Unwritten Rules Page 14

  “Because I like you.” As if it’s not any more complicated than that. He kisses Zach softly at the edge of his mouth before continuing. “And because you spent the past six weeks teaching me something even if it meant putting yourself out of a job. Most people wouldn’t do that.”

  “They did tell me I had to.” Something in the way he says it makes Eugenio laugh.

  “Here.” Eugenio reaches for his own shirt. He tosses it carelessly behind him, onto one of the already packed suitcases.

  Zach does the same, then reaches for the waistband of Eugenio’s pants, Eugenio covering his hand and moving it north, up the muscles on his stomach, slowing him.

  “What do you want?” Zach asks.

  “Lie back.”

  And Zach does, against the comforter, arranging himself so that he’s sprawled across the bed, Eugenio over him, watching him, his gaze lingering at Zach’s face and chest, before lowering his mouth to Zach’s.

  It’s slow, Eugenio kissing him and pulling back when Zach tries to deepen the kiss, running his hands over Zach’s sides, murmuring things. He takes one of Zach’s hands, kissing the skin at his wrist and then in the bend of his elbow. “Let me take these off.” He eases down Zach’s pants, his shorts, until they’re both naked, lying in the blue darkness.

  “I thought about how you’d look like this,” Eugenio says.

  “You’ve seen me naked in the clubhouse.”

  Eugenio kisses him high up on his neck, a hand in his hair. “It’s different. Doesn’t it feel different to you?”

  “It does.” And Zach swallows around all the things he wants to say. About how it is different, Eugenio next to him, the world a distant ocean, all the things he’s feeling but doesn’t quite have the capacity to put into words. And so says only, “It does.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  July, Present Day

  After Eugenio leaves the table, Zach sets a timer on his phone for four minutes. The wall separating this part of the restaurant from the other side of the dining area is translucent; he watches silhouettes through it like shadow theater. And he regulates his breathing for the last minute of the timer, seconds erasing themselves, at once too quickly and too slow.

  There’s a set of bathrooms near the kitchen entrance, each marked with a W.C. in fancy script. He pauses outside the door, wondering if he should knock. Wondering if he should go back down the narrow hallway, out into the warm Cincinnati night, to summon a rideshare and to text Eugenio that this was a mistake. Another apology he owes in a long ledger of them.

  A server comes out of the kitchen carrying a tray of food, the doors swinging behind her as she negotiates her way into the dining area. And something about it, even if Zach’s doing nothing more than standing in the hallway outside a restroom, makes him open the door.

  Inside, Eugenio’s leaning on the counter, scrolling through his phone. “I thought you chickened out.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  Eugenio seems to absorb this, his eyebrows raised, and whatever conversation they need to have they probably shouldn’t in a restaurant bathroom. Especially not when Zach’s hands feel suddenly empty, the distance between them insurmountable.

  “Is the door locked?” Eugenio asks.

  Zach confirms it is, jiggling the handle. It’s a small bathroom, small enough that, leaning against the door and with Eugenio against the sink, there isn’t much room to maneuver.

  He doesn’t know if he should move first, or wait for Eugenio, and so they stand for a minute, looking at each other, before Eugenio says, “Come here,” and tugs Zach to him by the placket of his shirt.

  Up close he looks a little older, the creases they all get from sun exposure beginning to form around his eyes. He’s tan, the kind of tan that comes from playing in an open stadium in the midsummer heat. There’s a scar Zach didn’t notice earlier, a nearly invisible one at his hairline, maybe from taking a bad slide and having his batting helmet cut him.

  But he kisses like he did before, teeth sharp against Zach’s lips, demanding as he sucks Zach’s tongue into his mouth, as he reaches and tugs Zach’s shirt from the waistband of his pants. Like he did years ago and with new immediacy, hands on Zach’s ass, encouraging him forward, Zach’s thighs interposed between his.

  He yanks at the buttons on Zach’s shirt. One of the small ones at his collar skids away before Zach undoes the others. He bites at the juncture between Zach’s neck and shoulders, hard enough to leave a mark. And Zach might have to cover it with a band-aid when he gets back to the clubhouse, the edges visible from the collar of any Miami-appropriate shirt. He licks over it, grabs at Zach through the cloth of his pants, a sudden sharp squeeze to his thigh.

