Page 19 of Diamond Ring
He taps Jake’s arm. Jake pulls back, just far enough to see the green-gray of his eyes, his eyelashes darkened and stuck together.
For a moment, neither of them moves. Alex watches the slow curtain of Jake’s eyelids as they lower, how his tongue wets his bottom lip. How he moves closer, fractionally closer, with the kind of unmistakable intent that Alex shouldn’t want. Because Jake is his best friend and because Jake is drunk. Perhaps worse, because Jake issad, and Alex can’t fix any of the things that are making him that way, no matter how much he wants to.
“We should—” Alex says. “You should get some sleep.”
Jake’s lips part in faint surprise. “Yeah, probably.” He sits up, blinking, leaving Alex’s torso chilly. “If you have a blanket or whatever, I can pass out here.”
“You can take the bed.” Because Alex will be up for a while, and because Jake is 6'4" and Alex’s couch isn’t.
Jake pads down the hallway toward the bedroom, drunken swaying replaced by fatigue.
Alex probably shouldn’t follow him. Should sit here and exercise good judgment and all that stuff because he knows—he knows—nothing good comes from this kind of despair.
He gets up. When he gets to his room, Jake is seated on the bed. He kicks off his shoes, strips out of his socks and the shorts he has over his compression leggings, and starts to take off his shirt. He must have abandoned his necklace somewhere along the line because he reaches for where it should be and looks momentarily surprised to find it missing.
“Here.” Alex tosses him a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. He has the impulse to turn around, to give Jake some privacy, though they’ve changed next to each other for the better part of a season.
Jake changes, skimming his leggings down and pulling on the sweatpants, a shirt with Alex’s last name across the back. His hair is in disarray. Alex’s hands itch to smooth it.
“Where are you gonna sleep?” Jake asks.
“The couch.” Alex grabs his spare blanket from the closet. His other pillow is on the bed. Where Jake is. And Alex takes a considered breath then reaches over him.
His T-shirt drapes, leaving a gap, enough room for Jake to reach up and curve a hand at his side. To settle his fingers against Alex’s ribs. He has a callus on his thumb that Alex knew about, because he’s felt it when Jake adjusted his hand while showing a pitch grip or slid it over some part of Alex to get his attention. Different now, in Alex’s bedroom. In the half dark. With nothing between them but the fabric of Alex’s shirt and the knowledge that, tomorrow, they’ll have to answer for their baseball sins to the media.
That Alex will go back to Rhode Island and Jake will go back to being straight.
“You could sleep here,” Jake says, like his invitation wasn’t clear already.
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Just sleep.”Just.The implication hangs for a second, like the suddenly humid air between them. “You don’t have to sleep on the couch.”
“Okay.” Because he doesn’t have infinite willpower, not with Jake looking at him like that. So Alex tries to put some distance between them. He cleans the living room. Turns out the lights. Gets more water for Jake who’ll probably be hurting when he wakes up.
Especially when they’ll have to answer the same questions, over and over: If Alex should have called for that pitch. If Jake missed his location throwing it or Alex set up in the wrong spot. The answers to which are either yeses or nos. Or worse. That they could watch that play a hundred times, and not know whose fault it was. That it might not be anyone’s fault, just the baseball gods deciding that now isn’t their time.
Jake’s asleep when he gets back, face mashed against a pillow. Alex sheds his pants but leaves his T-shirt and boxers, and slides into bed next to him, trying to hold his body apart, the tiniest strip of air as plausible deniability, though he’s not sure what, exactly, he’s trying to deny.
It doesn’t matter, not when Jake shifts, body slotting against his, back to Alex’s chest. His neck smells like him, like soft hair and sleep, and Alex’s mouth makes glancing contact with his skin. Jake approves, rolling his hips backward, seeking more contact, and Alex should get up, get his pillow and blanket, should flee his room, the apartment, into the rainless Oakland street.
He doesn’t. Instead he presses against Jake, against the long line of his body, the curled breadth of his shoulders and the waves of his hair. Alex has nothing else to do with his arms but wrap them around him. Jake gives a pleased murmur that makes it hard to focus on anything except how he belongs here, in Alex’s bed, next to him, sixty feet away when Alex goes to his knees in the dirt.
And tomorrow they’ll pretend this didn’t happen.
Alex sleeps, eventually, like a curtain pulled over the world. He wakes up, warm, hard, Jake grinding backward toward him unthinkingly, the swell of his ass against Alex’s cock. It’s one thing to drunkenly fall in bed together. Another to wake up sober, with the full provision of his senses and pretend that this is how things are between them.
Alex removes one arm then the other, easing away.
Jake grunts vaguely and throws a hand back as if to draw Alex to him. He blinks his eyes open, seeming to register where he is. “What time is it?”
It’s midmorning, practically dawn by ballplayer standards. They’ll have to go back into the clubhouse at some point today. Alex didn’t close his blinds. Light pours in the room, the bright California day at odds with how clouded he’s feeling.
“You want some coffee?” Alex says. Because he should get up, brew coffee, shower off the slightly sweaty feeling of having slept close to another person. Encourage Jake to do the same. Heshouldmake plans to go back to Rhode Island. Call up an old boyfriend or an old hookup, someone who doesn’t make his heart thump against the cage of his ribs like he’s misplayed a ball in front of fifty thousand people.
Jake shifts again, this time more deliberate. “I’m gonna sleep.”
Alex should leave him to it. Because he has questions. If this is the first time Jake has slept like this with a friend. If Jake is the kind of thickheaded straight guy to somehow not notice that Alex never has girlfriends, that Alex has pictures of himself in eyeliner and an ill-advised nipple piercing and an erection that Jake must be able to feel, even in his hungover morning obliviousness.
