Unwritten Rules

by KD Casey

  It’s not that late, though almost an hour has elapsed from Eugenio walking out until now, time an impossibly slow drip. He could get up. Get a drink. Sleep in the bed that smells like Eugenio’s cologne. Wake up with the sheets cold and have to summon a rideshare to take him to rent a truck.

  He should get up. He should put his feet on the floor and command the muscles in his legs to carry him across the echoing living room to the bottle of bourbon Eugenio left.

  Instead, he listens to his own breathing, intake and exhalation the only things he feels capable of. He wonders how long he can lie there: for the next hour, and the next, and the next. Until the next season, the long stretch of unfilled baseball-less time between October and February.

  It’s possible that the team won’t trade Eugenio or nontender his contract, making him a free agent. Won’t send him anywhere but back to their Arizona training field for pitchers-and-catchers report. And Zach can’t imagine coming to the bullpen in the early desert mornings, pretending to be coworkers or, worse, friends. The thought leaves an acid taste in the back of his mouth; the glass of water he pulls from the sink only intensifies it.

  Bourbon helps. He stands at the counter drinking, bypassing the warm, feel-good phase of being drunk in favor of oblivion. Pours and slugs it back, not bothering to taste it, until he feels like he might heave his guts out on the rented kitchen floor.

  He doesn’t sleep in their bed that night, instead drunkenly installing sheets in a bedroom downstairs, the windowless one they never slept in. It’s dark enough that his eyes don’t adjust, and his vision spins and then his stomach, the kind of unpleasant drunk where he’s still conscious but can’t do anything more than lie there.

  He must cry at some point, because he wakes up, eyes crusted, miserable, head throbbing from dehydration, and with a text from Morgan on his phone.

  What do you mean “Eugenio left”? Where are you?

  He does get sick, in the unused bathroom next to this cold cocoon of a bedroom, chilled enough that the sheets feel sweaty. He takes the kind of post-drunk shower where he can smell the bourbon leaking from his skin. Breakfast would settle his stomach, but then he remembers he doesn’t have a car with him, and fuck.

  It takes fifteen minutes for a rideshare to arrive, a twenty-minute trip to the rental car place, a wait to get the attention of an agent.

  “Aren’t you,” the counter agent says, “that guy who plays for the Elephants?”

  “Yeah,” Zach says, hungover-ly, “sure am.”

  “How’d you make it down here without a vehicle?”

  And it’s everything Zach can do to study the counter, which has various policies and brochures under a clear coating of plastic. To look down at his own hands. To breathe, the kind of don’t-break-down breathing he coaches pitchers through when they just got walloped by the opposing team.

  “A friend dropped me off. Nice to get some quiet after the season, you know?”

  He signs something and poses for a picture he looks like shit in, finally getting into his rented truck, which smells recently detailed and is bare of anything other than a road atlas and manual. Nothing like Eugenio’s, where he kept a flat of Gatorade in the flavor Zach prefers, two sets of spare shoes, a bike helmet, a few game-used balls he could sign for people when they approached him in public the way Gordon advised him to.

  And Zach pulls into the driveway of his rental house and checks to make sure that no one is around before spending a solid five minutes resting his head against the steering wheel.

  He calls Morgan, FaceTime ringing only once before she picks up. “Wow,” she says, “you look rough.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you. About me and Eugenio.”

  She waits.

  He feels dizzy, from his lingering hangover, from the past twenty-four hours. From the past two years. He focuses on the façade of their rental house—his rental house—and not on Morgan’s face on the screen. “We’re together. Or were together. I guess we’re not anymore.”

  There’s a pause, enough of one that he looks down at his phone. She’s chewing her lip. “How long has that been going on?”

  “Pretty much since we met each other. Almost two years. You’re, um, the first person I’ve told.”

  “Zach, holy fuck.”

  “Yeah, you don’t have to tell me how fucked up it is.”

