Page 25 of Breakout Year
Eitan slid a hand across the table and wrapped his fingers around Akiva’s wrist, the metal of his ring cool against Akiva’s skin. “C’mon,” Eitan said, and the flash of his smile did nothing to settle Akiva’s pulse.
They made it to the next room, to a table objectively not much different in size than the one they’d just left, except for how it felt like it was half the length. Eitan slid into a chair. Belatedly, he let go of Akiva’s wrist.
They must have touched, before, years ago, even if they’d never technically played for the same team. Baseball was a game of shoulder nudges and head rubs and ass slaps. Sometimes, Akiva’s kippah and his tzitzit and his weird diet stuff, as more than one teammate put it, had made other players keep their distance. Not Eitan. Akiva would have remembered that.
“Are you hungry?” Eitan asked. “You look hungry. I mean, you look thin—I mean, it suits you.” All said in a nervous rush. His skin was too tan to show a blush, but there was the suggestion of one in the way he smiled.
Akiva refocused himself on the menu. Their waiter came around. Akiva ordered the cheapest pasta, another glass of wine.
“I’ll have—” Eitan listed off two more pasta dishes, a pizza, and a salad.
“I forgot about ballplayer appetites,” Akiva said, when the waiter had cleared out.
“You say that like you aren’t still one.”
Akiva held up his uncalloused hands. “Nope.”
For a moment, Eitan looked like he was going to do something—grab Akiva’s wrist and rub his thumb over the soft basin of his palm. Worse, object. I left that part of me behind a long time ago, Akiva practiced saying. Even if he sometimes found himself holding various household objects with the same grip he’d used on his curveball.
“So if you’re not a ballplayer,” Eitan said, “and you’re only sometimes a model, are you like a ghostwriter or whatever?”
“You seem very hung up on the modeling thing.”
“Well, you know, a baseball player dating a model. Kind of cliché if you think about it.” Eitan took another sip of beer. “And you didn’t answer the question.”
Akiva glanced around to see if they were being eavesdropped on. If word got out about his arrangement with Sue, it’d be an entirely different kind of scandal. “I’m not a ghostwriter.” Mostly, ghostwriters aren’t paid by the hour.
“But that book I bought,” Eitan said, “the one Sue wrote, did you really write it?”
“I provide extensive editorial support.” A yes in all but name.
“So you do all the work and don’t get the credit?”
He didn’t—the work was driven by Sue’s ideas, and she took whatever Akiva wrote and made it ten times better. Some days it bothered him more than others. Today was one of those days. “I like eating and paying my rent,” he said primly.
“If you wrote a book, I’d want to read it.” Eitan plucked a piece of bread from the basket on the table, ate it with a scatter of crumbs.
Akiva’s heart did a thing. An entirely unwanted freeze-clench in his chest, the kind that came from someone saying something you didn’t know you wanted to hear. Eitan was charming. That didn’t mean Akiva should do something as foolish as being charmed. He plucked his own piece of bread from the basket and chewed it deliberately. “Thank you,” he managed. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
They sat quietly for a minute. Eitan ate and shifted and rearranged a napkin. Normal Eitan stuff. Until he blurted, “So why’d you leave baseball?”
Akiva had no polite response to that. Eitan was paying for his food, his time. The unwritten rule of all of this was Akiva could probably be challenging, lightly flirtatious, but not outright disagreeable. He definitely couldn’t do what he was currently contemplating and upend his water glass on Eitan’s head. “What really happened in Cleveland?” he replied.
“Nothing. A lot of little things.” Eitan shifted in his seat. His shoe knocked Akiva’s, but this time he drew it back on his own. “They wanted me to be part of Faith and Family night. Really leaned on me about it, citing me being from Cleveland and the face of the team and whatever. Connor was going to speak—he did the team bible study thing—and they always wanted us to do promo together.”
“Connor…?”
“Reynolds. He’s the Crooks second baseman. My best friend.” Eitan’s voice sounded tight for a moment, but he pressed on. “I took one look at who they had featured—a church I wouldn’t be part of for, like, so many reasons—and told them no. I thought the team understood. Guess not.”
“So you said something to the media about it?” Akiva said.
“Yeah. Maybe not a good idea in retrospect.”
“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”
A candle sat on their tabletop, not an electronic one but a real one with a sputtering little flame. Eitan’s smile reminded Akiva of that candle: warm, slightly flickering, genuine. Akiva stuffed that thought away with another mouthful of bread.
Their food arrived a few minutes later. Eitan oohed over everything—and nudged a few of his plates Akiva’s way—then ate with the professional focus of a ballplayer. Between bites, they talked about what ballplayers talked about—who was still playing and where and Eitan’s favorite games from over the years.
