don't bother me cos i ain't got no time
i was taking a look at that inventory and realized what was missing. near-porn starring one tim hudson. back we go into zito's psyche, hold tight.
Windfall
See, back when it started you knew what you were doing and you could map out every day, trace letters in the dust on the windshield. Xeroxed pages smeared ink on your hands, your schedule for the next week folded up into eighths and tucked into your pocket, and you were always running late, always miscalculating the traffic on the bridge and paying rookie fines. Driving ninety miles an hour, two hundred feet above the water, you wove between the other cars like you were being chased by the cops.
Back when it started you were twenty-two years old.
That was okay. Youth lent everything a drumbeat. You wanted to climb up the Coliseum’s light standards and shout it out over the highway. You were twenty-two years old and this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to you. You taped a green and yellow ticket from every game to your bedroom wall.
Summer like being slingshot into the sky, and Tim Hudson was there too, calling you kid and stressing the importance of changing speeds. You learned how to throw Sandy Koufax’s curveball, fingers tight on the twist of the stitches and your thumb pushing over top, hidden from the batter’s eye. Hudson sat on the grass and whistled low as your best pitch crashlanded, and you believed a curve like this was a better invention than the wheel.
You went quickly from teammates to friends to pretty much inseparable, and then all of a sudden you were in love with him. Irreversible like waking up from your first surgery and looking down at the loop of ugly black sutures over your kneecap. Not all scars are on the outside, though, and not all scars are bad, because Hudson was funny as all hell and had forgotten more about pitching than you would ever know and his eyes were a mixed-up color between silver and blue.
He took you to these little white-trash bars that reminded him of home, drank shitty beer and plugged quarters into the juke to play Merle Haggard, and you developed a taste for Natty Light and songs that made you want to kill yourself. Initials and angels carved into the wooden tables and Hudson was talking about Little League and this one time when he’d gotten thrown out of the game for arguing balls and strikes with the umpire, who happened to be his father.
You had stories of your own, though not too many, and three weeks in, Hudson was grinning and holding up two fingers, that’s the second time you’ve told me that. By August, he held up four fingers, and by September he needed both hands, flashing you signs like a pick-off play. You blushed and stumbled to a stop, and he shook his head, nah, tell me anyway. Tell me different this time.
You changed the endings of things, this time you actually lost your virginity in the janitor’s closet your junior year of high school, this time you made it to the College World Series, this time you weren’t able to talk yourself out of being arrested. Your life sounded so much more interesting when Hudson wanted to hear something new.
You were so fucking in love with him. It was still July and it really shouldn’t have caught you off-balance the way it did. You were born like this, deviance lived in you like an unborn twin, and you’d always had a weakness for tough good-looking men with accents and good right hooks.
And it was totally fucking useless, because Hudson was your best friend and his wife was small and blonde and adorable and made you a marble cake one time when you were feeling homesick, white icing with those chewy rainbow chip things that you used to eat by the spoonful, and you couldn’t do anything about that, no more than you could stop wanting to lick her husband’s neck. Straight was just a word, a bad label, and maybe sometimes it could be overcome, but Hudson was crazy about Kim, and that was clear as a stoplight.
Bound yourself desperately to baseball, because on the field you had him all to yourself. Between the lines, under a sky like water, Hudson kept trying to teach you to throw a splitter and you kept giving up with your fingertips feeling burned and raw. You fell onto the grass, propped up on your elbows, and watched him throw for awhile. Breathing in the warm air, the whip of his shadow over your body, you tried to think of somewhere better, but couldn’t.
Between the lines, Hudson squinted against the sun and didn’t seem to mind that you were always running late and always losing things. There were a million reasons that you’d been given for why you were impossible to be with: you’re thoughtless (really just forgetful, but it evened out to the same); you’re too hard to read; you care too much about baseball; your jokes aren’t funny; you’re just really weird, Barry. But all the stuff that you were certain would doom you forever, Hudson barely seemed to notice.
You fell deeper every day. He was cutting you up from the inside out, and you couldn’t even bring yourself to care.
There was something in the way he looked at you, too, and his hand in your hair, and his leg against your own in the dugout all warm and strong, making you think giddily, maybe, but you’d been through this before and you knew wishful thinking when it sucker-punched you in the back of the head.
A night in Baltimore, then, drowned in the staggered depth of the East Coast summer, the windows cracking under the weight of the humidity, and you were drunk, he was drunk, the world was beautiful.
Hudson was laughing, sitting on the edge of bed and bent over his knees, his head in his hands. You didn’t even remember what was so funny, and you could hear the rustle of his fingers over his buzzed hair. Halfway brown-rust color that spiked into individual pieces when he sweat and softened like a meadow when he didn’t, and his pale beaten fingers rested in backslashes over the curve of his skull.
His neck was flushed from laughing so hard, his T-shirt collar twisted and his legs long as chopsticks in his jeans. You were sitting on the floor, unsure how you’d gotten down there, and the room rolled all carnival-bright and the hundred-degree weather outside had migrated into your mind. So fucking drunk, you could hardly trust yourself to stay upright, even sitting was a challenge.
