Page 28 of Breakout Year
Mostly, it bothers me that I can’t date for real without this happening. “Guess I’m just an attention hog,” Eitan said. A deflection, but if Williams wasn’t going to be cool about Eitan dating—even fake dating—a man, Eitan would simply find another friend. The city was big. Eitan was friendly. He was sure the ache in his chest would go away any second.
Williams rolled his eyes. “You sure your friend wants that attention too?”
Yes, because I’m paying him to want that attention. What Eitan could absolutely not say. He was just happy that was Williams’s objection—to Eitan feeding Akiva to the paparazzi, not that Akiva existed at all. Still, he had to make sure. “Guess I’ll find out, ’cause I’m seeing him again.” He held up his phone illustratively. He should send Akiva a good morning text. A bodega cat picture. Akiva hadn’t been unfriendly, really, but he hadn’t been friendly either—save the occasional laugh that slipped through his reserve. Save the kiss Eitan could somehow still feel. Eitan didn’t usually have trouble winning people over, save the New York press who were no prize.
Akiva was…different. And Eitan would examine the scope of that difference just as soon as he’d texted Akiva good morning. The worst that could happen would be Akiva charging him for the time it took to answer. That would be fine. That would be in keeping of the spirit of their arrangement, even.
Williams put up his hands defensively. “All right, man, just asking.” Then he walked off and Eitan waited until he was at a safe distance to put his headphones back in his ears.
A heist. A chase through a train, a heroine who was a governess and also a safecracker. And oh, she and her nemesis-slash-love interest—the insurance agent who was pursuing her—were in a private train car now. Breathless, cornered, she grabbed his shirtfront. They struggled, briefly, hotly, until he spun her around. “If we had more time, I’d cut this chemise off you,” he growled.
Eitan had no real idea what a chemise was, but he imagined it anyway, the careful draw of a blade against stitching, a pop-pop-pop of the fragile threads holding in their inhibitions.
The scene continued. Eitan wasn’t entirely sure he should be listening to this in a clubhouse, even if guys sometimes showed each other porn.
Heat licked up his neck. Breathe. He shifted. These clubhouse chairs were deep. He was wearing exercise tights with shorts on top of them. There was no gracious way to get half-hard in a dressing room. It wasn’t about the words themselves. Akiva wrote this. His mind came back to it again and again. Akiva wrote this. As if Akiva had reached across the vast expanse separating them—the span of seven years and millions of dollars—and tapped him on the shoulder. Whispered in his ear.
He shifted in his seat again. Someone might think the worst. Most guys hadn’t said anything else about the press conference, something he should have been grateful for—except the baseball version of being cool about something was to chirp it aggressively, not to ignore it completely. He was already here on borrowed time. He was doing his job—playing well. Maybe that bought him some latitude. It was one thing for guys to let stuff go; a total other thing if he was in the clubhouse with a semi. It’s not about you, he practiced saying. For the first time in his life, he wished he were wearing a cup.
He went to withdraw his earbuds from his ears, then stopped. Just one more chapter, he told himself. He really wanted to see where this was going.
9
Akiva
Writing was—
Writing was?—
Writing was going great.
Really great.
Fantastic.
Akiva had everything he needed: coffee, a charged computer, enough ambient noise so that he wasn’t concentrating on the click of his keyboard. His ideas notebook. Just…no ideas.
His house was usually a fine place to work. Except that Akiva had been watching his cursor blink for almost an hour. He forced himself to stand, stretch, refocus. He sat, stared at his document. This Gilded Land_Draft2_real_REAL_3.0 stared right back at him.
He shut his eyes, then opened them. No words had appeared, just the beat of the cursor on the white of the document, its rhythm like the irritating drip of water from the kitchen faucet. Akiva tightened the faucet, did the same to the one in the bathroom, documented both on his long list of grievances with his landlord. In the bathroom mirror, he looked like who he was: an unshowered writer having a frustrating day.
Disappointingly, when he returned to his laptop, his document remained as it had been.
Eitan’s declaration from the restaurant popped into his head uninvited. If you wrote a book, I’d want to read it.
That wasn’t why Akiva had said yes to another date. He needed the money. The date had been…good. Better than other first dates Akiva had endured. And the moment dating Eitan was no longer good, he’d simply tell Eitan that he needed to find someone else to do this with. There, nice and neat.
For now, he’d get his money from Eitan, and he’d log his hours with Sue. The book he needed to write was the one that would keep a roof over his head—the book that might let him buy back his parents’ house.
Sue had sent options for her next book that was a spinoff from her main series. He set a timer, dragged his finger up and down until he landed on Art forger recreating famous lost works, museum investigator sent to catch her? But they’re exes???
Exes? Or maybe a passing flirtation, a one-night stand, a fallen-through betrothal? Perhaps they were intended for one another—predestined, bashert—but some hand of fate intervened. Oh, she could have fallen from society because of her father’s bankruptcy, given up her dream of being an artist for work that kept food on the table. And he might have…
So Akiva threaded his fingers together, cracked his knuckles, and began to write.
Several hours later, he had a neck cramp and a passable outline. It wasn’t great, even by first-draft outline standards, but he couldn’t stop re-reading it. Everything felt surface-level, brassy, a kind of uncomfortable incompleteness that made him want to print it out solely to tear it up or buckle down and immediately rewrite the whole thing. This isn’t good…
But maybe it could be.
