and the rest of it
last one standing
part II
Foulke gets the kid inside and digs into the brandy he keeps for particularly rough outings to calm the kid’s nerves some. He pulls out the futon and smooths sheets over it quick and neat, making it clean and welcoming. He pulls out a new toothbrush from his bathroom cabinet and puts it on the side of the sink, waving it at the kid, red, alright? Mine’s blue. Don’t mix ‘em up. He makes sure the kid gets into bed and retires to his own bedroom, stripping down to his boxers and falling almost immediately into a deep but uneasy sleep.
Some time later, everything dark and heavy with night, he wakes to the sound of water running. There’s a fat wedge of yellow triangling out from the direction of the bathroom door, and Foulke rolls onto his back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The kid is brushing his teeth, scrubbing the brush around and spitting, returning to scrubbing, spitting again, over and over and over.
Neon green numbers next to the bed declare it to be 4 am.
Half an hour later, the brushing finally stops.
A soft shuffling sound sheepishly approaches his bed. Foulke rolls onto his side and rubs his eyes clear, a dark blob at his side resolving itself fitfully into the kid, standing there wringing his hands again and looking as upset as a shadowy indistinct blob can look in the wee hours of the morning.
With a deep groan Foulke rolls over so his back is to the kid, freeing up half the bed. The kid climbs in and presses up against Foulke’s shoulder blades. He can feel the kid shaking violently. With another irritated groan he rolls back over and sleepily wraps his arms around Papelbon, pulling him to his chest and hoping the kid is too tired and fucked up to bother doing anything stupid.
The kid presses close in a pathetically desperate way, shrinking into Foulke despite his size. His face gets close to Foulke’s and there’s a weird scent, overwhelming mint and strangely metallic. Weary as he is, it takes Foulke a minute to place the smell.
He sits up abruptly and slaps at the lamp next to his bed until he hits the small button illuminating it. In the dim light he glares down at Papelbon, who has his arms wrapped around Foulke’s waist and a startled look in his eyes.
“Open,” Foulke growls, tapping the kid on the mouth. “Show me.” Papelbon’s eyes widen further, but he obediently parts his lips a little.
Of course. The kid has brushed his gums bloody.
With another groan that’s half exasperation and half pity, Foulke gently disentangles the kid and goes into the kitchen. He returns with a glass of water, a teaspoon of salt mixed in, and a cooking bowl. He makes the kid sit up and gargle with it, spitting occasionally into the bowl, water there pretty rosy pink. The kid’s eyes tear up at the sting of the salt and he makes protesting noises far in the back of his throat but Foulke is adamant, because he does know best, and if this is what being a veteran means, well, so be it.
Eventually the water entering the bowl runs mostly clear and he lets the kid fall back, completely exhausted. He throws everything into the sink and eases in next to Papelbon, damned if he’s going to be freaked out of his own fucking bed.
The kid’s arms wrap around him again, pulling him close and tight, and Foulke is far too tired to think of how awkward this could be in the morning.
----------
The summer grows hot everywhere but Boston, cold wet air still blowing over Fenway and whipping around the high yellow foul poles. Coming home from a west coast road trip is a little like coming back to a different country, Africa to England or something like that. Foulke vaguely dreads coming home, because the fans are much harsher when they all know his name.
The kid loves it, though. The cheers had started the season loud and have only gotten louder as it goes on. It’s getting so that he gets as much applause as a starter, as much as David Ortiz when he steps up to bat.
Travis Hafner nervously toes at the plate and Papelbon shrugs off his jacket, dumping it onto the bench next to Foulke in a pile of crinkled red. He turns to Foulke and offers a brilliant grin, apropos of nothing, before nodding at the bullpen catcher and jogging out the door, taking the long trip in from the outfield in easy strides.
The crowd is on its collective feet, screaming and clapping, tiny children raised up by parents and standing on seats, craning their necks for a glimpse of this mythical man, a hero in unlikely 58.
Foulke stands and leans on the wall to watch. Hafner dances up on the balls of his feet uncomfortably, swings mightily through the pitch as it whizzes by. The crowd roars as one. Varitek, behind the plate, nods at Papelbon and rises up on his haunches, calling the next fastball high. Hafner swings straight through it again, unbalancing himself and twisting around, cleats scoring the orange dirt and making long brown stripes.
