Page 20 of Diamond Ring
None of which he’s ready to say as Jake moves the crescent of his back against Alex’s chest and mumbles, “Go back to sleep,” adding something that sounds suspiciously likeAngel, which Alex has forbidden almost everyone in the clubhouse from calling him.
So Alex does. When he wakes up, Jake is gone.
Chapter Six
October
Jake
At first, Jake doesn’t know where he is. He’s in bed. Light invades through the window. His head throbs. Someone is with him; they tighten their arms around him as Jake crosses the threshold from sleep to wakefulness.
“Jake,” the person says, and right, it’sAlex, whose apartment he showed up to last night. He peels himself away, leaving Jake cold and with too much to think about all at once, the previous twelve hours coming to him in flashes.
Losing spectacularly. Drinking heavily, the kind of drinking that has painlessness as its end point. Stumbling into a cab and managing to give the driver Alex’s address. Banging on Alex’s door because Jake wanted to be fifty thousand miles from the nearest person and also right next to him.
Falling asleep on the couch. Waking up, fuzzy-mouthed, bleary-headed, with a singular intention. Because if they couldn’t win a world championship together, they could at least have this. Alex looks at him sometimes, the kind of look underpinned with something else. It was late enough and Jake was drunk enough that the invisible barrier separating them felt flimsy, inconsequential. Until Alex flinched away.
No sense in pretending to be asleep now with Alex already stirring. “What time is it?” Jake asks. His voice hurts his throat.
The clock reads ten a.m., too early to do anything other than let his body process his hangover. He’ll have to go into the clubhouse to complete the funereal task of throwing all his stuff in boxes. Too much to contemplate with the world intruding like the morning light.
“You want coffee?” Alex rolls away, sending ripples through the mattress. Of course Alex is offering him something—coffee or breakfast or the shirt off his back, though Jake is already wearing one of those.
It’s too much. It’s all too much. Jake turned off his phone last night when someone discovered his number, when he got a hundred anonymous text messages telling him how much he fucked up. Like he doesn’t know. He hasn’t been back to his apartment, but the fact that he lives there is no secret to his neighbors. He might find a vigil or a hand grenade or just the empty walls that he’ll have to spend the next few months explaining things to.
“I’m gonna sleep.” Jake curls himself, back rounded, and presses into Alex’s space, because Alex is the only person who can shield him from this. A thought that should scare him. It’s been a long time since Jake slept with anyone, since he actually spent the night and didn’t just leave with his number written on a scrap of paper. Longer since he slept with someone and just slept.
Jake has a reputation, intentional and well-watered: that he likes sex, which he does, and likes it with women, which he does, albeit not exclusively. That he’s not bi because that’s something pro ballplayers aren’t. A persona Alex believes because Jake has convinced him to believe it.
If Jake hasn’t asked Alex about who he’s sleeping with, it’s mostly because he doesn’t want those questions in return. At first he thought that Alex just didn’t sleep with anyone. That got amended the night he dragged Alex home from the bar, when his search for painkillers among items in Alex’s nightstand drawer revealed that Alex does sleep with people. Sometimes using stuff that comes with an instruction manual. The fact of which Jake found intimate and thrilling and impossible to bring up without sounding like a total creep.
With Alex, there was always a flinch, a change of subject, a strange gap in their friendship where they share everything else. One that’s seemingly dissolved now with Alex’s chest pressed against his back. He’s hard, cock making itself known to Jake’s ass, even if Alex doesn’t seem inclined to do anything about it. It’s morning. It’s a physiological reaction. Like everything else in Jake’s life, it’s unintentional and probably fleeting.
Jake doesn’t want him to move, so murmurs, “Go back to sleep, Angel.” A statement he can’t blame on whiskey or the disorientation of an unfamiliar bed. Because he’d know Alex anywhere, but especially here.
They sleep like that, or Alex does, and Jake catalogs how they fit together, the press of Alex’s knees to his, Alex’s mouth warm on his neck. Alex’s hands, battered from years of catching, cling to the fabric of Jake’s shirt. He has the urge to pull one to his mouth, to press his lips to the valley of Alex’s palm. To try to express what he can’t in words. That, even adrift, his internal compass spinning, his path could only lead him here.
So Jake sleeps. When he wakes, Alex is still wrapped around him. Jake shouldn’t like any of this as much as he does—Alex’s strength and the comforting rainwater smell of his sheets. Shouldn’t need any of this as much as he does. Because he knows, if he asked, there’s very little that Alex wouldn’t give him. If he asked, Alex might sayyes, not because he wants something but because when it comes to him, Alex hasn’t ever saidno.
Jake makes the decision for him. He extracts himself, slowly, then attempts to straighten his clothes. In the bathroom mirror, he looks exhausted and hungover. He swallows a couple pills with a palmful of water, swishes with Alex’s oversweet organic mouthwash, and tells himself he’s doing the right thing.
The walk home is brutal. The sun glares at him; the people on the sidewalk do the same, possibly because Jake brushes past a few, their arms briefly colliding, possibly because he lost yesterday.
His apartment is free of death threats or memorials. Just Jake and the dishes he hasn’t done in a week because he was playing for the commissioner’s trophy, a piece of metal that feels both meaningless and like the most important thing he’s ever lost.
He runs the water in the kitchen sink until it’s hot, stoppers it, adds a few dashes of dish soap. For a while, there’s nothing to do but scrub and rinse and scrub and rinse, loading dishes into the dishwasher that are probably clean enough to eat from.
He dries his arms with a towel, then surveys the rest of his apartment. It’s a mess. Everything’s a mess. He gets a trash bag out and sweeps up drink bottles, a box with fossilized pizza he doesn’t remember ordering, half-eaten bags of sunflower seeds he sometimes brings home from the park.
He loses a few hours that way, cleaning, straightening, a spree that tips from frustration into something else when he empties his dresser drawers so he can refold his shirts. In his rational mind, he knows it’s for a sense of control as the world spirals around him. In his irrational mind, if he just folds and refolds and refolds this one shirt until its seams perfectly align, he won’t have to think about how he failed. On national television. With Alex looking at him from sixty feet away.
He’s missed pitch locations before. That’s the nature of the game. The catcher puts down signs and the pitcher tries to throw them there. After their first game together, Alex and he were on the same page ninety-nine point nine times out of one hundred. It’s just that last little decimal. The interference of the wind or an errant stitch on the ball or the stochastic forces in the universe flicking the pitch just so.
Except Jake’s not sure if that’s what happened. If he didn’t put the ball exactly where he meant to and Alex’s wrist just got in the way.
He refolds his shirts, then returns them to the dresser. Remakes his bed, stretching the sheets as taut as he feels. He should shave, shower, change. He tosses the sweats Alex lent him into the overflowing laundry pile, then goes for his shirt.
It smells like Alex. Like the fussy toothpaste he uses, which surprised Jake the first time he saw it. Alex, who likes unlistenable punk music. Who once broke a toe in a mosh pit. Who seemed tough, until you got to know him, and then he just seemed strong.
