Page 73 of Breakout Year
Akiva rolled his eyes again, shot himself a look in the rearview. He was smiling. I’ll miss him when he’s gone. Easier to say to himself in the silent cabin of Eitan’s car than out loud where it might matter. So he got out and asked Eitan if he needed that black duffle.
“That’s for tomorrow!” But Eitan provided no further detail. He was using his crutches at least, and he was fast enough on them that Akiva had to scramble to keep up. They paused by the door as Eitan swiped his pass on the sensor to unlock it, paused at security for Eitan to flirt with the older woman stationed there who threatened to cook for him.
“And Akiva,” he said brightly. “He needs it more than I do.” A comment accompanied by Eitan’s elbow gently poking against his ribs, before Akiva was issued a lanyard that said he could be there and they were waved toward the clubhouse.
Akiva had only taken the hallway from the clubhouse to the parking lot, never the reverse. So he wasn’t prepared for how the hall suddenly widened, for how the mundane tile of the floor transitioned into something waxed and gleaming. This place is pretty different, huh. What Eitan had said the first time Akiva had come to the stadium. A place like Akiva imagined growing up: the luxury of the player facilities and the architecture of a big-league mound. How, when he’d shot up a foot in a year in high school, he’d looked in the mirror and thought how right everything was going, how the world was ticking according to plan.
Now, he followed Eitan through the clubhouse entrance. Somehow, it’d been easier to distance himself from pro ball with an entire big-league team here. They were athletes; he was just a guy who had to duck to get through low doorways. The keyboard didn’t care how far his hands could wrap around a baseball.
Eitan pointed out various clubhouse features—weight room, steam room, the dressing-slash-hangout area with clusters of chairs and couches and player belongings all lined up in wooden stalls. How they had a team foosball tournament going and how when Eitan first got traded to the team, he’d tried to lose because no one wanted a new guy to whoop them at something, then tried to win because what if his teammates all thought gay guys were bad at foosball?
Eitan smiled around the word gay, said it a little louder than all the others as if he was trying to prove a point. Akiva pinched his forehead, rubbed his fingers over his eyes. Tried and failed not to laugh. Tried not to reach for Eitan—to hold his hand or to kiss him or just be near him for the sake of having their bodies in proximity. His self-restraint got the better of him. He wound up holding only a handful of air.
“You can wait here,” Eitan said. “The docs said to meet them down in one of the treatment rooms.”
Akiva surveyed the clubhouse: there was about a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of memorabilia casually left around. For a moment, he considered it: how easy it would be to take from baseball to repay what baseball had taken from him. If he wrote a character with an outstanding debt—and an eye for what might sell at an underground auction that didn’t care about provenance—they wouldn’t hesitate to swipe something. “Are you sure you want me in here unsupervised?”
“Why? Guys bring their—guys bring people in all the time.” Eitan pressed his mouth shut, but Akiva could autofill the sentence: Guys brought in their wives, their families. Not their friends, not like this.
There was no one else here. No one would know how close they were standing, or how Akiva’s careful consideration—that he didn’t want money to come between them, so he made sure there was nothing between them—was beginning to crumble under the jaundice clubhouse lights. “Could I go out to the field instead?”
That brought back Eitan’s grin. “Sure.”
Objectively, it wasn’t a long walk from the clubhouse out to the field. Even with Eitan on crutches, Akiva was the one who walked slow. The tunnel was plain—no nostalgic reminders of past greats who had played for the team, no graffiti of former player signatures that sometimes decorated the tunnels of minor-league ballparks. Nothing to interrupt the light that streamed in from the field, the smell of grass that wafted through.
They stepped—or Akiva stepped and Eitan crutched—out of the tunnel into the dugout. The floor was ordinary concrete. Still, Akiva was struck by the sensation of it under the soles of his sneakers as if he could feel some unique property of ballpark cement. He hadn’t worn cleats since he quit. He wanted a pair now, to hear the familiar scrape of their spikes on pavement.
“Is here better?” Eitan wasn’t laughing, but there was something fond around his eyes.
“Yeah”—Akiva’s throat felt strangely tight—“here works.”
Eitan seized the handles of his crutches like he was about to go back inside then paused. “You sure you’re okay?”
They were under the overhang of the dugout roof. Invisible to the rest of the field, which was only occupied by a few groundskeepers who were tending the grass in the outfield near the warning track. Hundreds of feet from anyone who might notice that Akiva’s hands were gripped by his sides or how his vision was going a little watery at the edges. This was just a ballpark, no different from the one where they’d watched that rec league game, except for how it was. He was here for Eitan, not to deal with…whatever was happening inside him.
He examined the floor: they hosed the dugout down between games, but there were still a few lingering sunflower seed shells. He would not get emotional about something that had been horked and spat at the ground. He would not feel anything about standing here, in his street clothes, before a verdant layer of grass. He would certainly not remember the twin sensations that characterized his baseball career: that this was the only place he’d wanted to be and a place he couldn’t be and remain himself.
“I avoided coming here,” Akiva said. “Before I watched you play this season, I don’t think I’d seen a game in years.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Eitan leaned close, balancing the rubber tips of his crutches against the dugout floor. “Baseball’s more fun to play than watch.”
Akiva flinched. Baseball had been fun to watch, more fun to play. He’d done it every day for most of the first two decades of his life, ever since he’d been big enough to wrap his fingers around a hollow plastic bat and swing at a ball off a tee. He’d done it until he couldn’t any longer, then he’d fled. Now he felt like he had driving past his parents’ house for the first time after it’d been sold: that he was in a place that used to be his but wasn’t anymore.
“I just didn’t expect—” Words felt like too much. “You should go get looked at. I’m sure the doctors are waiting.”
Eitan shook his head, dropped his crutches in a clatter. Hopped over to Akiva and wrapped his arms around him.
“We’re not…” Akiva trailed off. Breathed into the clean fabric of Eitan’s shirt. “People might see.”
“They might see what?” Eitan’s mouth was close to his ear. His hands gripped Akiva’s shirt. He hugged him, hard, the kind of hug that you were meant to collapse into.
Akiva wouldn’t collapse. Baseball didn’t get that too. But his muscles untensed a little, and he sagged onto Eitan’s shoulder. Eitan was talking, indistinctly, about how any random person could throw a ball, but Akiva wrote books and that was special, creating something from nothing. Akiva had spent the morning and the night before and the night before that thinking about kissing Eitan, about drawing him back into his bed, but now all Akiva could think of was how few times in his adulthood someone had held him like this and how much it was something he hadn’t known he’d wanted.
“I’ll be fine,” Akiva said, a little stiffly, and Eitan tightened his arms again so much that he wobbled on his bad leg. “We shouldn’t be putting weight on your ankle.”
“Fuck my ankle. And fuck, I shouldn’t have dragged you here if you didn’t want to come.”
“I’m fine.” Akiva wasn’t, but he was getting closer to fine: his throat felt less tight, his body relaxed into Eitan’s. He didn’t need to be held up for a moment longer—shouldn’t need to be held up at all. He should let go. He would in just a second.