Foulke watches the red satin numerals on the back of the kid’s jersey glint dully under the ballpark lights as the material ripples through his pitching motion. Hafner stubbornly refuses to swing at the next pitch and gets caught with his bat on his shoulder, the ball sailing tidily through the inside corner. The umpire pumps his arms sharply and Varitek points to the kid before sending the ball back to him.
The brilliant grin of the kid is superimposed on the whole scene, green grass and orange dirt and white-clad teammates, riot of color in the crowd. Foulke blinks and blinks and blinks again but he can’t get rid of it, it’s shading over everything like an afterimage burned into his retinas.
He stares at the banks of lights high above the field until his head swims and there are bright painful squiggles dotting his vision, but it still won’t disappear, the kid’s stupid fucking smile brighter even than a hundred thousand watts of diamond-illuminating electricity.
----------
“Come out and have some fun with us, man,” the kid says, high off yet another game, yet another save.
Foulke nods silently and doesn’t have to be persuaded.
----------
It’s a club this time, the sort of trendy place with a lot of black paint and brushed metal surfaces, the bar on a level overlooking the thronging dance floor. The bar has rows and rows of bottles on the back of it, the wall lit bright neon blue and the bottles making dark silhouettes in elegant flowing forms. The music is thumping and electronic and Foulke can’t remember feeling more out of place once in his life before this, not even when he went out with Manny.
The kid edges onto the dance floor, along with Youkilis and Willie Harris and John Lester, one of the recent call-ups, another kid trying to fill a man’s spot on the team. Foulke ignores all the absurdly colored cocktails around him and orders a beer, which he nurses slowly, daring anyone around him to enjoy their drinks more. He talks to Timlin for a while, until a forward brunette slides her hand over Timlin’s wrist and Timlin hops off his stool with a casual nod and a wink.
Foulke snorts noiselessly to himself and gets up, dangling his beer by the bottleneck between his fingers. He walks up to the sleek chromed railing and leans on it, the dance floor undulating below him, dark shifting areas splashed with lights in magenta and green.
He spots Youkilis right away, easy, his bald head shining like a lighthouse and his jerky, uncoordinated dancing easy to recognize. He watches Youkilis jerk up to a couple of calculatedly bored-looking girls and get mercilessly ignored, which amuses him for a few minutes, watching and contenting himself with cataloguing everything that Youkilis is doing wrong, starting with his loudly obnoxious shirt and ending with his open-mouthed breathing.
He scans for Harris but can’t find the slender slip of him in the crowd. Lester he notices at the edge of the mass of people, leaning on the wall and catching his breath, a red-head leaning next to him and keeping one finger hooked in his pocket. Foulke lets a couple of the lights pass over them before deciding she’s obviously the kind of red-head that comes out of a little box in the local CVS and losing interest.
His eyes slide across the crowd again and, wholly against his will, light up against Papelbon, dancing with abandon near the opposite edge of the floor. There’s little grace to his movements, but there’s a certain freedom and lack of self-consciousness in it that makes Foulke grimace. It’s too open for his tastes, the kid ought to be careful, that fucking open and who knows what’ll come in.
Timlin clatters up against the rail next to Foulke, breathless and smug, and Foulke spends a minute rolling his eyes and sarcastically clanking beers with him. When he looks back down he can’t see the kid anymore. He frowns and scans the area carefully, suddenly catching sight of his back, weaving through the few people between him and the shadowy area next to the dance floor, a few scattered tables and the hall leading to the bathrooms.
With a lurch in his stomach Foulke watches the kid run up against the back of a guy in front of him, a middlingly tall guy with a rounded, solid look to him, tight black jeans and the sort of weird shimmery shirt that makes Foulke think of dead fish.
The kid giggles and presses his arm to the guy’s side, mouth moving in probable apologies. The guy turns his head and says something to the kid, who smiles and says something back.
Timlin is drawling next to him, a low easy stream of one-sided conversation, but all Foulke can process is the kid, a floor and a hundred people below him, throwing an arm over the shoulders of the guy in the dead minnow shirt and walking into the darkness near the bathrooms like they’re best friends, and it’s no big deal at all.
----------
The kid shows up at the park the next day an hour late, rushing in looking tousled and hurried. Francona narrows his eyes and spits in the corner and glares at Foulke until he sighs deeply, obviously, and pulls the kid into the video room, kicking the door shut.
The kid perches on the edge of the cheap plastic table they’ve got in there, the legs wobbling a little under his weight. Foulke can see a new mark just under his collar, a hint of purple bruising peeking out.
