”

“Is he…difficult?” Peter asked. When Caleb looked sharply at him, a ketchup-laden fry halfway to his mouth, Peter wondered if his question had given too much away, and felt his face heat.

“No,” Caleb said simply, and Peter thought that would be that until Caleb cleared his throat and spoke again. “And neither is my stepfather. He’s really decent. My father died when I was little.” He said this almost as if it was a qualifier, or maybe an explanation for why his stepfather wasn’t difficult, and Peter didn’t quite know what to make of that.

“I’m sorry.”

Caleb shrugged, and turned his attention to his newspaper—this time a Chicago paper he had found in the booth.

When the check came, Peter let Caleb do his math ritual, and they counted out nickels and pennies like that was a normal thing to do. When they stood, Peter slipped an extra dollar under the edge of his plate and Caleb pretended not to notice.

* * *

Cleveland, Ohio to South Bend, Indiana

After lunch, Caleb insisted on driving again. “I can’t let you drive me all the way to California,” he said, imbuing his voice with a level of irritation that no longer quite came naturally. “You may be used to being chauffeured about, but I’m not.”

“Fair enough,” Peter said, and handed him the keys without complaint.

Before that morning, Caleb hadn’t driven since he went home two summers ago, but he had learned to drive as soon as his feet could reach the pedals and he wasn’t likely to forget how. He got onto the highway without much trouble—well, after he got turned around twice trying to remember which direction they were supposed to be heading. Cabot was the kind of person who apparently thought that things like “head west after the jughandle” were useful instructions, as if Caleb had any idea what a jughandle was or what he was supposed to do with one, let alone which direction west might be.

But once they got onto the highway, it was easy enough. Cabot’s car—a late model Cadillac convertible, because of course it was—handled a sight better than any of the tractors or brokedown pickup trucks he had driven in the past.

“I suppose you’re going to California for the convention,” Caleb said when the silence got too boring. He didn’t know if it was because he had spent a whole day with a full stomach or because some kind of journalistic instinct made him want to get to the bottom of things, but he found himself wanting to make conversation with Peter Cabot.

“For what?” Peter asked, looking up from the sports section of the Chicago Tribune.

“The convention,” Caleb said, exasperated. “The Democratic National Convention. The event at which your father will presumably be nominated as the presidential candidate.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “Right.”

Peter Cabot was a terrible liar. How the man survived in a family of politicians was anybody’s guess. Caleb had overheard Peter’s telephone conversation that morning and knew that his family expected him someplace that wasn’t Los Angeles. “Arriving a month early is more than punctual,” Caleb remarked.

“And why are you going to Los Angeles?” Peter asked.

Caleb supposed he ought to have been ready for the question. Anybody else would have asked yesterday before offering to drive him across the country. “I have a job offer.”

“What kind of job?”

“A job at the Los Angeles Times.”

“As a reporter?”

“No, as a chimney sweep. Of course as a reporter!”

Peter laughed, and it was exactly the same warm rumble that Caleb had overheard in classrooms and corridors and across the green. “Right, of course. You were president of the Crimson,” Peter said. “This is why my father thinks I’m a lost cause.”

It took Caleb a moment to understand Peter’s meaning. Presumably, any other member of the Cabot family would have found a way to mention Caleb’s accomplishments in a way that would leave Caleb not only eager to vote for any Cabot he saw on the ballot, but also to liquidate his assets and donate to their campaigns. The Cabots were charming and smooth in a way that stopped just short of greasy. “No political instincts?”

“Zero.”

“No future in politics for you, then?” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Peter stiffen. Interesting. He stomped down on the urge to keep asking questions. “See if you can’t find something on the radio, will you?”

Peter let out a breath as if he were relieved to be let off the hook and tuned the radio to a station playing only slightly staticky music.

The sun began to set when Peter opened one of the maps he had bought that morning. “The road’s about to do something weird in a couple of miles.”

“Weird? How many things can a road do?”

“We’re going to need to exit this highway and get on another one, but it’ll still be 90. At least I think it will. I can’t tell from the signs. The signage here is almost as bad as in Boston. Okay, get in the right lane.”

Caleb flicked on the turn signal and merged into the right lane. He knew they were trying to reach Chicago, but the signs made it look like Chicago was simultaneously in all directions and no direction. The road began to turn a way that made Caleb lose track of where he was going. In eastern Tennessee, roads did not loop around and get tangled with one another like a bowl of noodles and he did not like this one bit.

“Okay,” Peter said, peering at his map, “get off here and then merge immediately into the left lane, then turn left at the first traffic light.”