  Morgan holds up a hand. “I honestly need a second with this. Two years. I’m your friend and you didn’t tell me.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. And I guess I stuck him with the same thing.”

  “You guess?”

  “I told him I’d work on it.”

  “Did you?” Her voice has the kind of flat inflection she reserves for guys she’s trying not to punch, her face held carefully neutral.

  “No, I didn’t. He left, and it’s sudden, and I should probably go after him.”

  “Are you going to? Work on it, I mean?”

  And Zach thinks of his parents on the phone, his mother setting him up with her friends’ daughters, their delight at Eitan’s son, Aviva’s engagement. The kind of joy that can’t be divorced from expectation. “I don’t know. I don’t think I can.”

  “Well, there’s your answer.”

  He sits for a while like that, Morgan’s face on the phone, the smell of the ocean coming in the truck’s back windows. “I have a beach house. If, um, you and Lydia wanted to come down.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. Even if we both didn’t have to work, I’m honestly not sure how I’m supposed to feel right now.”

  “I mean, it’s not like we could be together-together.”

  “Zach, I know what it’s like being closeted. And I don’t want to make the decision to come out or not for anyone else. But making promises like that, knowing you’re going to break them, that’s what I’m stuck on.”

  “Yeah, I guess, I don’t know. I thought it’d work itself out somehow.” He waves a hand before Morgan can say anything. “I know, I know. I fucked up. I could just use a friend right now. You don’t have to approve or whatever.” His voice goes tight and he can’t look at his phone for a minute, focusing on the gray rolling tide out his window, the way the water erodes the rocks. “I could just use somebody to listen and not try to fix anything right now.”

  “Okay,” she says, “I can do that.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  July, Present Day

  The Gothams series in Miami begins on a Monday, a three-game set of two night games and an afternoon game before a travel day. Normally, Zach doesn’t mind playing in the empty fan-less cavern of Swordfish Park. But it’s embarrassing to walk out before their first game to see fewer than five thousand people in a space that holds seven times that. Especially when the Gothams play in a perpetually packed house, fans cheering and booing and breathing with the team’s every movement. Especially when Eugenio is in the visitors’ clubhouse, his presence palpable even if Zach hasn’t seen him yet.

  Zach checks his phone approximately three hundred times but finds only the same text he sent to Eugenio a few days ago. One that says, Dinner Monday? And I want to tell you something sitting there on Read without a response.

  Zach drifts from the weight room to the batting cages and even out to the bullpen, to the point Pinelli asks him if he’s feeling okay.

  “Yeah, just keyed up for the series, I guess.”

  “More like waiting for a call from his agent,” Womack says. A few of his teammates have been ribbing him about it, seeing if the team will trade him at the trade deadline, which represents the last opportunity for contending teams to trade for players from non-contenders like Miami.

  Zach shrugs, hoping that they’ll take that as ambivalence about being traded rather than nervousness about the game they’re about to play.

  He stands out on the field with the other star
ters before the game, listening to a local celebrity mostly not butcher the national anthem, his heart rate starting to kick up. Eugenio’s standing in a row of Gothams players in their away gray uniforms, New York in script across his chest, and he looks—

  Right at Zach, unsheathing a grin at him before nodding like Zach should be taking this perfunctory act of patriotism more seriously. After the rituals of the anthem and the first pitch and a local school kid telling them it’s time to play Swordfish baseball, they play.

  Zach sets up behind the plate, receiving the warmup pitches Womack throws. His sinker looks like it’s got weights on it, dropping reassuringly, and he sits the first two Gothams hitters down without much drama.

  And then there’s Eugenio.

  He strides into the batters’ box, his bat resting on his shoulder, exuding purpose. He’s been to the barber since the All-Star Classic and has the kind of shave that leaves a rime of stubble. He’s got his batting gloves on, though Zach has seen him hit barehanded in recent games. When he peels one glove off, adjusting it, the nails of his left hand are painted a bright Gothams orange.