He sneers, exposing teeth, and marches right up to the kid, gets right in his face, fisting his hands and resting his knuckles on the table on either side of the kid’s legs. The kid’s eyes go wide and he leans back minutely, surrendering the space and going exactly where Foulke wants him. Kid’s already scared. Good.
“The fuck you doin?” Foulke growls, low but clear. “Comin’ in late like that? Fuckin’ around too much last night? Fuckin’ too much last night?”
The kid flushes crimson but gains a sullenly defiant set to his jaw. “I was havin’ fun. So I came in late, once. It’s not like I missed the game or nothin’.”
“Fun? Is that what you’re callin’ it?” The sneer is becoming more pronounced and, hell, Francona wants him to slap some sense into the kid, that’s why he sent him in here. Foulke is nothing if not good at being cruel to be kind.
“How can you do that shit and call it fun after what happened last time?”
The kid opens his mouth to reply, gapes, closes it again. Foulke presses on, watching closely for a weakness he can snag onto.
“Huh? Huh? Didn’t seem to be havin’ fun last time. Or maybe you like that now? That what you get off on now?”
The kid gapes again, surprised and helpless. “What?” Foulke snarls. “Don’t act all fuckin’ shocked. You like that shit? That’s your own fuckin’ problem. But when you bring it into here by bein’ late and comin’ in a mess, that’s a fuckin’ problem for all of us.”
“Don’t,” the kid protests, weakly. “I don’t. It wasn’t like that this time.”
Foulke raises one eyebrow challengingly and the kid gains confidence, the sullenness coming back to his posture. “Hey. Fuck you. It wasn’t. It was good.”
“How can you do that shit again after last time? Wouldn’t that turn you right the fuck off it?” Foulke puts all the disbelieving scorn he can muster into his voice, laying it on thick, but the kid just sneers back at him now.
“I wasn’t just experimentin’ that time. I’ve been practicing, since. I’m gettin’ good. Maybe that’s what I like, you ever thoughta that?”
Foulke pretends to think, rolling his eyes sarcastically to the ceiling, his nose inches away from the kid’s own. “Hmm. No, maybe I didn’t, cause maybe you got a fuckin’ wife. What about her, huh?”
“Fuck you,” the kid hisses, shoving Foulke in the chest. “Fuck, fuck you, you can’t say a damn thing about my wife, you don’t know shit about, you cheated all over the place. You don’t know a damn thing. Fuck you.”
“If you’re gay,” Foulke says, smugly, lingering over the word ‘gay’, drawing it out, “show everyone some fuckin’ balls. You shouldn’t be stringing the poor bitch along like that.”
He doesn’t have any real object here, except to punish Papelbon sufficiently for coming in late and incurring Francona’s displeasure. Beyond that he just wants to see the little fucker squirm. Teach him a thing or two about taking a job he’s not ready for.
The kid starts up at the word ‘bitch’ and grabs the front of Foulke’s shirt, shoulders broadening furiously, the back of his neck flushing to match his face.
“Don’t you fucking dare talk about her like that! I don’t! I’m not!”
Foulke takes advantage of the kid’s grasp on his shirt, pushes forward and the kid can’t back away, his hand locked up and Foulke close already. He grabs the back of the kid’s head brutally and mashes their lips together, catching the kid’s mouth open in surprise and clicking their teeth one set against the other, enamel slide, shoving his tongue in and turning things quickly wet.
He kisses him hard, keeping forward pressure, keeping the kid pressing back and scrambling for metaphorical footing, never getting a toehold. He kisses him until the kid has both hands in Foulke’s shirt, trying to pull him closer, desperately, his mouth quivering as he tries to get air, his legs swinging out and trying to hook around Foulke, pull him closer yet.
Foulke pulls back as abruptly as he had gone in, leaving the kid gasping frantically, mouth wet and puffy and eyes wild. He carefully pries the kid’s hands from his shirt and steps back, unruffled and cool as ice.
“Sure,” he says, controlling his voice tightly and making certain it’s smooth, cold, comprehensible. “Sure. Not gay.”
Papelbon makes a tiny squeaking noise, looking like a lost puppy teetering on the edge of the table.
“Have fun bein’ not gay, but if you fuck around on team time again, it’s Tito who’ll be hearin’ ‘bout how not gay you are.” Foulke turns, leaving without looking back, something he’s getting real good at.
