My sister bats her lashes, her brown eyes twinkling with delight. “How about the time when he was six, ran naked through the sprinkler in the front lawn, then down the street, all the way to the end of the block, where Grandpa finally caught him and carried him back, naked as a jaybird, over his shoulder?”

  “That’s what inspired Pops to start training for marathons,” I add.

  Declan slow claps. “Best story ever.”

  After we eat and say goodbye to my sister, our next stop is the Alliance for a game day. River and Owen meet us in the lobby, and after the requisite hellos, our quartet heads to the games room, sinks onto the couches and joins the regular crew.

  “Hey, Jason,” Declan says to the quarterback.

  “Good to see you again, man, and prepared to be annihilated,” Jason replies as he grabs a controller.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Declan says with extra bravado.

  After a few rounds of NBA 2K, we switch gears to Plants vs. Zombies, then dive into Minecraft. Declan is shit at most of them, but I’m worse and Jason takes us to task.

  “G-man, you and your dude need to work on your skills,” Jason says when he destroys me.

  “I’ll see if I can add it to my schedule along with catching nearly one hundred sixty-two games,” I say.

  “Excuses, excuses,” River calls out as he and Owen lead their team to victory.

  “Clearly we’re just going to have to work harder at Xbox instead of the batter’s box,” Declan tells me. He turns to Jason. “I might need lessons,” he says, then lowers his voice to a stage whisper, pointing to me, “But Grant needs them more.”

  “True that,” Jason says.

  After one more round, Declan and I say our goodbyes, and Jason does too. The three of us head to the exit, and on the way out, I shoot the quarterback an expectant look, figuring the timing of his exit isn’t entirely coincidence. “So . . . how did everything go?”

  He flashes me a grin. “It went pretty well, actually.” Jason turns to Declan, to add, “I came out to my teammates a week ago. During summer practice.”

  My boyfriend’s eyes light up. “That’s awesome.” Declan lifts a hand to high-five him, and Jason smacks back.

  “I’m stoked for you,” I add.

  “And listen,” Jason says, his expression turning serious. “You guys being out, being together, it’s . . . awesome. It means a lot to me. So, thank you.”

  Declan claps Jason on the shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”

  Jason nods a few times. “I think I am too.”

  Yup, now is the time to ask.

  This is it, this is it, this is it.

  This is the perfect opportunity.

  Before I start up my Tesla a few minutes later, I turn to Declan and jump off the cliff. “Do you want to have kids?”

  He blinks and jerks back. “What?”

  “Do you?” I ask, nerves threaded through my tone.

  “I . . .” He doesn’t complete the sentence. His mouth just hangs open.

  I fill the silence. “Because we can, you know. We can adopt from a ton of countries. We can adopt domestically. We can foster. There are a lot of options.”

  “Yes, I’m aware,” Declan says, taking his time with each word. His brow knits. “But, Grant . . . do you mean now?”

  Oh, hell.

  Maybe I shouldn’t have dived into the deep end. “No! Shit. Sorry. I don’t mean now. I mean down the road. Someday,” I say, sweeping out my hand as if to indicate the distant future so I don’t freak him the fuck out. “Not for a while. Not when we’re both traveling all the time and in the prime of our careers.”

  “Okay. Whew. I thought you meant now, and honestly, the answer to that would be no.”

  “Same here,” I say, quickly—maybe too quickly. “But . . .” I take a breath, and it feels like I’m drowning. I try to swim up. “Someday?”

  Declan parts his lips, drags a hand through his hair. “Why are you asking now?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, backpedaling.

  He reaches for my hand, runs his fingers across my knuckles. “You do. You think things through. You research them. Then you blurt them out.”

  This man knows me too well. I sigh, dipping my head, like I’ve been caught stealing.

  “Have you been researching gay couple adoption?” he asks, like he can read my mind.

  I raise my face and man up. “Yes. I like to be prepared.”

