Page 77 of Diamond Ring
Alex hits Play clumsily with his left hand. It’s easier to watch the video this time, for Jake to imagine that he’s watching some other version of himself, that he’ll wake up in bed with Alex ten years ago and this will all have been a cautionary dream. A timeline in which his arm stayed healthy, where they won it all. Where they spent the next ten years in Oakland playing together, attraction softening into friendship.
On screen, he throws three pitches. Each dots the outside corner of the strike zone, right where umpires are most generous about calling strikes. An intentional move by Alex, even if Jake didn’t appreciate it at the time. “Hey,” he says, “we used to be pretty good at this.”
Alex smiles, more with his eyes than with his mouth. “Yeah.”
“Maybe we could be again.”
Another smile, a shift, a rub of Alex’s thumb across his knuckles. “Yeah, I’m thinking we really could.”
New York is New York: loud, with an energy like Jake could touch his fingers to the sidewalk and feel its pulse. They board a charter bus that labors through traffic before it delivers them to a hotel that once housed robber barons, all glittering lobby and inefficient elevators. Jake resists the urge to look up, even though growing up in the DC suburbs still makes tall buildings a novelty.
He showers off the plane smell, unpacks to dewrinkle his clothes, and spends a good fifteen minutes sitting on his hotel room bed in a towel, staring at the view from the high-up window, the impossible stretch of the city bisected by the neat green rectangle of Central Park.
“This is nice,” he says out loud, because it is. Easy as baseball ever gets. The team group chat is already abuzz with dinner plans for tomorrow after their game. Even Alex sent aSureabout if he was joining them.
Jake takes out his journal, inscribes a horizontal line under his earlier entry for the day.Hotel room is great: good view, good bed. Nervous about my start. Better now that...Be honest. Erase nothing...now that Alex held my hand. A strangely vulnerable thing to write, even in a book full of his deepest anxieties. That he was calmed by the simple contact of their palms and Alex’s slight smile as he pointed something out on screen and his unwavering assurance that they could actually do this. Jake feels coated in that assurance now, like a thin but unmistakable armor against the world that he can’t quite bring himself to name.
A knock at his hotel room door interrupts his contemplation, along with Alex’s muffled “It’s me.”
Jake answers, still in his towel, and gets a sweep of Alex’s gaze as he comes in. He’s holding a couple of fielder’s gloves. “Figured we could get some throwing in.”
“You wanna have a catch?”
“I did before I knew you weren’t wearing anything.” Alex wraps a hand around his side, thumb against his hipbone, the heat in his eyes decidedly un-casual.
“Don’t know if we have time for that,” Jake says.
“At some point we should make the time.” Alex gives his hip one final pat like he might on the mound, then goes over to the window as Jake pulls on clothes.
“Where’d you want to go throw?” Jake asks when he’s dressed.
“Figure that big piece of lawn across the street might work.”
Outside, they have to walk a little while into the park to find an unfenced patch of grass. Around them, the hum of a restless city, shouted phone conversations and the brisk steps of dog-walkers.
They set up in a clearing, watched by elm trees and looming buildings. Alex, forty-ish feet away, with a ball he thumps in his glove before tossing to Jake. Maybe it’s the lack of team branding other than Jake’s hat or the way people don’t even nod as they walk past. Maybe it’s the anonymity that comes from being in a place where everyone carries themselves like they’re a little bitsomeone, which renders Alex and him nobodies. Maybe it’s just that Jake is tired from the flight, and warm from the late-in-the-day sun, and still can feel Alex’s hand in his, even from this distance. “I want to try something,” he says.
Alex nods. “Okay.”
Jake rotates the ball in his hand, forming his familiar changeup grip, his middle, ring, and pinky fingers astride the ball.Go slow. Easier said than done, an argument with his own body that wants to hurl fire and settles for embers.Go slow. The way Alex did the night they fucked, the patience of his hips, his hands, his promise ofno rushas if they have time.Go slow. Jake breathes and tries to match his pulse to it, pushes out that persistent gnawing worry that he’ll never get back what he lost.
But it doesn’t matter, here, in the fading light, his anxieties shoved off his shoulders, Alex ready to catch whatever he throws. So he does, a slow version of his changeup, without its familiar downward bite. A lazy pitch that wobbles in its path.
Alex catches it, then looks at the ball like it’s done something extraordinary. “What was that?”
“Just trying something.”
A return of the ball in a high assured arc. “Well, try it again.”
Jake does, again, then again, careful not to impart too much force on the ball’s seams.
“How’s that feel?” Alex says.
“Like playing catch.” Which it does. Easy, with his natural throwing motion, with Alex snagging it, like they’re just messing around in Manhattan’s backyard. “How’s it look?”
“It looks good.” Another toss, another catch. “It looks really good.” Alex holds up a hand, jogs over to Jake like he might in a game. “Try throwing that between two fastballs.”
Jake looks around, at the flat ground he’s tossing off, at Alex who’s protected by no more than the brim of his hat. “You sure that’s a good idea?”
