Page 88 of Breakout Year
“Guess you could have done the same thing with the Crooks, huh?” Williams said to Eitan as they were filing onto the plane.
“There’s a big difference between almost got it and never stood a chance.”
“Well, someone’s gotta be an optimist.” And he swatted Eitan on the hip without so much as a comment, then settled in to sleep through their ninety-minute flight.
Eitan wasn’t as optimistic when he got back to New York. They’d played an afternoon game—on the last day of the season, everyone played at the same time—and it felt later than it actually was. His lease ended in a few days. He needed to pack, a process helped by the fact he hadn’t really unpacked.
He needed to clean out his stall at Cosmos Park, to arrange for the return of his leased vehicle. He needed to?—
See Akiva. A need that superseded all others, as if they’d been apart for months and not just the two days since Akiva had flown back from Cleveland.
Eitan dialed Akiva’s number, then tucked his phone in the crook of his neck while he undid all his various locks. He would even miss those—there was something in the combination of mechanical and electronic entries that felt quaint and futuristic all at once. “Hey,” he said, when Akiva picked up. “I’m back in the city.” Because home felt like the wrong word for a place he was about to leave.
“Me too.”
Eitan could hear Akiva over the phone and through the now-open door to his apartment. Akiva was there.
Eitan put down the phone and walked to his living room where Akiva was sitting on the couch. Pulled him up. Kissed him until they both went breathless.
“I figured you might need some help packing,” Akiva said, when Eitan pulled back. “I got boxes.”
“You’re—” Eitan started to bite back a word, but fuck it, when else was he going to say it? “You’re perfect.”
Akiva shrugged, but he had on that pleased flush as well.
Eitan didn’t want to spend their last hours together shoving his stuff in suitcases and bins, even though he knew he needed to. “I don’t want to pack.” I don’t want to leave.
“If we get it out of the way, you won’t have to worry about it.”
Which sounded very responsible and organized and all the things Eitan generally wasn’t but perhaps aspired to be. He would not pout. He would not feel anything beyond an annoyance at having all of this stuff that he now had to schlep back to Cleveland.
Akiva put on music. His taste ran slightly folksier and a little more obscure than Eitan’s—a thing Eitan somehow hadn’t known. What else didn’t he know? Maybe he should call off the move, lease a short-stay rental for a month in New York while the playoffs commenced. Most of the guys on the team were already heading back to where they really lived, so they wouldn’t be around, but perhaps he could get a place and volunteer at the community center and?—
Do this exact same thing in another three weeks when leaving would be another three weeks harder. Or spend his offseason in New York, during which a call might come any minute from a team offering a contract, and Eitan would have to go through the business of another move, another goodbye.
“Are you okay?” Akiva asked, after they’d packed the guest bedroom and the hall closet and the dishes Eitan never used in the kitchen and much of Eitan’s bedroom that wasn’t his bed and clothes for the next day. “You’re quiet.”
Eitan put down the socks he was in the midst of shoving into a duffle bag. “I don’t want to leave New York.” But no, that wasn’t quite right. “I don’t want to leave you.”
“Eitan”—and Akiva had to know that he was only making it worse by saying Eitan’s name in that soft, casually devastating way of his—“we knew this was going to happen.”
Eitan did know that. But he also knew that he’d never been in a relationship where he’d felt like a collective we. “I could come back. Visit. Gabe says I’ll probably be signed by the Winter Conference, and that’s in late November.” A four-day set of meetings among general managers and team owners where Eitan would meet with prospective teams to hear their pitches as to why he should sign with them.
Akiva frowned minutely. “I don’t know how much I’ll be around. Sue’s in an edit sprint, and it’s the High Holidays starting on Thursday. I won’t be that available for most of the fall.”
“Yeah.”
“This has been—” And if Akiva was about to say fun, Eitan didn’t know what he’d do, but crying seemed like a very valid option. It didn’t matter, because Akiva shook his head, recalibrated. He wasn’t as expressive as Eitan, but his face was easy to read if you knew how to look. Eitan did know now—that Akiva wore his sadness in the pinch of his mouth, the faintly tense line between his eyebrows. “I wish this had worked out differently,” Akiva said.
Quit your job, move out of your tiny, falling-apart house, run away with me. Suggestions that seemed spun from clouds. “What if—” Eitan swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Do you ever think about what might have happened if we’d figured all this out in Arizona?”
“I thought about that. Right when I first quit, I thought, What if I’d gone up to those guys at the bar and, I don’t know, punched them? What if I’d told you that the things they were saying about me were completely true?”
Eitan grabbed Akiva’s hands, turned them over to reveal the smooth surface of his palms. He lifted one, kissed the hollow of it. “Don’t punch people. You might break something, and you need to write your book.”
“I don’t want you to leave either.” Akiva was smiling. Even that was sad.
Eitan didn’t want the last hours they had together to be like this, even if the whole situation felt unavoidably like this. “The second I got traded from Cleveland, I started counting the days until I could leave New York. But I stopped counting when you walked in that hotel conference room.”
