Page 91 of Breakout Year
For a moment, his entire body froze. His teabag was perched on a spoon, wrung out and awaiting more hot water, the string wrapped around it. If Akiva was here, he could find some metaphor in that, but it was only Eitan, with nothing to say for himself. “When did you know?”
Kiley’s forehead wrinkled delicately. “When we were dating, you’d look at other people. Men. I assumed you were seeing someone else and keeping it secret.”
He thought of every time they’d gone out in Cleveland, how she’d giggle when people had asked when they were getting married. How she’d shared pictures of the two of them together, captions studded with heart-eyes emojis. “You thought I was using you?”
She straightened as if gathering herself. Reached and tucked her hair back into its ponytail. “People can be really cruel. I thought maybe if we were dating, it’d make stuff easier for you. But with all that stuff with Pride Night—I wasn’t sure if you actually wanted anything to be easy.”
“I—” Eitan began, then shook his head a few times. She’d dated him knowing he was gay. Slept with him—less and less as time wore on until they’d just been friends long before they’d broken up. She’d comforted him when he couldn’t be what she wanted. Protected him when he’d needed it, before he’d known that he’d needed it. Assumed he’d been screwing around behind her back and hadn’t let that matter. He thought he’d had guts when he’d come out on camera. But maybe there was more courage to be found in doing a small, good thing, unknown to anyone but yourself.
“Thank you.” He reached for her hand and held it, not in the way he would have when they’d been together, his palm across her knuckles. “Thank you for doing that. I’m sorry you felt like you had to. I’m sorry—” He gathered his voice. “I’m sorry for not being honest with you. For not being honest with myself.”
“It’s okay.” She said it in that way where he could tell it really wasn’t okay—that she wasn’t angry at him but maybe was at the whole circumstance.
“For the record, I wasn’t dating anyone else.”
“Oh.” She considered. “That must have been lonely.”
“It was.” Less so now in retrospect, knowing she’d been with him all along. It was possible—probable—that he wasn’t the only person who’d been lonely when they’d been dating. “Why did you, uh, do that?” A question badly formulated, but she withdrew her hand and resumed eating, this time less hesitantly.
“Why did I date a handsome, famous baseball player?” She lifted an eyebrow at him.
“I wasn’t famous in Cleveland,” he protested.
“You were Midwest famous.” Though to Eitan that sounded like not famous at all. “Remember that WAGs trip I went on last year?”
A trip Eitan had bought her a plane ticket for and then cash app’d her money for various expenses. Kiley had sent pictures back: plates of food, her wet hair after the beach. Nothing particularly sexy, in retrospect. She must have known for a long time. He nodded.
“It was easy to be with you but not be in love with you, if that makes sense.” She said it like it was a simple calculation, then hesitated. “That sounds like I just wanted your money.”
Eitan thought of those first dates with Akiva: how he’d paid but never felt used. How, in retrospect, his relationship with Kiley felt much the same. “It was easy to be with you too.” He withdrew his hand and rolled his cup between his palms. Considered what their lives would have been like if they’d been honest with one another from the start. He’d thought she’d be angry with him. Maybe he’d been angry at himself—for waiting so long, for not seeing the truth right in front of him—and projected that onto her. A mistake. One he needed to remedy now. “How’s the new guy?”
“He’s good.” Kiley’s cheeks went slightly flushed. Good seemed like an understatement. So Eitan asked what her new boyfriend did and what he was like and tried to ask the right questions in the right places, but mostly the one whose answer he most wanted to know—if she was happier now—was met with a resounding yes.
“And New York was better for you?” she asked after a while.
“New York was…” He scrounged for words and couldn’t find any, so he took out his phone, scrolled through pictures—himself, the Cosmos. Akiva and him in the park. Akiva and him on that vintage train. Akiva on Eitan’s couch, frowning over his laptop. Ordinary, uninteresting pictures, really, except they were enough to make someone ram into his ankle, to make Connor stop speaking to him entirely. Ordinary, uninteresting pictures, except Eitan had scrolled through the same set almost every night since he and Akiva had been apart.
“Sounds like you didn’t want to split up.” Kiley was smiling at him, slightly benevolently, as he scrolled through yet another photo.
“I guess I’m still smitten.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Just smitten?”
The question hung there for a moment. He knew the answer. He knew it, and he didn’t let himself know it. Took it, shoved it in a mental box. There were bad breakups and bad breakups. Some happened to people who never should have been dating in the first place, and some happened because of circumstances beyond anyone’s control. A difference he hadn’t understood until he’d experienced both.
“I’m sorry for how things worked out between you and me,” he said.
Kiley waved a hand. “If it helps, I wasn’t morose when we broke up.”
“Me neither,” he confessed.
“So what does that tell you?” she asked.
Eitan thought about that for the rest of brunch as he explained where he might end up next season—some place that wasn’t New York and wasn’t Cleveland.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Kiley said as she hugged him goodbye, “but I’m glad we broke up. I would have felt obligated to move wherever you went if we’d stayed together.”
“You wouldn’t have had to. I mean, your career, uh…” Eitan racked his brain. He knew she worked in an office, that she’d recently gotten a big promotion. That she had three coworkers she liked and one she absolutely hated, that he’d spent their time dating agreeing that she’d been right to be annoyed by things that were perhaps not objectively that annoying, but Eitan knew how that went. Some guys in the clubhouse just rubbed you the wrong way, even if he was now such a guy. He just couldn’t remember the details of what she actually did.
