It was an awesomely warm May Saturday.  There was just the slightest breeze and it was the perfect weather for shorts and a shirt, not too hot.  You didn’t sweat like an animal, but you were never cold.  He was actually not expecting much out of this River Rat’s stadium. He was imaging a little league park with metal bleachers and a mom selling cans of Pepsi and homemade brownies.  But instead, this was actually a decent stadium, it was beautiful, actually, with a field and pine trees around it, and looked fairly new.  It was in the middle of nowhere, but there was a buzz around the stadium, lots of families hanging out, kids with gloves, everyone in a baseball hat.  The smell of grilled foods from people tailgating in the parking lot, which was nothing more than a field with wood stakes and orange tape, mixed with the smell of fried foods wafting around the concourse.  Everyone was smiling.

“This is a nice stadium…”

She laughed, looking adorable in her red Cardinals hat.  “Yeah, it’s fun.  Wait ‘til you see a giant rat riding around the stadium in a 4 wheeler.  It’s so awesomely bad and red neck.”

“I love it.”  He laughed and readjusted his own hat.  After they had given their tickets and gotten a program she said, “You wanna get a beer and some peanuts? Or are you more of an ice cream in a batting helmet kind of guy”

“Peanuts, for sure…”

They grabbed their food and found their seats, she got them just left of behind home plate.  They were pretty good seats.  The stadium wasn’t full but there were a fair amount of people there.

They did laugh for a while watching the Rat Mascot come out on his four-wheeler, whiskers on his face, shades over his eyes. Honestly, the thing was kind of bad ass as he had a little ramp he jumped off.  And suddenly, Justin realized he was having a great time.  He had had an awesome time the night before, too.  They had just chatted, some about his dad, but then they ended up just watching the game.  It was silent a lot, but never awkward.  It was great game, too.  Came down to the wire.  She was so into it, knew stats, knew players.  It really was like being with Bill or his dad again watching a game.  But it was different too, cause this was a girl, and she was adorable and sexy, rooting for her team, shaking her fist, cheering silently when they did something great and then yelling “come on…” when they did something bad.  But he was proud of himself, he hadn’t been flirty and he hadn’t pried.  They had just been buddies.  But she hadn’t opened up too much to him and he was hoping tonight he would learn a little bit more about her.

“This kid here is supposed to be good,” she said, cracking open a peanut shell.  “I think he’s supposed to be pulled up to the big leagues soon. Especially ‘cause they don’t know how long Cobb’s gonna be out with his injury.”

“I still can’t believe Molina hit that walk off last night.  A freaking 0-2 count and he blasts one off Kimbrel.”

“He’s my man.”

He eyed her and blindly worked on getting peanuts out of their shells. “You like him?”

She eyed him back, “I think he’s adorable, despite his horrific neck tattoo.  He’s probably my favorite player.”

“Adorable…you think Yadier Molina is adorable?”  He laughed.

“Is that so bad?”

“No, just funny.  Do you like…like him?”  He winked at her and laughed.

“No!”  She shook her head and had a bright, beautiful smile on her face, but then it faded and he watched her eyes widened and she pulled down the bill of her hat mumbling, “Oh my God…”

He turned to see what she was looking at, but didn’t see anything weird.  “What?”  Some dude with his family was walking along the row in front of them, that was it. There was an overweight guy with a mullet and a tie-die shirt 10 seats down from them, but that was pretty normal in the South.  There was always at least one in every crowd.

“Just…shit,” she grumbled and seemed to sink further down in her chair.  The guy and his family stopped right in front of them and Justin looked in between the guy and Julie.

“Hey Julie,” he said.

“Hey Ben,” Julie was forcing a smile.

“You know Steph and my son Jacob.”  The wife was blonde and a little overweight but pretty, and the son was cute with his glove on his hand and a hat that looked way too big on his head.

Any mood that Julie was in before disappeared and she looked utterly carefree and happy to see them, sitting straight in her chair, her hat tugged into a more normal place on her head, “Hey guys, here enjoying a game?”

“You know it.  It’s good to see you…”

“You, too.” They waved and kept walking, finding their seats about 20 seats and 2 rows down.   “Oh my God,” she groaned, eyeing them still.

“What?”

“That was my first boyfriend,” she said.

He nodded.  This was interesting.  So she had at one point in her life dated, this wasn’t some lifelong situation she had going on. Maybe tonight, with a little helpless prying and pointed questions, he’d start learning about her. “So you have had a boyfriend?”

“Yup.”

“Interesting.  Are you like sad and jealous that he’s here with his family?”

Her voice lowered and she widened her eyes, “Hell no.  I can’t believe that woman let him procreate with her.  He’s one of the reasons I’m not into…things.”

