Page 58 of Breakout Year

Akiva

Akiva woke up in the middle of the night to a pounding from his front door, loud even above the pinging rain. He got up, pulled on a sweatshirt over his flannel pajama pants that warded off his house’s late fall chill, grabbed his kippah and his phone.

His front door lacked a peephole. He stood as whoever it was knocked again, a noise punctuated by a familiar gasp. He opened the door to find Eitan: dripping wet, accompanied by a massive rolling suitcase, and incontrovertibly there.

“Come in, you must be freezing.” Akiva ushered him inside.

He wasn’t sure how long Eitan had been knocking, but it had to have been a while—his clothes were raining water onto Akiva’s floor. Akiva wanted to get him a towel, a hot shower. Wanted to demand what Eitan was doing there at two in the morning.

He abandoned all of that for taking Eitan’s face in his hands and kissing him lightly on the lips. Eitan was cold—shiveringly so—and there was a wildness about him Akiva recognized from the moment after he’d said something at that press conference he couldn’t take back.

“You’re wearing it.” Eitan’s hand traced its way down Akiva’s arm to the fraying cuff of his sweatshirt, the Rivkin one he’d never gotten around to returning.

“And you’re not wearing a coat,” Akiva clucked.

“I was in California.” Though Eitan didn’t say much more. That look was back—a slightly stunned expression that made Akiva’s chest ache. “I used to be a lot of things.”

And now you’re not? Akiva didn’t ask the question, not with Eitan so obviously fragile. “Hey, you could actually get sick.” He coaxed Eitan’s chilly fingers between his and led him to the bathroom. Ran the water and waited as the water heater made its painstaking decision to actually heat up.

Eitan shucked his clothing with the ceremony of a pro ballplayer—so none at all. He got in Akiva’s shower but didn’t pull the curtain completely shut. Groaned under the spray, a noise that lengthened until it was halfway to a sob.

Not knowing what else to do, Akiva shed his own clothes, folded them neatly, and set them on the closed lid of the toilet.

His shower was snug, but they both fit. Eitan was standing under the showerhead a little numbly.

After a moment, Akiva took him in his arms, Eitan’s back to his chest, the damp ends of Eitan’s hair brushing his mouth.

Eitan’s shoulders were tense. His teeth chattered occasionally as if he couldn’t get warm. His eyes were shut, and it was possible he was crying. Akiva kissed his hair, the side of his neck. Kissed him, held him, waited until Eitan drew in a few great shudders of breath.

“I’m quitting baseball,” Eitan said, finally. “I decided on the plane.”

“Hey.” Akiva tightened his arms, dropped his chin to the top of Eitan’s head. This feeling he knew—the same one he’d had seven years ago, when he’d made it all the way home before he’d collapsed into his childhood bed in a house where someone else now lived. “Hey.”

“A team asked me if I was still gonna be—” Eitan hiccupped. “If they didn’t want to sign me, they didn’t have to bring you into it.”

“It’s only one team.”

“Yeah, well, they were the only ones who bothered to show up.”

Akiva couldn’t lie to him. Couldn’t tell him there would be another team, another chance, without some guarantee.

Sometimes you closed doors, and sometimes you had them closed for you.

He held Eitan tighter, putting his strength into it, and let Eitan lean against him as the shower sputtered warm water over both of them.

“I shouldn’t complain,” Eitan said, after a few minutes. “I have enough money—more than enough, really. More than I ever thought was possible. I’ll be fine.” His voice cracked a little on fine .

“You don’t have to decide now.” Akiva kissed his neck, his ear, any place that might ground him. “You shouldn’t decide now. Take it from someone who’s been there.”

Eitan’s hair brushed Akiva’s lips as he settled back into Akiva’s arms. They stood like that for a while longer until Akiva’s water heater decided enough was enough.

Akiva turned off the water, grabbed two towels, handed one to Eitan, who accepted it and then Akiva’s offer of clothing and his insistence on a cup of tea.

“This is the brand I like.” Eitan cupped the mug between his hands and blew steam off its surface as they sat close on the couch.

Akiva nodded. “Yeah.”

“I didn’t think you drank tea.”

“I don’t. I like the way it smells.” No, that wasn’t the whole truth. “It reminded me of you.”

Eitan put his mug down on the coffee table. His hands were warm as they covered Akiva’s. “I missed you. I don’t know how to say this other than to say it. I made the wrong decision when I picked baseball over you. I’m making the wrong decision if I pick anything over you.”

“You shouldn’t—” Akiva started.

But Eitan looked more like himself: bright-eyed, determined.

“I had five hours to think about this on the plane. Four if you don’t count the hour we spent in turbulence.

I want to be with you. I want that more than I want anything else.

Whatever I need to do to make that happen, that’s what I’ll do. ”

Now it was Akiva’s turn to shake his head, to insist. “You get both. You should get both.” Someone should.

Someone should come out of this intact. He was suddenly, incandescently angry at whatever team did that to Eitan.

At Goodwin for slamming into his ankle. At every camera flash and rude comment online.

At those guys at the bar in Arizona. At everyone who’d picked on them or denied them or spat on them, just because they could.

“None of this is fair. None of this is right .”

Eitan closed his hands tighter over Akiva’s. Kissed him. “Someone has to be the optimist.”

“Wanting to punch the entire baseball establishment in the face on your behalf doesn’t make me an optimist.”

Eitan tilted his head back. Laughed, big-throated. “I’m a bad influence, clearly.”

And so Akiva had to gather him up, to kiss him. To hold him close as the wind outside howled its discontent.