Page 81 of Breakout Year
“It’s just down to DC, but they’re leaving from there to…” Eitan searched for the next city they were supposed to be in before realization washed over him. “Cleveland. We’re going to Cleveland.”
“Oh.” Akiva dipped down and kissed him reassuringly on the cheek.
“Do you want to come with me?” Eitan blurted it before could stop himself. He wanted Akiva there. Eitan’s parents always insisted on sitting in the stands and he’d arranged for tickets for them already, but if they were all together, maybe a box would be better, and he could probably arrange for kosher food to be catered or delivered to the stadium or?—
Akiva’s shoulders were creeping up to his ears. “I can’t. I have work. Sue has to go to physical therapy, and I really can’t miss much more time.”
I can pay you. A mistake Eitan wouldn’t make twice. “What if I get you a plane ticket?” Before Akiva could object, he added, “I have points.”
Akiva’s face twisted. “You’ll be fine.”
Eitan was less certain of that. Words would get thrown at him, surely. Possibly, a fist. That depended on his former teammates—most of whom were good guys when he was playing with them, some of whom might not be now that the situation was reversed. There was also the small matter of playing baseball in his hometown. It didn’t matter if he won so much as he absolutely couldn’t lose, not in front of a crowd already prone to hate him, not in front of his parents, who’d told him that the country would love him as much as he loved it—and he didn’t want to see them proven wrong.
All of which would be easier with Akiva there. All of which were probably the reasons why he shouldn’t be. Akiva wouldn’t be with him next year in whatever city he ended up playing in. Eitan needed to get used to this.
“You ever see yourself living anywhere but around here?” he asked. Too honest a question for before coffee but fuck it.
Akiva wrapped his arms around him again. He was wider than Eitan at the shoulders, narrower everywhere else. The exact right dimensions, yet they couldn’t seem to make their lives fit together. “I worked for a long time to get where I am,” Akiva said, eventually. “I felt like I was drowning for so long—that one bad month would be enough for me to lose everything. I don’t want to owe anyone more than I have to.”
You wouldn’t owe me. But of course, Akiva wouldn’t see it that way, if he lived somewhere else. If he had to start over again or just sat, dependent, on whatever Eitan provided for him.
“Sue has…” Akiva continued, and he looked like he was struggling with the next part. “I write for her and it’s an opportunity I might not get with anyone else. She has a tremor that’s been getting progressively worse. Most people don’t know about it. She can dictate, but she can’t type anymore or write by hand. She’s pretty independent, but her son lives in California and the rest of her family is mostly her dead ex-husband who sucks. I don’t want to leave her.”
Wouldn’t leave was a much different thing than couldn’t. Akiva had a life here, one Eitan couldn’t ask him to abandon.
“Will you watch the game against Cleveland?” Eitan asked instead. “That way I know at least one person’ll be rooting for me.” He knew he was being pathetic—whiny, even—but he felt raw the way he had when he’d first come to New York. Somehow, he didn’t expect the opposite journey to be even worse.
Akiva’s arms tightened around him. “People are rooting for you. That lady at the park said she’d punch someone on your behalf. That’s not nothing.”
“If this was a book, what would you have happen?”
Akiva hummed at that. “Concealed pistols. Maybe an explosion. Or possibly someone could derail a train.”
Though Eitan felt that way now: like he was veering off track and couldn’t stop himself. He checked his phone again. The ticket the team sent had come through. He turned to Akiva, cupped his cheek in his palm. Stroked the pad of his finger over that freckle. Whoever did that next should know how special it was.
“I’ll be back a week from Sunday,” Eitan said. To pack up his apartment. To watch the standings to see if Cosmos made it into the postseason, though the odds were looking less and less likely. “I was wondering if you wanted to go out with me. Like on a date.”
Akiva laughed and kissed him again and Eitan’s heart had beat nervously against his chest when he’d asked Akiva on that first date, an entirely different sort of rhythm from asking him out and knowing it was for the last time.
31
Akiva
On Monday, he watched the Cosmos game: Eitan wasn’t playing, but he was in the dugout, hoodie on, pants slumped over his socks and slides. He sat at the dugout railing for most of the game, and the camera kept catching on him as it panned around the ballpark, the announcers recounting a version of The Ankle Incident that mostly sanitized the details.
“Baseball used to be a rougher game,” one said, then went into all the rules changes and procedures the league had put in place to protect players’ bodies.
Baseball was safer. Teams weren’t feeding players greenie amphetamines by the handful. Shredded pitcher arms could be reconstructed. Eitan’s ankle, the commentator said, had undergone extensive imaging, as if Goodwin had been merely trying to break his bones and not his will to play. Still, Eitan was there. That counted for something in the baseball media.
He was there the next two nights, yawning and chewing seeds, and clapping hitters on the back as they cycled through their turns in the batting order, hand always carefully above their belts.
Akiva watched. Edited and watched. Watered his plants and watched. Proofed Sue’s transcriptions and watched. Sat down determined to write but the only words that came out were ones of formless longing, lovers separated by the tides of history vastly beyond their control. No one wants to read depressing crap, Sue once told him.
He was being maudlin. There were worse things, surely, than if he moved with Eitan to an up-and-coming city with—he checked real estate listings for the cities the media said were Eitan’s likeliest landing spots—incredibly competitive rent prices compared with New York. Of course there was no guarantee that was where Eitan would end up. Sue had lived in this area for long enough she considered Pennsylvania an obscene distance. His working relationship with her would not survive a move out to a different coast, and there went Akiva’s chance to be published, even under someone else’s name.
He was being practical, he told himself. He texted Mark. Surely someone who’d married their college sweetheart and settled down to a middle-class life in New Jersey would understand.
Akiva: Eitan’s probably leaving New York
