Unwritten Rules Page 20

  “For real.” Zach attempts to slide out of bed but stops when Eugenio hooks one of his legs around him. “Get up.”

  “Counteroffer,” Eugenio says. “I do something about that—” he glances down at where Zach is hard “—and then you go get me coffee and we tell Giordano to mind his own fucking business and stop snooping at peepholes.”

  “It’s not Giordano I’m worried about. Gordon—he kept looking at us at the restaurant yesterday.”

  “So what? He knows we’re friends.”

  “You know it’s not like that.”

  “I gotta spend today getting abuse from Houston fans. The least you could do is let me rub off on you.” He reaches for Zach’s shoulders, and Zach should absolutely tell him to get up, get his clothes and get out, get to his own room, to stop rolling his hips like that, and twisting his own nipple with his painted fingernails and pressing the scratch marks on his ribs.

  Zach should and he doesn’t, instead lowering himself by increments until his chest is against Eugenio’s, mouth on his neck, the wet easy slide of their cocks together. “You should go back to your room.”

  But he gasps when Eugenio spits in his hand, reaching between them, thumb against the head of his cock.

  “I could stop,” Eugenio says, pausing, “you know, if that’s what you want.” And he whines when Zach pinches him, up the thin skin of his ribs, using his index and middle fingers, a few times, leaving a ladder of red marks. They move together like that, long enough that it starts to build.

  “Don’t come yet,” Eugenio says.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Sure, you weren’t. Hold still.”

  Zach does, holding himself up, arms on either side of Eugenio’s shoulders. Long enough that he starts to feel it, tense with the effort of holding himself in one position. “Can I move?”

  Eugenio shakes his head.

  “Now?” It feels like an eternity later, tension mounting in his lower back, in his balls, like he’ll shoot off if Eugenio so much as breathes on him.

  Eugenio waves a hand. “Get off me.”

  Zach does, reluctantly, hissing when his cock rubs Eugenio’s stomach as he brushes by him. He walks across the room, like he’s making for the desk where he set his clothing in a neat pile. “I was just gonna go back to my room. Since you’re so insistent that I leave.”

  “If that’s what you want to do, I guess I’m just gonna take care of this, then.” Zach reaches for his own cock, giving it a deliberate tug.

  “What I want to do—” Eugenio walks back toward him “—is to not have to look over my shoulder every ten minutes about everything.”

  “You know it’s not that simple.”

  “Feels pretty simple to me.” He reaches down, bypassing Zach’s cock in favor of holding his balls, not gripping, but enough pressure that Zach can feel it.

  “Yeah, okay, c’mon.”

  And Eugenio straddles him, weight pinning him down. It doesn’t take much, just their bodies, moving together, Eugenio’s hand possessive at his jaw. The span of his shoulders blocks out the rest of the room, the light from the hallway and the inevitability of having to deal with the world for a few more minutes. And he kisses Zach through it as they both shake apart.

  “I was gonna shower.” Eugenio rolls off of him. “I meant it about getting coffee.”

  Zach cleans himself up, contemplating the relative dangers of going to the lobby and getting two cups of coffee versus ordering room service, and decides the former is less of one than the latter.

  He doesn’t run into Giordano or Gordon in the hallway. Instead, he finds Braxton, looking un-showered, hair unbrushed, the stubble around his beard not yet shaved. He doesn’t say anything to Zach as they ride the elevator down to the lobby, just scrolls through his phone.

  Zach doesn’t say anything to him either as they wait at the Starbucks. The line progresses slowly enough that he probably should, even just a “good morning” or something about the game later. But he doesn’t trust himself not to overexplain why he’s getting two cups of coffee—an early game-planning meeting, a bet he lost to Eugenio, whatever. He wonders if Braxton will say something or ask about who was up in his room. If Zach should go out when they get back to Oakland, be seen with someone he has no intention of sleeping with, just for plausibility. If Eugenio should do the same. And he pictures Eugenio sitting at a restaurant he picked out, having flirtatious dinner conversation with someone who won’t flinch their hand away if he reaches out to hold it, and feels an unadorned dread about a showy date turning into something real.