  “Your hair’s gotten long,” Eugenio says, and tugs on a handful of it.

  “Do you mind?”

  “Clearly, I don’t.” He tugs at it again, unsubtle, and Zach has no idea how he’s going to walk out of here without everyone in the restaurant knowing what they’ve been doing, and maybe that’s been Eugenio’s plan all along.

  “What do you want?” Zach asks.

  Eugenio looks like he’s about to say something before pressing at Zach’s shoulder, sending him to his knees.

  Zach rubs his face against where he’s hard in his pants, earning another impatient hair-tug, and undoes Eugenio’s belt, unbuttoning and unzipping him, leaving his shorts up. He licks through the line of hair leading to his waistband, cups Eugenio through his underwear, making his stomach muscles tense, his hips buck up.

  There’s a squeeze on Zach’s forearm, once, twice, and Zach looks up. “We don’t really have time for finesse, Zach.”

  “Finesse.” Zach rolls the word around in his mouth, hoping to make Eugenio laugh the way it used to.

  Instead, he says, “Finesse can wait until later.”

  As if they’ll even get a later.

  Eugenio tugs down his own shorts, one-handed; his cock is leaking against his belly. He urges Zach forward. It’s rough, insistent, wet, Eugenio’s hips braced by Zach’s arm across them, the hand in Zach’s hair familiar with the limits of Zach’s breathing. He doesn’t press further than what Zach can take, just exhales audibly when Zach pulls off and spits, working a glob of it with his fist, the callus on his thumb a counterpoint.

  Another set of squeezes to his arm, these harder, and Eugenio is flushed, color up on his cheeks, an impression of teeth on his lower lip. “Suck me.”

  And Zach is torn between wondering if someone is listening in the hallway and not caring, so long as he can stay there kneeling in the spotlight of Eugenio’s attention.

  Zach leans forward, applying himself to the skin of Eugenio’s hip, hard suction right at the constellation of birthmarks there. A challenge, especially when he insinuates two knuckles up behind Eugenio’s balls and presses, making him pulse.

  “Zach, unless you want to walk out of here with my come in your eyelashes—” Eugenio gasps when Zach rolls his knuckles, unrelenting and unfair, and takes him shallowly in his mouth.

  He presses against Zach’s arm where he has it across his hips, before Zach releases him, letting him push deeper with the kind of urgency that will mean a sore throat. And he tugs hard at the hair on Eugenio’s thigh and doesn’t release him until he comes.

  “Fuck.” Zach pulls off, wiping his mouth, Eugenio letting him at the sink to gulp a palmful of water and spit it out. “That was—fuck.”

  Zach’s voice is shot, and he’s unmistakable in the bathroom mirror, hair wild, lips swollen. Eugenio doesn’t look much different, his mouth red from Zach’s teeth, and Zach kisses him, slowly, petting the exposed skin at his hip. Like they can spend time here without the world intruding like it always does.

  “Are you gonna—” Zach says, pulling back, gesturing with the circle of his fist.

  Eugenio shakes his head. “Lean against the door
.”

  Zach does, undoing his pants, easing them down, and in the bathroom mirror, he looks flushed and desperate. “You’re really not going to help?” he asks, a little incredulously. “I could do this on my own.”

  “Could you?” He takes Zach’s hand, spitting twice into Zach’s cupped palm. “There, I helped.” Though he’s also watching Zach watch himself, jaw a little slack.

  It’s no different than what Zach would be doing in his hotel room, except for when he closes his eyes, Eugenio says, “Don’t.” Except for Eugenio breathing next to him, hand skimming over Zach’s stomach, into the opened vee of his pants.

  Except for when Zach gets close, Eugenio reaches and stills his wrist, thumb and forefinger circling it. “Wait. Don’t you remember how to be patient?” He says it teasingly, like they’ve just been separated by a few weeks, and not almost two years and a thousand miles and all the things they said to each other.

