Page 18 of Breakout Year

Akiva

Akiva woke up with a grunt. He reached an arm out and batted at the stuff on the nightstand—his phone, his glasses, a bottle of ibuprofen whose rattling hurt his ears.

It took a minute to realize where he was: Eitan’s guest room.

What time was it? The numbers on the alarm clock yelled at him; the sun did the same through a gap in the partially drawn curtains.

He rolled over and wished he hadn’t. Lots of things got better as you neared thirty, but hangovers definitely weren’t one of them.

How was Eitan going to play after going out like that? Memories from last night came back like strobe-light flashes. Eitan dragged him out, dragged him to the dance floor, kept dragging his eyes all over him. Must have been the liquor, the high of a win.

Eitan appeared at the doorway as if summoned, looking better than Akiva felt. He had two bottles of sports drink; he handed one to Akiva. “Heard you get up,” Eitan said. “The walls are pretty thin.”

Akiva sipped from the bottle. He must’ve been bad off if red electrolyte water had lost its melted popsicle taste. “How are you so…” Akiva nearly abandoned the second half of the sentence “…vertical?”

Eitan smiled. “Couldn’t sleep. Also, there are a bunch of pictures of us, so welcome to being famous.”

“Fuck.” Akiva fumbled open his phone, checked social media.

The pictures were there, all right.

Akiva scrolled through the comments, which was his first mistake.

Everyone had something to say about those photos of him and Eitan.

Who’s that with him? a comment asked. Because they were dancing…

close. Purposefully. Intentionally . Which must have been why Eitan’s hand kept finding its way around parts of him: his waist, his arm, once, pressingly, on his lower back.

Someone posted a video. Fortunately, the only sound was the (good at the time, awful in retrospect) music, because whoever captured it had gotten the exact moment when Eitan breathed an I missed you right in his ear.

The video was entirely too grainy to see Akiva’s eyes go wide—surprise mixed with something else he wasn’t ready to think about—but he knew they had and that was worse.

This was what Eitan wanted, right? They were out .

Well, they were kind of out. None of the Reddit comments seemed decided on the matter.

More than once, they referred to Akiva as Eitan’s bro .

“People seem a little unclear that you and I are…” Akiva wasn’t awake enough to come up with more than gesturing between them.

Eitan snorted. “Yeah. Anything short of a coming-out press release isn’t gonna be clear enough for some people.”

“I don’t know that I want to do that,” Akiva said. Because there was a world of difference between pretending and outright lying, and Akiva wasn’t being paid anywhere near enough for the latter. If such a thing could even have a price.

“I wouldn’t ask you to.” Eitan said it almost wistfully, as if he was thinking about dating someone for whom such a press release wouldn’t be a problem.

For both their sakes, Akiva needed to get out of this apartment. “I should get up.” He didn’t move.

“You want something to eat?”

“Maybe some plain toast?” Even that thought made Akiva queasy.

“Coming right up.” Eitan padded off like he was going to bring Akiva breakfast in bed. If Akiva’s chest ached, that was blamable on how much vodka he’d had in the past twenty-four hours.

Akiva didn’t get up so much as he threw himself toward the floor and mostly missed. The floorboards were gratifyingly cold under his feet; the walls stayed relatively still.

He navigated his way down a narrow hallway decorated with family and team photos. A sudden flash of memory: Eitan helping him up the hallway last night, the two of them hanging onto one another for balance before Akiva had collapsed onto the mattress and into the long plunge of sleep.

Out in the main area, Akiva hoisted himself onto a stool at the island that separated the kitchen from the living room. The apartment smelled like tea and warming breadcrumbs. He closed his eyes and drank his sports drink. It tasted red.

“Oh here.” Eitan slid a paper cup of coffee over.

“Did you go out for this?”

“Most people don’t drink tea, so I figured you might want coffee.” Eitan shrugged as if the mental calculus was obvious.

“In the future, tea’s fine,” Akiva said. As if their future was going to involve his waking up at Eitan’s apartment with any regularity. “You don’t need to go out of your way.”

For some reason, Eitan’s shoulders stiffened. “Hypothetically speaking, would it be okay to bring you coffee if we were actually dating?”

“Um.” Akiva took a sip of black coffee. It was understandably bitter.

“I meant,” Eitan continued, “did other guys bring you coffee?”

Mostly, we didn’t have sleepovers like that. What Akiva didn’t want to say in case Eitan felt sorry for him. “Sometimes.”

“I wasn’t sure if…” Eitan began and then faded off. “I’m just figuring out this dating men stuff.”

It wasn’t clear if Eitan meant dating men—who he might have slept with but not dated—or dating men rather than women. Akiva glanced around. “No one here’s grading you.” So you don’t have to pretend with me , he didn’t add.

Eitan’s shoulders unhunched themselves. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted milk—I only have oat milk—or sugar or anything.”

“Both is good.”

“The oat milk can get a little sweet.”

Akiva gulped around a sudden lump of air in his throat. “I like sweet.”

Eitan retrieved the milk, the sugar, watched as Akiva applied them to his coffee.

After a few sips and a piece of buttered toast—“Don’t worry, it’s hechshered,” Eitan assured him, and Akiva didn’t mention he’d gotten lax about checking kosher labeling in recent years—Akiva almost felt like a person.

“What time do you have to be at the park?” Akiva asked.

“You know me, I like to get there early.”

“I remember.” And it was intimate somehow, to be remembering the same thing at the same time—how in Arizona, they’d sometimes both get to the ballpark hours before practice, Eitan to get his energy out running laps, Akiva to get a sense of the park’s sightlines and features.

Some of which might have included Eitan, jogging the outfield in shorts and exercise tights.

Now, Eitan was moving with a certain freneticism: he poured tea into a mug and sloshed some on the counter.