  Ahead of him, Braxton orders three cups of coffee, not bothering to explain them. He grunts as he passes Zach on the way back to the elevator, drinks secured in a cardboard carrier.

  When Zach gets back to his room, Eugenio is there, dressed in his dress pants, in one of Zach’s shirts, oversized and sufficient to contain his shoulders, one of the dozens of team-branded ones they all get without Zach’s name anywhere on it. His hair is already drying in the air conditioning, the ends going fluffy.

  They drink coffee, and Zach goes, shaves, showers, dresses. When he looks out the window, the team bus is parked outside on the street below, ready to ferry the first wave of players and staff to the park.

  “Bus is here if you want to head out,” Zach says.

  “I might get the next one. Or walk. It’s not like it’s that far.”

  “The heat here is kind of sneaky. I didn’t think it’d bother me until my legs cramped up the first few times we played.”

  “Look—” Eugenio gets up, coming to sit on the bed opposite from where Zach is sitting. “I don’t have to sleep here if it makes you uncomfortable. I guess I wasn’t being that fair to you.”

  “We shouldn’t be doing this on road trips. I got the sense at the restaurant last night that Gordon might have figured it out.”

  “If he has,” Eugenio says, “he hasn’t said anything to me about it.”

  “He could be waiting. For a confirmation or to tell the front office. And if the team finds out, you know it wouldn’t end well for either of us.”

  “He wouldn’t do that.” And Eugenio sounds confident in that, like Gordon’s friendship will be some barrier against his disapproval.

  “You don’t know that until you know. He’s old school. He might be cool with one of us in the abstract. But together? No.”

  “Do you want to stop?” Eugenio looks past him, out the window, into the big open blue of the Texas sky. “We can if you want to.”

  “No.” And Zach wishes he got breakfast along with the coffees, for the hot glare of the morning to stop pouring in through the uncurtained window. For the simplicity of falling asleep against Eugenio and waking up with him still there. “No, I don’t want to stop. But we need some boundaries. Ground rules. Something.”

  “How have you handled it before?”

  “This is my first time—” he searches for a word for what they’re doing together “—with a teammate. With a ballplayer at all.”

  “I meant, if you met someone on the road or something.”

  “They weren’t exactly sleeping over. Or at the team hotel at all. This is new to me. I don’t know what I’m doing either.” It’s too much to admit. That he’s nearly thirty and his longest previous relationship was measured in weeks.

  “I was with my ex for a long time,” Eugenio says. “We were in high school when we got together. It felt like it wasn’t really a choice, just something everyone expected.” He pauses for a second. “And I’ve never really dated anyone other than her or slept with anyone besides her. No one else serious. Before you.”

  “Oh.” Because Zach stopped tallying his hookups once it felt juvenile to do so. And Eugenio said before that he hadn’t dated anyone seriously since his ex, but the implications of what serious meant slosh around in Zach’s stomach like cold coffee
. “Is it, like, a religious thing?”

  Eugenio shakes his head. “I think I’m just built that way. I thought she and I were going to get married, and that would be that. And then we didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “If it helps, I’m not actually that sorry.”

  Eugenio laughs. He comes over to Zach, legs interweaving between his, kissing him, hands on either side of Zach’s face. “I can sleep in my room tonight.”

  It’s both pragmatic and fundamentally disappointing, enough that Zach wants to say fuck it. But his courage will likely evaporate when their teammates give Eugenio hell for getting laid spectacularly enough to leave marks. Something he’ll have to deny, which will only incite them more. A ritual that Zach is on the outside of, even if Eugenio’s wrist still carries the impression of his fingers. “Does it matter that I don’t want you to?” Zach says.

