Page 51 of Breakout Year
“You should…” Akiva pulled together the remnants of his good judgment. “Take me home.”
“Upstairs is closer,” Eitan said.
Upstairs was closer—Akiva could imagine the messy sprawl of Eitan’s bed, mattress long enough to accommodate someone much taller than Eitan. Upstairs was both closer than Akiva’s house and not close enough for the particular kind of impulsivity reverberating through Akiva’s body. He’d spent the last seven years doing what he’d needed to do, no matter how arduous. Doing what he wanted to do wouldn’t last the course of the elevator ride skyward before common sense took over.
So he reached behind himself, tugged the door ajar.
After a moment, Eitan stepped back. “Home it is.” But it didn’t sound like a concession. No, it sounded like a promise.
Eitan drove with one hand on the wheel and the other splayed on the center console. Akiva wouldn’t have pegged him as a stick shift driver. But Eitan seemed to enjoy the concentration required to weave through traffic, to register all the stimuli around them: the other cars, the idle construction zones, the music playing diffusely from his stereo speakers. At rest, Eitan fidgeted and fiddled and tapped his fingers and feet. In motion…
Akiva had twenty-five minutes to catalog all the ways that Eitan drove and fielded third base and kissed and draped his hand, casually but meaningfully, on Akiva’s knee for a fleeting second before he had to shift gears again.
Too soon, they arrived at Akiva’s. “You can just drop me off—” Akiva began, just as Eitan pulled into his driveway and cut the engine.
“Can I see your house?” Eitan flushed as he said it, like by house he meant bed.
“You want to meet my plants?” Akiva said.
“See, I didn't know you had plants.”
“Well, the spider plant is kind of a dick, so I don’t talk about it much.”
Eitan laughed and took that as an invitation, opening his door, spilling out of his car and onto Akiva’s driveway.
He’s just coming in to be friendly. For a panicked moment, Akiva wondered about the last time he’d vacuumed (two days ago, procrastinating writing) or wiped down his kitchen counters (three days ago, procrastinating writing) or did any of the little tasks so much of adulthood was composed of. Then he remembered the clothing on Eitan’s floor, the picture frame drained of its battery. Eitan might not judge his relative tidiness—but that wouldn’t stop him from knowing how small Akiva’s life was in sum.
So Akiva climbed out, and unlocked his front door, and tried to ignore the heat of Eitan at his back as they went inside.
Akiva flicked on a light—he’d slowly replaced all the old fluorescents with LEDs to save on his power bill. Something about the wiring always made them come on too bright, illuminating his scant few rooms.
It was warm in here—it was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, and Akiva could sleep through both if it meant he didn’t have to worry about affording his grocery bill, even if Eitan had been picking up tab after tab. Still, Eitan was a guest, and it was too warm for guests. So Akiva flicked on the window-mounted air conditioner and tried not to wince as it rattled to life. “This place really isn’t much,” he said.
“I’m sure that’s not true.” Eitan shook his head. “No, I know it’s not true.” He slowly turned, perusing the room as if there was something interesting to be found in Akiva’s secondhand couch and slightly warped floorboards. “I want to know everything there is to know about you.”
A statement that caught Akiva like a hand at his neck. “Come meet my plants.”
“Should I? I hear your spider plant is kind of a dick.” But he went over to Akiva’s shelves of plants and said nice to meet you to Akiva’s philodendron.
“You don’t need to impress her,” Akiva laughed.
“Oh, her, is it?” Eitan mimed shaking one of the plant’s leaves like a hand. “I wanted to make sure I was making a good first impression.”
As if inspecting Akiva’s plants on the shelf was the equivalent of meeting his family. That liquid feeling in Akiva’s belly was back, softer than the urgency with which they’d kissed by Eitan’s car, but no less demanding. How impossibly generous Eitan was—with his money, with things beyond money.
He was still examining Akiva’s plants, close without touching, hands clasped behind his back. Akiva suppressed the urge to reach for his hand, to twine Eitan’s fingers with his own. To lead him the thirty or so feet from the safety of his living room to his bedroom and whatever lay beyond.
He was grateful when Eitan made the decision for him and reached for the LED strip lights spanning over the plants, which clicked on and off with a timer, so Akiva didn’t need to worry about them on Shabbat. “Did you install this yourself?” Eitan asked.
“I did, right after I got this place. I’d been staying with Mark and Rachel—my friends from synagogue, who, uh, let me crash with them for a while.” If Eitan heard his hesitation, he didn’t say anything. “After everything with baseball and my parents and all the stuff with the money, I wanted a place that was just mine.”
“It looks like yours”—Eitan took an inhale—“it smells like you.”
“I smell like wet socks?”
“You know in Arizona right after it rained? That’s what you smell like.”
Akiva wasn’t sure how he was supposed to stand there in the privacy of his house and not kiss Eitan. His curtains were open, the windows exposing them to the street. This late, they’d look like shadows to anyone walking by, like two people who could be anyone. Better to remove Eitan as a temptation. “Sorry,” Akiva said, “but I really do have to get up early.”
