Page 47 of Breakout Year
Eitan’s eyes snapped to his. His hand found Akiva’s leg under the table again. No one would see, but Akiva supposed it’d align their bodies the right way. Verisimilitude and all that. He braced himself for a quick kiss, for the darting press of Eitan’s lips—for Eitan performing for an audience no less rapt than the one at Cosmos stadium. The hand not on Akiva’s thigh slid to his jaw, angling his chin.
“I haven’t…” Eitan began, then shook his head, and Akiva was about to tell him not to self-censor when Eitan’s lips touched his. Eitan kissed him long and closed-mouthed, lips firm, breath a soft fall on Akiva’s cheek. Akiva was about to declare this a success, very realistic, entirely for the click of phone cameras, when Eitan made a noise somewhere between an approval and a groan, then slid his tongue past Akiva’s.
And for a single fluorescent minute, Akiva let himself be kissed.
I should stop this. It wasn’t fair to Eitan. There was no fairness to be found in the brush of his nose or the way his mouth tasted like toothpaste and the whiskey from his drink—like something slowly aged—or the clench of Eitan’s hand on his thigh as if he was reluctant to let go. This wasn’t fair, not to him or to Akiva, a lopsided sort of unfairness that Akiva thought he’d left behind seven years ago.
“Hey.” Akiva pulled back and rested his forehead against Eitan’s. His cheeks were warm for reasons he’d like to chalk up to embarrassment—they really were being photographed—but he knew weren’t just attributable to that. He pitched his voice low. Some things were for performance and some were to be whispered in the space between them, something so new and uncertain that Akiva wasn’t sure if it could even make it across that bare distance. “Hey,” he said again, like that was the only word he knew.
Eitan’s eyes were intent on his. “Hey, yourself.” He was smiling, breath quick. “How was that?”
Good, good, good, say it was good, some part of Akiva advocated. Another more sensible part told him that he shouldn’t want like this, openly, or as openly as their arrangement would allow. He told that part to shut the fuck up. “I could ask you the same thing.”
Eitan’s grin broadened. “Like I just jumped off a high dive.”
“In a good way or—” Akiva didn’t have time to answer the question, not when Eitan closed the distance between them for a fraction of a second, then held off right as his lips were about to make contact with Akiva’s.
“In a good way,” Eitan confirmed, but he forced himself back.
Akiva sobered slightly. They were here. They were being watched. There was verisimilitude and there was exhibitionism. He was going to get an earful from Mark and Rachel and possibly Sue either way, if she figured out how not to call Instagram “Instant Graham.” “You don’t have to use tongue.”
Eitan laughed. He had one of those laughs Akiva could feel all over, like he couldn’t keep the joy out of his throat. “I guess instinct took over. I’ve never paid someone to fake date me before.”
Akiva could say something—that he hadn’t ever been paid to date anyone, even if date felt uncomfortably close to kiss. “You were very convincing,” he reassured Eitan.
Eitan scanned the room. “You think this is gonna be all over social media tomorrow?”
“If it’s not, we’ll just keep trying.”
16
Akiva
Eitan kissed him again outside his apartment building, then by the subway entrance as Akiva began his train journey home. Later that week on a walk through Central Park, Eitan’s fingers held loosely in his.
At a bookstore, when Eitan handed the clerk a matte black credit card and told Akiva to get whatever he wanted, even if Sue got more free copies of books than she could ever reasonably read, most of which she foisted off on Akiva. Still, he bought a stack and Eitan took him to a nearby cafe and listened to Akiva gush over various authors and books he’d read and books he wanted to read and asked the right questions in the right places.
When other customers were near enough to be obviously eavesdropping, he held Akiva’s hand across the surface of the wooden table. Eitan moved constantly; this time that restlessness manifested as minute strokes over Akiva’s knuckles with the pads of his fingers, leaving his skin sensitized.
Eitan cleared his throat. When Akiva shook himself out of his haze, Eitan was smiling. “You were telling me about—” He nodded to the book on the table, as if Akiva had dropped the thread of conversation mid-sentence. It was entirely possible that he had.
So Akiva talked. When the morning crowd cleared out, Eitan peeled his fingers away and pled that he had to be at the ballpark and that Akiva should have another coffee and sit and write if that was what he wanted to do. Akiva did. His hands were less empty with a keyboard under them anyway.
They kissed again as they watched an amateur baseball game, seated on the long metal benches at a Manhattan rec field that was tucked against the Hudson River. By now, Akiva was used to Eitan sitting close. This kiss was a brief, appropriate press of their mouths, if not for the rub of Eitan’s thumb against his neck, stroking his pulse.
“You know, some of these guys played pro ball.” Eitan nodded toward the field. “And a bunch played in college.”
Akiva had been vaguely following the game—there was a digital scoreboard being operated by a volunteer. Its display was always a pitch or two behind what was actually happening in the game. Mostly, Akiva had been following the swell of cheers from players and accompanying groans from the opposing team: baseball stripped down to its simplest elements, the potential for a win or a loss volleyed between sides.
On the mound, the pitcher couldn’t find the billboard-wide strike zone, even aided by an umpire who’d declared loudly that he needed to be out of here to pick up his kids. Akiva’s hands had that same feeling from the café—that emptiness, but of a slightly different flavor, one that could only be cured by holding a ball with exactly a hundred and eight red stitches. He rubbed his palms against his jeans to dispel the feeling.
“Is that right?” he asked belatedly.
“I don’t know if their rosters are final,” Eitan said, “but maybe they’d make an exception for someone with pro experience.”
Oh, so that’s what this was about—Eitan trying to goad Akiva into playing. Akiva moved down the bench, a distance that could be just buddies, and Eitan glanced at the newly cleared space between them.
Maybe people will think we’re having a couple’s fight. But no, Akiva had given up playing a long time ago. He was there to do a job. So he slid back and accepted the sprawl of Eitan’s hand across his thigh like an apology.
