Page 35 of Breakout Year

Akiva’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, and Eitan wanted to put his mouth against it and his palms on Akiva’s too-skinny ribs. To fold them into Akiva’s bed and not have to deal with all this stuff simmering between them. “All right,” Akiva said instead of telling Eitan to leave.

Akiva’s kitchen was barely large enough to hold both of them.

Hell, it was barely large enough to hold Akiva .

He pulled a cutting board from somewhere—one of the flexible plastic ones scarred with cuts—and a knife from somewhere else.

He washed the apples more thoroughly than Eitan would have, and Eitan stopped himself from asking about that and if Akiva had a favorite type of apple and what Akiva had done today and what he was planning to do tomorrow because the only thing his brain could supply was this is over .

He wouldn’t get to stand in this kitchen again, admiring the line of Akiva’s back as he sliced apples.

Akiva’s cuffs fell down his wrists until he pushed them back up, and Eitan lost himself in the hair on his forearms, in the competence of Akiva’s hands.

For the second time this year—after crash landing in New York having been unceremoniously thrown out of Cleveland, contract un-extended—Eitan found himself missing something that was never really his to begin with.

“C’mon,” Akiva said, when he was done slicing, “we can eat outside.”

Akiva’s yard was a patio that was fraying at the edges with weeds, presiding over a lawn that was growing more stones than grass. Akiva unfolded two lawn chairs. One he sat on a patch of concrete marked with two long rust spots.

“You come here often?” Maybe Eitan shouldn’t tease him, given the conversation they were about to have.

Akiva’s smile tugged the corner of his mouth before he disciplined it away. “Every morning. I drink coffee out here before I daven.”

Eitan surveyed the yard again—the bare patches of soil and wilting grass, the rust of the chain-link fence separating Akiva’s yard from his neighbors—and tried to find something in this place that would inspire beginning his day in prayer.

Let me take you away from this. Even as Akiva settled into what was clearly his favorite chair, as he balanced a plate bearing apple slices on the bony tops of his knees.

“Huh,” Eitan said belatedly.

“Yeah, I know, it doesn’t look like much.” Akiva dragged an apple slice through a pool of honey, then said the blessing just barely loud enough to be audible, fast enough that Eitan could only make out a blur of words.

“I forget what prayer we’re supposed to use for this one,” Eitan said, even if he knew perfectly well that it was the blessing for things grown on trees.

Akiva shot him a look—a knowing Akiva look that Eitan filed away for later—then recited the blessing again, louder and slower, as if he was blessing not just a plate of apples but also his neighbor’s high oak tree and all the other trees beside.

Obligingly, Eitan dipped an apple slice into honey then chewed it as Akiva did the same.

The slices were already beginning to brown.

Eitan would not find a metaphor in that, mostly because he wasn’t sure if that qualified as a metaphor, and he was going to save his important questions for things like asking what Akiva had meant by stop and this .

“I’ve lived here for about six years,” Akiva said.

“After I quit baseball, I left home pretty soon after. I enrolled in college, but I couldn’t afford the dorms, and I didn’t want to take out a bunch of loans just to pay rent.

I figured I owed enough as it was. Things got bad for a while.

I was working a shitty retail job and barely making ends meet.

The only place I could afford was this short-term rental place and I thought that was gonna be the worst part—but the worst part was not being able to afford even that. ”

He shrugged and dipped another apple slice through honey, and Eitan would not rush him through this story—he knew how it ended, with Akiva sitting next to him, safe and relatively sound, even as some part of Eitan twisted up waiting to hear what happened next.

“I was gonna have to sleep in my car.” Akiva gave another shrug, this one markedly more defensive. “Mark and Rachel found out and let me crash in their guest room for a while, then floated me money for a deposit on this place and a few months’ rent. Even now, Mark won’t let me pay him back.”

Eitan got the not-unfamiliar urge to hug a complete stranger. He wondered if Mark was a Cosmos fan and if he had any use for season tickets or a personalized ballpark tour. “They sound like nice people.”

“They are.” Akiva’s voice tightened. “I tried to show my gratitude to them. I ran errands. I cleaned their house, even when they insisted I didn’t have to.

I felt like I was trying to dig my way out of some place unrecoverable but if I could just get something right…

I was determined to repay them. So I did cam work for a while. ”

He said it like he expected Eitan to shout at him or possibly to get up and leave the patio suddenly enough to knock over his chair. “By cam work, you mean…” Eitan began.

Akiva lifted an eyebrow at him. “Stuff on camera. For money.”

“Right. Right, yeah, I know.” Eitan felt like he couldn’t move his limbs.

“I didn’t show my face much. There might be screenshots out there, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Eitan blinked, willing sensation back into his body. “I don’t care if people find out.” No, that wasn’t correct. “I mean, it’s not about me. Are you—” Okay felt enormously incomplete for what he was trying to say.

