Page 14 of Breakout Year
“Yes, yes, what was it before Ellis Island?” Akiva waved a dismissive hand. Annoyed looked much better on him than spooked. Even if he bit his lip like he hadn’t meant to say that. His mouth went white, then deeper red, and seven years was a long time, but not so long that Eitan had forgotten that Akiva always did that. That, for whatever reason, he’d always watched Akiva do that.
“Man, it’s really good to see you,” Eitan said. The wrong thing to say, because Akiva’s back stiffened again. Eitan pressed on. “I think there’s a form.” He slid an NDA across the table.
Akiva looked it over, eyes quickly scanning the page. He really did look good. Seven years older: time enough for his face to thin out, revealing sharp cheekbones, for his hair to get slightly longer than he’d worn it when they’d played together in Arizona as prospects. Thinner than the last time Eitan had seen him, when they’d exchanged a perfunctory hug on the last day of the short fall season like it was the last day of sleepaway camp along with promises to see each other at spring training the following year.
Except Eitan had shown up to spring training and Akiva never had. He’d left without so much as a text, just a simple transactional statement from his team saying he wouldn’t be returning.
Then he’d been gone. For seven fucking years.
Now he was looking at Eitan from across the table, the overhead lights reflecting off his glasses. “Any preference for what name I sign this as?”
“You don’t have to,” Eitan said, just as Gabe said, “Your real one.”
Akiva signed, a dash of his signature across the page, like his skill at giving autographs—which they’d both done a lot of in the Fall League, for kids willingly and for collectors banking on getting a souvenir from the next big-name player more grudgingly—had faded. He slid the agreement back to Eitan.
“What’s the last book you’ve read?” Eitan asked.
“How long you got?”
And right, he remembered Akiva toting around books, brick-heavy things with bent-back covers like he hadn’t wanted other players to give him a hard time about what he’d been reading. “How do you feel about baseball?” Eitan said.
That got a less enthusiastic response. “Baseball’s fine.” Said in a way like it wasn’t.
“Great, you’re hired.”
“Eitan”—Akiva’s voice rumbled off the hard-top surface of the table—“what are you actually hiring me to do?”
“I need a boyfriend,” Eitan blurted. A statement followed by a pronounced silence.
“Right.” Akiva pushed his chair back, then stood carefully like he was holding himself together by a few weakening threads. “I don’t know what this is, but it’s not particularly funny.”
As if Eitan had sought him out after seven years to pull a prank.
Gabe cleared his throat. “I can assure you that—despite my best attempts to intercede—this is a serious offer. That piece of paper is as much to protect you as it is Eitan from this mishigas.”
Akiva sat. There was something wary in the set of his shoulders. Not wary: skittish. Like he’d spent the past seven years being rightly suspicious of things. “Okay.” He folded his hands. It was hard to tell from across the table, but pitchers’ hands were usually ridged in calluses, imperfectly tanned from being outdoors, one darker from the other as an effect of wearing a glove.
Akiva’s hands looked smooth, and Eitan got the urge to slide them between his own, to check for the roughness of his calluses, the freckles sun brought out. To catalog all the other subtle ways Akiva might have changed since that month in Arizona. When they hadn’t been friends, exactly. Friendly, the way that Eitan was friendly with people he’d gone to high school with, like Akiva was merely a guy from fourth period who’d drifted away after graduation.
Why’d you quit? A question Eitan couldn’t ask, not in front of Gabe, not now, when Akiva had just been convinced to stay. Along with its corollaries. Why’d you ghost me? Was it because of something I did? Or didn’t do?
“Well,” Gabe said, when it’d become clear that Eitan wasn’t going to provide more details, “here’s what we’re thinking.”
5
Akiva
His time. That was what Eitan wanted to pay him for. Eitan, who Akiva hadn’t seen since the Fall League, who he’d stopped thinking about (mostly) a few years after that. How, after seven years, Eitan looked…
Akiva trafficked in words for a living. He knew a lot of them and when to pick them and how to use them for rhythm and effect.
Eitan looked…
Fuck.
He’d never been tall, at least not for a ballplayer. His listed height was probably exaggerated by an inch. He’d filled out in the years since he’d been a prospect, thick through the shoulders and stomach with a well-earned strength. Sun exposure had deepened his olive skin and lightened streaks in his dark brown hair. Sue sometimes joked about talking an athlete into being on the cover of one of her books, but Eitan could be, especially with the bright collar of his shirt contrasting his tan, with the way his eyes crinkled slightly at the corners even when he wasn’t smiling.
Akiva had spent seven years trying to craft perfect men from something as paltry as words. He came up short more often than he would’ve liked, a deficiency that was all the clearer now, with Eitan there, looking perfectly, approachably handsome.
