Page 94 of Diamond Ring
“Decided they don’t get that part too.” Alex kisses his hair—the kind of kiss they can’t do if Jake keeps playing, the satisfaction of having rebuilt his career weighed against the unthinking press of Alex’s lips.
He told Alex that before this year he was apprehensive about playing in Japan because it felt like too much to do alone—the truth, but not the entirety of it, since he mostly worried about the isolation’s effect on his mental health.
Now he doesn’t know if he wants to go there alone, without Alex. If he can reasonably say,Hey, put off your dreams just a little longerso I can go live mine.
And he doesn’t want to interrupt this temporary respite, especially with a mug of tea that smells like the woods. With Alex sitting next to him, a solid line at his side.
They do what players on an off-day do: watch a movie, eat, throw in the backyard when the rain temporarily clears, mist rising from the grass like ghosts. Alex, near a bed of feathery-topped carrots, smiling as Jake’s pitches float into his glove. It’s damp enough that Jake eventually gets cold, a fact he complains about, expecting an indulgent New England eye roll.
“We could go in”—Alex smirks—“warm up.”
So Jake finds himself under the quilt on Alex’s bed, under the careful attentions of Alex’s hands. After, they sleep, an early evening nap that Jake wakes up from with Alex sitting next to him and gets a kiss dropped on the shell of his ear.
“I want to tell you something,” Alex says, and he smiles when Jake nods. “I love you.” Said with Alex’s familiar brevity, in the same tone he might say,Throw a changeup. Except for the flicker of his smile, the set-back challenge of his shoulders.
Jake laughs, kisses him, enjoying the scrape of his stubble, the dark line of his eyelashes, how he chases Jake’s mouth like he can’t bear to be apart. “I love you too.”
Noises rise from downstairs—conversation, Marianne’s drums. “We should probably see about dinner,” Alex says. Though he pulls Jake back down and kisses him. For a minute, the world is the two of them and the curtain of evening rain, Alex’s words on his lips,I love yous he whispers again, again.
Eventually Jake pulls on his clothes, readying himself for Sofia’s glare and Marianne’s subtle distaste and Evie’s less subtle one. It’s not like he doesn’t deserve some of it. His mother had a few choice words about Alex too, though stopped when Jake mentioned that they were playing together again.
Downstairs, a hive of activity, Sofia cooking and directing Marianne to both stop interfering and to taste what she’s making, for Evie to get out plates and glasses. For Alex, when he comes in, to lug down a food processor that looks like it originated in the late seventies.
They eat lumpy homemade pasta and pesto made from pumpkin seeds and wild garlic with a healthy dosing of nutritional yeast.
“This is really good,” Jake says, hoping to defuse some of Marianne’s glare.
She takes another bite. For a second, Jake worries she’s going to ignore him entirely. “Made all the foraging worth it.”
“Foraging”—he puts on his bestdealing with the mediasmile—“what’s that?”
Foraging, it turns out, involves sustainably collecting wild edible plants and other food items in a process that involves a lot of squinting at identification manuals, some guesswork, and the New England–inherited characteristic of knowing how to shuck an oyster.
“Don’t know how to do that,” Jake says, mostly to prompt their faux-outrage. He doesn’t point out that he’s from Maryland and doesn’t know how to pick crab either, since his family keeps kosher. “Aren’t you afraid you might eat a poisonous mushroom?”
Which prompts more information about fungi than Jake has ever considered. Still, it carries them through dinner, through dessert, through Sofia listing out another set of tasks for Alex, leaving Jake to help her with the dishes.
They wash up, Jake emptying the dishes into the compost bin, Sofia rinsing them and slotting them into the dishwasher. A silence, except for the splash of water, the scrape of a fork against mismatched plates.
“That foraging stuff is pretty cool,” Jake offers.
Sofia gives an affirmatory hum. “We believe in respecting everything we grow or find.” She runs a scrub brush over a plate, then sets it in the dishwasher with a clink. “That only really comes from knowing a place deeply. From being committed to it.”
A protectiveness like Alex’s, like happiness is something hard-won, that recasts her coldness to him over the last few days. “I don’t know what Alex told you about ten years ago,” he says, “but I don’t think I really understood how people—especially people who love each other—could hurt each other. Even without intending to.”
“I’m more interested in the future.” As if she can sense that he wants to split himself into Jake the ballplayer and Jake the person, one of whom gets paid to throw, the other who doesn’t wander. That the end of the season will arrive, with a rapidity it lacked when he was young, and he’ll have to decide.
He puts down a plate. “Alex has a big heart. I don’t intend to break it.”
“What we intend and what we do are sometimes misaligned.” Said sharply, though her shoulders drop, like she’s purposefully relaxing them. “I just mean—see that you don’t.”
Jake swallows around his apprehension as he says, “I’ll really try my best.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
October
Jake
