Page 53 of Breakout Year

Eitan

@da_stars_baby: Weird way for Rivkin to propose but I accept!

@queens_king: Delusion is a Great Lake in Cleveland

Akiva was sitting in the lobby of the team hotel when Eitan arrived after the game.

Akiva had his computer out, an overnight bag next to him that had seen better days.

He’d need a better one if he came to visit Eitan next season, and Eitan was half-tempted to make a note of it until he realized there was no guarantee that Akiva would visit, and even if he did, he’d have to leave again.

His head was bent over his work; he frowned slightly as he typed.

If you’d asked Eitan seven years ago if he thought Akiva was attractive, he would have said something like, Sure, he’s a good-looking guy .

If you’d asked him a few months ago, when Akiva walked into the conference room, he might have updated good-looking to handsome .

Now, Eitan wasn’t sure if there was a word for what you felt when you knew the sandpaper grit of someone’s stubble, when you wanted to take their shoulders in your hands.

When you wanted to hold them and have them hold you and not let them go for stupid things like baseball contracts.

He wasn’t sure, but Akiva had come all the way to see him, so maybe he had some idea of what that was called.

“Hey,” Eitan said when he pulled up to where Akiva was working.

Akiva looked up then pushed his glasses up his nose with his forefinger, an action Eitan found far more adorable than he probably should have. “Hey.”

“You have dinner yet?”

“I have had more hot dogs than I want to talk about. Your mother insisted I eat something.”

“She’s right, you know.”

“Well, I told her she sounded just like her son.”

Eitan grinned at that. If anyone was taking their picture, he knew what his face would look like. Goofy. Smitten. That was fine. He was both those things. “What are you writing?”

Akiva clicked his laptop shut and tucked it in his bag. “Emails, mostly. But I’m working on…” He lowered his voice. “There’s a book I’ve been writing on and off for a while. I think it’s finally starting to come together.”

Write me a book. Write me the book you always wanted to write. “Can I read it?”

“Half of it is placeholders and the other half is a mess.” But Akiva was smiling. “Maybe? We’ll see if anything ever comes of it.”

“I’m sure something will.” Eitan picked up Akiva’s bag, held out his hand to offer leverage up from the chair. If they kissed now, everyone would see. So he leaned up and did it, a brief press of their mouths. “If you’re not hungry, I was thinking maybe we could go to bed.”

“It’s good the room came with two beds,” Eitan said later, as he lay panting across the hotel comforter. Akiva was lying next to him, arm thrown across Eitan’s chest.

Akiva had started kissing him the second they’d gotten in the door and hadn’t stopped until Eitan had been gasping on the bed.

He’d sucked his fingers to get them wet and touched two fingers to Eitan’s ass, and Eitan thought that was the gayest thing he could possibly do until Akiva had told him to lie back and licked him there, Eitan’s knees on either side of his head.

Eitan had shot off from that, all over Akiva’s hand and his own belly, and Akiva had added to the mess a minute later, coming on Eitan’s stomach, and Eitan never ever wanted to move.

Now, cleaned up at Akiva’s insistence, Eitan’s heart rate still hadn’t settled. Belatedly, he pulled off the sensor ring and stuck it on the nightstand and hoped whoever got that data thought he was really into late-night runs.

He was just about to suggest they order room service or hit up the minibar or despoil the other bed when his phone started buzzing, frequently enough to be audible from where it was still in the pocket of his discarded pants. Grudgingly, he hauled himself up and checked it.

Williams: you seeing this?

A sentiment echoed by half a dozen other Cosmos players.

Vientos had dropped a link in the chat. Eitan searched the floor for his underwear—the clinging supportive kind that apparently made Akiva’s eyes go hot.

Whatever this was, he probably should be nominally dressed. “Something happened,” he said.

That made Akiva sit up. He had a sheet pulled up—orgasms made him a little cold, a fact Eitan now knew and would never unknow—that pooled around his waist. He unfolded his glasses from the nightstand and put them on.

And Eitan should probably figure out this apparent new crisis alone without burdening Akiva, but he climbed back in bed and tucked himself at Akiva’s side. “This might be awful,” Eitan warned.

Akiva reached across him and stroked his hip.

Eitan sometimes worried that he’d come apart—publicly, frenetically.

Now he felt held together, made safe by the tiny motions of Akiva’s hand.

He should probably text Kiley and apologize.