  A sliver of a smile shifts his lips, then disappears. “What’s making you think about that? We haven’t even talked about . . .” He gestures from him to me.

  He doesn’t say marriage.

  I don’t either.

  It feels like the most taboo word in the world.

  And I don’t want to tread on taboo right now. But I do want him to know my heart. “Talking to Jason got the ball rolling. He made a comment a few weeks ago that I was good with talking to him. That I’d make a good dad. And then your mom coming to help me. It just felt so right. The way she took care of me, and I feel like I could do that really well for another person. For a kid.” I drag a hand roughly through my hair, feeling wired with tension. “Am I freaking you out?”

  Declan takes a beat.

  A beat too long.

  “I am,” I say firmly. “I’m freaking you out.”

  He squeezes my hand. “Do you want the truth?”

  “Yes. Now please. I’m dying.”

  Declan draws a breath, maybe to fortify himself to deliver bad news. “The truth is, I honestly never thought about kids till this second,” he says calmly, neutrally. “I didn’t give it a second thought because I have such a shitty relationship with my father. I never let myself go there. I didn’t even imagine being a dad, because I have no role model. No idea how to do it well. So, it never entered my mind as a possibility.”

  “Okay,” I say, breathing evenly again. That’s not bad news. “That makes sense.”

  “But you’ve thought about this?” Declan presses.

  “Yes,” I say on a shuddery breath.

  “And do you want to?”

  Nerves flood me. If I tell him the truth, will I lose him? Is our life together going to come down to him or kids?

  I could answer him with maybe. Hedge my bets a bit.

  But then, I got hit in the head by a pitch and I’m still here. I was outed in high school and I’m still here. I nearly lost this man and I’m here. I didn’t reach this point in my life by denying my truth. I arrived here by speaking it.

  “I think I do, Declan. I would like to have a family someday. Not today, not tomorrow. Not even next year or the one after that. But after baseball, you know? When I think about life after baseball, I think about family. And I would like, someday, to be a father.”

  That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever said.

  But as soon as those words pass my lips for the first time, they feel so right, so true. And so does loving Declan, and I desperately want my two wishes—him and a family—to mesh.

  “You’re going to be a great dad,” he says, warmth in his tone.

  But he doesn’t say with me. He doesn’t say we’ll be great dads.

  My heart beats too fast. Too uncomfortably.

  Maybe he needs my faith in him to get there. “I think you would too,” I offer, even as my chest twists with fear of losing him.

  Declan smiles softly, then shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  I walk the tightrope of the next question. “You don’t know if you’d be a good dad or if you want to have kids?”

  “I don’t know if I’d be such a good dad,” he says, then squeezes my hand harder, and I’m so glad he didn’t write off kids yet. “But I also never thought about being a dad till now. So can I ask you for something?”

  “Anything.”

  “Will you give me time to think about it?”

  “Of course,” I say, half-relieved, half-terrified.

  “Thank you,” he says, then hauls me in for a kiss.

  A sweet, tender kiss that settles my nerves.

  Some of them.

  When he breaks the kiss, he slides a thumb along my jaw. “We’re okay, right?”

  “Yeah, of course,” I say, with a laugh. “What else would we be?”

  “Just making sure,” he says.

  “We’re fantastic.”

  Except when you know you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you kind of want to fast forward time to his answer and find out if the rest of your life is going to look the same to him as it does to you.

  23

  Grant

  Declan makes a decision in August. Not the one I’m waiting on, but another one.

  “We need to learn to cook,” he declares one Sunday afternoon.

  “Cooking is overrated.”

  But he signs us up for a class anyway later that week. I meet him on a Thursday after his four o’clock game—I had an early afternoon one, so I caught the tail end of his, sprawled in a seat on the third baseline, watching my boyfriend win. It was fun, and I felt like a baller, winning at life.

  I still do as we walk along Market Street on our way to cooking class. “So, you still contend we’re failing at life if we can’t cook well?” I ask.

