Page 24 of Unwritten Rules
“Yeah.”
“We could just hang out up here. Sorry, I shouldn’t assume you don’t want to go back down.”
“If it helps, I really don’t.”
“Good, because this is gonna take a while.”
There’s a bunch of bananas sitting on the counter, a box of butter, sugar, and a few other things. “You bought pie crust?” Zach says.
“I hate making it.” Like it’s a moral failing and not just Zach razzing him about it. “The roll-out ones taste fine.”
“That was a joke. And I guess I should volunteer to help, though I don’t actually know anything about cooking.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He’s peeling bananas into Zach’s trash can, and then slicing them into a bowl with a paring knife. He does it the way he swims, the way he blocks pitches when he’s not trying to frame: neatly, efficiently, like he put time and effort into learning how.
“You’re good at that,” Zach says.
Eugenio rewards him with the kind of look he has during framing practices, a genuine smile, different under the flickering lights of Zach’s rented kitchen. Not the indulgent one he aims at their pitchers when they’re being exasperating or the false grin he gives the coaching staff when he’s asked, yet again, to translate.
“What are you making, anyway?” Zach says.
“Tarte tatin. It’s not as fancy as it sounds.”
“I don’t know. It sounds fancy.”
“It’s basically just a quick version of a fruit pie. My ex made it a lot, and I picked it up from her.”
“Gotcha.” The kitchen doesn’t have a place to sit, but Zach’s been leaning against a counter, watching Eugenio as he talks. Now, he wants an excuse to move away, to get out of the little bubble of the two of them. To remind himself that Eugenio is a teammate with a very specific hobby and a well-developed sense of gratitude, even if Zach wonders what it’d be like to come up behind him and rub his thumb over the skin above his waistband. If this was something more than two teammates avoiding a party together.
“Do you want another beer?” he asks, even though he can see Eugenio’s is still untouched and his own is only half-finished.
“I’m good. But for the next part, you might want to stand back.” He pulls a pan out of one of the bags he brought, a heavy cast-iron thing. Into it, he cuts cubes of butter from one of the sticks, turning on the burner, and rotating the pan to melt it.
Sugar next, and he really does tell Zach to stand back, like he’s doing a science experiment and not making dessert, and Zach goes and investigates his phone and looks out the window at where the party outside appears to be dying down.
“That’s gonna need a few minutes to bake,” Eugenio says, after a while. “If you wanted to watch a movie or something. I mean, I don’t know what you normally do.”
Zach normally swims and relaxes and scrolls through Grindr looking at abs better than his own, before passing the fuck out. “Movie sounds great. What do you want to watch?”
“Whatever you want. I don’t have a preference.”
Zach laughs a little at that because Eugenio has preferences for everything: his coffee, his preferred spot in the bullpen. Preferences, and a particular pleased grin he gets when someone fulfils them. One that Zach likes more than he should. “You don’t have an opinion about, like, camera angles?”
“Camera angles?” Eugenio aims a smile at Zach, one that makes him feel like he swallowed something warm and glowing. And it’s nice, it’s really fucking nice, to the point where Zach wants to open the window and admit the cool desert night, to douse whatever this is like he would charcoals after a barbecue.
Instead, he flicks on the TV, navigating through the on-demand menu before picking a movie he’s already seen, something with a lot of explosions and not a lot of plot.
“Oh, yeah,” Eugenio says, “this one’s good.”
“I can pick something else if you’ve already seen it.”
“I have to get up and check on that every couple minutes, so this works.”
The living room couch is, in fact, closer to a love seat, or at least isn’t comically oversized the way Zach’s couch is in Oakland, bought specifically so that he can stretch out fully. It feels small, especially since there’s no way to sit on it so that Eugenio’s thigh isn’t pressed against his.
“We can turn the subtitles off,” Zach says, “if they’re in the way.”
Next to him, Eugenio smells like whatever he’s cooking, like cologne and ballpark shampoo. With their shoulders touching, Zach can feel it when he says, “They don’t bother me.”
