Page 81 of Unwritten Rules
“No.” Because Zach woke up with Eugenio there, draped next to him, complaining of the early morning cold, about Zach’s feet against his legs, about how coffee doesn’t make itself. He pressed his face into Zach’s shoulder and talked about how he wanted to rent bikes that day. About a new restaurant he picked. About a hundred things lying before them, the possibility of years together, now set aside. “No, you don’t have to drop me off. I’ll figure it out.”
Eugenio goes into the bedroom, leaving Zach to watch his own expression where it’s mirrored in the blank screen of the television. He emerges a few minutes later, rolling a suitcase behind him.
“I think that’s everything.” There’s a piece of fabric protruding from the zipper, and Eugenio usually insists on folding his clothes, even his dirty laundry, when he packs. He stands, waiting for Zach to do something other than lie there. Like he expects Zach to scream or cry or dig in with his fingernails and not let go.
But Zach doesn’t know what to ask. If this was a sudden decision or a long time coming. If he should have seen the cracks between them broadening into fractures instead of being surprised when it all caved in so quickly.
Eugenio leaves the suitcase. He comes over and slips his hand under Zach’s chin, focusing his gaze up. Leans and presses his lips to Zach’s forehead, the bridge of his nose. Once, glancingly, to his mouth.
“I wish,” Eugenio says, and his voice sounds strained, “I wish you cared about yourself, the way I’ve seen you care for other people. I wish you cared about me enough to—”
“Eugenio.” And it’s desperate, pleading. Like Zach might drop to his knees and beg, if his body wasn’t pinned to the couch, held by an invisible weight.
Another kiss, this one simple. Finite. Over before Zach can acknowledge it.
Eugenio gets his suitcase, wheels loud against the wood floors, echoing off all the empty space between them. And he walks out, shutting the door, the soft snick of the bolt in the lock. Leaves Zach to watch his taillights fade as he drives away.
Zach sits there for a long time, body unable to move from the couch. Sits there and thinks,I should call someone.But doesn’t. Scrolls through his phone, an endless list of contacts—players he knew in high school, the minors, who played for the team years ago and who’ve cycled out to play in Korea or the Mexican leagues. Some who’ve left the game entirely, felled by injury, exhaustion, financial hardship. The ones who look back on their playing days as a lark, a sun-dappled adventure from their youth.
And he can’t call any of them. Can’t call Aviva, though he considers it. Or his mom, just to hear gossip from their shul. To put his father on and have him talk about what old men talk about—amateur radio, police procedurals—and not why Zach is calling for no particular reason.
Morgan—he hovers his thumb over her number. She asked, occasionally, if he was seeing anyone, with that interest that married people get about their single friends. And he could tell her. She left the Elephants and didn’t come back even when the team, finally done with its waffling, offered to hold her position. Went to Korea to play in the tournament. The US team finished seventh, and when he asked her if she regretted it, she shook her head and said she mostly regretted not trying out before.
It’s not that late, though almost an hour has elapsed from Eugenio walking out until now, time an impossibly slow drip. He could get up. Get a drink. Sleep in the bed that smells like Eugenio’s cologne. Wake up with the sheets cold and have to summon a rideshare to take him to rent a truck.
He should get up. He should put his feet on the floor and command the muscles in his legs to carry him across the echoing living room to the bottle of bourbon Eugenio left.
Instead, he listens to his own breathing, intake and exhalation the only things he feels capable of. He wonders how long he can lie there: for the next hour, and the next, and the next. Until the next season, the long stretch of unfilled baseball-less time between October and February.
It’s possible that the team won’t trade Eugenio or nontender his contract, making him a free agent. Won’t send him anywhere but back to their Arizona training field for pitchers-and-catchers report. And Zach can’t imagine coming to the bullpen in the early desert mornings, pretending to be coworkers or, worse,friends. The thought leaves an acid taste in the back of his mouth; the glass of water he pulls from the sink only intensifies it.
Bourbon helps. He stands at the counter drinking, bypassing the warm, feel-good phase of being drunk in favor of oblivion. Pours and slugs it back, not bothering to taste it, until he feels like he might heave his guts out on the rented kitchen floor.
He doesn’t sleep in their bed that night, instead drunkenly installing sheets in a bedroom downstairs, the windowless one they never slept in. It’s dark enough that his eyes don’t adjust, and his vision spins and then his stomach, the kind of unpleasant drunk where he’s still conscious but can’t do anything more than lie there.
He must cry at some point, because he wakes up, eyes crusted, miserable, head throbbing from dehydration, and with a text from Morgan on his phone.
What do you mean “Eugenio left”? Where are you?
He does get sick, in the unused bathroom next to this cold cocoon of a bedroom, chilled enough that the sheets feel sweaty. He takes the kind of post-drunk shower where he can smell the bourbon leaking from his skin. Breakfast would settle his stomach, but then he remembers he doesn’t have a car with him, andfuck.
It takes fifteen minutes for a rideshare to arrive, a twenty-minute trip to the rental car place, a wait to get the attention of an agent.
“Aren’t you,” the counter agent says, “that guy who plays for the Elephants?”
“Yeah,” Zach says, hungover-ly, “sure am.”
“How’d you make it down here without a vehicle?”
And it’s everything Zach can do to study the counter, which has various policies and brochures under a clear coating of plastic. To look down at his own hands. To breathe, the kind of don’t-break-down breathing he coaches pitchers through when they just got walloped by the opposing team.
“A friend dropped me off. Nice to get some quiet after the season, you know?”
He signs something and poses for a picture he looks like shit in, finally getting into his rented truck, which smells recently detailed and is bare of anything other than a road atlas and manual. Nothing like Eugenio’s, where he kept a flat of Gatorade in the flavor Zach prefers, two sets of spare shoes, a bike helmet, a few game-used balls he could sign for people when they approached him in public the way Gordon advised him to.
And Zach pulls into the driveway of his rental house and checks to make sure that no one is around before spending a solid five minutes resting his head against the steering wheel.
He calls Morgan, FaceTime ringing only once before she picks up. “Wow,” she says, “you look rough.”