I’m sorry I couldn’t be who you wanted. I didn’t understand then, but I understand now .

He clicked the link.

A video of Hairston popped up. A normal postgame scrum with reporters shoving microphones toward him in the hope of getting an un-bland quote.

In baseball, there were rules for everything, particularly player equipment and dress. Your bat could only be certain woods and certain colors. Your glove couldn’t be white. When speaking to the media, you had to wear team-branded clothing at all times, including shirts and hats.

Eitan thought he knew all the Crooks gear. He’d certainly been issued enough of it, though most was still in boxes at his apartment he didn’t know if he’d ever unpack.

Hairston was in a hat with the familiar logo—most player hats were battered things, salt-stained from sweat.

This one had a stiff brim. An embroidered C patch.

Eitan counted the colors running through the patch and counted them again: red, orange, yellow, green, blue…

two shades of purple, then a band of brown and one of black.

“That’s the Pride Night hat. They did a fan giveaway. ”

“Are you friends with him?” Akiva asked.

“Not really. We were talking about fielding earlier when—” And Eitan recounted the briefest version of what happened with Connor, though his throat went dry as he said it. “Anyway, that’s really solid of Hairston to wear that. The team must be furious.”

“It’s their hat.” But Akiva said it like he didn’t disagree.

Eitan opened his texts, extracted Hairston’s number from a long-ago text thread.

Eitan: thanks, man, I appreciate it

Hairston: don’t know what you’re talking about

Accompanied by a halo emoji.

Hairston: see you in the spring

Eitan: count on it

He put down his phone. Struggled to find the right words. “When I did that press conference, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Or no, I did, but I thought it’d be simpler: people would hate me or they wouldn’t, and if they did, well, fuck ’em. Not how everyone gets to have their own opinion about me.”

Akiva snuggled closer, resumed stroking Eitan’s hip. “What’s your opinion of you?”

A question that made Eitan’s throat go tight for a different reason: how Akiva knew the right words, even when Eitan felt frayed. “I want to be who I am as much as possible. I want that for everyone.”

That got Akiva’s smile, the press of his mouth to Eitan’s cheek. “Good.” He paused then added, “And fuck everyone who disagrees.”

Eitan turned, kissed him, buried himself in Akiva’s grin and the length of his body and the way he tugged at Eitan’s shorts and slowly worked him until Eitan was aching almost to the point of tears. As Akiva kissed him through it and held him after.

The words were there again, sitting in Eitan’s mouth, closer to the surface. “I feel like myself with you but better,” he said. Not quite what he wanted to say, but enough of a fraction Akiva would get it.

“You make me feel like I can jump and not fall.” Akiva said it in a rush, color on his cheeks, like he was embarrassed that he’d admitted that much.

He looked up as Eitan cupped his cheek, blinking behind his glasses that had somehow stayed on.

Akiva shivered slightly: the cold, something else?

Eitan reached for the blanket and covered them both to shield them from the world, until it was only the two of them together, breathing in the quiet dark, not letting go.

On Sunday, Eitan played his last game with New York, four straight wins to finish it up in Cleveland—and still not enough to make the postseason.

“Guess you could have done the same thing with the Crooks, huh?” Williams said to Eitan as they were filing onto the plane.

“There’s a big difference between almost got it and never stood a chance .”

“Well, someone’s gotta be an optimist.” And he swatted Eitan on the hip without so much as a comment, then settled in to sleep through their ninety-minute flight.

Eitan wasn’t as optimistic when he got back to New York. They’d played an afternoon game—on the last day of the season, everyone played at the same time—and it felt later than it actually was. His lease ended in a few days. He needed to pack, a process helped by the fact he hadn’t really unpacked.

He needed to clean out his stall at Cosmos Park, to arrange for the return of his leased vehicle. He needed to?—

See Akiva. A need that superseded all others, as if they’d been apart for months and not just the two days since Akiva had flown back from Cleveland.

Eitan dialed Akiva’s number, then tucked his phone in the crook of his neck while he undid all his various locks.

He would even miss those—there was something in the combination of mechanical and electronic entries that felt quaint and futuristic all at once.

“Hey,” he said, when Akiva picked up. “I’m back in the city.

” Because home felt like the wrong word for a place he was about to leave.

“Me too.”

Eitan could hear Akiva over the phone and through the now-open door to his apartment. Akiva was there .