  He’s never worn his pants particularly loose the way some players do; he told Zach once that he worried about clipping the hems under his spikes while he’s running on the base paths, to which Zach said, “When did you learn how to run?”

  But now they’re tight enough that they’re daring someone to say something about it, to send the old-man baseball commentariat into a frenzy about respecting the game and being classy and not flashy, as if players didn’t practically paint theirs on in the ’80s.

  And Zach is grateful for his catcher’s mask, for the Miami heat to excuse his flush. But he’s waited long enough to call a pitch that the umpire actually says, “Play!” like Zach has somehow forgotten they’re in the middle of a game. Which he kind of has.

  He drops a couple signs he knows Womack will shake off, before settling on a sinker. Womack delivers one on the inside edge, low and close to Eugenio. He jumps back a little in a possible attempt to convince the umpire that it was a ball.

  “Striiiiike,” calls the ump behind them, punctuating it with a declarative point of one finger.

  “Where was it?” Eugenio asks.

  “It caught some plate,” Zach says.

  Eugenio glances back at him, eyebrows raised into the brim of his batting helmet. “Oh, it’s like that?”

  Players talk to one another during games. About the weather. Food. The nebulous dimensions of the strike zone. But Zach’s mind pulses with only one question: if this will be the only context in which they see each other. If Zach’s later for when they’ll discuss things has transmuted to never. If he’s too late.

  Zach puts down a sign for a pitch he should be hoping Eugenio pounds into the ground for the final out of the inning, but wants him to foul off instead, prolonging this for as long as possible.

  Womack arranges himself into his windup, coiling and firing, and it’s a pretty pitch, a beautiful pitch, thrown exactly where Zach wants it, dropping reassuringly as it comes toward him at home plate—or would if Eugenio didn’t swing and hit it with enough force Zach can feel it in his teeth.

  Swordfish Park is a cave, a lingering testament to the ability of team owners to promise economic revitalization and deliver poured concrete. It’s four hundred feet from where Zach is squatting to the outfield fence, and it takes the ball only a few seconds to reach there. Only a few seconds and an eternity, as Eugenio stands in the box watching to see whether this will be a home run or a high fly ball—the sharp ringing crack of it a victory or a wasted effort.

  The ball clears the fence, dropping into an area holding a few fans who scramble after it. And Eugenio doesn’t do anything except for tossing his bat behind him, a calculated way of telling Zach and the entire Swordfish team exactly what he thought of that pitch.

  Enough to rankle Zach, refocusing him on the game. “Aren’t you gonna move?”

  Eugenio glances back at him, the gleam of his teeth, the fullness of his lower lip, amused, incredulous, before beginning his slow trot around the bases, first to second to third and back home again, Zach standing aside and letting Eugenio tap the plate with his cleat, hands raised up in praise to a God Zach knows he doesn’t particularly talk with.

  The score stands tied by the time Zach is up to bat. Eugenio’s behind the plate, and Zach doesn’t say anything. Not about his nails or the first pitch he calls, a fastball that misses high and outside, one that Eugenio tries, and fails, to frame for a strike. Or about the next two that miss outside either.

  “Whoever taught you to frame,” Zach says, after another pitch the ump deems a ball making a four-pitch walk, “you should really let that guy have it.”

  And Eugenio laughs at that, his big familiar laugh and says, “Aren’t you gonna move?” loudly enough that the ump probably hears it too.

  From there it’s a tense game, especially when the next batter drives Zach in. Miami clings to a one-run lead going into the ninth, something that always speeds Zach’s pulse.

  The first two Gothams hitters make for quick outs.

  But of course Eugenio’s up this inning, batting third, having slapped a double into the outfield on his last plate appearance and drawing a walk before then. Zach calls for three successive sliders, two that hit the edge of the strike zone, one outside that’s a ball. And he’s thinking about calling for another, when Eugenio says, “Those weren’t strikes last inning.”

  Zach doesn’t glance back at the ump, who probably heard him. “Maybe you need more practice framing.”