  Declan nods crisply. “Yes. What if something happens and you can’t DoorDash?”

  I scoff. “What would that situation be?”

  “You really can’t foresee a situation where you can’t order DoorDash?” He arches a brow in question.

  I screw up the corner of my lips, tap a finger against my chin. “Not really.”

  “What if it’s the middle of the night?”

  I lift a finger to make a point. “Aha! I thought you were going to pull the middle-of-the-night card. And that’s why I keep veggie burgers, sandwich meat, and avocados at the house, along with, wait for it, bread. I also have red peppers and hummus.” I pump a fist. “Booyah. All the food groups.”

  Declan rolls his brown eyes. “You are seriously adorably helpless.”

  “That’s not helpless. That’s a life hack for a midnight snack. So, unless we’re hiking the Inca trail or backpacking in Ecuador, none of which I can really see us doing, I’m all set. Big Bear Grylls fan here,” I say, patting my chest. “But I don’t need to be Bear Grylls, eating bugs or snakes or whatnot.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting we fry bugs in the wilderness,” Declan says when we reach the corner, stopping at the light.

  My lips quirk up in a grin. “Have you seen Bear Grylls? I’m not sure he fries them. A lot of times he just takes them and pops them in his mouth and eats them raw. Sort of like candy. Wait.” I grab Declan’s arm, curling my hand around his bicep for effect, which is totally an excuse to curl my hand around his bicep. “Is that the kind of cooking class you signed us up for? Are we going to learn how to eat bugs like candy?”

  Declan cracks up, then drapes his arm around me as we cross the street. “No. It’s sushi.”

  “Ahh. You remembered my favorite cuisine.”

  “We only order it half the time,” he says.

  “But why the hell did you sign us up for something hard like sushi? You have more faith in me than you should. My skills are pretty much on the basic sandwich-making level.”

  “Don't you want to graduate to advanced sandwich-making?”

  “I love sandwiches, but not that much. I don't love them as much as I love sex or Lady Gaga or James Bond. Definitely not as much as baseball.”

  “You better not like sandwiches more than sex,” Declan growls in warning. “But the sandwich tidbit you just dropped?” He taps his temple. “I’m filing it away in my Grant intel.”

  I kiss his temple, then he stops me in my tracks on the street, curls a hand around the back of my head and seals his mouth to mine in an unexpected moment of street-side passion from my guy.

  In one hot second, my temperature spikes as he sweeps his lips over mine, crushing my mouth in a searing kiss. Right on Market Street. At eight in the evening. As a trolley trundles by. As tourists stroll around us. As cars cruise along the road. Slinking an arm around his waist, I let out a shameless whimper as his lips devour mine.

  Someone, somewhere, is taking a picture of us. I just know it.

  And I love it.

  After hiding our secret affair when we were teammates in spring training five years ago, then keeping it under wraps when we got back together in February and tested the waters of a relationship, it’s a welcome change to kiss him freely on the street.

  It’s like a dream come true. I slide my other hand around his waist and our street kiss threatens to go full NSFW. I’m not sure I have the will to stop it, because Declan brushes his lips against mine with the same passion, the same fire we had the other night when he came home and had to fuck me after a game, the same passion he had after the dance club, the same lust he rained down on me the night we got back together.

  How is it possible the passion doesn’t fade? Instead, it intensifies. Hell, our desire for each other feels exponential.

  Declan finds the will to break the kiss. He breathes out hard. “Did that help your PDA kink?”

  I look him in the eyes, grin salaciously. “Oh, yes. It did.”

  “Good.”

  I arch a brow, a little suspicious. “Is that why you did it? Just to satisfy me?”

  He pushes his pelvis against me for a mere second, then pulls back. “Does it feel like you’re the only one who’s satisfied?”

  “Mmm. How am I supposed to make it through a cooking class now?”

