Page 82 of Unwritten Rules
“There’s something I need to tell you. About me and Eugenio.”
She waits.
He feels dizzy, from his lingering hangover, from the past twenty-four hours. From the past two years. He focuses on the façade of their rental house—his rental house—and not on Morgan’s face on the screen. “We’re together. Or were together. I guess we’re not anymore.”
There’s a pause, enough of one that he looks down at his phone. She’s chewing her lip. “How long has that been going on?”
“Pretty much since we met each other. Almost two years. You’re, um, the first person I’ve told.”
“Zach, holy fuck.”
“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me how fucked up it is.”
Morgan holds up a hand. “I honestly need a second with this. Two years. I’m your friend and you didn’t tell me.”
“I didn’t tell anyone. And I guess I stuck him with the same thing.”
“Youguess?”
“I told him I’d work on it.”
“Did you?” Her voice has the kind of flat inflection she reserves for guys she’s trying not to punch, her face held carefully neutral.
“No, I didn’t. He left, and it’s sudden, and I should probably go after him.”
“Are you going to? Work on it, I mean?”
And Zach thinks of his parents on the phone, his mother setting him up with her friends’ daughters, their delight at Eitan’s son, Aviva’s engagement. The kind of joy that can’t be divorced from expectation. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can.”
“Well, there’s your answer.”
He sits for a while like that, Morgan’s face on the phone, the smell of the ocean coming in the truck’s back windows. “I have a beach house. If, um, you and Lydia wanted to come down.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Even if we both didn’t have to work, I’m honestly not sure how I’m supposed to feel right now.”
“I mean, it’s not like we could be together-together.”
“Zach, I know what it’s like being closeted. And I don’t want to make the decision to come out or not for anyone else. But making promises like that, knowing you’re going to break them, that’s what I’m stuck on.”
“Yeah, I guess, I don’t know. I thought it’d work itself out somehow.” He waves a hand before Morgan can say anything. “I know, I know. I fucked up. I could just use a friend right now. You don’t have to approve or whatever.” His voice goes tight and he can’t look at his phone for a minute, focusing on the gray rolling tide out his window, the way the water erodes the rocks. “I could just use somebody to listen and not try to fix anything right now.”
“Okay,” she says, “I can do that.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
July, Present Day
The Gothams series in Miami begins on a Monday, a three-game set of two night games and an afternoon game before a travel day. Normally, Zach doesn’t mind playing in the empty fan-less cavern of Swordfish Park. But it’s embarrassing to walk out before their first game to see fewer than five thousand people in a space that holds seven times that. Especially when the Gothams play in a perpetually packed house, fans cheering and booing and breathing with the team’s every movement. Especially when Eugenio is in the visitors’ clubhouse, his presence palpable even if Zach hasn’t seen him yet.
Zach checks his phone approximately three hundred times but finds only the same text he sent to Eugenio a few days ago. One that says,Dinner Monday?AndI want to tell you somethingsitting there on Read without a response.
Zach drifts from the weight room to the batting cages and even out to the bullpen, to the point Pinelli asks him if he’s feeling okay.
“Yeah, just keyed up for the series, I guess.”
“More like waiting for a call from his agent,” Womack says. A few of his teammates have been ribbing him about it, seeing if the team will trade him at the trade deadline, which represents the last opportunity for contending teams to trade for players from non-contenders like Miami.
Zach shrugs, hoping that they’ll take that as ambivalence about being traded rather than nervousness about the game they’re about to play.
