Page 45 of Breakout Year
Akiva: For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re in New York.
Then he pocketed his phone before he received the buzz of Eitan’s response.
Eitan didn’t tell him where they were going for their date—he just told Akiva to meet him at his apartment building.
Eitan: Wear a shirt you have to iron but if you don’t that’s okay too.
Akiva didn’t trust himself to respond with actual words—like Do you mean I don’t have to iron or I don’t have to wear a shirt?—so he gave a virtual thumbs up and dug out his ironing board.
He met Eitan in the lobby to his building, Eitan chatting with the woman at the front desk like they were old friends. Akiva didn’t want to interrupt; it felt too much like announcing his presence. Too much like a real date. So he adjusted the smooth fabric of his shirt collar at his throat. Waited. Watched Eitan effuse about something—possibly the weather, though Akiva supposed he’d be effusive about the weather too if he worked outside.
So he stood and watched Eitan talk with his hands, the light catching the ring around his index finger. Mid-gesture, Eitan seemed to realize he was being observed. Slowly, he turned toward where Akiva was standing. Smiled impossibly wider.
“Sorry,” Eitan said, “gotta go. My date’s here.” For a moment, he stiffened, as if expecting the woman’s sudden disapproval. This is New York, Akiva wanted to say. No one here gives a shit. Outside a baseball stadium anyway. Inside was a whole different matter.
She only laughed. Told them to have fun. Even her not too much fun was gently said.
Outside, Eitan hailed a cab—“I’m getting better at that!”—then piled inside. Eitan wasn’t tall, but he was tall enough to sit with splayed knees, one of which brushed Akiva’s.
“We could’ve taken the train,” Akiva said as Eitan shifted around, trying to get comfortable.
“All the train stations are too hot, and all the trains are too cold. Someone should really look into that.” He dropped his hand onto Akiva’s knee, possibly a condolence for the city just being like this in the summer.
“We’d be seen on a train,” Akiva whispered.
Eitan nodded to where the cabbie was studying them in the rearview as they were paused at a stoplight. “Looks like he’s seeing us just fine.”
That’s not the point of this. But Akiva didn’t really want to remind Eitan of the point of this right at that second, not with most of his consciousness spinning down to the grip of Eitan’s hand on his knee, casting off all the ways in which this was a bad idea.
Going out turned out to be the nicest kosher restaurant in New York, a steakhouse situated in lower Manhattan where Akiva’s ancestors had once hauled pushcarts. Akiva ran his hands over his cab-wrinkled button-up as Eitan smiled shamelessly at the hostess until they were whisked off to their table.
This time, they weren’t seated in a backroom, but at a padded corner booth with a wide view of the dining area. The arc of the table was large enough to fit a party of four around it, but it didn’t matter, not when Eitan sat close.
He slid even closer as their waiter dropped menus and then collected their drink orders. The Cosmos had played a day game; Eitan smelled like spray sunscreen and fresh-scented soap. They were here to be seen. That was what the zeros trailing the ends of Eitan’s cash app payments were for. So Akiva leaned into Eitan’s space and breathed in deeply. The ends of Eitan’s hair tickled his cheek, as fleeting as a kiss.
“What?” Eitan asked, but he was smiling.
“You smell like the ballpark.”
Eitan’s smile crinkled the corners of his eyes, and Akiva would not press his mouth there, not for all the money in Eitan’s bank account, not if this wasn’t real. “You must really miss the game, huh?” Eitan asked.
A question Akiva had gotten a few times over the years—from Mark and Rachel during the period he haunted their guest room like a ghost. By Sue exactly once. She knew when to drop things. It didn’t hurt exactly, but it didn’t feel great either, so Akiva distracted himself scanning his menu without really registering the food descriptions. Some of the prices were in the triple digits. He suppressed his instinctive shock. “Not really,” he managed.
“Not even striking guys out?” Eitan pulled out his own menu, frowned briefly at it, then closed it and shrugged.
That sequence gave Akiva just enough time to smooth a wrinkle from the pristine white tablecloth, to nab a breadstick and swim it through olive oil. “If you asked me five years ago, I might have had a different answer. I miss playing, I guess, but I don’t miss the game.” He chewed for a second. “Right after I left, a reporter got a hold of me. Wanted to do an article about why I quit. It felt too fresh. Now there’s a part of me who used to play, but that isn’t the person who wakes up in the morning anymore.”
“Would that be Akiva the model?” Eitan asked.
“I haven’t been doing much of that lately.” Except for the part Akiva was doing right at that moment—but if he didn’t acknowledge the room was watching them, perhaps that didn’t count.
“So Akiva the writer, then?”
“I don’t know if I qualify as that either.”
Eitan actually frowned at that. “It doesn’t really matter what the front of the book says if you wrote it.”
“If you only played rec league ball, you wouldn’t call yourself a ballplayer.”
