Page 14 of Breakout Year

Akiva waved a hand. “It’s fine.” None of this was real. Akiva was going to eat dinner, have his picture taken by a paparazzo named Dave, and wake up (alone) in his house with bills still seeping in like rain through his window screens.

Around them, conversation had dimmed, either because other diners were winding down their meals or because—yes, Akiva looked from table to table, confirming what he’d suspected—the entire restaurant was looking at them and barely pretending they weren’t. “Everyone is staring at us.”

“Why, are you famous?”

Akiva attempted a smile as various phone cameras clicked. What the photos would look like—indigestion, amusement—he didn’t know.

A group of fans took that as permission and came over, their phones at the ready. “Can we get a selfie?” a woman wearing a Cosmos T-shirt asked.

“Sure, of course.” Eitan smiled, subtly different from his smile at Akiva, not that Akiva was keeping track of that at all.

“Here, I got it.” Akiva took the woman’s phone and pointed it at the group with a “Cosmos on three” that probably sounded facetious.

Eitan signed a napkin, a water bottle, declined autographing someone’s arm. Waved the group away with, “Thank you so much for supporting the team!”

After they’d left, Akiva turned to him. “You get asked to sign people’s arms a lot?”

“Yeah, sometimes: arms, babies, shoes, uh, other body parts.” Eitan motioned to his chest. “I probably shouldn’t have said that last one.”

“Well, now I know,” Akiva said.

“Know what?”

“That you haven’t read anything by Sue, if you think talking about”—Akiva lowered his voice to a whisper—“ breasts is gonna scandalize me.”

Eitan laughed. “Now I have to read that book.”

“Please don’t.”

“Did you secretly write it?” Eitan joked—or it would have been a joke, except Akiva could feel himself turning an intractable red. “Holy shit, you did.”

“Be quiet.” Said through clenched teeth.

Akiva didn’t have a chance to add anything else. Another group of fans pressed closer to their table, this one visibly drunk. Sorry , Eitan mouthed, as if they were on an actual date and not a publicity stunt.

It made it easier for Akiva to sip his wine.

To watch as Eitan smiled and signed and made cheerful banter.

Eventually, he must’ve hit whatever internal threshold he had for fan interactions.

He rose. Cast an arm to indicate the room.

Shouted, “Next round’s on me,” and visibly relished the answering calls of approval.

Eitan flagged down the server once patrons had begun clamoring for the bartender, who was clearly torn between watching his tip ratchet up and the logistics of making thirty drinks at once.

“Would it be possible to be reseated somewhere a little less…public?” Eitan said it with full implication, and the waitress smiled at him delightedly and assured him that it was.

“I thought you wanted us to get photographed,” Akiva said. Though he supposed one of the most important lessons of being famous was knowing when to make yourself scarce.

The crowd near them had thickened, a cluster edging closer like they might resume asking for things.

Eitan slid a hand across the table and wrapped his fingers around Akiva’s wrist, the metal of his ring cool against Akiva’s skin. “C’mon,” Eitan said, and the flash of his smile did nothing to settle Akiva’s pulse.

They made it to the next room, to a table objectively not much different in size than the one they’d just left, except for how it felt like it was half the length. Eitan slid into a chair. Belatedly, he let go of Akiva’s wrist.

They must have touched, before, years ago, even if they’d never technically played for the same team.

Baseball was a game of shoulder nudges and head rubs and ass slaps.

Sometimes, Akiva’s kippah and his tzitzit and his weird diet stuff , as more than one teammate put it, had made other players keep their distance.

Not Eitan. Akiva would have remembered that.

“Are you hungry?” Eitan asked. “You look hungry. I mean, you look thin—I mean, it suits you.” All said in a nervous rush. His skin was too tan to show a blush, but there was the suggestion of one in the way he smiled.

Akiva refocused himself on the menu. Their waiter came around. Akiva ordered the cheapest pasta, another glass of wine.

“I’ll have—” Eitan listed off two more pasta dishes, a pizza, and a salad.

“I forgot about ballplayer appetites,” Akiva said, when the waiter had cleared out.

“You say that like you aren’t still one.”

Akiva held up his uncalloused hands. “Nope.”

For a moment, Eitan looked like he was going to do something—grab Akiva’s wrist and rub his thumb over the soft basin of his palm.

Worse, object. I left that part of me behind a long time ago , Akiva practiced saying.

Even if he sometimes found himself holding various household objects with the same grip he’d used on his curveball.

“So if you’re not a ballplayer,” Eitan said, “and you’re only sometimes a model, are you like a ghostwriter or whatever?”

“You seem very hung up on the modeling thing.”

“Well, you know, a baseball player dating a model. Kind of cliché if you think about it.” Eitan took another sip of beer. “And you didn’t answer the question.”

Akiva glanced around to see if they were being eavesdropped on. If word got out about his arrangement with Sue, it’d be an entirely different kind of scandal. “I’m not a ghostwriter.” Mostly, ghostwriters aren’t paid by the hour.

“But that book I bought,” Eitan said, “the one Sue wrote, did you really write it?”

“I provide extensive editorial support.” A yes in all but name.

“So you do all the work and don’t get the credit?”

He didn’t—the work was driven by Sue’s ideas, and she took whatever Akiva wrote and made it ten times better. Some days it bothered him more than others. Today was one of those days. “I like eating and paying my rent,” he said primly.

“If you wrote a book, I’d want to read it.” Eitan plucked a piece of bread from the basket on the table, ate it with a scatter of crumbs.

