“I do,” Corey says.

“What was that, son?” she says, spitting a spray of pool water from her mouth.

“I do. Know how to swim.”

“Well, good.” She smiles. “Hop in, then.” The boy is already kicking off his shoes, unbuckling his belt, pulling his shirt out from his waistband.

“You’re not going in.” Trey’s voice is anxious, somewhere between a question and a command.

“Why not?” Corey’s chest, hairless and ridged with muscles, is more striking than Stephen had imagined. Trey, also staring at the boy, looks stricken.

The ferocity in Corey’s eyes and the pleading in Trey’s: suddenly, Stephen sees everything, all that has happened between these two men. He sees a physical bond, an emotional one. These men have been together, or else Trey desperately wishes it so. The locker room, indeed.

His heart sinks. He thought Trey was better than this, more like him. Adaptable to the point of mimicry, flexible into the realm of acrobatics. But still composed of the kind of fortitude that would keep him from ever looking so desperate, so vulnerable, as the center fielder does in this instant. To be like Stephen, you have to be strong, stronger than everyone else. You go out and get—take—what you need. Never ask, unless you know the answer will be yes. Never plead. You’re not going in? The boy steps out of his pants, revealing short boxer briefs and long, lean legs. Even as Trey crumples, Stephen can see: this boy is fierce.

Stephen knows what he has to do.

As Corey steps down the ladder into the pool’s deep end, as Trey sulks back behind a potted aloe with the last puffs of his cigar, as Mona dives below the surface, kicking hard, Stephen marches around the pool to where Dorsey Paine is guffawing in the shallow end.

“Where’s Woody?” Stephen looks around the pool patio; he doesn’t see the general manager anywhere.

“Headed home early. Said he has a call with New York in the morning.” Dorsey shrugs and reaches for a sweating bottle of Corona on the pool’s ledge, but Stephen pushes the bottle with his foot. It slips into the water and begins to sink.

“Hey!” Dorsey complains. The lime floats loose from the neck and bobs back to the surface of the water. Jason, still silent, grabs it and sets it back on the lip of the pool. He retrieves the bottle, too. “What gives?” Dorsey asks.

Stephen, crouched next to the men, looks at the left fielder, at his chest. “Jason, will you give us a minute?”

When he’s out of earshot, Stephen starts, his voice a whisper. “Trey Townsend.”

“What about Trey?”

“He has, what, three years left on his contract?” Corey climbs out of the pool, dripping wet, Adonis-meets-Venus under the desert moon.