  “You offering?” Eugenio steps out of the box. He strips off his batting glove, wrapping his hands around the neck of the bat, ten bright orange fingers a distraction. And Zach feels a roll of heat with it, the kind that has nothing to do with squatting in the Miami humidity for nine innings.

  He calls for a fastball, up and in, opposite from where he called the sliders, a clear strike to anyone who might question why Zach is getting calls Eugenio isn’t.

  Not that it matters, when Eugenio swings and misses for the final out of the game. He drops to one knee in the dirt, next to where Zach is similarly set up. “Had to get me some time, I guess.”

  It’s the last out, Eugenio turning to go back to his team’s dugout. “You still up for dinner?” Zach asks, though Eugenio never officially agreed to it in the first place.

  Eugenio glances around them, considering. “Meet you by the players’ lot later.”

  And if a few guys chirp Zach for smiling like that as he high-fives the infielders as they file off, they probably attribute it to a narrow win against a divisional rival and nothing more.

  “Morales went two for three against you, with a walk tonight,” one of the reporters says, when Zach’s by his stall, doing his interviews in a ripped T-shirt and set of hastily pulled on shorts, his street clothes hung in a dry cleaner bag behind him.

  For once, Zach is happy for reporters’ focus on the opposing team, for a chance to stare down the cameras and say, “Yeah, I hear Morales might be pretty good,” mostly to watch the beat writers laugh.

  After the scrum disperses, Zach scrambles for his phone in his stall. There’s a text waiting for him, one from Eugenio that just says 15 min sent a few minutes before.

  Zach shaves over one of the sinks in the bathroom, trying to tame his hair in the Miami humidity. He got it cut, cropped closely over his ears, leaving the curls at the top longer. He dresses, carefully, putting on a nicer belt than he normally wears and considering cologne he bought before abandoning the idea.

  Womack, who’s lingering behind as well, ice pack around his arm, says, “Hot date?”

  Zach shrugs, something that’s not quite a confirmation but isn’t quite a denial either.

  He finds Eugenio waiting for him by the players’ lot entrance. “Where to?” he asks, after Zach has given him the
standard ballplayers-reuniting hug. He smells like cologne and ballpark shampoo, and Zach is tempted to suggest his apartment, his bed, possibly the back of his truck before they even get out of the lot.

  “There’s a Dominican place nearby, if that works for you,” Zach says.

  It’s a warm night even as late as it is, busy, even on a Monday. Zach navigates his way through traffic, down streets bracketed by palm trees, the only hills created by the grading of the road. There’s always a sense here of being close to the water, the way there was in Oakland, the ocean lurking just over the horizon, the city a defiant strip of lights sitting between the rising Atlantic and sinking Everglades.

  “We’re just south of Hialeah,” Zach says when they make the final turn toward the restaurant. Hialeah, the baseball heart of a city that eats and sleeps baseball, though not Swordfish baseball, where the high school game is king and half the players go on to get drafted.

  Eugenio has been quiet on the ride, face against the window, watching the strip malls and apartment buildings go by, the streets here as wide as New York ones are narrow. He’s wearing his glasses; the lights reflect off them.

  Zach pulls his truck into a parking space. “The guy who owns this place has some great stories. He played in the Dominican league, and I’m sure I’m not getting the best ones because my Spanish isn’t that great but maybe he’ll tell them to you.”

  “Hey.” Eugenio reaches for him as Zach is reaching for his keys to cut the engine, hand around Zach’s wrist. “Breathe.”

  Zach looks down at the circle of his fingers, the pads of them warm points of contact in the blast of his truck’s AC. “I just don’t want to fuck this up.”

  “Then don’t.”

  It’s almost eleven p.m., but the restaurant is full. They wait by the bar even though Zach called, asking for a reservation in halting Spanish before the hostess took pity on him and switched to English. It’s not a big place, tables set in a perimeter around a parquet dance floor, a place for a band.