He turned to her a little in his seat, “Really?  Ok, this is interesting.  Do go on…”

“Let’s just watch the game.”  She pointed to the field.

He crossed his ankle over his knee and said flatly, “I can watch and talk at the same time.  So one of the reasons you are so hard to get is because of that guy and his lack of pleasing abilities.  Is he the only guy?”

She sighed and looked at him under the rim of her hat, “It’ll make things a lot easier if I just tell you, huh?”

“You look like you want to tell me.”  He shrugged.

He watched her inhale deeply and then exhale for a few seconds.  Once she started talking, though, it was hard to get her to stop. It was like it had been pent up for a while and she was ready to blurt it out.  “I’ve been with five guys.  Ben was my first and I hated every minute of it—not of being his girlfriend.  We were in high school it was stupid and fun.  He really is a nice guy.  But sex?  Honestly, it hurt and it was annoying and gross and he smelled funny afterward and…like he wasn’t patient! It was hop on, go a round, hop off, see ya later.  We did it a couple times and each time it sucked and really hurt.  So I stopped and then we broke up.”

He listened to every word, eagerly waiting to eat up this women’s sexual adventures.  Five guys were more than he had originally expected.  But he didn’t know what to expect from her.  He had honestly only ever been with four women, but all but one of them had been his serious girlfriend at the time.  It was one of the things that sucked the most about him and Becks break up, they had had a fantastic sex life.

But sex with her didn’t matter in the scheme of things.

“Then, in college I met a guy I actually liked. He was a pretty horrible kisser, though, and everything else.  When I let him have sex with me, it was again weird and annoying.”

“What do you mean weird and annoying?”

“Just like really quick and I’m lying there silent just starting at the ceiling and he has the nerve afterward to ask me if it was good for me.  No, it wasn’t, to be honest.”

“You should have told him what to do, sometimes guys, especially younger guys, need guidance.  I know I did back in the day.  Now I gotta it going on.”

She ignored his arrogant comment and said, “Well, I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t listen. I’d ask him to go slower or to just chill out so I could get into it as well, but he was just so into getting off.  And afterward he would totally bounce to go hang out with his friends.  There was no intimacy, no talking, no nothing—he wouldn’t take me out or anything.  It hurt me, too.  I was still pretty young and I really liked him, but he just wanted to fuck me.”

“Well guys are idiots sometimes.  So the other three?”

“Next one was my 21st birthday. I was drunk and I don’t remember it.  Honestly.  No idea, not one morsel of memory.  Just woke up naked with this guy, D. J., and I completely freaked out. I remember kissing him on the couch but had no recollection of anything else.  When I asked him if we had sex, he just kind of sheepishly laughed and was like, ‘yeah, you don’t remember?  You were pretty wild’.  So went to the health clinic and got checked out.  No STDs, no babies and I swore it off. I didn’t drink for like three years and I didn’t do anything with any guy.  I was terrified.  It was this very scary thing to me.  I try hard to never let myself to get black-out drunk again.  I get tipsy sure, drunk even, but never black out.”

He nodded and said teasingly,  “Well, that’s a smart thing to aim for no matter what.”

She laughed, but her voice now was completely mischievous.  If he didn’t know any better, he’d say she was enthralled telling him all this stuff.  “The next one was one of these guys that, yeah, ok it was a dating service online.  I had been so busy publishing and stuff that I hadn’t had time to date and was kind of still freaked out by the 21 thing.  This was like 4 years ago and I was really lonely. And he was nice and we hit it off and everything seemed to be going so well.  We went on like six dates—like he was almost my for real boyfriend.  Jackson was his name, and he wasn’t pushy and seemed to like me, so I was ready to go for it.  I was like...this is the one to get me back in the game.  We weren’t soul mates, but we had a great time together and he was attractive and everything was going awesome.  And who knows, maybe we could have grown into soul mates…”

“But…”

“But then we went back to my place one night and we started making out heavily and it was, really, pretty freaking awesome. He was a really, really good kisser.”  He liked the way her voice dropped and got heavy when she said “really”.  He was trying not to get turned on by the way she was talking, and shifted his legs a little and tried to force his brain to listen to her, but not picture all that she was talking about.   “But then, he started talking…”

He eyed her, “Talking?”

She closed her eyes in a slow blink and laughed, “He started calling me sugar muffin and told me he wanted to eat me like I was a powdered donut.  Those exact words.”  Justin almost spat out his beer and he stared at her hard.

“What?!”

