You Should Be So Lucky

by Cat Sebastian

a passing familiarity with baseball is something he caught, like the measles, not something he did on purpose.

Mark has little patience for people who can’t muster up a minimum degree of self-control. They’re spoiled children. Most people would be arrested, beaten, fired, or disowned if they didn’t keep a tight leash on their emotions and reactions, but the Eddie O’Learys of the world think they can do whatever they please.

Eddie is leading the National League in not noticing men in locker rooms.

It can’t be because Mark’s handsome, because Eddie’s been attracted to plenty of men, and never once has it made him want to read a book.

Still, this book is something solid that Eddie can hold in his hands, real proof that queer people exist, that he exists. Nothing good is coming to the women in this book—honestly, they’ll be lucky if the house doesn’t eat them or do whatever it is evil houses do in scary books. But they exist, and Mark noticed they exist, and Eddie can look at the words printed on the page and at Mark’s perfect penmanship and know that he isn’t alone.

Hiding the fact of William had been bad enough, but explaining the loss of him was somehow even more inaccessible, and so his world shrunk to the people who knew all of him.

There’s something so comforting in the ability to be wordlessly petty with someone, in knowing that as soon as you have a closed door between the two of you and the rest of the world, you can share all your least attractive thoughts.

“Only two things in the world people count by months. How old a baby is, and how long since something awful happened.”

“I can put you in a cab,” Mark says, “or, if you really aren’t safe to go home, you can spend the night on the sofa.” “But my virtue,” Eddie mutters darkly. “Okay, get up. Time to go home.”

“It’s not pity,” Eddie says. “And I don’t think I could have a single feeling about you that’s wasted.” He worries this might be too much, but when he leans in even closer, Mark mirrors his posture. “Look at that, I was sincere, you didn’t die—good work, team.”

Maybe relief isn’t the word; Eddie isn’t sure there even is a word. It’s a tug and a yes and a there he is.

I’m not saying things happen for a reason—I hate that. I’m saying that things happen. And it doesn’t have to mean anything except what it means to you. Nobody else gets to decide.”

It’s foolish, but Mark’s making peace with the fact that everything he feels about Eddie is a little foolish.

“It isn’t all bad. You get older, and things change. That’s the price of admission. You lose the people who knew you first, and then you start to lose everyone else. You lose your work. You lose the place where you grew up. You get things in return—new people, new hobbies, a chance to see everything new that the world has to throw at you. But you lose the things you’ve had the longest, the things that went into making you.”

When the world has decided that people are supposed to be a certain way, but you’re living proof to the contrary, then hiding your differences is just helping everybody else erase who you are.

“I love you.” He kisses Eddie then, because otherwise that phrase is going to linger in the air, true but somehow inadequate. He has a professional aversion to phrases that refuse to get the job done. “I’m going to keep loving you,” Mark says, and that’s much better.