  “I want you to know that the kiss wasn’t just for you—it was for me too. You should know, Grant, I also have a you kink, so it works out really well when I can make you happy.”

  It works out so incredibly well that it takes my mind off the fact that we haven’t returned to our talk from a month ago in my car.

  That we haven’t once touched on what all these next steps look like. We’re taking cooking classes, we’re domestic as hell sometimes, and we’re living this bold, incredible life.

  But I still don’t know how far he wants it to go.

  Or when he’ll let me know.

  24

  Grant

  We’re an adorable rom-com montage. I bump his hip. He winks at me.

  All I need is a peppy soundtrack as I swipe wasabi on his nose then flick my tongue and lick it off. Declan rolls his eyes, then smears some rice on my cheek. If the instructor weren’t busy with other students, we’d be in trouble.

  But she is, so we goof off more.

  We don’t eat anything we make. I mean, my sushi does not look appetizing. At the end of class, I brandish my avocado roll at my boyfriend, then make a sad sound as it falls over limply. “This is not a good phallic representation,” I whisper.

  Declan leans in closer. “I’ve got a good phallic representation for you right here.” His eyes drift down to his jeans. “And I’m going to show you when we get home.”

  I give him a confused look once we leave class. “Was not showing it to me ever an option?”

  “No fucking way.”

  Thirty minutes later, we’re laughing and still a little slap happy as I unlock the door.

  But the second it closes with a whoosh, Declan grabs the waistband of my jeans, backs me up against the wall, and slams his pelvis against mine.

  “Whoa, cowboy,” I say, since he’s frisky. “We should make sushi more often.”

  Declan covers my mouth with his in an enticing, entryway kiss that’s a prelude to one thing only. His mouth is possessive, consuming mine in a way that says I want you, I need you, I’ve been thinking about touching you all day long.

  I go shivery-hot all over. He tugs my bottom lip between his teeth, makes a throaty purr, then coasts his mouth along my jawline, nipping me. I groan as pinpricks of pleasure zip along my skin.

  “Did you like cooking class?” he asks, all hot and commanding.

  But I can’t follow the question. “Uh, it was fun. Why are you asking now?”

  “I really liked cooking class,” he continues, his voice husky, suggesting his mind isn’t on class at all.

  His mind seems solely on me as he pushes a hand on my chin, exposing my throat so he can sweep his tongue along my Adam’s apple, while holding me in place. His lips are on a mission. They travel across my chin, my throat. He sweeps those soft, full lips along my jawline, igniting a blast of sparks down my spine. I grab his hips, curl my hands tight around them, letting my head fall back against the wall as he rumbles, “I liked class so much.”

  And I get where he’s going now. At least I think I do. “Declan Steele, did you use that class as foreplay or something?”

  “I didn’t use it as foreplay, but guess what? It turned out to be. Want to know why?” he whispers, all smoky in my ear.

  “Yes, I do,” I say on a gasp.

  Declan takes his time answering, choosing instead to close his mouth over my earlobe and suck. “Fuck, yes,” I moan, my eyes floating shut as my man shows me everything his mouth can do to me.

  He pushes his crotch harder against mine, then his lips leave my skin.

  I open my eyes. Declan’s brown gaze is shimmering with heat. “Because I love being with you, babe,” he says. “Spending time with you turns me on.”

  “Making sushi?” I ask.

  “Getting coffee,” he adds.

  “Going for a run?”

  “Watching a movie,” he continues, and Declan grinds his hard cock against mine, showing me how very turned on he is. “Being with you excites me,” he says. “So damn much.”

  “Evidently,” I tease, and I sneak a hand between us, squeezing his erection, then cupping his balls.

  “Yesssss,” he moans. I fondle him through his clothes. “You turn me on, Grant. I fucking love being your man. And I hope you’re having a good time with me too.”

  My heart glows, shining brighter, growing bigger. “We don’t need our relationship to feel like a week in Ibiza, Deck. I’m completely happy with us being very, very San Francisco.”