Page 43 of Breakout Year

Akiva surveyed the clubhouse: there was about a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of memorabilia casually left around.

For a moment, he considered it: how easy it would be to take from baseball to repay what baseball had taken from him.

If he wrote a character with an outstanding debt—and an eye for what might sell at an underground auction that didn’t care about provenance—they wouldn’t hesitate to swipe something.

“Are you sure you want me in here unsupervised?”

“Why? Guys bring their—guys bring people in all the time.” Eitan pressed his mouth shut, but Akiva could autofill the sentence: Guys brought in their wives , their families . Not their friends , not like this.

There was no one else here. No one would know how close they were standing, or how Akiva’s careful consideration—that he didn’t want money to come between them, so he made sure there was nothing between them—was beginning to crumble under the jaundice clubhouse lights. “Could I go out to the field instead?”

That brought back Eitan’s grin. “Sure.”

Objectively, it wasn’t a long walk from the clubhouse out to the field.

Even with Eitan on crutches, Akiva was the one who walked slow.

The tunnel was plain—no nostalgic reminders of past greats who had played for the team, no graffiti of former player signatures that sometimes decorated the tunnels of minor-league ballparks.

Nothing to interrupt the light that streamed in from the field, the smell of grass that wafted through.

They stepped—or Akiva stepped and Eitan crutched—out of the tunnel into the dugout.

The floor was ordinary concrete. Still, Akiva was struck by the sensation of it under the soles of his sneakers as if he could feel some unique property of ballpark cement.

He hadn’t worn cleats since he quit. He wanted a pair now, to hear the familiar scrape of their spikes on pavement.

“Is here better?” Eitan wasn’t laughing, but there was something fond around his eyes.

“Yeah”—Akiva’s throat felt strangely tight—“here works.”

Eitan seized the handles of his crutches like he was about to go back inside then paused. “You sure you’re okay?”

They were under the overhang of the dugout roof.

Invisible to the rest of the field, which was only occupied by a few groundskeepers who were tending the grass in the outfield near the warning track.

Hundreds of feet from anyone who might notice that Akiva’s hands were gripped by his sides or how his vision was going a little watery at the edges.

This was just a ballpark, no different from the one where they’d watched that rec league game, except for how it was.

He was here for Eitan, not to deal with… whatever was happening inside him.

He examined the floor: they hosed the dugout down between games, but there were still a few lingering sunflower seed shells.

He would not get emotional about something that had been horked and spat at the ground.

He would not feel anything about standing here, in his street clothes, before a verdant layer of grass.

He would certainly not remember the twin sensations that characterized his baseball career: that this was the only place he’d wanted to be and a place he couldn’t be and remain himself.

“I avoided coming here,” Akiva said. “Before I watched you play this season, I don’t think I’d seen a game in years.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Eitan leaned close, balancing the rubber tips of his crutches against the dugout floor. “Baseball’s more fun to play than watch.”

Akiva flinched. Baseball had been fun to watch, more fun to play.

He’d done it every day for most of the first two decades of his life, ever since he’d been big enough to wrap his fingers around a hollow plastic bat and swing at a ball off a tee.

He’d done it until he couldn’t any longer, then he’d fled.

Now he felt like he had driving past his parents’ house for the first time after it’d been sold: that he was in a place that used to be his but wasn’t anymore.

“I just didn’t expect—” Words felt like too much. “You should go get looked at. I’m sure the doctors are waiting.”

Eitan shook his head, dropped his crutches in a clatter. Hopped over to Akiva and wrapped his arms around him.

“We’re not…” Akiva trailed off. Breathed into the clean fabric of Eitan’s shirt. “People might see.”

“They might see what?” Eitan’s mouth was close to his ear. His hands gripped Akiva’s shirt. He hugged him, hard, the kind of hug that you were meant to collapse into.

Akiva wouldn’t collapse. Baseball didn’t get that too.

But his muscles untensed a little, and he sagged onto Eitan’s shoulder.

Eitan was talking, indistinctly, about how any random person could throw a ball, but Akiva wrote books and that was special, creating something from nothing.

Akiva had spent the morning and the night before and the night before that thinking about kissing Eitan, about drawing him back into his bed, but now all Akiva could think of was how few times in his adulthood someone had held him like this and how much it was something he hadn’t known he’d wanted.

“I’ll be fine,” Akiva said, a little stiffly, and Eitan tightened his arms again so much that he wobbled on his bad leg. “We shouldn’t be putting weight on your ankle.”

“Fuck my ankle. And fuck, I shouldn’t have dragged you here if you didn’t want to come.”

“I’m fine.” Akiva wasn’t, but he was getting closer to fine: his throat felt less tight, his body relaxed into Eitan’s. He didn’t need to be held up for a moment longer—shouldn’t need to be held up at all. He should let go. He would in just a second.

Eitan’s breath was a faint puff on his neck.

Akiva wouldn’t think about that or the beat of his heart through his ribs or the way their bodies fit together like tumblers in a lock.

