Page 36 of Unwritten Rules
“Sure. I don’t want to make too much of it, if you’re saying it’s nothing.”
Zach looks out at the cloudless Arizona sky, hills dotted with patches of trees, the kind stubborn enough to grow in a desert.
“Look, if—” But there’s a metallic burn in the back of his throat that he has to swallow around. “If I was gonna tell anyone something, Morgan, I’d tell you. But I can’t, and you know I can’t. And you of all people should knowwhyI can’t.”
She sits for a second before rising, arms out as if asking permission, and then he’s enveloped in one of her hugs, not one of her bone-crushing ones, but something gentler that somehow hurts more, standing while he’s sitting and wrapping her arms around his shoulders. “Thank you,” she says, after a while.
She goes and gets another round, even though he’s not done with his beer, bringing back a pile of extra napkins that she pins to the table with the guacamole dish. She doesn’t say anything when he blows his nose with one.
“There’s this fundraiser my parents are having,” he says a few minutes later, once his throat feels back to normal, his lungs like they can pull enough oxygen into them. “It’s over the All-Star break. They keep pestering me to put in an appearance. It’s just for some local politician, but I was wondering if you wanted to come.”
“A vacation in Baltimore? How fancy.”
“I don’t know if you have plans already, but I figure I’ll go out there for the week, maybe go to the beach.”
“We don’t have plans. Plus, I hear they got rum at beaches on the East Coast, even if they suck.”
“Lydia would be invited too. If she wants to come.”
“Your parents—” Morgan fiddles with her ring. “I mean, would they be all right with her being there?”
“They wouldn’t give you a hard time. Maybe ask some shit you don’t want them to, probably about having kids because my brother has one and they want everyone to. But, no, I wouldn’t put you in that situation.”
“I figured they were...” She catches herself, shaking her head as if to dispel the thought. “Let me talk with Lydia about it. But yeah, you never know. Maybe it’s good to get a change of scenery midway through the season.”
D’Spara finds him out in the bullpen one morning. It’s late enough in the day to be spring-warm, the sun pleasant on his face. His pleasant feeling doesn’t last when D’Spara wastes no time in getting to his point. “Are you still training with Morales?”
And Zach’s stuck between the lie—that of course they’re still working together, why wouldn’t they be, and there’s no reason they wouldn’t be—and the truth that he sometimes catches Eugenio looking at him, mostly when Zach’s trying, and failing, not to look right back. “I didn’t think we really needed to. He’s gotten pretty good at framing.”
It sounds defensive, Zach making excuses for why he’s no longer doing something the team told him to do. D’Spara frowns at him, the edges of his mustache drooping, giving a sigh like Zach’s one of the many, many problems he’ll need to deal with in his day. An expression that Zach wants to avoid if the team is still considering who’ll be on the roster for the season and who’ll be sent down.
“We can keep working on it,” Zach says.
“Glad to hear that, son.” D’Spara gets up. “Johnson’s still tipping his curveball.” And Zach waits until he leaves before draining his coffee and scrubbing his hand across his closed eyes.
Eugenio doesn’t do more than shrug when Zach tells him D’Spara wants them to keep working together. And their practice is like before: a pitching machine, Eugenio squatting and moving his mitt, trying to massage balls into strikes. Except that Zach stands at a careful distance away from him like they’re being monitored by chaperones at a school dance. Like if he gets any closer, they’ll be inevitably drawn together by forces Zach is helpless to resist.
“Quit flapping your glove,” Zach says, for the third time.
“Stop telling me and come show me.” Like Zach is being ridiculous standing there, more than six feet away. Which he probably is.
Up close, Eugenio looks good, less tired than he was at the beginning of spring training. It’s warm enough that a drip of sweat traces its way down his face, down toward the neck of the T-shirt, and Zach doesn’t watch it or the way he licks his lips to wet them in the dry Arizona air.
“If you keep your thumb up, it’ll be less obvious when you’re moving your glove.” He reaches to adjust Eugenio’s arm, clasping Eugenio’s wrist, rotating it, his fingers bright points of contact.
It shouldn’t be anything. It shouldn’t be anything. But it’s both better and worse than it was before, obvious in the way they both pause, Eugenio looking down at Zach’s hand.
And Zach can feel the tattoo of Eugenio’s pulse, the strength of the muscles in his forearms, the way he inhales, shoulders expanding. He has his mask tipped up on his forehead, and Zach almost wishes he were wearing it now so that he didn’t have to see his expression: impassivity mixed with something more heated. Something Zach can’t want, not shielded from the rest of their teammates only by chain link, especially when he remembers the hunger with which Eugenio kissed, the way he looked at Zach like he was worth looking at.
Especially not when Johnson comes in, placing his bag obliviously by the fence and wishing them both a good morning.
It’s enough to make Zach drop where he’s holding Eugenio’s arm. “Move your hand like we, uh, talked about.”
From there, it’s practice, Johnson setting up near Eugenio, Zach’s attention divided between them, bouncing from assuring Johnson that he’s flapping his glove correctly to conceal his pitch types to convincing Eugenio to stop moving his when he catches.
“You’re fine,” he says to Johnson, when Johnson throws, wiggling the last three fingers of his glove so as not to reveal how he’s holding the ball.
“He’s tipping.” Eugenio gets up from where he was squatting and clicks off the pitching machine, then walks over to where Johnson is standing on the tilted bullpen mound.
