Page 12 of Breakout Year

Akiva

Rain came the next week, a gush of it, a summer storm that arrived on Sunday night and didn’t leave, pouring like water from an overturned cup.

Monday morning, Eitan texted Happy weekday shabbat , along with a selfie, Eitan on his couch in sweatpants and a thin T-shirt, halfway asleep.

Too much for just being back in touch, and Akiva paused for all of twenty seconds before he saved it as Eitan’s contact picture.

That was all the romanticism Akiva got about rain. His roof didn’t leak, at least, but humidity swelled the walls of his house. His power flickered with every gust of wind.

He had only so much laptop battery. So it was emails, and transcription, and more emails, and editing, and yet even more emails.

Today, most of them came from Willow, Sue’s agent, who believed very seriously in only two things: astrology—Akiva was momentarily grateful that he was estranged from his parents so that she’d stopped asking him about his birth time—and making Sue piles and piles of money.

When he’d finally finished, he opened the document he’d been avoiding all day.

This Gilded Land_Draft2_real_REAL. A book.

His book, even if it wasn’t anywhere near ready to be a book.

A set of half-formed ideas. A cast of characters he wanted to give Yiddish names as befitting their time on the Lower East Side.

No, he should probably christen them things more familiar to the American palate. So, sighingly, Raisel became Rose .

He lit a candle, set his intentions—to write words, possibly good ones, possibly several thousand of them—then avoided writing in favor of scrolling social media. He should probably charge his laptop. He’d get up to do that in just a second.

A second he didn’t have, because the power went out.

Right, scratch that. He got a notebook, activated the flashlight on his phone. Wrote, or tried to. He probably shouldn’t run down his phone battery, just in case. Tomorrow. I can write tomorrow.

The rain didn’t stop Monday, Tuesday. Wednesday when Akiva woke up to the ping of rain on his roof, the ozonic smell of thunderstorms. He’d gone to sleep with his window partially cracked.

Now the area by his windowsill was wet, the cheap paint already bubbling.

He texted his landlord, got a thumbs-up in response that could mean anything.

So he took pictures and made sure to mark them with today’s date.

The first rule of anything: document, document, document.

He was going through his morning routine—coffee on, prayers said, emails answered—when a text from Eitan came in, a hi as if they were the kind of friends who just sent things like that.

Akiva: Do you ever sleep?

Eitan: Being awake is more interesting. Are you not a morning person?

Akiva: I am

Eitan: Then why are you grouchy?

Akiva: This is me normal

Eitan: OK, Oscar, well today’s game is postponed, so you wanna go out tonight? I could pick you up

Akiva checked his schedule. Bookstore event still sat at the top.

Akiva: I have to work.

For his trouble, he got a frowny face.

Eitan: I’m really looking forward to taking you out

One date. He’d agreed to one date. One date was what Eitan had paid for. One date was what Eitan would get. And not tonight.

Akiva: I’m available?—

So he cross-referenced his and the Cosmos’ schedule and sent a list of potential times, neat as making any other appointment.

The room was packed. Fuck . Akiva had spent last night—the part of it where he hadn’t been rewatching Eitan’s press conference as if that would help him prepare for their date and pointedly not noticing the faint lines that Eitan now had around his eyes—worrying that no one would show up.

The chairs weren’t empty, that was for sure.

A table was stationed at one end of the store, a backdrop behind it that the publisher had sent over to advertise Sue’s catalog.

At the other end of the store where Akiva was seated in the back row, some readers were chatting quietly, while others had books open on their laps as they scrolled through their phones.

One gave Akiva a look like he’d gotten lost on the way to somewhere else, even if he’d designed each of the thirty-six slides Sue was about to present. He tucked the tzitzit fringing the corners of his clothes into his waistband and tried not to let his answering smile turn into a glare.

He was wearing a name tag, the peel-off kind on which he’d markered Spencer Lattimore . The beauty of an alias was that he could disappear whenever he wanted, even if people now knew that Spencer Lattimore was a tall pale guy who occasionally used his tzitzit like a fidget toy.

He was contemplating the logistics of how best he could fade into the woodwork when two things happened: bookstore staff called the room to order and Eitan ducked in the door.

Fuck. Well, so much for this going smoothly.

To Akiva’s dismay, Eitan spotted him immediately.

“Hey!” Eitan whispered. Or almost whispered.

Shouted, really. He settled himself in one of the two empty chairs in the back row—right next to Akiva.