It’s his moment of triumph. He’s beaten the kid at his own game and he’s left him hollow and broken behind him. And Foulke does feel triumphant, kind of, but the pleased swooping sensation in his gut is mixed in with something else, something he can’t exactly place but doesn’t like having there.
He wonders if it’s possible to feel the absolute best and the absolute worst he’s felt in years as the exact same time, for the exact same reason. He wonders if maybe that means he’s not sane.
----------
The kid doesn’t look at Foulke for two weeks, but he doesn’t come in late again and Francona pulls Foulke aside to thank him for setting the kid straight, it was damn good of you to keep him from having to go through the same kinda shit you did, real big of you, real proud of you, Foulkie.
Foulke nods and grins falsely. Not quite the same kinda shit he got caught up in, no mistresses drawing acrylic fingernails down his back or small son blinking in confusion when mommy starts shouting. But Francona doesn’t need to know that.
It’s given Foulke the reputation, in the manager’s eyes, of being a good teammate and a helpful kind of guy, an idea Foulke is not too quick to disabuse him of. It’s a tidy bit of trickery and he should feel better about it than he does.
----------
Another month passes unremarkably, Boston still under fitfully raining clouds, but they’re as far north as baseball goes, up in Toronto, where it doesn’t matter what the weather is. The roof of the Rogers Center is crisscrossed with girders and Foulke spends much of the game staring up at them, trying to count rivets from his seat on the field. The starters are plodding along tolerably well and Papelbon is closing games out easy as ever. He has nothing better to do.
Coco Crisp, fresh off the DL, his fingers wrapped in white tape, hits the game-winning single and in a move of relieved largesse invites the entire team to a series of drinks at the hotel bar, on his tab. Beer is beer and with the whole team there Foulke can be relatively sure of being left to his own devices, he has no reason not to join in.
It’s a simple enough matter to ignore the clumps of Red Sox around tables and to sit on a high stool at the bar itself like any average hotel patron. The beer is cold and unobjectionable and he’s halfway enjoying himself, anonymous in the noise and actually pulled some tail the night before, feeling generally good about life, if he doesn’t think about baseball.
The kid hasn’t spoken to him since that day in the video room, so Foulke is surprised when he feels a tap on his shoulder and turns around to see the kid standing there. He’s knotted his hands together and is wringing them almost unconsciously, a sign that he’s upset, something Foulke wishes he didn’t immediately note and remember.
“Can, can we talk? I’ve gotta… you’re the only… can we?”
Foulke stares hard at him for a minute, watches him squirm under his gaze. He turns and signals to the bartender to put his drinks on his room bill, finishes his beer in one long, practiced gulp and gets up without a word.
They ride the elevator up in silence and Papelbon leads the way to his room in silence, gesturing Foulke in ahead of him. He closes and locks the door, his back to Foulke, and when he turns around Foulke is dismayed to see that the kid is close to tears.
“”I can’t, god,” he chokes, covering his face with his hands while Foulke stands uncomfortably before him, “I can’t keep on with this, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t keep on, I don’t know what to do, I don’t, I know you don’t want, don’t wanna hear it, you’re the only one who knows, I can’t.”
Pathetic, Foulke thinks, and he says as much, “You expect to be a closer with that kinda weak attitude?” he growls, doesn’t even really know what the kid is talking about but, Christ, he doesn’t have to. “You expect if you can let shit get to you like that you’ll be able to make it on the mound?”
The kid tears his hands from his face and screams at Foulke, blotchy-cheeked, “Being a closer doesn’t mean having no fucking emotions at all!” He’s shaking where he stands, emotionally out of control, while Foulke stands still as stone and easy as anything, regardless of the dual-twanging of his heart, the callous laughter at the breakdown and the sharply warring desire to take the kid in his arms, wrap him up and tell him it’ll all be OK. He thinks it’s pretty fucking obvious who has the better handle on themselves, who has a better handle on what it is to be a closer.
“What’s the fuckin’ problem?” he asks, snidely. “Don’t like bein’ in the closet? Getting’ sicka lyin’ to your wife? That ain’t my problem.”
“You’re the only one who knows!” Papelbon cries, plaintive. “I can’t fucking tell anyone else! I can’t do this!”