“I want you to remember,” Akiva said, “that I was twenty-two and broke and stupid.”

“I don’t think you could ever be stupid. I didn’t know you had to pay different amounts for different types of apples and got in trouble at the grocery store.”

“You’re not stupid, you’re…” Akiva searched for a word. “Sincere.”

“That’s a writer word for not smart .”

Akiva shook his head. “New Yorkers like to disguise ignorance with aggressiveness half the time. You’re brave enough to tell people when you don’t know something.”

“Well, I don’t know a lot.” Including how I’m supposed to feel right now or what I should say. Eitan held that in. Maybe Akiva needed someone who would listen. He could do that, if nothing else.

“Anyway,” Akiva said, “Mark found out about the cam work. He got pretty pissed off—he thought I needed more money and was too stubborn to ask for it. We had a big fight. I slept a night in my car just to show that if I needed to, I could. When he came to find me the next morning, I…” He looked down and turned a shade of red that Eitan had never seen him become. “…I, uh, tried to kiss him.”

Eitan’s brain sometimes went too rapidly for its own good. Now it moved slow, as if recalibrating every interaction he and Akiva had over the past month. Akiva was sitting there, ashamed that he’d tried to kiss someone out of a misplaced sense of obligation. Someone who’d given him money . “Oh.”

Akiva’s shoulders, already stiff, went even more rigid.

“Mark turned me down, of course. He’s bi—he wouldn’t mind me telling you—but that doesn’t mean…

” Akiva shook his head. “I was scared and lonely, and he was just so kind about it. Rachel knows and she was kind about it too. I think that was almost worse: how understanding they both were.”

“You’re all still friends?”

Akiva nodded. “They’re my best friends, and they’ve said it’s not a big deal a hundred times over. That was the thing about the money I got from you. I finally had enough to spare that I could pay them back. And maybe they could forgive me once and for all.”

“I don’t know if forgiveness works like that.” Mostly because it sounded like Akiva’s friends knew him and loved him and had put the past where it belonged—behind them.

“Yeah, I know. You can’t buy it. But I wanted to try. Anyway, Mark won’t take the money, so I guess it’s something I’ll always owe.” Akiva ate his last apple slice, then placed his plate on the ground before wiping his hands together with an air of finality.

Eitan looked around at the yard again, at the weeds poking their defiant way up through concrete. “You’ve been living here for six years?”

Akiva’s forehead pinched. “Yeah?”

“The people in your books—don’t make that noise, they’re your books—they’re always going on adventures.

Like, everyone’s always on a luxury train or a steamship or escaping in a carriage.

Why are there so many names for carriage?

That was confusing. Anyway, I thought Akiva must want to go somewhere on a really nice train. I looked at tickets.”

Akiva laughed. “I do like really nice trains.”

“But I figured that’s why you wrote. For stuff like that. Not for stuff like this.”

“Just getting by?”

Eitan shook his head. “You should be proud of this place.”

That got him Akiva’s snort. “You don’t need to pretend—this place is kind of a disaster. Nothing works, and if I could afford any better, I would.”

“No, really,” Eitan pressed. “You’ve worked for everything you have. Most people can’t say that. And nothing can take that away.”

“Just my landlord if he ever decides to raise the rent.”

“I meant more, you know, metaphorically. Is that the one with like or as ? Regardless, it’s your place, not your landlord’s.

You’re the one who fixes it when stuff gets broken.

You’re the one who sits out here and prays with the trees.

” A place that Akiva had earned. That he felt like he had to keep earning through cam work or modeling or whatever else.

He’d called dating Eitan his job and Eitan took it as an insult, but that’s what it was—a job.

“My parents came over from Russia in the early nineties,” Eitan said.

“Even with the community, they didn’t have much when they got here.

Our temple used to give us groceries for Passover.

My mom would call them gifts , but I knew the difference.

I once heard her say that at least the bread you got in the breadlines was free .

But they couldn’t be Jewish in Russia, not really, and they were broke here.

I don’t think living like that ever really leaves you. ”

“No,” Akiva agreed, “it doesn’t.”

“No amount of money I make—that I might make—will ever make them certain that it’s enough.

I wish I could fix it.” I wish I could solve the same thing for you .

Despite being an optimist, Eitan knew certain things weren’t his to solve.

“We probably also should stop, uh, dating. Not dating. You know what I mean.”

“Probably.” Even if Akiva sounded as reluctant about it as Eitan felt.

“If it helps, I had a really good time. You were a great fake boyfriend.”

“You’re going to be a great real boyfriend.”

But Eitan could fill in the rest. He’d be a great real boyfriend to someone else.

A drop of honey was still clinging to Akiva’s lower lip.

Under any other circumstances, Eitan might lean over and try to drink that from his mouth.

For now, he drew his last apple slice through the sticky glob on his plate, and ate it, and told himself that it tasted the same.