Page 58 of Unwritten Rules
And maybe Gordon looked at him for no particular reason. He’s a nice guy, Eugenio’s landlord even though he refused offers of rent. He hasn’t shown up unannounced with the pack of folks he always rolls with, instead calling and telling Eugenio to clean the place up—not that it was ever really messy—but giving them enough time for Zach to shower and throw clothes on and sit on Eugenio’s couch, pretending to be engrossed in a movie with his hair still wet. A nice guy, but Zach doesn’t want to test the limits of his niceness, especially not in front of their teammates, the restaurant waitstaff. Not with Eugenio there, laughing expansively and pressing his thigh against Zach’s.
One of the bathrooms opens. Zach goes in and splashes water on his face, trying to cycle his breathing back to normal. He thinks about texting someone—Morgan, maybe, though he doesn’t know what to say. His sister, who would tell him that he picks food off everyone’s plates and always has. Eugenio, to tell him to sit farther away from him and to stop making jokes and having a lower lip Zach has to watch in order to hear them.
When Zach gets to the table, he slides into his seat, eats his duck mechanically, and keeps his thigh a few inches from Eugenio’s.
“Your food okay?” Eugenio asks, when he sees Zach sawing a microscopic piece of duck down even further.
“It’s perfect.” But he doesn’t finish it and declines the waiter’s offer of a box.
When they get back to the hotel, Zach stops for a small bottle of nail polish remover at the little vending area in the lobby, one selling single-serve pints of ice cream, half bottles of wine, and various toiletries. He should take the nail polish off, especially since they have Eugenio starting the next two games. Especially since the cashier glances at his hands and then up at him in question.
The light is on in his room when he opens the door, Eugenio on one of the beds watching something on TV. And right, Zach slid his extra key into Eugenio’s stall under his mitt. He tried to be clandestine about putting it there until he realized it was an unmarked black room key for a hotel they were all staying at.
Eugenio clicks off the television. “I didn’t want to rummage through your stuff.” He wiggles his unpainted fingers.
It takes Zach a minute to find the nail polish, which is in his travel toiletry kit, sitting under a spare tube of toothpaste. “Here you go.” He tosses the bottle to Eugenio.
It’s a matte white; he tried a different brand that turned out to be too shiny and hard to see. This kind only takes one coat to be visible but a while to set because, according to his sister, the quick-drying kind is garbage that peels off.
“It might be easier if you did it,” Eugenio says. “My coordination isn’t great with my left hand.”
“Uh, get comfortable, I guess. This shit takes forever to dry.”
They end up sitting cross-legged on one of the beds. Eugenio takes off his shirt when Zach tells him he doesn’t want to wreck it by accident and holds out his hand like Zach’s a manicurist at a nail salon. He has big palms, squared-off fingers, nails filed neatly the way pitchers do to get a good grip on the ball.
“Sorry,” Zach says, before he starts, “this is probably gonna look like shit.”
“I’m sure the pitching staff will notice and complain.”
Zach twists the top off the nail polish, setting the bottle onto the nightstand and holding the brush. It’s different from this angle, Zach pushing a blob of nail polish on the plane of one of Eugenio’s nails, down, and then tracing upward like in a YouTube tutorial he watched on how to do this. He thought about having his nails done at a salon, but he really only needed the one hand, and only occasionally, and didn’t want to deal with guys thinking this was something he went out of his way to do.
He tries to keep his hand steady, holding Eugenio’s fingers with his left hand and anchoring the pinky of his right on the bedspread to make it easier to paint. Eugenio isn’t watching him—or rather, he’s watching the slow spread of nail polish on his fingernail, Zach re-dipping the brush and beginning the next one. “Have you done this before?” Eugenio asks.
“Hold still. And no, not for someone else. Why, have you?”
“A couple times with my ex.”
Zach finishes the coat on Eugenio’s index and middle fingers. “Quit moving your hand. It’s gonna look jacked up.”
He takes Eugenio’s ring finger, rotating it to one side, and then the other, applying polish. “Put your hand down on the comforter.” And it only takes two strokes to do Eugenio’s pinky nail. “Do you want me to get your thumb?”
“Yeah, might as well.”
Zach does, blowing over it when he’s done. “There, I can set a timer. I usually wait about ten minutes.”
Eugenio is looking down at his nails. The paint is white, a contrast to his skin, tanned from playing outside. It’s more visible than it is on Zach.
“Thanks,” Eugenio says. He wets his bottom lip with his tongue, and Zach is about to lean in and kiss him, when he says, “Um, do you think you could do the other hand too?”
“Guys’ll notice that. Someone’ll probably say something.”
“You can take it off right after. I just want to see how it looks.” Eugenio is flushed, and his face must actually be burning, looking everywhere but Zach, at the forest-green bedspread, over Zach’s shoulder at the TV on the dresser behind them. “It’s okay. Forget I said anything.”
“No, um, here.” Zach shifts Eugenio’s right hand—his throwing hand, the one he actually uses to signal specific pitches with—on the comforter, thumb and forefinger circling his wrist without applying pressure. “Don’t move this one, okay?”
He takes Eugenio’s left hand, the hand he conceals in his mitt when he’s catching, and in batting gloves otherwise, though he usually strips those off and stuffs them in his back pocket when he’s on base. The fingernails he has no practical reason, no justifiable baseball reason, to paint.
Objectively, it’s no more difficult to do this hand than it was the other. Except for the way Eugenio sucks a breath as Zach starts on his first finger. Except for the way that he’s watching the slow spread of polish on his nail, biting his lip. Except for that he’s moving his wrist, a small motion but one Zach stills, his thumb pressing the tendons in Eugenio’s forearm.