Ripped a paper towel from the holder messily enough to leave shreds.

Stubbed his toe as he was tossing the shreds in the trashcan.

Issued an I’m sorry to the room like he’d somehow offended Akiva.

By now, Akiva was almost ninety percent awake.

He got off the barstool, peeled a pane of towel from the roll, and wiped up the tea.

It didn’t take a mystery writer to know that something was weighing on Eitan.

“You good?” Akiva asked, because that was an easier question than Is this about last night?

“I’m fine—” Eitan began. “Okay, I’m not. I cursed out my meditation app.”

“When was that?”

“Earlier.”

“I must not have heard you.”

“I was whispering because I didn’t want to wake you up.

” Eitan plucked another paper towel from the roll and began shredding it.

It was the kind with quilting Akiva had to wait to go on sale to afford.

“The team scheduled me for an interview to quote, ‘Deflect media attention away from any distractions.’”

Akiva swallowed a mouthful of sweet coffee. Because distractions meant the press conference. It was possible distractions meant him. He shouldn’t feel guilty. He was just doing what he was hired to do. “Oh.”

“I think this interview might go about as well as my last go-round with the media.”

“I liked that press conference,” Akiva said.

“You liked me making a fool of myself?”

“You didn’t.” You were brave. Certainly braver than I was . And Akiva could blame the lingering vodka for making him say, “And you won’t this time.”

Eitan smiled a little ruefully. “Anyway, so that’s my day. What are you doing?”

Taking the PATH train home and trying not to puke . Sitting in my house and trying not to think about you. “Writing probably.”

“If you want to stick around, help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. Here, I’ll give you my spare keys.” A morning-after kind of offer, even if they hadn’t really had the kind of night to have an after .

“I might need some time before I get on the train,” Akiva admitted.

“Just as a head’s up, there are sometimes photographers waiting when you get outside.”

“So I should comb my hair?”

“Just if there’s anyone who you don’t want to see your walk of…

” Eitan frowned. “Walk of whatever.” And he turned toward the process of getting ready—pouring a travel mug of tea that he immediately abandoned in favor of collecting his duffle bag—quickly enough that he probably didn’t notice the flush to Akiva’s cheeks.

“Here,” Eitan said a minute later, “let me show you how all the locks work.” He did, running through the doorknob, the deadbolts, the electronic lock. “I should probably head out.”

“Are you sure you want me to stay here?” Akiva asked. “I could rob you.”

Eitan smiled. “You can take whatever you want. No robbery required.”

You shouldn’t give yourself away like that , Akiva wanted to caution. After Akiva, Eitan might date someone for real, someone who might not leave Eitan’s stuff—or his heart—undisturbed. “Here,” Akiva replied instead, “you forgot your tea.”

He grabbed the mug from the counter and brought it over. If he was writing a scene like this, their hands might brush or Eitan might spontaneously confess that he’d had a crush on Akiva all those years ago.

Neither happened.

Eitan took the mug, gulped a mouthful of tea, immediately made a face at its temperature. “What are you doing after the game?”

“It’s Shabbat.”

“Oh”—Eitan shifted from foot to foot—“right.”

“When does your interview air?”

“Tonight. At least you won’t have to watch it.” He stuffed a hand in his pocket, rocked on his heels. “I guess you didn’t have to watch it anyway.”

“Let me know how it goes.”

“You answer your phone on Shabbos now?” Eitan said it Shabbos , soft and a little Russian.

“No, but tell me anyway.” Technically beyond The Contract, but Akiva remembered that desperate spinning feeling of having the entire baseball world looking at you.

“Okay.” Eitan lingered for a long minute as if he wanted to say something else. But he didn’t, and the bolts snicked in their various latches as he locked the door on his way out.

Akiva did his penance for a late night by cleaning up the breakfast dishes and resolutely not being envious of Eitan’s apartment.

Of course he can live some place like this and not have to think about rent.

A horseradish-bitter thought that Akiva squashed.

Eitan had invited him here. Eitan was being as generous as he always was.

It wasn’t his fault that baseball didn’t work the same way.

A while later, Akiva conceded he was stalling. He was also faced with a new problem: his shirt from last night smelled like vodka and looked like he’d slept in it, which he had.

Akiva: Can I borrow a shirt?

He didn’t expect an immediate answer. Eitan was obviously busy—baseball!—and Akiva should have thought about this yesterday and brought something extra. Before he could pocket his phone, it buzzed.

Eitan: Help yourself to whatever fits

Which meant Akiva had to go into Eitan’s bedroom.

What’re you gonna do—swoon? It was a bed.

Eitan slept in it. Eitan’s bedroom was no more intimate than the rest of his apartment.

So Akiva girded himself like he was about to ford the Red Sea and not just part his way through Eitan’s discarded laundry, then entered.

Eitan’s bed was suitably large. The untucked dark green comforter revealed stark white sheets. The surface of his nightstand held a phone charger, a scattering of change, a digital picture frame with a blank screen. An indicator light said it was low on power.

Akiva was not going to touch anything that weren’t the handles to Eitan’s dresser and the shirts in his drawer. There was close like dancing together in a club, and close like Eitan’s foot brushing his under a restaurant table, and close like it meant something. They weren’t that kind of close.

He took his best guess as to which drawer held Cosmos gear, picked a hoodie that was more midnight blue than screaming yellow, and fled with a sweatshirt and the better part of his self-respect.

He ended up breathless in the hallway, laughing at himself, holding a hoodie with Eitan’s last name written across the back.

Maybe he should have picked something else.

He pulled the hoodie on. The inside had clearly been pre-treated to be soft.

Each letter of Eitan’s decaled name sat like a hand between his shoulder blades.

Well, all right then.