Page 94 of Breakout Year
“Yes.” Gabe’s mouth went tight.
“How many other teams will care?”
Gabe didn’t answer, because the answer was obvious. All of them.
“You gonna say ‘I told you so?’” Eitan spat. Because he had told Eitan so, repeatedly, adamantly, in language that never quite stuck. He called Eitan kid; Eitan felt like one now, sore all over like he’d been in a schoolyard scrap.
Gabe clenched his eyes shut. For a moment, Eitan braced himself to be told he’d fucked everything up. “I’m sorry this is happening,” Gabe said. As if this kind of treatment was inevitable as the weather. “Knowing it was going to and seeing it are two different things.”
Feeling it was another thing entirely, one Eitan wasn’t going to let himself experience in front of a witness, even if it was just Gabe. “Yeah.” Even that came out with tears in it.
“Hey, listen”—Gabe was using a tone that Eitan had never heard him employ before, one deliberate in its gentleness—“it’s been a long day.” Though it was barely two in the afternoon. “Why don’t you take a break? I’ll text you if any other teams make contact.”
Eitan’s hand was beginning to smart; his head was beginning to throb. The reasonable thing would be to go back to his room and hang out or find the handful of other players on site and go for a round of golf or something. Eitan mostly hated golf.
Nothing good would come from this feeling, like if someone else walked into the room, he might explode or worse.
Once on a road trip, when he’d been awake earlier than was reasonable to bother other people, he’d watched a documentary on deep-sea diving. How explorers would bring Styrofoam cups to the bottom of the ocean that would come back miniaturized from the pressure. He felt like that now—not crushed, precisely, but hammered into something smaller than himself.
“Yeah, I should probably go,” Eitan said.
“Hey.” Gabe reached out as if he might do something drastic, like try to hug Eitan, before he shook his head. “It’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna work this out.”
“You don’t know that.” And so Eitan picked up that folder and his suit jacket. Said goodbye to Gabe and dragged himself through the hotel conference center in a daze.
Up in his room, Eitan threw his jacket on the floor, stripped out of his suit pants and left them in a heap. Sat on the bed. Stood up. Pulled out the desk chair, pushed it back in. Opened the curtains—the midday light was blinding—and closed them again. He considered the folder, its contents. Hiding that away wouldn’t change anything. There were other copies of course. He opened the folder, smoothed the printout with the flat of his palm. They wanted him to turn away from that picture, from that past version of himself rendered grainy on printer paper. He studied it now; even at low resolution, the look on his face, and on Akiva’s, was clear. Maybe Eitan would take that picture with him wherever he was going. Hell, maybe he’d get it framed.
He sat again. Cupped his head in his hands. His ring was cold against his face. He took it off, considered it in the light. Was someone from the Cosmos still eavesdropping on his heartbeat? He wasn’t theirs now. Didn’t belong to anything so crass as a baseball organization. An impulsive person might chuck the ring from the hotel window. It didn’t open. Probably for the best. Instead, he tucked the ring into a recess of his suitcase and checked his phone—no word from Gabe. Eitan should put his suit back on. Should go downstairs, head held high, as if nothing was the matter. He should show all of baseball they couldn’t fucking get to him.
Instead, he picked up his suit, folded it half-heartedly, and stuffed it back in its carrying bag and into his suitcase. Pulled on sweats. If he went for a run, at least he’d be somewhere other than this room, where the walls felt like they were closing in. He wanted to be anywhere else—in his room in Cleveland, in his apartment in New York.
In a small house in New Jersey.
He took out his phone. Found a plane ticket. It was somewhere between a forty-minute and two-hour drive to LAX, but that had the most direct flights. If he left now, he could be in Newark by one a.m. He could be by Akiva’s side, in his bed.
Before, Eitan had wondered what it would cost for them to be together. Now he knew. He went anyway.
39
Akiva
Akiva woke up in the middle of the night to a pounding from his front door, loud even above the pinging rain. He got up, pulled on a sweatshirt over his flannel pajama pants that warded off his house’s late fall chill, grabbed his kippah and his phone.
His front door lacked a peephole. He stood as whoever it was knocked again, a noise punctuated by a familiar gasp. He opened the door to find Eitan: dripping wet, accompanied by a massive rolling suitcase, and incontrovertibly there.
“Come in, you must be freezing.” Akiva ushered him inside.
He wasn’t sure how long Eitan had been knocking, but it had to have been a while—his clothes were raining water onto Akiva’s floor. Akiva wanted to get him a towel, a hot shower. Wanted to demand what Eitan was doing there at two in the morning.
He abandoned all of that for taking Eitan’s face in his hands and kissing him lightly on the lips. Eitan was cold—shiveringly so—and there was a wildness about him Akiva recognized from the moment after he’d said something at that press conference he couldn’t take back.
“You’re wearing it.” Eitan’s hand traced its way down Akiva’s arm to the fraying cuff of his sweatshirt, the Rivkin one he’d never gotten around to returning.
“And you’re not wearing a coat,” Akiva clucked.
“I was in California.” Though Eitan didn’t say much more. That look was back—a slightly stunned expression that made Akiva’s chest ache. “I used to be a lot of things.”
And now you’re not? Akiva didn’t ask the question, not with Eitan so obviously fragile. “Hey, you could actually get sick.” He coaxed Eitan’s chilly fingers between his and led him to the bathroom. Ran the water and waited as the water heater made its painstaking decision to actually heat up.