“I’m not kidding, Justin.  I can’t even remember what all he said ‘cause I started laughing so hard. And the bad thing was, I was willing to just laugh it off and get back to it. Ya know, joke about it and tease him.  I thought it was really weird but I could over look that ‘cause Lord knows I’ve said some stupid shit before.  But he got so offended that I was laughing at him that he stormed out of my house.  I woke up the next morning to this nasty email about not having any respect and most girls are so turned on by his “love talking” that they come by the sound of it!  I was willing to call and apologize to him, but he was so pissed in his email I was like, geez, maybe this was for the best.  I tried calling him a couple times, but he never called me back.  So that ended quickly.”

“That’s…amazing.  I will never look at powdered donuts the same.”

She smiled. “I know, right?  Ruined me for life.”

“So, number five.”

Suddenly, the entire mood changed.  The light-heartedness left, and coolness entered their conversation.  She wouldn’t look at him and her voice caught a little.  She had to clear her throat before she said, “I’ve already told you. The donut dude.”

“Nope, you didn’t.”   He counted them off on his fingers.  “High school, college, black out on your birthday, donut dude…and?”

“Crap, I said five…I meant four…”

“Liar.” She was obviously lying, not looking at him, fidgeting with her peanuts and her beer and her hat. If this was the one, if this was some kicker that she didn’t want to divulge, he wasn’t going to make her.  The others had been awkward, but she had told them in such a funny way that the tone was light.  Suddenly, this fifth one was making the air heavy and awkward.  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

For two full minutes they were silent.  They watched someone try to steal a base and get called out.  They listened as someone below them shouted out for cotton candy, five dollars.  They watched the next batter look on as two fast balls flew past him into the catcher’s mitt.

Then quietly, softly, and suddenly, she said, “Five was last summer.”

He glanced over at her.  “And?” he asked softly.

She took in a shaky breath and quickly said, “And I cried the whole time.”

Suddenly, he thought, maybe he shouldn’t pry.  Maybe it should have been left alone. “Ju…”

“It was a publisher,” she said quickly, looking down at her fingers.

“What?”

She shook her head and looked up, staring out at the field, “I was trying to get one of my non-romantic books sold.  It’s was a collection of short stories.”  She let out another deep breath and looked over at him, her green eyes bright and glossy in the stadium lights.  “The guy was fine, he was nice, I mean at first.  He wasn’t really attractive, but he started flirting and I just kept thinking, ‘This is your dream, this is your dream!  This is all you want.  This is the credit you deserve.’ And…and I just let him do it.  And that would have been shitty enough, but the kicker is he knew I was upset.  He knew and he didn’t care.  He just, he didn’t care.  And he kept on and on, and it got to the point it was painful and….anyway, I just tried to keep thinking, this couldn’t hurt my chances.”

He gulped back a swallow of his beer.  It was a hard story.  He knew it wasn’t rape, ‘cause she hadn’t said no and she may have even initiated it.  But dammit, if it wasn’t close.  It made him feel sick inside and made him think about how many stupid fucking men there were in the world who were too up their own asses and too evil to care about another human being.  He remembered one time with his second girlfriend, right after high school.  Amie and him were going at it pretty hard and they were both really into it and she was going nuts on him, bouncing like crazy.  And then suddenly, she just started screaming.  It wasn’t a good scream, and she had pulled off him and started crying.  He freaked out.  He knew he had hurt her.  She had even gone to the doctor to have it checked out.  It was some condition that made the lining in her vagina tender or something.  But he had been so upset with himself for hurting her, he had even cried about it.  And it took them a while to get back into a groove sexually.  He could never imagine having sex with a woman and just not caring that it hurt her, or that she was upset.

It made his skin crawl because the bad thing was, he knew that there were actually a lot of guys out there like that, guys that just didn’t give two shit about what a woman was feeling.

She kept talking and he had a hard time looking at her now.  “As soon as he was finished, he got up, put on his pants and said in this really bitter and arrogant voice, ‘next time try to enjoy it and maybe you’ll get a deal’ and he just left.  He flew back to New York and I never heard anything from him again or that publishing house.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah…”  She sucked in a deep breath and seemed to let it pass her.  “I hate that one.  The others are kind of funny.  I can even laugh at the blacked out one because the dude I had sex with turned out to be one of Blake’s future boyfriends.  So I have this whole “I turned a man gay” stigma that we joke about.”

“You have too many stigmas and dammit guys are jerks.”

She said softly, “Yeah, but I feel like a jerk too sometimes.”

“No wonder you’re all anti-sex.  You’ve never had one good experience with it.  I can’t even believe you write about it.  I would think all your stories would be about mutilated penises or something.”

“Maybe that will be in the next story.  The crappy thing is I was so messed up by the last one I burned the print copies and erased the document that had the finished short stories.  So I’d have to go back and try to rewrite them if I wanted it to be published.  It was one of my favorite things I ever compiled…”

He looked over and she was wiping at her eyes a little.  “Jules…”

But then it was over.  Just like that, like a snap and she was into the game.  The kid hit a double out into right center and it made a loud popping noise.