Caleb could do that. He exited the horrible bendy road and made it to the left lane of the new, equally bendy road. The lanes looked like they had been painted on as an afterthought, probably by somebody very drunk.

“Wait, shit, there’s construction. This map is out of date. Turn right here. Here, Caleb!”

He wasn’t sure exactly how he fucked up, only that he did. What he thought was the right lane was actually a shoulder. He slammed on the brakes, but the car skidded out of control, bumping over the curb and coming to a stop with two wheels on the grass verge.

For a minute all he could hear was the blood pounding in his ears. The solid wood and leather of the steering wheel seemed to evaporate from under his hands and he was horrifyingly certain that he was about to faint.

“Hey. Hey. Caleb,” came a soft voice, accompanied by a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” Caleb said, his mouth dry.

“You’re fine. We’re both fine. And that was entirely my fault for being a bad navigator.”

There wasn’t enough air in the car and Caleb was going to suffocate. He flung open the door and stepped out into the cool night air, desperately filling his lungs. He gripped the roof of the car and slowly came to rest his forehead against the ragtop.

“You okay?” Peter asked.

“Peachy,” Caleb answered. “Never better. I could have gotten us killed. I could have ruined your car. I’m so sorry.”

“Hey.” There was a firm hand on Caleb’s shoulder now. “You didn’t get us killed. You did a great job.”

Caleb let out a slightly hysterical laugh.

“No, really. The car skidded and you knew just what to do. And if I had given better directions, you wouldn’t have needed to do anything in the first place. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

Caleb heard the words, but it took a moment to understand them over the pounding in his ears. “Do you always blame yourself for other people’s fuck ups?” He pressed his cheek to the rough fabric of the convertible top, turning away so Peter couldn’t see his face.

“Caleb, you need to breathe. You’re holding your breath.”

Caleb tried, and his breaths were shaky and uneven, like he had forgotten how to breathe sometime in the last few minutes.

“Do it with me,” Peter said, stepping around Caleb so they were face to face. “In and out. In and out.”

Caleb felt like a prize idiot but copied Peter anyway. He wouldn’t say it made him feel better, but it didn’t make him feel worse, and after a minute or two his lungs remembered what the fuck they were supposed to be doing. He stood upright.

“Thanks,” he said, hoping it didn’t come out too ungraciously. Really, all he needed was to be even more in this man’s debt. “Thanks.”

He went to the passenger side door before being told.

* * *

South Bend, Indiana

Judging that they were done for the night, Peter drove a few blocks to the parking lot of a motel whose sign he had been able to see from the shoulder where the car skidded to a stop.

“I thought we were going to try to reach Chicago tonight,” Caleb said, managing to sound peevish despite the stress of whatever had just happened at the side of the road.

“Change of plans. I’m hungry and tired. This motel looks clean and there’s a sandwich place across the street.” Peter tried to make it sound like this was exactly what he wanted. He had a sense that Caleb wouldn’t want to be catered to, and Peter felt acutely horrible that he had bungled his explanation of the road detour so badly that Caleb hadn’t known what to do.

Caleb went along with only a minimum of grumbling. Peter got them checked in and gave one of the keys to Caleb. “What kind of sandwich do you want?”

“Surprise me,” Caleb said, turning away from the check-in desk, his battered suitcase dangling from his hand.

“Caleb,” Peter called.

“Yeah?” Caleb asked, looking over his shoulder.

“The room’s in the other direction.” Peter gestured with his chin to the sign indicating that rooms 100 through 125 were to the left.

Something hard and annoyed passed over Caleb’s face, but dropped away, only to be replaced by a wry smile. “I guess you’ve noticed I’m not great at finding my way.”

“I think the cat’s out of the bag,” Peter agreed, smiling back at him. “You make up for it with your sunny disposition.”

Now Caleb smiled outright. It was a weary smile, but it reached his eyes, and Peter felt absurdly pleased with himself. He wished he wasn’t like this—so eager to make things right, so pitifully eager to please but so hopelessly bad at it most of the time.

The sandwich shop’s parking lot was filled with teenagers eating inside their parked cars with the windows rolled down, calling out loudly when they saw someone they recognized. The music coming from the car radios was relentlessly cheerful, and Peter felt suddenly exhausted. He checked his watch; somehow it was only eight o’clock.

Inside, he chose two sandwiches almost at random from a menu that was mounted on the wall behind the counter, then bought a couple of slices of strawberry pie that he figured would keep for breakfast if neither of them were hungry enough tonight. When he left, the sandwiches and pie wrapped up in butcher paper inside a paper sack, he realized he hadn’t gotten anything to drink. At the grocery store next door, he bought a six pack of beer. He also saw a copy of that morning’s South Bend Tribune and bought that too.