He wasn’t wearing anything obviously Cosmos-branded so was just a handsome athlete in a room full of people, a few of whom swiveled with an Is that…

? No, it couldn’t be . He smiled, guilelessly, and folded his hands on his lap.

It’d be petty for Akiva to scooch his chair away, but that was what he did, moving to all of two inches from Eitan where he could think more clearly. “What are you doing here?” Akiva spit.

“Nice to see you too…” He eyed Akiva’s name tag. “Spencer.”

He said the name as if he was trying it out, different from the almost-grudging way people sometimes said Akiva .

Akiva wasn’t going to think anything of it, or of the teasing flash of Eitan’s dark brown eyes.

Akiva had agreed to do a favor—a job, really—for Eitan, but he wasn’t on the clock yet. He didn’t need to pretend.

Despite the rain, Eitan looked pulled together—dry, casual in black jeans and expensive sneakers, the kind of T-shirt that must have cost a lot to look that distressed. “I figured, what goes better together than books and rain, you know?” He studied the room. “So when you said you had to work…”

Up front, Sue scrolled through the slides Akiva had labored over. “I work in publishing. Sort of,” Akiva said.

“I thought you were a model.”

“Sometimes.” Mostly when the rent is due . Akiva nodded to Sue. “The rest of the time I work for her.”

Eitan hummed. “Is that what you’ve been doing since you left?”

Akiva’s spine went rigid. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?” Eitan repeated, a question tilting his voice. He drummed his fingers against the metal edge of the chair as he waited for Akiva to answer. When Akiva didn’t say anything else, he dug in his pocket, retrieved a cough drop, and unsheathed it. The wrapper crinkled.

People were beginning to look at them. Akiva wondered if this counted as their date. Given that he was sitting as stiff as his folding chair, purposefully away from Eitan, probably not. “Can we talk,”Akiva whispered, “when this is over?”

Eitan smiled. The effect was no less dazzling than it had been in Arizona when Akiva used to watch it shimmer like heat off desert pavement. “Sure.”

Distantly, Sue tapped the mic a few times to gather the room’s attention.

“I got into writing,” she said, “after my husband disappeared under suspicious circumstances. It was fortunate luck for a mystery writer: I came home one day to find him gone—clothes, hair pomade, that damn car he spent so much time working on. Now I knew why. It was because he was going to up and leave me in it. Other women at the time had bank accounts, but I didn’t. So, I took a job as a typist…”

She flipped to the next slide that showed photos Akiva had scanned for her, the typewriter on which she’d written her first book, her library card that she’d put miles and miles on.

“In retrospect, borrowing a bunch of books about what happens after your husband disappears isn’t the best way to remove suspicion that you disappeared him. ”

Laughter, followed by Eitan’s glance as if asking, Do you really work for her? Because that tended to be everyone’s reaction to Sue: that she and Akiva went together like peanut butter and borscht. Which was to say, not at all.

The talk went on. Sue spoke. Akiva tried to listen, aware—too aware—when Eitan went into full sprawl mode. Their knees weren’t brushing so much as held apart by a shivering layer of air. Eitan shifted again. Boredom, perhaps.

Akiva grabbed a notebook from his backpack, scrawled, You can leave if you want on a blank page, and slid it to Eitan.

Eitan grinned. Motioned for Akiva’s pen.

Wrote something and slid it back. It’s interesting.

His handwriting was slightly haphazard. Akiva resented the crooked crossbar on one t and the ease with which he tapped the muscled edge of his thigh against Akiva’s leg, a reminder of the compact efficiency of infielder bodies that Akiva really didn’t need in a professional context.

You’re really into the technical aspects of structuring mystery books? Akiva countered.

Eitan scribbled a response. No, but you are .

Akiva didn’t deny it, and he didn’t glance to where he could practically feel Eitan radiating a smile. If he folded his hands in his lap, he wouldn’t be tempted to write something back and encourage him.

Sue changed to another slide, one Akiva had known was coming.

He sucked in a breath. Held it. Purposefully did not look at Eitan to see what he thought of the cover—a woman in a profusion of a ballgown holding a knife.

It was historical mystery, right on the edge of romance, and Akiva was immensely proud of having worked with Sue on it and also wanted to crawl under his chair.

Next to him, Eitan made an interested sound. “Have you read that one?”

Akiva nodded. It wasn’t technically a lie.

“It’s good?”

“I think so.”