“Oh nice!” she cheered.  It was over.  She was done telling her story.

“Yeah that was a nice at bat.  Where’s that kid from?”

“South Carolina I think.”

“So…question…”

“Yeah…”

He didn’t look at her, figuring she may be more comfortable if he acted like most of his attention was on the game.  But it wasn’t, he was completely attuned to her.  “And I don’t want to pry, but like…you don’t have to answer this—I just want to make sure I understand you.  You write about sex, and what I read seemed to make it pretty awesome, so you aren’t like…just turned off by it, right?  You’ve just had some shitty dudes take advantage of you.”

“I don’t know.  For a long time I thought maybe I was turned off by it.  Ya know, there are people out there that have no sexual desire.  It’s actually some sort of medical condition.  I thought maybe I had it.  But I kind of don’t want to know, so I never tell my doctor anything.”

He glanced over. “What makes you think you have it?”

“Internet research.”

He laughed, “Oh come on, you go online to figure out how to treat a cut finger and the next thing you know you think you have the black plaque.  If you really are concerned you should have it checked out by a doctor.  They may be able to give you something to help…relax or stimulate…you.”

Her eyes widened and she chuckled, “That’s not awkward.  I just—oh God this is embarrassing. When I write, it’s fun and ok, yeah, arousing…”  Their eyes met and she covered her face with her hand.  “Oh my God, stop smiling!  In real life situations it almost makes me want to vomit. Can we talk about something else?”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“So I was thinking about some of the things...”  But it was hard for him to stop thinking about her and she laughed and smacked him lightly on his arm.  “I said, stop smiling!”

“So you do have a drawer full of dildos somewhere?” he said to her quietly.

“Stop! No I do not.”

She was blister red in her face, “Why are you getting all red?”

“Cause being friends does not give us liberty to talk about whether we masturbate!”

He shrugged one shoulder and said as calmly as possible. “I did last night.”

“Oh my God.”

“Mismatched socks get me going.” She covered her face again and bent over in half, not looking at him.  She didn’t move.   “What, I'm sorry!  I'm joking.  Come on, I'm joking Jules.”

She peeked out at him and he saw a bright smile on her face, “So do you have a drawer full of cock rings somewhere?”

“How do you even know such things exist?”  He widened his eyes.

“Internet.”

He shook his head.  “Please do not tell me you just Googled cock rings one day.”

“Why?”

“Because your poor little green eyes.  No wonder you sometimes wear glasses.”

“I wear glasses when I’m lazy, contacts when I’m not.”

He pulled his hat off, scratched his head and put his hat back on.  This was ridiculous. “I cannot get the image of you looking up sex toys on the internet off my brain.  And the funny thing is I know what you'd do, you'd have a little piece of paper and take notes and be all “that's interesting” and totally not aroused at all.  Totally clinical.”

“Picture this.”  She waved both of her hands out over the field.  “All the baseball players are wearing them right now.”

“That's not...”  He shook his head.  “No Jules.  You don't know how those things work.”

“And you do?”

“No, but...I can imagine.”  She was quiet, biting her lip to keep from laughing.  She then took a sip of her beer and he said, “I swear if you say anal beads next, I will just leave.”  She coughed and put her beer down, patting her chest.  She was half laughing, half coughing.  “Are you ok?”  He patted her back.   “Oh my God are you choking?”

When she finally got her breath she said in a strained voice, “That makes powdered donut dude seem not that bad...what if he had asked me...”

“No, stop Jules.  Stop.” He turned and said a little loud, “Security, this woman has lost her mind...” 

She was still laughing and she pinched her nose, “I think beer just went up my nose.”

“Good, it's what you deserve!”

When they calmed down a little, she said, “One day I wanted to change the green curtain in our store to those old 70s beads, ya know what I'm talking about?”

“Uh huh...” He nodded.

“And Nik was like I cannot work in a store that hangs up anal beads.  I just stared at her and she just went back to stocking some shelves.  I did not pry.”

“Kinky,” he said and then pointed to the field.  “This kid is about to pop one.”

“How can you tell?”

“He's hit five foul balls in a..”  And it happened, home run.  The stadium, even only half full, went nuts and fireworks went off.  “Yes!”

“High five!” she yelled and they slapped hands. “Three run!”

“This is fun,” he said after they sat back down. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“Of course.  Cheers.”  She lifted the neck of her beer bottle to him and he touched his with hers. This girl was crazy and different, but damn she was fun and this was the first time in a long, long time that he could honestly say he felt carefree and happy.  No mask, no faking to get through, no secret dark thoughts about his life, his ex, or his dad.  Nothing was holding him back and he was ready as hell to toast to that.

“Cheers.”