When he turned the key in the lock of the motel room door, he found Caleb rubbing his damp hair with a towel, already dressed in his pajamas. Well, dressed in pajama pants and an undershirt. Peter had seen dozens of men in less—roommates and teammates and friends—and sometimes he did sneak looks out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he could hardly help it.

The sight of Caleb Murphy in his undershirt and a thin pair of pajama pants slung low on his hips shouldn’t have done much for him—Caleb was, objectively, too thin, not to mention perpetually cross, more than a little arrogant, and just a lot of work to be around. Peter shouldn’t have been attracted to him at all, not for any reason, and yet he was, and he had been almost from the start. He caught himself leaning forward to hear what the whip smart blond kid had to say in the classes they shared, found himself trying to tune his ears to the exact frequency of Caleb’s voice in crowded dining halls.

But the sight of Caleb with fluffy, mussed hair, squeaky clean from the shower, took what had been a low-grade attraction and ratcheted it up to something he couldn’t ignore. So did the way Caleb immediately looked pleased to see him, just for a fraction of a second before wiping the expression from his face and replacing it with his usual cool annoyance. As Peter stood in the doorway, almost frozen by the realization, Caleb’s gaze dropped to the six pack Peter held in one hand. Caleb raised a questioning eyebrow.

“I figured that you might want,” Peter began, and then started over. “I mean, it’s been a long day. I don’t know if you drink beer. I should have asked.”

Wordlessly, Caleb crossed the room and took the cardboard container from Peter’s hand and placed it on the tabletop. He took out a bottle and glanced around the room. Realizing what he was looking for, Peter hastily fumbled in his pocket for his Swiss Army knife and handed it to Caleb. Peter stared, transfixed by the sight of Caleb’s long fingers wrapped around the wet bottle, the way he flicked off one cap and then another in two efficient movements.

“I do drink beer,” Caleb said after draining about a third of the bottle and handing the other to Peter. “What, did you think queers don’t drink beer?”

Peter felt his face heat and wanted to sink into the ground. He hadn’t thought anything of the sort, but the notion that Caleb might be too refined or something for a bottle of Miller had crossed his mind. He tried to pull himself together. “I know queers drink beer.” He pointedly clinked his bottle against Caleb’s, then took a long swallow. “Obviously.”

He didn’t know if it was his imagination or if Caleb’s gaze lingered on his throat before hastily darting away. Peter spread out the contents of the paper sack on the table, unwrapping both sandwiches and arranging the paper napkins into a neat pile. “I got chicken salad on a roll and ham on rye. I wasn’t sure which you’d want, but figured you’d like one. Or we could each have half of both. It doesn’t matter,” he said, horrifyingly aware that he was rambling but unable to stop himself. “And there’s pie. Strawberry. Shit, I didn’t get forks.”

When he forced himself to look up, he found a pair of amused gray eyes regarding him. “You might be too good to eat pie with your fingers, Peter, but I’m not.”

That was the first time Caleb had said his name, and Peter felt his cheeks heat with stupid, exaggerated pleasure.

Caleb finished his beer and reached for another one. Peter regarded the narrowness of the ribcage beneath that thin undershirt, then considered how long it had been since their last meal, and concluded that it was just as well that they were only a few feet away from a bed in case Caleb passed out.

“Why don’t you sit down and eat,” Peter said. “I picked up a copy of the paper. I thought you might—I mean, you seem to like reading all the papers we find, and we haven’t seen that one yet.”

“Thank you,” Caleb said after a moment. “For supper and everything. If you tell me what everything cost, I’ll pay you back.”

“You don’t have to—” Peter started, and then caught the look in Caleb’s eye—a flash of that brittle anger Peter was getting used to seeing there, but also an entreaty. “The sandwiches and pie were about two dollars total and the beer was a dollar seventy-five. The paper was—” he glanced at the front page “—seven cents. That comes to three dollars and eighty-two cents, so I guess half of that is a dollar ninety-one. See, I can do math in my head, too.”

He watched as Caleb took his wallet out of the trousers he had been wearing that day and counted out a dollar and change. “Thank you,” he said when Caleb put the money on the table near Peter’s key.

This room had a television, so Peter put on a baseball game while Caleb read, and they both ate in silence. The game was between the White Sox and the Orioles, and Peter didn’t care much about either team, so he watched in a sort of comfortable stupor.