Eitan put down the phone and walked to his living room where Akiva was sitting on the couch. Pulled him up. Kissed him until they both went breathless.

“I figured you might need some help packing,” Akiva said, when Eitan pulled back. “I got boxes.”

“You’re—” Eitan started to bite back a word, but fuck it, when else was he going to say it? “You’re perfect.”

Akiva shrugged, but he had on that pleased flush as well.

Eitan didn’t want to spend their last hours together shoving his stuff in suitcases and bins, even though he knew he needed to. “I don’t want to pack.” I don’t want to leave .

“If we get it out of the way, you won’t have to worry about it.”

Which sounded very responsible and organized and all the things Eitan generally wasn’t but perhaps aspired to be. He would not pout. He would not feel anything beyond an annoyance at having all of this stuff that he now had to schlep back to Cleveland.

Akiva put on music. His taste ran slightly folksier and a little more obscure than Eitan’s—a thing Eitan somehow hadn’t known.

What else didn’t he know? Maybe he should call off the move, lease a short-stay rental for a month in New York while the playoffs commenced.

Most of the guys on the team were already heading back to where they really lived, so they wouldn’t be around, but perhaps he could get a place and volunteer at the community center and?—

Do this exact same thing in another three weeks when leaving would be another three weeks harder. Or spend his offseason in New York, during which a call might come any minute from a team offering a contract, and Eitan would have to go through the business of another move, another goodbye.

“Are you okay?” Akiva asked, after they’d packed the guest bedroom and the hall closet and the dishes Eitan never used in the kitchen and much of Eitan’s bedroom that wasn’t his bed and clothes for the next day. “You’re quiet.”

Eitan put down the socks he was in the midst of shoving into a duffle bag. “I don’t want to leave New York.” But no, that wasn’t quite right. “I don’t want to leave you.”

“Eitan”—and Akiva had to know that he was only making it worse by saying Eitan’s name in that soft, casually devastating way of his—“we knew this was going to happen.”

Eitan did know that. But he also knew that he’d never been in a relationship where he’d felt like a collective we .

“I could come back. Visit. Gabe says I’ll probably be signed by the Winter Conference, and that’s in late November.

” A four-day set of meetings among general managers and team owners where Eitan would meet with prospective teams to hear their pitches as to why he should sign with them.

Akiva frowned minutely. “I don’t know how much I’ll be around. Sue’s in an edit sprint, and it’s the High Holidays starting on Thursday. I won’t be that available for most of the fall.”

“Yeah.”

“This has been—” And if Akiva was about to say fun , Eitan didn’t know what he’d do, but crying seemed like a very valid option.

It didn’t matter, because Akiva shook his head, recalibrated.

He wasn’t as expressive as Eitan, but his face was easy to read if you knew how to look.

Eitan did know now—that Akiva wore his sadness in the pinch of his mouth, the faintly tense line between his eyebrows.

“I wish this had worked out differently,” Akiva said.

Quit your job, move out of your tiny, falling-apart house, run away with me. Suggestions that seemed spun from clouds. “What if—” Eitan swallowed around the lump in his throat. “Do you ever think about what might have happened if we’d figured all this out in Arizona?”

“I thought about that. Right when I first quit, I thought, What if I’d gone up to those guys at the bar and, I don’t know, punched them? What if I’d told you that the things they were saying about me were completely true?”

Eitan grabbed Akiva’s hands, turned them over to reveal the smooth surface of his palms. He lifted one, kissed the hollow of it. “Don’t punch people. You might break something, and you need to write your book.”

“I don’t want you to leave either.” Akiva was smiling. Even that was sad.

Eitan didn’t want the last hours they had together to be like this, even if the whole situation felt unavoidably like this. “The second I got traded from Cleveland, I started counting the days until I could leave New York. But I stopped counting when you walked in that hotel conference room.”

Akiva’s mouth did that thing, the little tic that meant he was happily embarrassed. “Oh.”

“What I’m saying is we get one more day together.”

“We do.”

“So I want to hang out with you and eat some terrible New York pizza,” Eitan said and ignored Akiva’s outraged squawk.

“You don’t want to go out?”

“I think the city’s seen enough of us, don’t you?”

Akiva laughed, and Eitan wound a hand at his waist, feeling the expansion of his ribs. “You’re right,” Akiva said. “We don’t need anyone else.”