Page 27 of Breakout Year
Eitan
Big Day…Out? Rivkin Tells Fans Scram in Back-Room Door Slam
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After they’d finished, Eitan paid their check and the bar tab, then navigated them into the still-raining streets. “My apartment’s nearby if you want a ride home.”
“The train is probably faster.”
“I don’t mind.”
Akiva shook his head definitively. It was possible he wanted to be done with this date and was humoring Eitan. Eitan resolved to change the subject. “How does anyone understand the subway with all the colors and numbers and letters, anyway? I keep worrying I’m gonna end up on an express train when I meant to take the local or?—”
“Kiss me,” Akiva whispered. He nodded across the street. “I think Dave’s over there.”
Eitan craned his neck to look. “So he is. Are you sure?”
“Just on the cheek.”
Eitan nodded, slow. He tightened his hand minutely in Akiva’s shirt. Akiva was much taller than anyone he’d ever kissed, his body leanly muscled. If Eitan kissed him on the cheek, he’d feel his stubble. He’d smell the faint scent of his deodorant. His lips might accidentally brush Akiva’s mouth. He laid a kiss at Akiva’s jaw that was scarcely more than how he might kiss someone in greeting. I am kissing a man. A bare nothing of a kiss. Still, it counted. It had to count.
He drew back just far enough that Akiva’s stubble rasped against Eitan’s neck. This close, he wondered if Akiva could feel the flutter of his pulse in his throat. “Can I see you again?” Eitan asked.
Akiva studied him for a moment.
Eitan braced himself for a no. If he needed to go back to the agency for another fake boyfriend, he always could. But do you want to? Still, he decided that begging would be beneath him, especially if it didn’t work.
“A few more dates might be okay,” Akiva said, finally.
Eitan couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “Let me walk you to the train.”
He did, to an entire half a block away, umbrella raised above them both. He paused there in case Akiva was going to do something rash like kiss him goodbye.
“Dave’s still down the block,” Akiva said.
“Right.” Because Eitan needed to remember what this was all about. “Let me know when’s good for you.” And he waited until after Akiva had safely descended into the subway, bag of leftovers bouncing against his thigh, before raising his arms in victory.
Later, after Eitan was back at his apartment—after he’d brushed his teeth and splashed his face with water and spent five minutes not being soothed by his meditation app and thirty minutes rolling around in the sheets his laundry service over-bleached, after he’d read through Akiva’s texts looking for something he couldn’t quite put into words—he put in his headphones and opened the app where he’d downloaded Sue’s book. Akiva’s book. And then he began to read.
He kept listening on his drive to the ballpark the next day, as he was milling around the clubhouse. As he said ’sup to Botts, and to Vientos, and to Bishop, and a handful of other guys.
To Williams when he came in and stood over where Eitan was sitting in a padded rolling chair beside his stall.
Eitan removed his earbuds reluctantly. “Morning.”
“How’re you doing?”
Mostly, Eitan wanted to know what was gonna happen next in his book, curiosity a sharp pull in his belly. “I’m good?”
Williams held out his phone. “There are pictures of you online. Not sure if you knew.”
There were—on Insta, on a newspaper website so overloaded with popups that it nearly crashed Williams’s phone browser. Images presented in reverse chronological order: Eitan and Akiva, saying goodbye on the sidewalk, though from a distance, it just looked like they were hugging. Eitan and Akiva at dinner—those must have been from the waiter in the back room, and Eitan mentally scratched off giving that restaurant a good Yelp review. Eitan and Akiva disappearing into said back room, his hand around Akiva’s wrist. Even fifteen hours later, Eitan could feel the reassuring beat of Akiva’s pulse, the warmth of his reluctant smile.
The headlines were curious but inconclusive like Cosmos Third Baseman’s Day Off itself was news. The kind of thing that never happened in Cleveland. The only pictures of him that got posted were the ones Kiley shared to her Instagram with lots of heart emojis. Now, Eitan was almost tempted to find Dave just to yell at him. Akiva and I were on a date! Print that so we can all move on! But no, they were in pictures chaste enough that he hadn’t even gotten an inquiring text from his family group chat.
“Yep,” Eitan said, “those sure are pictures.” He handed Williams back his phone.
“Some guys… it might bother them.” Though Williams said it like it might bother him for whatever reason.