  Eugenio smiles at that. “It does.”

  He smells like coffee and the shower. Something about it makes Zach’s chest hurt, different from the rising panic he felt while waiting in line behind Braxton.

  “Depending on how things go today,” Eugenio continues, “I might need to actually game-plan tonight.”

  “You’d miss me from the other room?” Zach asks.

  “I might.” And he winds a hand into Zach’s hair, lifting the curls above his ear, kissing him on his jaw and his temple, on the bridge of his nose, a place Zach can’t remember anyone kissing him before.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Elephants are in Michigan playing a four-game set against the Detroit Muscle when Zach gets two phone calls. The first is from his mother, a voice mail that begins by her dictating out her number, as if he doesn’t have it, before saying how excited they are to see him for the All-Star break, which is right after the series.

  The second call comes from Johnson.

  “Everything all right?” Zach says, when he calls him back. Over FaceTime, Johnson looks older than he did in spring training, mid-season weight loss thinning out some of the puppy fat on his face.

  “I’m good,” he says. “Real good, in fact. They activated me. I’m on the forty-man. I mean, Baptiste is getting surgery, so that’s not great for him.”

  “Hey, congrats. Good for you.”

  “Thanks.” And Johnson looks like can’t stop himself from grinning.

  Zach asks how his season has been, and Johnson tells him about playing in Nashville, living with four other guys in an apartment that could be a lot worse than it is. About how his parents drove up a couple times to see him pitch, and Sara Maria flew in for a series. About how he’s learning Spanish, so her family doesn’t feel like they have to switch to English when he’s around.

  “Yeah,” Zach says, “that still going on?”

  Johnson turns red, and Zach laughs, and he turns even redder when Zach laughs. “Um, I’ve been looking at rings, especially now that I might be making some money. It’s early. It just feels like we’ve been through so much together.”

  “Everything feels that way when you’re twenty-one.” Zach should probably say something else—that getting serious that young doesn’t always work out. That some guys Zach’s age are going through their first divorces.

  “I just want to be with her.” And he says it with the kind of certainty that makes Zach look away from his phone, long enough that Johnson asks him if the call got frozen.

  “No, I’m still here.”

  “I’ve been thinking, if baseball doesn’t work out, I might move back to Arizona. It only takes a year to get in-state residence for tuition, so if I live there during the offseason, I could enroll someplace. I did two years of junior college, so it wouldn’t even take that much.”

  “That’s still kind of a long time,” Zach says. “And like you said, you’re on the forty-man now. Stuff’s gonna work out for you.”

  “I’ve been praying on it, and I don’t know. Baseball. Just doesn’t seem fair, even if I make it, other guys don’t.”

  “No, it isn’t. I didn’t have a lot of options. It was pretty much baseball or re-covering couches in Baltimore for the rest of my life. Hell, it still might be if things don’t work out.”

  “You really think the Elephants would cut you? Even with how you been playing?”

  Because he has been playing well, though he feels like less a member of a catcher tandem and more a backup catcher, Eugenio starting nearly double the number of games he is. Enough that guys are beginning to comment on it, Gordon even asking if Zach was injured and not telling the team about it, and not quite believing Zach when he said he wasn’t. “None of this stuff comes with a guarantee.”

  It hangs there, Johnson absorbing it, and he looks young to Zach, even if they’re only eight years apart in age.

  “But this isn’t about me,” Zach says. “You’re smart. You have good instincts. If you want to go and do something else, well, I mean, I’ll be glad I never have to face you on the mound.”

  Johnson laughs at that. “You know, everyone else I’ve said that to acted like I was throwing something away.”

  “There’s more to life than having three good pitches. Or in your case, two and half good pitches and a curveball you tip.”

  “I’ve stopped doing that. But yeah, I guess I got some thinking to do.”

  “Whatever you end up doing, let me know.”

  “Thanks, man. I, um, I don’t think I can really say how grateful I am for everything you did for me.”

