Page 85 of Unwritten Rules
Except Eugenio keeps looking at him like he expects something else from Zach, something more than Zach’s opinions about a strike he stole in the sixth inning. A restlessness that builds over the course of their meal, Zach getting up and going to the restroom, his heart pounding when he gets to their table and sees that Eugenio is gone—only for him to come back a few minutes later saying he was asking for another drink at the bar.
And it’s probably after midnight, though Zach hasn’t looked at his phone since he turned off alerts and tucked it into his pocket. There are only a handful of diners left, a couple in a far corner facing away from them, a family with a baby asleep in a highchair, a few other kids running around the dance floor in a mostly quiet game of tag.
It’s late enough that Zach is half-tempted to just request the check and retreat to his apartment to contemplate the ceiling, forfeiting whatever chances he has and trying to move on. To remain here, safe in his isolation.
Except for the way Eugenio is looking at him. Except that Zach once drove through the unguarded desert twilight to kiss him. Except for all the times Zach wanted to tell him about his day, about the indignities of being an aging catcher in a humid city, to hear Eugenio’s complaints about bad umpiring or the Gothams’ mercurial bullpen, to sleep in the same bed and wake up with his fingers curved around Eugenio’s ribs, as indelible as a tattoo.
“I really don’t want to fuck this up,” Zach says.
Eugenio doesn’t say anything. The waiters have cleared off their dishes. Only Eugenio’s drink, mostly emptied, and the last sips of Zach’s beer remain, the table itself scarred by years of un-coastered drinks, ring marks overlapping. Zach has been resting his elbows on it, Eugenio his hands.
And Zach moves his arm, forearm against the damp tabletop, fingers extended. He pauses, thumb hovering over the rough surface of Eugenio’s knuckles. Inhales, holds it in his chest, blowing out lightly through his mouth, before lowering his thumb, an inch, a fraction of an inch, eclipsing the space between possibility and deniability and action, his hand reaching to cover Eugenio’s.
He can feel Eugenio’s pulse, the callus ridging his palm when Zach wraps his fingers around his, the weight of his stare as he looks down at their hands, and then up at Zach.
“Is this, um, okay?” Zach asks.
Eugenio nods, swallowing once, visibly. He smiles, a smile that starts as a twitch in his bottom lip before expanding. “Yes, this is okay.”
“I found this guy. He’s a therapist or a counselor, I guess. He helps people come out. I haven’t called him yet, but I put his number in my phone. I wanted to have it there, just to have.”
Eugenio looks like he’s going to say something, eyebrows shooting up, before deciding not to, especially when Zach holds up his other hand, asking for a second.
“I don’t think I’m going to tell everyone. But I need to tell someone. My family. Maybe the players here or on my next team. And I need some help doing that.”
“Zach.” Eugenio says it softly, like he’s holding the word in his mouth.
“I missed that. The way you say my name. I just, I miss it so much. I feel like I’ve missed out on so much. And I feel like it’s choking me. That it’s so close I could reach out and grab it, if only I could bring myself to. Do you ever feel like that?”
“Only,” Eugenio says, “only all the time.”
They sit like that for a while. The restaurant is quiet around them, the family hugging their goodbyes by the door. Music drifts in from the kitchen. Staff come around, clearing dishes into plastic tubs, wiping down tables, righting chairs. Two more come out with a mop and bucket, swiping figure-eights on the floor with economical motions, dousing and wringing the mop.
“We should maybe head out,” Zach says, though he hasn’t yet paid.
Which is when Vladimir comes back, rounding a corner with a tray holding three drinks. Eugenio squeezes their fingers where they’re interlocked before withdrawing his hand. “I hear you tell baseball stories,” he says in Spanish.
They end up drinking bourbon and listening to tales of the greatest Dominican hitters and how they would fare against the greatest Venezuelan pitchers—a conversation that starts congenial and ends in a re-litigation of the recent World Baseball Classic game between the two countries. One that apparently Eugenio is still sore about, mostly because the Venezuelan team struck out fourteen times while the Dominican team was K’d only five.
“Dominicans don’t strike out,” Vladimir says. “It’s simple. When you play vitilla, you don’t strike out.”
“What’s vitilla?” Zach asks.
A few minutes later, he finds himself holding the cut end of a broomstick in the courtyard behind the restaurant, Eugenio standing thirty or so feet away, flinging bottle caps at him.
The courtyard itself is a rectangular patch of grass lined by flower planters, with an unwatered fountain and shrubbery that Zach doesn’t care to investigate. A few trees stand watch, birds whistling from their branches. Vladimir turned the floodlights on, and with them a bug zapper, which is busy in its futile attempts to rid South Florida of anything that can sting or pester.
“Keep your eye on it.” Eugenio sails one of the caps—the top of a large water jug—at Zach. The cap doesn’t stay level, doesn’t have the normal trajectory of a baseball pitch. Zach hasn’t ever faced a knuckleballer before, but this must be what it’s like: to see the ball dance and swerve and dip unpredictably.
“Fuck.” Zach swings through it, missing and Eugenio, having appointed himself both pitcher and umpire, calls a loud strike one. “How am I supposed to hit that thing?”
“Use the stick, Zach,” Eugenio says, and then sends him another. This one makes glancing contact, swerving off the end of the broomstick and into the shrubbery, though Eugenio reminds him it’s strike two.
“How’d you learn how to do this, anyway?”
Eugenio flings another cap at him, one that takes a funny turn in its trajectory, disappearing into the darkness at the edge of the courtyard. “We play it in Venezuela too. It’s called chapita, but it’s more or less the same thing. My cousins and I would sometimes play whenever we’d go back there for the summers.”
“If that’s the case, then how come you struck out tonight?”
