Chapter 1

I’ve just returned home after spending the holidays with family. It was the best holiday season ever. Mostly, that was because over Christmas, I introduced my fiance to my family, and over New Years, she introduced me to hers.

All of my family, all of her family, and all of our friends asked the same question: how did you guys meet each other? And every time someone asked, I gave the same answer: I won her with a baseball bet.

Maybe I should start at the beginning.

My name’s Rob. I’m 26 years old, and for the past 5 years I’ve been dating and living with a girl that I met in university. Her name’s Angela. She broke up with me just over four months ago, on the Labour Day weekend. We were spending the weekend at a friend’s cottage, at the annual gathering of a group of us that had all been at school together. This year was special, because two of those friends, Ainsley and Ian, were getting married at the end of October, and the annual get-together had been turned into a kind of a buck and doe weekend for them.

I’d always had a soft spot for Ainsley. We’d never dated, and we’d never slept together. It was more like a sibling kind of relationship, I guess. She told me her troubles, and I told her mine. And I tried to look out for her when I could. I was so happy for her when she and Ian got together, and even happier when they announced their engagement last year at Christmas. The two of them were so wonderful together. They seem to have been made for each other.

Angie and I, on the other hand, seem to have hooked up out of convenience more than anything else, and I believe we stayed together because of inertia. I realize now that it was a doomed relationship from the beginning, but I didn’t see that then. So when Angie broke up with me, on the beach, on that sunny Sunday afternoon, in front of all of our closest friends, I was devastated. And heartbroken. And humiliated.

Humiliated? Well, one of the many things that Angie shouted at me, along with the fact that I was totally boring and I had a lousy deadend job, was that I was terrible in bed. She’d never said anything negative about my lovemaking skills before. But as I got in my car and drove back to Toronto, all I could hear was her ranting on and on about how small my dick was and how I always took too long to come and how bored she was with our sex life. I wanted to die.

Ainsley called me just after I left the cottage that day, and pleaded with me to come back. I said that there was no way I could do that. She cried. I assured her that I wasn’t upset with her. I just couldn’t be around Angie at that moment. Ian took the phone from Ainsley, and told me that he didn’t know what Angie was trying to do, but he was sure she’d soon realize what she’d thrown away and come crawling back to me. I laughed, and said she might as well save her breath, because I was done with her. It seems like it was mutual, because Angie moved her stuff out of the apartment that same week. She did it while I was at work, and left her keys on the table. She didn’t even leave a note. Perhaps it was better that way.

But the month of September was pretty miserable. I hadn’t really realized how much control Angie had been exerting over how I spent my time. The upside was that I could spend my time any way I wanted to. The downside was that all I really wanted to do was be with Angie. I was so hurt, and I hated her. But at the same time, I missed her terribly.

So I started watching baseball again. Angie didn’t like sports, and she had gradually pulled me away from what had once been a pleasurable pastime. My evenings were free, so I could watch as many games as I wanted to. And my beloved Blue Jays were having a great season, and looking like they were real contenders for the World Series, for the first time since I was old enough to stay up and watch them play.

On the Saturday of the Thanksgiving weekend, I had lunch with Ainsley. She’d called earlier that week and asked if we could meet up. She was worried about me. And she had good reason to be, I guess. I’d lost some weight, and hadn’t been sleeping well. We talked about Angie, and the breakup, and how I was coping - or not coping. And then I told her that I didn’t think I could come to her wedding, which was only three weeks away. I hadn’t seen Angie since that fateful day when she humiliated me, and as much I wanted to see Ainsley and Rob tie the knot, I just didn’t see how I could face Angie, and I knew that she’d be there. She was one of Ainsley’s bridesmaids, after all. Ainsley had asked her, or so she told me, not because the two of them were particularly close, but because she and I were close. Ains couldn’t ask me to be a bridesmaid, but she could have me standing there beside her via proxy, so to speak, by asking my girlfriend to be a bridesmaid.

In all the time that we’d been friends, I’d never seen Ainsley cry like she did that day over lunch when I told her I was planning on skipping her big day. At one point she came and knelt beside my chair and threw her arms around me and held me like she’d never let me go. She begged me to change my mind, and come. She told me I could bring a guest, if I wanted to. I laughed, and asked her who she thought I could get to go with me. She said I could bring anyone I wanted, even one of my sisters, or one of the guys I worked with. That made me laugh again, though there wasn’t any humour in it. I could just see Angie telling everyone I was gay if I showed up at the wedding with a male friend in tow.

Finally, I gave in, and said I’d do my best to be there, because deep down, I knew that Ains was right. I needed to be her at wedding. And it would be a lot nicer to be there if I had a date with me, instead of just being there on my own, so I told her I’d bring a plus one. But who could I possibly take?

I thought about it all week, and no answer came.

On Friday afternoon, just as I was wrapping up work for the day, one of my coworkers came by. Jeff’s an ok guy - a bit rough around the edges, but his heart is in the right place. He shares my love of baseball in general and of the Jays in particular. The Jays had indeed done well. They hadn’t been able to pry the AL East away from the Red Sox, but they’d won the wildcard, and in the first round of the playoffs they’d beaten the Sox three games to none. That night, they were in Cleveland, for the first game of the American League Championship series against the Indians.

“Hey, man,” he said, as approached my desk. “You gonna watch the game tonight?”

“Of course,” I replied. “Nothing else to do.”

“Then why don’t you come watch it with me and my buddies? Baseball’s more fun when you watch it in a group.”

I didn’t have a good excuse to say no, so I agreed to join him. He was going to his friend Phil’s place. We stopped and got some beer on the way, and arrived just as the game got underway. Now, like I said, Jeff’s an ok guy. But his friend Phil was an ass. And Phil’s friend Mike, who was there too, was an even bigger ass. But I’ll get to that later.

We settled in down in Phil’s man cave, where he had one of the biggest TVs I have ever seen in a private home. Phil’s girlfriend, a cute but shy looking thing named Ally, about 5’3” or so, with blue eyes, shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair, and curves that deserved to have a warning sign, came in and brought us some chips and beer, then disappeared again.