It strikes Foulke, all of a sudden, that the kid thinks he’s the only one on the team interested in that kind of shit. Manny and Millar were never as demonstrative in 2005 as they had been the year before, the kid had only been up for something like 20 games then anyhow, and now Millar isn’t on the team. The kid, incredibly, has no idea about Manny. Not that he supposes Manny would be any great help to talk to, when Foulke considers it, but it still gives him pause.
The kid takes his silence for unconcern and makes a noise like a wounded cat. “How can you be so fucking indifferent?” he screams, heedless of the thin hotel walls, their teammates roomed all around them.
Foulke cocks an eyebrow at him and sneers again. “Because I’m the one with a closer’s attitude, kid.” Stupid fucking question.
Papelbon makes the frustrated noise again and snaps, charging at Foulke and catching him off guard. They fall to the bed and Foulke finds himself momentarily pinned, on the bottom. He grabs at the kid’s wrists and tries to hold them apart, away from him, Papelbon looking all kinds of crazed and wanting to bash his head in.
The kid drops all of his weight on Foulke, who can feel his breathe rush out of him in a surprised whoosh, his grip loosening just enough for the kid to wrench his hands free and grab Foulke’s head on either side, clamping him in place. Reverse of the video room, here, and Foulke has a second to stare into the wild eyes of the kid before his mouth is clamped down on and he’s being kissed.
Already airless from the kid forcing his breath out of his chest and he can’t get any more air with the kid suctioned to his lips, tongue lashing at the inside of Foulke’s mouth and making his body think he’s swallowing something, keeping his trachea closed. He struggles for a minute but black dots dance in front of his eyes and everything goes dull headachy gray.
He comes to with a start, not knowing how much time has passed, his pants missing and the kid licking at his dick. Foulke inhales deeply, his lungs burning and dry coughs racking through his body but the kid is undeterred, holding Foulke down at the hips with both hands and swallowing him all at once, making Foulke inject a shout into his coughing fit.
Foulke tries to get his hands down to shove the kid’s head away but he’s still fuzzed and weak from passing out and he’s barely coordinated enough to breathe, let alone do anything forceful with his limbs. The kid is sucking him with a brutal kind of efficiency, like it’s a race. He must feel Foulke’s hands flutter at his hair, though, because he pauses and looks up, eyes still wild and cheeks still flushed red as their livelihood.
“Push,” he rasps, voice rough-edged, and Foulke blinks uncomprehendingly. “C’mon, your hands, get, on my head.”
Unsure, Foulke lightly cups a hand around the side of the kid’s face, concentrating hard to make the fingers curve right. The kid’s eyebrows pucker down in a frown and he shakes his head slightly.
“No, c’mon. Shove.”
Brain still catching up with current events, Foulke stares. The kid shifts under his gaze and drops his own eyes down to Foulke’s dick again, which is half-hard, but through no fault of Foulke’s.
“Shove, c’mon, that’s how you do it.”
Finally, finally Foulke catches on to what’s going on here. Christ, so fucked up, he did not ask to be thrust into this kind of shit, but with the kid it seems like it’s always ending up in Foulke’s lap anyhow, just, this time a bit more literally.
He gets his hand a bit more manageable and presses it firmly against the top of the kid’s head, shoving him out of his lap. The kid looks up like he can’t believe Foulke would stop him in the middle of this, and Foulke may be a little bit drunk, a little bit horny, a little bit an asshole, but this is too fucking wrong for even him.
“That’s not how you do it, kid,” he says, sense of right and wrong skewed but anchored somewhere, in the final estimation.
“Yeah it is,” the kid stubbornly replies, tiny pucker forming between his eyebrows and belying his certainty.
“No. Maybe that’s how you do it when you’re suckin’ off random guys in bathrooms,” (the kid winces visibly), “but it ain’t how it’s done.”
The kid still looks like he doesn’t want to believe it, so Foulke frowns at him gravely. “C’mon. If your wife was suckin’ you off, would you be shovin’ at her head and tellin’ her to hurry it the fuck up?”
“No! No, but. This is. Guys.”
Foulke sits up, carefully easing his hips out from under the kid, piling a lump of rucked-up sheets over himself. The kid looks empty, lost, adrift somewhere behind his eyes.
“Just cause it’s guys, that don’t mean it’s any different than how you should treat a chick.”
Indignant, the kid protests, “I ain’t a chick! I don’t, I ain’t askin’ to be treated like a fucking chick!”
“No, but you ain’t supposed to be gettin’ half raped every time neither.”