He would hug Eitan the appropriate amount and stand at the appropriate distance from him and in less than two months, some baseball team would reward Eitan with a check with a staggering number of zeros for his restraint.

Gay, but not in a way they had to think about it.

The way Akiva’s team hadn’t minded that he was Orthodox but hadn’t exactly gone out of their way either.

At the time, he thought that was the kind of oversight that money couldn’t cure.

Now, he knew that money couldn’t fix it—but the lack of money certainly didn’t help.

He eased himself from Eitan’s arms. Climbed onto one of the benches lining the front of the dugout. The bench had two levels; the higher one allowed him the full view of the field. “It’s just grass,” he said, mostly to himself. “We have that in New Jersey too.”

“If you’re good here, I’ll be back in a little while.” Eitan tapped his hand against the bench near where Akiva’s knuckles wrapped around the railing. Not a kiss—not even contact—but maybe the idea of one. “Do you have a notebook?”

Akiva frowned, dug through his bag. Held up a notebook—this one had a dark green cloth cover. The color of Eitan’s bedspread. “Yeah?”

“Write me something while I’m gone.” And with that, he left Akiva sitting there.

For the first few minutes, Akiva didn’t do much more than watch the breeze ripple the ballpark grass.

It was a nice day, air cool with the coming fall.

He could sit here at a safe distance from the field.

He eyed it as if it might leap up and bite him.

Then he got up. Climbed the dugout steps.

Displayed his visitor’s badge in case someone came over to ask what he was doing there, but the groundskeepers didn’t do much more than wave to him in greeting.

Maybe they’d seen him and Eitan hugging.

Maybe, without the team present, the park went back to being just another piece of the city in which no one much cared if you were queer.

Akiva walked near the foul line, sneakers over the curated dirt.

Sure, they had this in New Jersey, the same way the dictionary had the same words as a novel.

If this was like everywhere else, they wouldn’t pay them millions of dollars to play here.

He watched a groundskeeper duck down to trim an errant blade of grass.

How Eitan must feel the same as that grass: present but cut to someone else’s specifications.

A woman trudged up from the dugout and approached him, her team ID on a lanyard around her neck.

Akiva was about to retreat to wherever in the stadium he’d cause the least hassle—probably outside of it—when she put up her hands, indicating he should stay put.

She was dressed like she worked in an office.

Her fluffy black hair was beginning to slip from its ponytail.

“I’m Isabel, one of the PR staff. You’re here with Eitan? ”

“Yeah.” He didn’t know whether to be apologetic, but he wasn’t. “He’s with the doctors. I’m just waiting for him.”

“You’re Akiva, right?” She said his name correctly, meaning she’d probably heard it from Eitan and hadn’t just read it off some Reddit thread.

“Yeah.” He braced himself for a lecture like Eitan got from his agent, that Akiva should hide himself away until the world deemed him appropriate. Which would probably be never.

“Great. Well, whenever he’s done, I wanted to confirm everything for tomorrow.”

“Confirm…what, exactly?”

“He didn’t tell you? He’s taking me on this little tour of his.” Whatever Akiva’s face was doing made her laugh. “Maybe I should let him explain.”

“I’d prefer to know now, to be honest.”

“Eitan felt that after what happened last week, it might be a good use of his time off to see New York.”

A selfish part of Akiva had wondered if that was something he and Eitan would get to do together. But distance would probably be easier to maintain with a team chaperone. “Yeah, he did mention that.”

“So he asked me to arrange a couple visits.” She pulled a camera from her bag. “If a few candid shots make their way onto social media or to the press, that might not be so bad.”

We’re supposed to be off camera. Which would have been easier to stomach if Eitan hadn’t also arranged for a literal camera.

Akiva had spent seven years hiding. There was no reason he couldn’t do it a little bit longer, even if something within him rebelled at the idea.

“His agent, uh, told him to stay out of the public eye.”

Isabel smiled at that, a PR grin that was hard at the edges. Maybe hard was the wrong word. Determined. “Well, I don’t work for Eitan’s agent. I work for the team, and Eitan’s on the team.”

“I can see why you and he get along.”

That got a laugh. “Do you want me to get a few pictures of you on the field while we’re waiting?”

Akiva looked around at the manicured grass, the plastic circle of sheeting covering the mound.

In another lifetime, he might be out there, throwing.

In another lifetime, he might have met Eitan in Arizona, and they might have been nothing besides friends.

Now he was something else—at once less and more than that, doubly unsatisfying.

Except…did he have to be just that? He thought of Eitan holding him, unsteady as he was on a bum ankle. How the two of them might be able to steady each other, somehow.

“Nah, I’m good,” Akiva said. “Would you excuse me for a moment? I’ll let you know when Eitan’s around.” Then Akiva went back to the dugout and pulled out his notebook and his favorite ballpoint pen. Sat himself down on the bench. And with the smell of expensive dirt in his nose, he began to write.