Akiva’s heart did a thing. An entirely unwanted freeze-clench in his chest, the kind that came from someone saying something you didn’t know you wanted to hear.

Eitan was charming. That didn’t mean Akiva should do something as foolish as being charmed.

He plucked his own piece of bread from the basket and chewed it deliberately.

“Thank you,” he managed. “I’ll keep that in mind. ”

They sat quietly for a minute. Eitan ate and shifted and rearranged a napkin. Normal Eitan stuff. Until he blurted, “So why’d you leave baseball?”

Akiva had no polite response to that. Eitan was paying for his food, his time.

The unwritten rule of all of this was Akiva could probably be challenging, lightly flirtatious, but not outright disagreeable.

He definitely couldn’t do what he was currently contemplating and upend his water glass on Eitan’s head.

“What really happened in Cleveland?” he replied.

“Nothing. A lot of little things.” Eitan shifted in his seat.

His shoe knocked Akiva’s, but this time he drew it back on his own.

“They wanted me to be part of Faith and Family night. Really leaned on me about it, citing me being from Cleveland and the face of the team and whatever. Connor was going to speak—he did the team bible study thing—and they always wanted us to do promo together.”

“Connor…?”

“Reynolds. He’s the Crooks second baseman. My best friend.” Eitan’s voice sounded tight for a moment, but he pressed on. “I took one look at who they had featured—a church I wouldn’t be part of for, like, so many reasons—and told them no. I thought the team understood. Guess not.”

“So you said something to the media about it?” Akiva said.

“Yeah. Maybe not a good idea in retrospect.”

“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?”

A candle sat on their tabletop, not an electronic one but a real one with a sputtering little flame. Eitan’s smile reminded Akiva of that candle: warm, slightly flickering, genuine. Akiva stuffed that thought away with another mouthful of bread.

Their food arrived a few minutes later. Eitan oohed over everything—and nudged a few of his plates Akiva’s way—then ate with the professional focus of a ballplayer.

Between bites, they talked about what ballplayers talked about—who was still playing and where and Eitan’s favorite games from over the years.

“Can I ask you a weird question?” Eitan said after a while.

Akiva’s shoulders involuntarily crept toward his ears. “Ask. I might not answer, though.”

“How does this compare to your other dates?” As if Eitan was placing this on a mental leaderboard.

“I don’t really have time to date—I work a lot.

” Something that people usually accepted as given, if they thought Akiva dated at all, as if a kippah was the same as a monk’s tonsure.

He wasn’t lying, though. He could resolve The Spreadsheet or spend his time on the apps, which occupied a firmly lower-case designation in his brain, but he didn’t have time for both.

“Mostly, am I doing this right?” Eitan asked. “I’ve, uh, never been out like this. With a man.”

Akiva blinked in surprise. “Did you not date men in Cleveland?” He’d assumed Eitan had, just discreetly. Or maybe he’d dated women publicly and fucked men privately. He certainly wouldn’t be the first.

Eitan frowned as if he was unused to the expression. “No, not really. I wanted to see what it was like, dating and having people know about it.”

“So you decided to do it on the biggest stage imaginable?” Akiva asked.

“Doesn’t feel so big right now.” Eitan’s eyes picked up the candlelight.

Akiva knew about fifty adjectives for the word brown , ranging from sable to mud . He would not think of any of them right now. He would not reassure Eitan that he was doing well in case he got…notions. “Wait until all those pictures of us hit the Internet,” Akiva said.

“Might not be so bad.”

Akiva made a noncommittal sound he hoped communicated that yes, yes it would be.

“So you’re a pessimist like Gabe.”

“I’m a realist.”

“That’s what pessimists say when they’re denying being pessimists. Okay, another weird question. Did you know, uh, you weren’t straight before you left baseball?”

Akiva could hear the question under the question. Is that why you left? “Yeah, I knew I was gay. I’ve known ever since I could be conscious of knowing, if that makes sense.”

For whatever reason, Eitan’s mouth twisted. He took a quick swig of beer, dabbed the foam off his upper lip a little forcefully. “What’d your family think of that?”

Akiva’s hand went tense around the stem of his wineglass. “We’re not really close anymore. Not because of me being queer.” Just because of everything else .

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Eitan said. “Unless it’s a good thing?”

“Mostly my fault.” Akiva didn’t care to elaborate, so he didn’t. He’d get paid the same rate either way.

“You must have had a good reason then,” Eitan said.

Nothing about this date was supposed to be real, except the wine, the food, the way Eitan kept saying things like that.

Casual declarations that Akiva should box up like leftovers and unpack in the safety of his house, far from the restaurant and the candle-lit glow of Eitan’s eyes and the hesitation in his smile. “It’s been a long time,” Akiva said.

Eitan shrugged. “Still.” As if he knew time didn’t always make things easier.

“What do your parents think about”—Akiva gestured between them—“you dating a man?”

“Not about me dating you ?”

“We’re not really dating.”

Eitan’s mouth twisted. “I think they were surprised at the whole press conference thing. Maybe not as surprised as I was expecting.” He cut through another ravioli. Egg yolk, sunshine yellow, trickled onto his plate. “Hell, I was surprised I said something, even as I was saying it.”

“Are you sorry you did?”

Eitan gave him another look, this one glowing and hopeful in a way Akiva didn’t have within him to extinguish. “No,” Eitan said. “No, I don’t regret a thing.”