And there it is. Foulke’s said it, the word that they’d been so assiduously avoiding ever since that first time, the kid coming back to his apartment shaking down to his fingertips. It hangs now in the air between them, flat and heavy, the sound dying slow in the hotel room and seeming to linger long after it should have floated away.
“It’s not,” Papelbon whispers, folding into himself at the foot of the bed, a thousand miles away from the star pitcher pumping his fist under the madly adoring gaze of an entire ballpark. “It’s not. I want it.”
“That don’t make it OK,” Foulke says, strong and calm as he knows how to be. A small tear escapes from the corner of the kid’s eye and straggles down his cheek without his noticing. Foulke doesn’t even have the heart to upbraid him for it, instead opening his arms with a grunt and letting the kid swarm up the bed, pouring himself into them.
The kid bites Foulke’s shoulder through his shirt, teeth digging in to keep himself together. Foulke grimaces at the wall and says nothing. It’s not like he’ll be pitching much anyways, may as well offer up his shoulder to the ability of another.
Even a closer, he supposes, has to break down sometimes. Just so long as he shows can use it. So long as he’s got the understanding that he’ll come back stronger.
----------
Just for the hell of it, Foulke is warming up before the game in the outfield, throwing a baseball at the wall and letting it carom back in his direction. He hates playing in Oakland, it makes him feel old and reminds him of stupid things he doesn’t need to think about, but of course it’s not the sort of thing he can get out of.
Some fans in green and gold are leaning over the wall near him, staring expressionlessly at him like lizards, little kids with their mouths hanging heedlessly open in the heat. He sets his jaw hard until his teeth ache, and bounces the ball off the wall again, scraping the tops of the blades of close-shorn grass with his glove to scoop it up on the rebound.
There’s a soft cough behind him and he doesn’t need to turn around to see who it is, starting to recognize the small indicators just through osmosis, not particularly wanting to but too tired of fighting, gave up long ago.
He throws the ball a few more times, putting the spin on it just right so that it skips directly back to his feet, lateral movement streamlined and cut to a minimum.
“How d’you do that?” Papelbon asks curiously.
“It’s all in the stride,” Foulke explains, only just loud enough for the kid to hear, not bothering to change the direction of his gaze. “And keepin’ your shoulders in a line.”
“Show me,” the kid demands, the familiar entitled voice of someone whose professional curiosity won’t be denied.
All the Oakland fans are watching and Foulke is thinking about when he was the kid’s age, cocksure and stupid as all fuck, tantrums on the field and in the clubhouse and at home. No one told him shit, it’s a wonder his marriage lasted as long as it did, it’s a wonder he stayed in baseball at all.
The fans are watching and Foulke turns just his head, shoulders still open to the wall, raising his voice just enough.
“What do you say?”
The kid stares at him. The fans stare at them both. Foulke ignores them and stares right back at the kid. He’ll be damned if he’s going to be freaked out of his own fucking former home park.
A long pause later, the air moving slowly, Papelbon clasps his hands theatrically in front of him, making his eyes absurdly huge, his voice de-aged by 10 years and snottily begging.
“Please?”
Foulke gives him a sneering smile that still somehow manages to feel sincere, not quite as warm as the haze-streaked city air, but holding its own. He shakes out his wrists and toes the grass to demonstrate. The kid comes in close behind him, watching attentively and asking questions any self-aware pitcher with a youthful dose of inquisitiveness would ask.
The air between his back and Papelbon’s chest charges up, staticky, ionized, but Foulke ignores it and throws at the wall, throws again, arm snapping forward from the shoulder, the elbow, smoothly repeated. He can almost hear electricity crackle, making the small hairs on the back of his neck stand up, but he concentrates on keeping his delivery consistent and doubts that the fans’ eyes are sharp enough to see it.
----------
Papelbon leans on Foulke, teetering on his stool, two games lost and everyone on the team too dejected to venture beyond the hotel bar, even if Francona hadn’t told them not to. Salvage the third, unspoken but on everyone’s mind. Schilling is supposed to be pitching against Barry Zito and he’s locked himself into his room with his notebooks and charts and a direct line to his wife.
Papelbon is jumpy too, neither of the previous losses his fault but his nerves twitching at the thought of a sweep. Foulke is calming him down as best he can, saying nothing when the kid gestures for a drink, another, and telling him stories about what Zito is probably doing to prepare for this start, his stupid fucking hippy shit, chants and trance music piped into the clubhouse so that everyone gets the benefit of it, as determined by, well, Zito.