“How did you know what to do?” Caleb asked, apropos of apparently nothing, as far as Peter could tell.

“Do what?” Peter asked.

“When you told me to breathe.”

“Oh.” Peter took another bite of his sandwich and swallowed. “My mother has that happen sometimes. My father just yells at her to calm down, but that only makes things worse. My sister breathes with her, and that sometimes helps. It’s not as good as the pills, but it’s something.” Then, realizing what he had said, he cringed.

“Don’t worry,” Caleb said, his voice unreadable. “I’m not going to the press. Well, I suppose I wouldn’t have to. But I’m not going to make my first byline by reporting on your mother’s mental state. Give me some credit.”

“It wasn’t that,” Peter said, turning his head on the pillow so he faced Caleb across the space between their beds. “I didn’t think you would. It’s just that I’m usually more careful about what I say. I don’t want to put people in the position of having to keep my family’s secrets.”

Caleb raised an eyebrow, but his eyes were warm and unfocused and Peter felt caught in them. It took an effort to turn back to the baseball game.

“I think you lied to me yesterday,” Caleb said a minute later.

“What?” Peter tried to think of what Caleb could be talking about. It rarely even occurred to him to lie, let alone actually go through with it.

“When you said it was a new thing. Not being an asshole, I mean.”

“Oh. I—no. I only really started worrying about it a year ago.” That was when he had taken a good look at the rest of his family and realized they just didn’t like him and that they were never going to like him—but more importantly, he didn’t like them either. It was a shitty state of affairs to be in with his own family, but the further he got from the idea that he was supposed to like them just because he was related to them, the clearer it was that they were nearly all assholes. Maybe being an asshole was a Cabot trait, like the nose and the hair. Peter decided to hit the brakes before he became one himself. He still wasn’t sure he was getting it right.

Caleb had fallen silent, so Peter tried to watch the game.

“You can’t see it properly from there,” Caleb said, balling up the paper that had wrapped his sandwich and throwing it toward the wastepaper bin, missing his mark by several feet. “It’s at a weird angle.”

The television was indeed at a weird angle, more visible from one bed than from the other.

“It doesn’t matter,” Peter said. “It’s like listening to a game on the radio.”

“I’d offer to switch beds, but that would mean I’d have to move, and that isn’t happening, so you should come over here,” Caleb said, his voice containing approximately five hundred percent more Tennessee than it had earlier that day.

“Huh?”

“You,” Caleb said, pointing at Peter, “should come over here.” He pointed at the empty side of his own bed. “To watch the game.” He pointed at the television set. Then he made all the gestures again, as if Peter might not have understood the first time.

Peter snorted and gathered up the remaining two bottles of beer. It would, he reasoned, be more awkward to refuse than to go along with the suggestion. He had long ago learned that it was better for everyone if he did what other people wanted rather than actually decide what he wanted to do. And he really, really did not want to think about whether sitting next to Caleb—on a bed, on a hotel bed—was something he wanted. As casually as he could, he climbed onto Caleb’s bed. “This one’s yours,” he said, handing one of the bottles to Caleb.

He tried to pay attention to the game, but all he could think about was the presence of the man a foot away, the way the mattress dipped under his weight, making Peter have to fight the urge to lean into him. As Caleb flipped through the newspaper, he occasionally emitted a little hum of interest or sniff of disdain, as if the entire world could be divided into things that pleased him and things that irritated him.

Peter already had a partial list. Filed under “things that please Caleb Murphy” were sandwiches, extra fries, cheap beer, and newspapers. Filed under “things that drive Caleb Murphy into a snit” was virtually everything else, as far as Peter could tell. He was pretty sure that until a few hours ago, he had been firmly on the second list, but that something had shifted, and now he was a probationary entry on the first list. The prospect surely shouldn’t make him quite so pleased with himself, but Peter had been short on wins this past year.

Around the sixth inning, Caleb’s head tipped onto Peter’s shoulder. For one hysterical moment, Peter thought Caleb intended to snuggle up to him. Then he saw that the newspaper had fallen to the mattress and Caleb’s hands were limp in his lap. When Peter ducked his head to check, he could see that Caleb’s eyes were shut, his lips parted.

Peter let himself stay for a little while. Just until the end of the inning, he told himself. And if he spent the next three at bats inhaling the smell of shampoo and feeling wisps of clean hair against his cheek, if he couldn’t take his mind away from the places where Caleb’s bare arm pressed against his own, if he thought that he could actually feel the other man’s heartbeat where their bodies met, then that was fine. There was nothing wrong with it.