Page 5 of Breakout Year

Whoops . “They won’t once we change them.” Which they did.

“Have you posted a thank-you message to Cleveland yet?” she said when they were done.

He hadn’t. Mostly because every time he’d tried to, he’d been hit with a wave of but then I’ll really be gone .

Still, he knew he needed to, so he did, using a picture that the team photographer had taken a few years ago: Eitan at third base, slightly out of focus, people in the stands behind him like a pointillist’s set of dots.

Cleveland, you always had my back . Which was true of the city, if not the team.

There’s nowhere I’d rather call home. Once he’d posted on his Instagram account, he scrolled through the other photos he’d been tagged in.

Connor’s farewell post was gone. Huh. Weird.

Well, maybe he hadn’t wanted to deal with a flood of negative comments.

Eitan probably shouldn’t be getting the ghost of a sensation in his throat—homesickness for a place he’d only just left, for how simple his life had been before—especially not in front of someone he’d just met. He pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth. “What’s next?” he asked.

“Next is damage control from yesterday’s press conference.”

Eitan winced at the word. Damage . What he’d undoubtedly caused. Now, in the eyes of organized baseball, he was tainted goods.

“I brainstormed a few possible statements.” Isabel handed him another piece of paper, this one with denser text.

“How long did it take you to do this?” Eitan asked, though the circles under her eyes answered for her.

“A while.” Though a while sounded a lot like all night .

Eitan wasn’t the only person who’d gotten chewed out yesterday.

She tapped her desk for emphasis. “Option one, which is, I think, the best option: we put out a statement reiterating your commitment to various social causes and clarifying that you were just discussing your advocacy work.”

Eitan considered. He could just let this go.

Put out a statement. Control the amount of damage he was associated with.

Having a full day to think about it hadn’t changed his decision.

If you can’t be who you are in New York…

What hope was there for anywhere else? The only issue—the issue that felt bigger than Isabel’s suddenly claustrophobic office—was that he wasn’t entirely sure who that was.

“I meant what I said, even if I didn’t mean to say it that way.

It probably makes your life more difficult, doesn’t it, if I’m not straight? ”

“ If ?” Isabel’s face went through another set of contortions—surprise, potentially exasperation. “Sorry, that wasn’t…” For a moment, it seemed like she was gathering her words. “I have no issue with that. Obviously.”

Though from where Eitan was sitting, nothing about that was obvious.

“It’s just—” She glanced around as if pointing out they were very much in the executive area of a baseball stadium. “I want what’s best for you and what’s best for the team.”

Those probably aren’t the same thing. Eitan mentally calculated how many days he had left in New York.

If the team didn’t make the postseason, he just needed to survive until the end of September.

If they did, then maybe a couple weeks after that.

A few years ago, he’d made it a point to start all one hundred and sixty-two games of the season, even if it meant he’d played on a sore hamstring for weeks.

His parents sometimes described what life was like for them before they emigrated.

This was nothing, and even if it wasn’t, he could survive it. “Sure, fine, I’m convinced.”

For that, he got another eyebrow lift, but Isabel leaned forward and tapped the first bullet point on the paper. “Saying nothing is always an option. Not for you but for other people.”

“Hey!” he said in faux outrage.

She shot him a smile. For the first time since he’d come to New York, his heart rate settled fractionally.

“Or,” she continued, “we say nothing, but we do a photo op at a charity. There’s a community center near here we work with a lot.

It’s LGBTQ-friendly but not for LGBTQ youth specifically.

” She drummed her fingers against the surface of her desk.

One of her nails was chipped, as if she’d been biting it. “Or we could get you a girlfriend.”

At first, he thought he’d misheard her. “A girlfriend—just like that?”

“You are aware as of twenty-four hours ago that you are the starting third baseman for the New York Cosmopolitans baseball team. So, yeah, just like that.” She dug around in her desk and came up with a card that she handed to him.

On it was the logo of a modeling agency, though Eitan wondered if modeling was being used euphemistically for something else.

“They do girlfriend gigs?”

“They do no-strings-attached date to an event gigs.” She blew a strand of hair out of her face. “If you want people to forget you implied you were gay without issuing a direct denial, it’d only take an email.”

“I don’t, uh—” Eitan paused, breathed. Tried to put words to all the things flapping around in his belly. That he wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t not sure, either. That, like being in New York, this would all take some getting used to. “I don’t want people to forget.”

That got him Isabel’s slow nod. It must be a lot if she didn’t have an immediate plan to address this. Certainly a lot for someone like Eitan to handle.

“Well, we could say nothing. It’s possible people will forget come fall.”

“You mean, when I hit free agency and am no longer your or the Cosmos’ problem?

” A reality that he’d also only had forty-eight hours to process: because he wasn’t staying in Cleveland, he’d have to cope with the uncertainties of an open market and having to sell his baseball services to other teams—a place unlikely to be the Cosmos given their top prospect was a third baseman who was a year from being ready.

An easier task if Eitan was straight. “What would you do if you were in my situation?”

Isabel studied the ceiling for a moment. It was possible she was contemplating going into another line of work entirely, one free of demanding ballplayers. “I think baseball teams are like everyone else—they go with the safest option.”

I don’t want that option. I want to be myself. A distinctly un-safe possibility. “I’m not sure I’m ready for the commitment of a fake girlfriend.”

“We can table that for now.”

He chewed that over for a minute. “Have you ever done the opposite? Helping someone, um, not keep things secret?” He knew it couldn’t be a ballplayer—there were only a handful of out players, and all had come out years ago on the cusp of or right after retirement—but maybe someone else…

She shook her head, and Eitan was about to declare the meeting over and take himself back down to the clubhouse to somehow play a game of professional baseball, when she added, “Are you already dating someone—is that the issue? If you are and people find out about him?—”

Him . Said simply, taken as fact. A possibility that brought Eitan’s skin up in gooseflesh—nerves, anticipation.

Every impulse told him that it was a bad idea to even consider the idea of a him : he was new to the city, to the microscope of the public eye.

He should settle in, find an apartment, do all the practical things that came with a new team.

“I’m not dating anyone,” he said. But I could be .

And if Isabel noticed that he was having a wild moment of clarity in a windowless office at what was the crack of dawn for a ballplayer—eleven a.m.—she didn’t say anything.

She just jotted something down in her notebook, like Eitan Rivkin, professional troublemaker, was yet another item on her list of to-dos.