He finishes telling a particularly good one, about the time Zito’s little plastic Buddha statue got hung from a noose in his locker as a joke. Papelbon is leaning heavily on him, giggling helplessly, pressing his face into the place where Foulke’s shoulder and neck meet. He struggles to catch his breath, hiccupping, and announces that he has to go to the bathroom.
Foulke rolls his eyes, pays the tab for the both of them, and leads the kid up to his hotel room, arm around his waist just to keep him upright, the kid lolling around and manifestly needing it.
Inside, the kid backs him up against the door, pressing the whole length of his body against Foulke and sliding his hands up his sides. Foulke gently reaches between them, his own hands gingerly cupping the kid’s waist and trying to push him off.
“You’re drunk,” he mutters, no longer disturbed, these days, but still not welcoming it.
The kid looks up at him and Foulke is startled to see how clear his eyes are. The kid doesn’t look nearly as drunk as he had been acting mere minutes ago.
“Please,” he says, deferential. “Show me.”
“Show you what?”
He slides one hand down to the fly on Foulke’s jeans. He fingers the button and doesn’t make any overtly aggressive moves, which Foulke supposes is a vast improvement, but the direction this is taking is left in no doubt.
“Show me what it can be like,” Papelbon says, not begging, not crying, not flying all over the place, calm and controlled. Foulke watches him appreciatively, even as he marshals his thoughts against what the kid is asking. He can still, for once, approve of how he’s doing it.
“M’not like that, kid.”
“I know. I know.” The kid is contrite but something in his voice manages to concede the point without giving up any ground. “Look. I don’t. I don’t have great luck with, well. Guys. I trust you. I want you to.”
Foulke stares at the kid. He doesn’t think he’s done much to incur the kid’s trust, not like that, surely the kid knows what Foulke used to do with groupies, the stories still bruiting around the clubhouse when guys need something to talk about. But there’s no hesitation in the kid’s eyes, no doubt in his stance, no wavering in his palm against Foulke’s ribs.
“Please,” the kid adds, hint of a cheeky smile ghosting across his face. “I know you ain’t. Ain’t like this. I’m only asking this once, I won’t ask again. I just. I want to know how it can be, the first time, so I don’t. So it doesn’t end up like before. I don’t know how else to do it.”
“The first time?” Foulke is starting to get a little bit hysterical, slamming the walls down around himself forcibly, he’s the fucking pro here, he’s not going to panic, he’s not going to get excited, he’s not going to anything.
“Want it t’be you,” Papelbon purrs, fingers easing into activity, sliding the button of Foulke’s jeans free and snagging on the zipper. “Know you’ll show me right.”
Christ. Foulke swallows and he can control his emotions, he can control the reactions in his head, but he can’t control his reactions in his pants, there isn’t a closer in the world, superstar or not, who can.
There are some ideas that you object to with every aspect of your being, some things you just never ever want to do. Some of those things you spend the rest of your life not wanting to do. Some of them, though, work their way into your unconsciousness, worm their way into your life, crawl under your skin until your resistance is broken down, your barriers burst, and you haven’t even noticed it.
Fucking hell.
Foulke leans back against the door and wets his lips. Papelbon leans in, closing his eyes gratefully and murmuring his thanks into the hollow of Foulke’s throat. He unzips Foulke’s fly and shoves his jeans down his hips, one-handedly undoing his own pants before pressing up against Foulke with a happy, relieved sigh.
Foulke fists one hand in the back of Papelbon’s shirt and hopes, hopes like hell, that he knows enough to get through this.
----------
Moving slow and careful, Foulke drapes himself over Papelbon’s back, reaching one hand around to press it to the kid’s chest, heaving underneath them both.
Papelbon pants and arches his back and Foulke is gripping his hip just to stay in, going at his own pace, deliberate but not too careful, because he’s not going to start treating Papelbon with kid gloves now, when he least needs it.
It’s not unlike trying to find the elusive G-spot of some chick, Foulke thinks, as he shifts around and minutely shifts his weight, a little more this way, a little more that, biting his own lip bloody to keep from going crazy over it all.
Papelbon suddenly shudders and cries out, pushing back into Foulke unsteadily. Foulke grins smugly behind him, glad to see he’s as good at this as he is at fucking groupies. He keeps his delivery smooth and consistent, behavior ingrained and just as good here as it is on the mound.