  Zach breathes through his nose, holding himself in an insufficient grip in his wet hand. “Can I—”

  “Look at me.”

  And, fuck, Zach does, in the mirror and then to where he’s standing next to him. Eugenio reaches up, pressing the pad of his thumb over Zach’s bottom lip, rubbing it there and pushing in, just the tip of it, and Zach comes into his own hand in a few long pulses, shivering through them.

  After, Eugenio kisses him, wrapping his hand on the back of Zach’s neck, tongue sweet in his mouth. It goes on longer than it probably should, like they did back when they had time. Zach doesn’t pull away, because he knows, if he does, that will be it. They’ll go their separate ways and see each other in the hazy and unpromised future.

  Eugenio lets him go eventually. “We should get cleaned up.” His voice is low in Zach’s ear, his hand still resting at Zach’s side.

  It takes them a few minutes. Zach futilely tries to finger-comb his hair, making it worse. Eugenio untucks and re-tucks his shirt. There are tender patches on Zach’s neck from Eugenio’s late-in-the-day stubble. When he turns to ask Eugenio if he has similar ones on his legs, Eugenio is leaning against one of the walls, eyes closed.

  “You all right?” Zach says.

  “Everyone said this was a bad idea.”

  “Who’s ‘everyone’?”

  “I didn’t bring your name into it.” And he sounds resigned. “I was supposed to come out here, see you, and that would be an end to it. Out of my system. Easy.”

  “Easy?”

  “Yeah, Zach. You know us. Easy.” He blows a breath out through his mouth. “I should go.” He peels himself off the wall, re-tucking his shirt once more. And if Zach didn’t know what to look for, he’d just look like a ballplayer on a night out, his expression as carefully arranged as his clothes.

  “Come back with me to my hotel. I got a suite. My agent sent champagne.”

  Eugenio looks at him for a minute. “You think that’ll fix anything?”

  “No.” Because there are some things that can’t be fixed or, at least, Zach doesn’t know how to fix them. He searches for a way to say that the room’s too big without someone else there, that he doesn’t want to sleep in a cold bed or fly back to the reality of his over-air-conditioned apartment in Miami to sulk with his dying plants. “Just come back with me, okay?”

  “Let me think about it.”

  Zach digs his spare key out of his pocket, because he always gets two out of habit. He hands one to Eugenio. “I’ll text you the room number. Come by whenever you’re ready.”

  Zach takes a rideshare back to his hotel. The driver is chatty to the point where Zach sends the standard “This passenger is Deaf or Hard of Hearing. Please text them instead of calling and let them lead the way with communication” message to the rideshare app, the one he knows people abuse so that they don’t have to make conversation with drivers. He wonders if the driver recognizes him. If there’ll be some story on social media about the audacity of a Miami Swordfish catcher big-timing him or if he’s anonymous here the way he is in Florida.

  He shaves and showers when he gets to his hotel room, stuffs his dirty laundry into his suitcase. Makes sure the champagne is chilled. Sits on his bed, face reflected in the blank TV screen. Waits.

  It’s late, and he doesn’t want to text Aviva, who’s on a service trip with students. Or Eitan, who will be either asleep or still working.

  He has a Twitter DM from Morgan on the burner account he uses to pick fights with randos about basketball. She’s sent a tweet that someone at dinner must have put up, a picture of them all eating together. Eugenio’s arm is thrown around Zach, and he’s leaning in to say something to him; they’re both smiling. A set of question marks is the only other message.

  Yeah, Zach sends back.

  She responds immediately, another row of question marks, this one bordering on absurd in number.

  Yeah, Zach says again, because he’s not going to justify his decisions, especially not in the middle of making what’s probably the wrong one.

  If Eugenio decides to come around.

  Zach’s text with his room number is marked as read, but he hasn’t heard anything since they parted ways in the restaurant hallway. So he sits, staring at the beige-on-beige striped wallpaper, considering whether Eugenio somehow got a better offer between the restaurant and getting here. Zach could just go to sleep on the tundra of his hotel bed and go back to Miami, to the emptiness of his apartment, to play in a half-full stadium.

