“Nice shot,” Heath remarked before planting a firm slap across the breadth of my left ass cheek. Hmm, team sports aren’t so bad after all, I thought to myself while I turned to hustle back down the court.

As the soles of my white Adidas jogging sneakers slipped and squeaked against the freshly waxed gym floor, I couldn’t help but have my concentration on the ball-carrier broken by eyeing the strong, round, sinewy shoulders and sweaty, muscular thighs of the other men on my team.

On my team I laughed quietly to myself for thinking. If only these guys truly were ‘on my team’. What an infinitely more interesting game that would be! But just as my mind was about to wander, Jeff hit me with a pass and I was forced to handle the ball. Forced to handle the ball. Dear god, the sports innuendos are just unavoidable, aren’t they?

I didn’t mind playing this game with the half-interested sort of focus that I now demonstrated. I had only joined the local YMCA men’s league because Heath, a coworker, said they really needed someone to fill out their team. The last thing I ever wanted to spend my precious evenings doing was dribbling a ball down some lacquered court, but I figured I could use the exercise since my activity level had dropped somewhat since college. That, and I just couldn’t say no to Heath. One look into those dreamy deep-brown eyes of his, or the way he tussles those bouncy chocolaty curls atop his head, and I’m sold. And in the unlikely event that I actually could hold out, all he needs to do is shoot me a quick grin of that man-dissolving smile of his and I’d be bent in the knees.

He had joined the office last year when Jonesy retired. It was his second job out of school and the pour thing didn’t know his head from a wastebasket. Fortunately for him, and me, I was there to usher him into his business adulthood. If only he would have let me usher him into another important stage of his life…

Naturally, I kept my eyes on Heath through most of the game. I flubbed up here and there, but for the most part, I actually played the game like I knew what I was doing. I never figured my dad forcing me to play on my high school’s basketball team would ever actually turn out to be a good thing in my life, but it’s still doing for me now what it did for me then: giving me an eye-full of sweaty man-candy in the locker room after the game.

We lost. But none of the guys on the team take it too seriously, so everyone was still in pretty good spirits after the game. The YMCA ‘locker’ rooms are really little more than oversized changing stalls that are barely big enough for five grown men to fit in comfortably. This, of course, made the whole situation infinitely more comfortable for me as John and Paul, our two stout, biblically handsome forwards crossed paths in the center of the room, twisting sideways to pass one another and nearly sliding across my lap as they scrunched to do so. I didn’t move a muscle to get out of their way either. Each stood the better of 6’2” and is ripped like an old pair of acid wash jeans. I dropped the damp gym towel that I had been using to blot the sweat from