Under his hand, Papelbon’s heart jackhammers and Foulke’s palm slides a tiny bit, the kid’s sweat making him slippery, hard to hold onto, intangible.
The incoherent groans and breathy gasps Papelbon had been voicing somehow meld seamlessly into a phrase, repeated over and over.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you, Keith, thankyouthankyou.”
Foulke lets his hand skid freely, still gripping surely with the other. He skates it down Papelbon’s sternum, over his stomach, fingers splaying until he runs up against something hard and wraps around like it’s himself, a familiar motion in an unfamiliar angle.
Papelbon shudders harder and jerks sharply under Foulke, crying out helplessly, pleading without words.
Knees a forgotten problem, no benches here, Foulke grins and sets his teeth and like he’s always done, like he’ll always, in his heart, be able to do, brings the game to an overpowering, masterful close.
----------
The DL doesn’t come as a surprise to anyone, least of all to Foulke. The pain was constant, and he would have kept on pitching through it until they were taking him from the field in a stretcher, but Francona notices and decides that enough is enough. It’s not 2004 anymore. He’s only worth keeping out there if he’s got stuff worth, well, keeping.
Foulke clears out his locker, leaving a few things just in case, a spare jersey, his nameplate. But he packs most of it up. Medical attention, that’s what he needs, Francona tells him sternly. Doctors and machines and rehab, far far away from Fenway Park.
He’s never been much of a brainy guy, not into that studying shit like Varitek or anything like that, but Foulke can read the writing on the wall when it’s there to be read.
So he packs most everything away in boxes, stacking haphazard because he’s never been any good at packing. It’s not giving up, it’s not giving in. Not anymore. He might come back, but baseball will move on without him regardless, and he’ll always have his place in it, photos of him leaping on high, arms in the air, plastered all over the history books, printed up in glossy green and red. Joy writ large over all their faces, and long after these past two seasons have faded away, that’s the image that will endure.
He straightens up and stretches his back, looking around the clubhouse. Manny’s got his headphones on in the corner, tapping his foot in what is almost certainly the wrong rhythm. Timlin is arguing with Youkilis over whose camo-patterned shirt belongs to whom. Beckett is hanging over Schilling’s shoulder at the computers, four eyes glued to the screen, while Trot Nixon plays digital solitaire next to them. Ortiz is rubbing preemptive pine tar on the handle of a new bat, joking with Alex Gonzalez in rapid-fire Spanish.
Foulke smiles. He’ll miss this, but he no longer regrets it. He fought so long and so hard, so doggedly and so bitterly, all to keep from losing his spot in the bullpen, and in the end he no longer has it, but it’s not really lost.
Hefting a box on his shoulder he turns to walk out to the parking lot. Outside the clouds have finally parted over Boston and the moon is shining weakly down, the light pale and watery but clear all the same.
He’s halfway to his truck when he hears his name called from the doorway. He pauses and looks back.
Papelbon is standing in the doorway, bright artificial light streaming out from behind him and making him backlit, a black silhouette with yellow creeping around the edges.
“Take care, alright?” he calls, voice raised just a little, just enough to project out into the nearly empty parking lot.
“Sure,” Foulke says. “O’course.”
“I’ll keep ‘em from giving anyone your locker.”
Foulke laughs, tipping his face up towards the moon. “Don’t strain yourself none.”
“That’s it?” Papelbon calls back, a tiny choke at the center of his voice but he’s mastering himself, he’s holding it together, learning, always learning, Foulke got prouder by the day. “That’s all you got? No more pokes at my attitude or nothin’?”
Foulke studies his outline for a moment, deep hole in the light of the park. He thinks of all the things he could say, and then he thinks of what he will say, what no one ever bothered saying to him.
“Show me,” he says, echoing slightly off the brick sides of Fenway and bouncing back at them, around them. “Show me. Show everyone.”
The silhouette in the door stands taller, its shoulders widening and its chin lifting. Foulke lets himself look at it for another long second before nodding to himself, turning, trudging away to his truck and Christ knows what else.
He holds a grudge as well as anyone, but it was the kid he held his grudge against, and it was intolerable to think that his job, his fucking life, could be taken by a kid. That’s never changed. It never will.
He could never allow himself to be sent packing by a fucking kid.
He can turn his back with dignity now, though, walk away with his head held high and not look back, leaving nothing behind but a team full of men.
~~
go back to part I
Ha ha, god, I'm such a whore for repetition.