Page 8 of Breakout Year
“They do girlfriend gigs?”
“They do no-strings-attached date to an event gigs.” She blew a strand of hair out of her face. “If you want people to forget you implied you were gay without issuing a direct denial, it’d only take an email.”
“I don’t, uh—” Eitan paused, breathed. Tried to put words to all the things flapping around in his belly. That he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t not sure, either. That, like being in New York, this would all take some getting used to. “I don’t want people to forget.”
That got him Isabel’s slow nod. It must be a lot if she didn’t have an immediate plan to address this. Certainly a lot for someone like Eitan to handle.
“Well, we could say nothing. It’s possible people will forget come fall.”
“You mean, when I hit free agency and am no longer your or the Cosmos’ problem?” A reality that he’d also only had forty-eight hours to process: because he wasn’t staying in Cleveland, he’d have to cope with the uncertainties of an open market and having to sell his baseball services to other teams—a place unlikely to be the Cosmos given their top prospect was a third baseman who was a year from being ready. An easier task if Eitan was straight. “What would you do if you were in my situation?”
Isabel studied the ceiling for a moment. It was possible she was contemplating going into another line of work entirely, one free of demanding ballplayers. “I think baseball teams are like everyone else—they go with the safest option.”
I don’t want that option. I want to be myself. A distinctly un-safe possibility. “I’m not sure I’m ready for the commitment of a fake girlfriend.”
“We can table that for now.”
He chewed that over for a minute. “Have you ever done the opposite? Helping someone, um, not keep things secret?” He knew it couldn’t be a ballplayer—there were only a handful of out players, and all had come out years ago on the cusp of or right after retirement—but maybe someone else…
She shook her head, and Eitan was about to declare the meeting over and take himself back down to the clubhouse to somehow play a game of professional baseball, when she added, “Are you already dating someone—is that the issue? If you are and people find out about him?—”
Him. Said simply, taken as fact. A possibility that brought Eitan’s skin up in gooseflesh—nerves, anticipation. Every impulse told him that it was a bad idea to even consider the idea of a him: he was new to the city, to the microscope of the public eye. He should settle in, find an apartment, do all the practical things that came with a new team.
“I’m not dating anyone,” he said. But I could be.
And if Isabel noticed that he was having a wild moment of clarity in a windowless office at what was the crack of dawn for a ballplayer—eleven a.m.—she didn’t say anything. She just jotted something down in her notebook, like Eitan Rivkin, professional troublemaker, was yet another item on her list of to-dos.
3
Eitan
u/make_it_anywhere: So Rivkin’s kind of a hothead. Guess we’ll see if he backs all that static up on the field.
u/longlive86: He really came out and said Cleveland ain’t shit. I’m a fan.
u/cosmos_gazer: Who’s that with him?
* * *
A week later, Eitan had an apartment with too much space for his stuff, a browser history full of searches that boiled down to what to do if not straight and also kind of famous that yielded a lot of unsatisfying answers, and a handful of really dedicated paparazzi who seemed to think Eitan’s personal life was a lot more interesting than it actually was.
“Morning, Dave.” Eitan waved hello, and Dave—who was somewhere in his forties and always wore a ballcap that looked twice that age while he wielded a camera that he kept perpetually trained on Eitan—waved back somewhat abashedly.
So Eitan put on his shades and pulled his hat low. Donned an expression somewhere between determined and bored, the same mask every other pedestrian was wearing, as he walked to his destination without having to consult his phone directions (much).
Today was Monday, a bookstore day, because no one could possibly cause trouble at a bookstore. At least he couldn’t. Probably.
Stay under the radar: The directive from the team, from Gabe, from his parents via texts, because he hadn’t been ducking their calls, exactly, but he hadn’t been answering them either.
They loved him. They supported him. They were five hundred miles away from him in a city where people were practically burning him in effigy for the sin of being traded and being marginally happy about it—and for other things Crooks fans also viewed as sins. He’d only seen one photo of someone in Cleveland running over a Rivkin jersey with their truck, but really, one was enough.
He’d been to this bookstore a few times already, so much so that the employees greeted him as he came in. Dave was somewhere—maybe outside, maybe he’d decided that big-league player also sort of literate wasn’t going to sell papers. Wherever he was, the burned-in sensation of being watched faded as Eitan entered the store.
Book people will tell you about the particular smell of bookstores: ink and paper, something inarticulable like ideas floating above the shelves. This one smelled like coffee and lemon floor polish as he browsed their selection for a while. The employees seemed content to let him, though the fifty he’d shoved in the tip jar by the register might have had something to do with that. He noted a few books, googled to see if they were available in audio, because—fortunately or unfortunately—books had a lot of pages.
He pulled one from the shelf that looked similar to the mystery series he was binging. Words swam as he tried to track them, an effect that was usually lessened when he was reading off his phone, when there was enough white space and the text was rendered in a particular font. He didn’t have problems in three dimensions: a ball was a ball, and he could see one well enough to discern the patterning of its stitches, even when it was coming at him at a hundred miles an hour.
But these words shifted, slightly, perceptibly, dizzyingly. Eitan was about to return the book to the shelf when the employee at the register called out to him. “That copy is probably signed.”