  “You’re making me blush, kid,” Zach says, mostly because it makes Johnson go red. “I mean it, though. Whatever happens—pitching or college or whatever, I want to know about it.”

  After they get off the phone, Zach gets a notification that Will Johnson is trying to send him a payment for $20, one marked First of three, a reimbursement for the money Zach gave Sara Maria months ago. Zach declines the transfer. Save it for tuition, he texts, and gets a thumbs-up in response.

  He takes the later bus to the ballpark the day after his second start, and when he gets there, Eugenio is standing by his stall. With two people he introduces as his parents.

  “This is Zach,” Eugenio says, as if his parents will know who Zach is already.

  “It’s nice to meet you both,” Zach says. And he wasn’t expecting anything in Detroit to be challenging, not against the Detroit Muscle’s weak bats, and not in the clubhouse either. Which doesn’t help the churning in his gut as they stand there. His palms, which were previously dry, start to sweat.

  Eugenio’s parents aren’t that short, but he has to reach down to shake each of their hands, hoping that they can’t tell that he’s having fifty percent of a panic attack. They’re dressed in more formal clothes than most people wear to ball games, his father in a collared shirt and dress pants, his mother in a modest sundress and a cardigan, though each of them has a Morales jersey over their clothes. Their demeanor is similarly formal, more soft-spoken than Zach would have expected, Eugenio at one point asking them to speak up in the din of the clubhouse.

  Zach doesn’t know much about them, other than that they’re professors. But they seem to know about him—definitely more than his own parents do about Eugenio, since he worries he won’t be able to talk about him without accidently giving something away. Usually, it’s Morales, you know, the other catcher and Zach’s playing time has been reduced enough that his mother started grumbling when he does.

  “Zach,” Eugenio’s father says, “Eugenio tells us you’ve been helping him get acclimated.” And he says Eugenio’s name differently from the way that Zach’s been saying it, pronouncing the E and U as slightly separate syllables, but not fully separate the way reporters do.

  “We go over scouting reports together.” Zach looks very intently at the floor, willing himself not to flush.

  “It’s good that you’re working togeth
er,” Eugenio’s father says, as if Eugenio needs Zach’s help.

  “Eugenio’s pretty prepared,” Zach says, and then amends to, “very prepared.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  Giordano came in on the same bus as Zach, and he rolls into the clubhouse now, music blasting from an old school boombox.

  And Eugenio’s father asks something that Zach can’t make out.

  “Sounds like it,” Eugenio says, loud, over the din.

  “I should go. It was nice to meet you both.” Zach turns to leave.

  “I was thinking,” Eugenio says, before Zach can make his escape, still at a higher volume than he normally uses, “Zach, if you’re not busy for dinner, there’s this Cuban place a couple blocks over we were all going to check out.”

  And Eugenio was in Zach’s hotel room game-planning the night before. He left a pile of scouting reports and his boxers, which are now stuffed into Zach’s suitcase. It couldn’t have been a surprise that his parents were driving in for the game. Couldn’t have been, and yet Eugenio is standing there, beatifically asking him if he wants to check out a Cuban restaurant in front of them.

  “I wouldn’t want to intrude,” Zach says. “But thanks for the invite.” And he walks away quickly, hoping he made his point.

  Eugenio finds him later in the tunnel before the game.

  “You could have asked me that,” Zach says, “yesterday.”

  “You would’ve said no.”

  “Yes, I would have said no, but now I look like an asshole,” Zach says, tightly. “To your parents.”

  “Zach, I know I can’t tell them about—” Eugenio makes a hand motion between them “—but I wanted my parents to meet you.”

  “We should not be talking about this here,” Zach begins, when Gordon comes into the tunnel. And they should be talking about the game, except Zach cannot remember a single thing about the game they’re about to play, not who their starting pitcher is, not a single batter in the Detroit lineup he faced yesterday.