Page 68 of Diamond Ring
A demand phrased as a question. Fuck.Fuck.
Alex gets up. “We gotta make this quick.”
Todd grins, bright, accommodating, except it’s clear he won’t let them opt out of this. “Won’t take more than a few minutes.”
In Todd’s office, they settle in what are now their customary seats: Jake on the couch and Alex in the armchair. Todd, with his desk chair pulled out like he’s a cool teacher in a bad movie.
“I just wanted to check in with you,” Todd says. Like he couldn’t have done this yesterday. Like there isn’t an unwritten clubhouse rule about not talking to a pitcher on the day of his start. A check-in that means Alex will have to lie to Todd and tell him that everything’s good with Jake on the field and lie to Jake and tell him that everything’s good off it. He doesn’t say anything; Jake doesn’t answer either, long enough that Todd eventually cracks.
“You give any thought to those lists I asked you to make?” he says.
The list. Three things important to Jake. Alex ekes out an “uh-huh,” and Jake—who used to be eager to show coaches how much work he was putting in before they overworked him into injury—just nods.
“Don’t both rush to share,” Todd says.
More silence.
Todd lets out a long, slow breath. “This process works if you want it to work. But you have towantto improve your relationship with one another.”
Relationship. Alex tries not to flinch. He’s spent the past few days ignited by flashes of memory—Jake, against his apartment door, who kissed like he never wanted Alex to stop, then told him this was for one night only. Jake, who Alex stripped bare and fucked slow so that he wouldn’t have to leave. Then Alex left with his socks shoved in the pockets of his jeans along with the scraps of his pride.
The problem is what it’s always been: I want a relationship and Jake doesn’t.
If Alex asked Sofia, she’d give the exasperated exhale of the longtime partnered and tell him totalkto Jake. Which he should, though he’s afraid of what Jake might say. How Jake might, gently but firmly, tell him that this isn’t going to work, and Alex will just have to...live the rest of his life knowing that his decade-longwhat ifwas unceremoniously extinguished.
He has Jake’s necklace—the one he took from Jake’s room the day he stormed out—sitting under his shirt collar. Something that made him feel slightly less despairing when he put it on that morning. Now its fraying cable just reminds him of how long they’ve been at this. How much he wants and how much he sometimes doesn’t get.
His phone saves him. His cousin calling him—and Evie’s young enough that an unannounced phone call in the middle of the day is basically a warning siren.
“I gotta take this.” Alex holds up his phone, then leaves, not waiting for Todd’s permission.
He’s looking for a quiet piece of clubhouse when he’s accosted by Toni the documentarian, who has both impeccably bad timing and a camera crew with her. She opens her mouth like she’s going to ask him to sit for an interview.
“Sorry,” Alex says before she can say anything, “not a good time.”
“I’ll get you at some point, Angelides.” She laughs, as if it’s a challenge. At least she says his name correctly.
He finds temporary refuge in one of the training rooms, then answers Evie’s call. “What’s wrong?” he asks by way of greeting, and Evie’s laugh turns into a slight hiccup at the end.
“I moved out.”
Alex has to think about how old she is for a second, because she’s been his baby cousin all his life. He was nineteen when he moved out too, leaving to go play ball. Unlike Evie, who’s in her second semester at the Rhode Island School of Design. But they didn’t talk about his covering her rent as well as her tuition. “What happened?”
“I’m not sure I want to keep going to RISD either.” She says it like it’s a word,Riz-dee, and not letters.
“I thought school was going okay.” Because she showed him her first set of grades, and although Alex has no idea how you grade freshman-level art, it must be how they evaluate baseball prospects: some objective analysis, some assessment of their potential, and a lot of bullshit dressed up as narrative.
Evie lets out a teenage sigh. “I guess it is. I just don’t know—is art even like a career or am I just kind of screwing around with paint?”
“You’re nineteen. Screwing around’s normal.”
“That’s not what you did.”
“Catchers don’t get to screw around,” he says. “None of this explains why you’re moving out.”
“I got a job. At an office. Doing data entry.”
“If you need money, you can just ask.”
