Page 75 of Unwritten Rules
“You know they’re tanking your playing time, right? And floating your name in trade talks?”
“Well, fuck.” And it figures, given how the team reacted to him winning his arbitration case arguing for a higher salary. But it’s another thing to have it confirmed.
“I thought it’d be good news. Maybe you can get the hell out of Oakland.”
“I’d prefer not to leave. Even if it means I take less money.” His phone flashes an alert where he has it in his pocket, Eugenio a continent away, sending him pictures of a kitchen he wouldn’t have time to cook in, or lying sleepless in his bed, complaining that it’s too hot with the window closed or too cold with it open, and that Zach isn’t there with him. A set of messages Zach will delete later like they never existed.
“Is that part of the ‘complicated?’” she asks.
“There’s stuff I’m not ready to say.” Things he’s not ready to admit to himself, much less anyone else. How tenuous everything feels—with Eugenio, with the team—like trying to hold on to water. “I don’t know when I will be.”
She claps a hand on his shoulder, then leaves him standing there, watching the waves as they rise and crest and fall, the ocean returning to itself. Above him, the night-flying birds wheel, their calls erased in the wind.
Chapter Twenty-One
October, Three Years Ago
That fall, they drive down the coast from Oakland to the beach house Eugenio rented in Cambria. Zach sleeps for most of the drive, his body is still working off the ache from their season ending with an elimination in the division series. Five games against the Union, interspersed with having to haul ass to New York and back, accompanied by the kind of jet lag that sets in and never lets off.
His parents called after the game to commiserate with him for a while and then ask when he’s coming back to Baltimore. His mother asked who he was going to the beach with and looked skeptical when he said, “A friend.”
“AnyfriendI know?”
And he could have lied and said he was going to the beach with guys on the team, or could have said Eugenio, though that would invite more questions, especially when his mother asked if Eugenio tried cooking from the cookbook she loaned him.
“Nah, just some folks in Oakland,” he said, and then changed the subject, hoping she wouldn’t press the point.
Now, it’s just the two of them in the for-once-merciful traffic, Eugenio driving, Zach resting against the window. They make decent time, enough to get there when the beach house is in full midafternoon splendor. It’s one of those big West Coast houses, the kind that seem impossible anywhere but California: three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms, including a little tucked-away stall for hosing sand off their feet. An enormous living room and palatial kitchen. The kind of house that should be filled with other people but isn’t, just the two of them and a strip of offseason California beach.
Eugenio goads him into taking a shower, even though Zach just wants to collapse on the massive bed in the largest bedroom, everything in the house spread out from itself like it knows he needs the space. Eugenio goads him and then follows him in, water beading on his eyelashes and down his chest, standing close while Zach steams the exhaustion from his pores.
They collapse in bed, sleep until the light outside is fading, Eugenio getting up like he’s leaving to go grab food at the store and then Zach cajoling him into staying, into letting Zach touch his chest, his hips, all the places he knows by feel.
“Let’s just order something,” Zach says. “Stay here. For the next few days. Or weeks.”
“Sounds ambitious.” Eugenio pulls up the reviews for half a dozen places that do delivery, reading Zach potential menu items while he’s sitting, naked, orange light from the setting sun tracing shapes on his shoulders and chest, and illuminating the dark lines of his tattoos.
“Are you going to get one for this season?” Zach runs his fingers over the tattoo at Eugenio’s ribs, feeling the feathered vibration of his laughter.
“I’ve been thinking about it. You got any suggestions?”
“You’d just let me pick something?” Zach presses his mouth to the edge of one, and he expected the skin to feel different, to taste different, somehow, when he first kissed Eugenio there, in the rented bed of his Arizona apartment, the desert night pouring in the window. “How about a plant?”
“A plant?”
“Just—” and Zach’s long since cooled from the shower, but his face feels hot “—I mean, you can’t get something forus, but I’d know it was there.”
Eugenio puts his phone on the bedside table. He brackets Zach’s face with his hands, kissing him and interposing a thigh between his. Zach explores the muscles of Eugenio’s sides, the oblique he strained and didn’t tell the trainers about. He tries to imagine something written there, permanent, declarative, announcing to the world who they are to each other.
“Any particular kind of plant?” Eugenio asks later, when Zach’s resting with his ear against Eugenio’s chest.
“I don’t really know anything about tattoo designs. My parents wouldn’t be happy if I got one.”
“You worry about what they’ll think.”
“I mean, yeah.”
“You ever think they should meet you halfway?”
