Page 59 of Breakout Year
But it wasn’t like he could explain Akiva didn’t need things but money, more than what could reasonably constitute a gift. If I keep giving him money, then we can’t date. If we date, I can’t give him money…right? “You ever pay down your wife’s, uh, student loans?”
Vientos’s eyebrows rose skeptically. “He wants you to pay off his student loans?”
That made it sound like Akiva was after his money, specifically. “No, he doesn’t. That’s part of the problem.”
Williams guzzled seemingly half his cup of coffee in one swig, then said, “Have you tried talking with him?”
“We talk all the time.” Which was true, even if sometimes it felt like they were talking past each other. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Try sorry.”
“I don’t know if—” If I’m actually sorry. Eitan bit that back.
“Ah,” Williams said, once, damningly, as if he’d mentally filled in the rest of Eitan’s sentence. “So you don’t want to apologize but you want this to be fixed?”
“When you put it like that…” When he put it like that, Eitan probably needed more than books and an ambiguous apology.
Salenko inhaled as if he was going to dispense some manner of profound relationship wisdom. But what came out was a belch, followed by a frantic waving of hands by the other guys at the table, and orders for Salenko to go the fuck away.
They didn’t say that to Eitan, though, even as he moped in his chair. And when Botts asked if he wanted in on the next hand, Eitan let himself be dealt in. He lost the first round and the second. “You sure you want to keep playing?” Vientos asked as if he hadn’t been the one to relieve Eitan of his money.
“Might as well keep trying,” Eitan said, and he grinned when he got his cards—a handful of nothing, but hey, he could work with that.
After their game—an afternoon game plagued by shadows—Eitan showered and changed and gamely answered reporters’ questions about how it felt to hit a wall-banging double in the sixth—“Good!”—and into a game-ending double play in the ninth—“Less good!”—then hustled out of the clubhouse to his car where he googled the location of the nearest late-night grocery store. It turned out that in New York most grocery stores were open past nine. Who knew?
Shopping only took a minute. Or should have only taken a minute. He grabbed his first item, then spent a while in the produce aisle, pondering his options. Did specific breeds of apples have meanings the way that flowers did? Was there a certain variety—honeycrisp, Gala, Pink Lady, envy—that properly conveyed that he was sorry for both past and probably future mistakes? He grabbed a bunch, threw them into the same bag. When the cashier had to sort them out, because apparently apples all cost different prices by the pound, he slid a fifty into the tip jar and got her grin.
“Buying your way out of trouble?” she teased.
“Here’s hoping.” And he grabbed his groceries and left before she could ask what he’d meant.
Akiva’s house looked even smaller in the light of the fading evening sun. At least his car was in the driveway. Eitan had spent most of the ride over rehearsing what he was going to say, all of which abandoned him when he knocked at Akiva’s door and Akiva answered wearing a Cosmos hoodie that Eitan knew had Rivkin on the back.
One of the cuffs was starting to fray, and there was something intimate about the poke of Akiva’s thumb through the loosening seam, about the way he shuffled his socked feet back to admit Eitan.
His house was no different than it had been yesterday, though it was noticeably chillier, like Akiva had cranked the A/C to prove a point. “Air conditioner working again?” Eitan asked.
“I’m glad you came over.” Though Akiva’s arms were folded tightly across his chest. “We have to stop doing this.”
Eitan’s stomach dropped. It was clear what Akiva meant by this: that whatever contractual relationship existed between them was coming apart like that seam.
“I’m sorry,” Eitan blurted. Words that none of his careful car speeches had included: he’d practiced saying he wasn’t going to apologize for caring about Akiva, for wanting to solve at least as many problems as he created for him. But he was sorry—that this was ending. That it’d never really begun.
Akiva nodded as if that was the conclusion of the conversation. He said stop, Eitan said sorry, and they’d both go their separate ways and move on. Then Akiva registered the paper bag Eitan was holding and frowned. “What’s that?”
Eitan offered the opened bag for his inspection.
“You bought me apples?” Akiva asked.
“And honey.”
“Rosh Hashanah isn’t for another few weeks.”
A fact that Eitan knew because he’d checked his calendar to confirm. He’d probably have to play, but he’d done the services-in-the-morning, game-at-night deal before. “I know. I thought you might tell me that you wanted to end the contract.” The verbiage he picked in favor of breaking up even if it sounded like bullshit. “And I thought with you and your family not being, uh, close anymore, maybe the High Holidays would be hard. So if this was our chance to spend them together… But you probably have friends you spend them with. Never mind. It was kind of a stupid idea.”
Akiva’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, and Eitan wanted to put his mouth against it and his palms on Akiva’s too-skinny ribs. To fold them into Akiva’s bed and not have to deal with all this stuff simmering between them. “All right,” Akiva said instead of telling Eitan to leave.
Akiva’s kitchen was barely large enough to hold both of them. Hell, it was barely large enough to hold Akiva. He pulled a cutting board from somewhere—one of the flexible plastic ones scarred with cuts—and a knife from somewhere else. He washed the apples more thoroughly than Eitan would have, and Eitan stopped himself from asking about that and if Akiva had a favorite type of apple and what Akiva had done today and what he was planning to do tomorrow because the only thing his brain could supply was this is over.