  There’s a movement, the click of the electronic lock on the door disengaging. Light from the hallway slices in, a brief cut into the room. Eugenio stands in the doorway, like he’s debating if he’s going to actually take the last step.

  It’s possible that, if other players are staying in the hotel, someone will see them together and make something of it. It’s possible that, if given time to reconsider, Eugenio will turn around and walk up the dizzying hotel corridor, leaving Zach to look at the outline of his shoulders, his impatience at the slow elevator.

  Zach ushers him inside.

  But they don’t make it much farther into the room; he crowds Eugenio against the closed door, tucking his face into his neck, taking a long inhale. He smells like his new cologne, like his life after Oakland. “I didn’t think you were actually going to come.”

  “Yeah, I wasn’t sure either,” he says, when Zach pulls away. He looks around the room, and Zach follows his gaze to the big bed occupying most of it, linens neat except for the dent where Zach was sitting. There’s a wood-panel headboard, a couch against one wall. Artistic lamps.

  “You want a tour?” Zach asks.

  “No.”

  “How about one of just the bed?” Zach grabs the bottle of champagne from the chiller, showing it to Eugenio like a sommelier at a restaurant.

  Eugenio takes it by the neck, peeling back the foil and untwisting the little wire cap. He has to work the cork out. It pops, overflowing onto his hand. He takes a swig directly from the bottle, champagne running down his lips and chin, drops lingering at his shirt collar.

  “You got some on your shirt.” Zach points to where it glistens on Eugenio’s neck. “Better take it off.”

  Eugenio does, and Zach saw him in the clubhouse hours before. But it’s different, standing here, Eugenio shirtless, his belt unlooped. Knowing that he’ll have to leave after. That he’ll go back to his glamorous real life and Zach to his disappointing one, and they’ll see each other when they see each other.

  Eugenio reaches for the bottle again and drinks, mouth wrapped obviously around it.

  And Zach watches him, with the kind of focused attention involved in consciously putting something to memory, an image he won’t have to conceal or erase later.

  “C’mere.” Eugenio sets the bottle on the bedside table, motioning for Zach, who leans down to kiss him. He also starts to say something against Zach’s neck, lips buzzing on his skin, befor
e catching himself.

  And Zach didn’t bother to put his hearing aid back in after he showered. “I couldn’t hear whatever that was.”

  Eugenio slides his hand up Zach’s arm, up his shoulder and the tendons of his neck, across the ridge of his collarbone, resting his fingers there. “I said I need to go soon.” Like he didn’t just get there.

  Zach leans down, letting himself be pulled back onto the bed. Stripping off his shirt, his pants, until he’s lying naked, Eugenio down to boxers. He has a new tattoo, an outline of California on his ribs.

  Zach traces his fingers over it. “That must have hurt. Being so close to the bone or whatever.”

  Eugenio doesn’t answer, just continues running his mouth along the side of Zach’s neck, licking over the mark he left earlier, now mottled purple in the shape of his teeth.

  “California?” Zach asks.

  “Why do you think, Zach? And yes, it hurt like a motherfucker.”

  “Oh.” Though something in his chest unknots, knowing that Eugenio didn’t just walk away from him the way he did the unsold furniture abandoned in his condo, things left on the West Coast to gather dust.

  Zach kisses him instead, ducking down, aligning their bodies. He didn’t expect them to still fit together, but they do, like the parts of a lock. He kisses Eugenio like they didn’t back at the restaurant, no urgency to it. Like he doesn’t have to get on a plane tomorrow and fly back to his real life. Kisses him and touches his sides, the thin skin at his wrists, runs his finger under the waistband of his boxers but doesn’t go further.

  He moves to mouth at the California tattoo, expecting his skin to taste somehow different, when Eugenio pulls back. “Hey, I don’t know if being together like this is a good idea.”

  “It probably isn’t,” Zach says.

  “I just mean, I can take a lot of stuff, Zach. Just it can’t be like this, all right?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know what I mean.” Eugenio’s hands are tense on the bedspread. “We can’t pretend this is how things are. That this is anything more than what it is. It’s not fair to either one of us.”