And you wanted to touch him, just your fingers on the prod of his ankle bone, under the cuff of his jeans, wanted his laughter to fall onto your lips and his hammered-metal body to tighten and give under your hands. You wanted everything.
Something about being a rookie and the brilliance of your year so far, your curveball the best it had been since you were nine years old and the only kid in the league who knew how to throw a breaking pitch, when it had made you a thousand feet tall and convinced that you would never die. Rookie year.
You rose up onto your knees and put your hands on his legs, yank of muscle through his jeans. He hiccupped and lifted his head, and you were already saying, “Please, just, dude, let me, please,” your hands scrabbling at his belt.
He looked down at you with a strange frozen expression on his face. Looked at you like you were a photograph that had come alive and started talking to him. You got his belt open and slid your hand inside his briefs, no time for foreplay or second thought, just heat in your palm and he gasped a little through his teeth.
You were too drunk to be afraid, and that would astonish you later, the boldness of it, maybe fifteen seconds separating you on the floor and your hand on his dick. He ground out something (fuck, kid) that you wouldn’t remember.
Nice feel and the lights were on, enough for you to see the blood rising and the tremble in his stomach as you began to jerk him off and knee-walked closer, ducking your head and breathing on the inside of his thigh. Too drunk to realize that you were about to be beat within an inch of your life, and maybe that’s why Hudson didn’t even try to backhand you.
It was supposed to be the Best Blowjob Ever, good enough to turn straight men gay and addict Hudson to you forever, make him leave his kind wife and spotless life and come live in sin with you in your messy San Francisco apartment. You were thinking about graham crackers and daytime television, sprawled on the couch with him on an off-day and necking during commercials, planning your fiftieth anniversary even as you took him in your mouth for the first time, because that was the kind of guy you were.
The Best Blowjob Ever was slow and careful and painstakingly meaningful, but Hudson fucked it up. He fisted his hands in your hair and jerked his hips and destroyed your cautious rhythm, and it was so hot you lost track. It became wet and clumsy and amateur (amateur! The injustice of it all, after your college career), and he fell back on the bed, didn’t even want to watch, didn’t want to see your mouth stretched or the way you were rubbing your dick through your pants with your free hand, and that was his loss, you guessed.
He pulled on your ears, split your lip, and you came first, in your pants like a fucking teenager. You might have cared, had circumstances been different, but you were wrapped up all silver and gold and you’d sucked Tim Hudson’s dick and the world was still outside the window. His hands were still on your head.
You dropped back after he’d finished, slick white taste of him, and you wanted to look in the mirror and see if your eyes really looked like they felt, saucer-sized and stunned with light. You said his name a couple of times and peeked over the bed when he didn’t answer. He was asleep, passed out all long in your perspective and his jeans open, showing everything. You had dents in your fingers from the rivets in the denim.
Even drunk, you knew that climbing up onto the bed beside him and curling near, tucking your head into the space where his ribs met his stomach, that was a bad idea. You borrowed his toothbrush and got rid of the taste because you knew how sour it would turn by morning, and stole pillows and the spare blanket from the hallway closet.
You slept on the floor, absently aware that this wasn’t much better than sleeping in his bed, but nothing was the same on the outside, and you didn’t want to open the door and have to recalibrate your existence, not yet. The guy you were secretly in love with had come down your throat. It was hard not to feel triumphant. You dreamt of peacocks, happily listening to Hudson breathe.
In the morning, you awoke to him talking to Kim.
You were stricken with terror, thinking that she was in the room somehow, woman’s intuition and a plane chasing the tail of the team’s. She’d known, impossibly, felt it clutch in her chest when you popped the button on Hudson’s jeans, when you’d gone down so far your mouth hit your fingers around the base of his dick, when he’d wrenched his hands in your hair and moaned and said her name into the dense air. She must have heard.
And why were you only remembering that now?
You raised your head fearfully, blanket still pulled high so that your feet stuck out bare and cold at the other end. Kim was going to be so disappointed in you. No more home-cooked dinners, no more marble cake ever. Blinking at Hudson from under the edge, you breathed out. He was on the phone, pacing around the way he did, his hand on the back of his head.
Hudson shot you a look from under his eyelashes and you shivered. His hips had pushed up, he had torn your hair out by the roots. You were sticky-stiff inside your boxers, and you grinned at him. He wasn’t looking at you, though, which was probably lucky, he probably didn’t want to see you grinning right then.
He said, “Yeah, babe, love you too, see you in a couple of days,” and you waved your hand, caught his eyes, stupidly mouthed, ‘tell her I say hi.’ Hudson stared at you aghast, stuttering a little bit.
You lay back on the floor, folding your hands under your head. You kept thinking about how you sucked him off and it wasn’t like you thought it’d be, not perfect like you’d planned, and yet.
Hudson came looming over you, tree-tall and you could look up his shirt, see the shadowy muscles of his stomach and chest. It was a nice view.
“So you’re gay now?” He sounded like he was talking through glass.
You shrugged awkwardly. “Well. Not just now. More like. Always.”
Hudson put his hand on his face, pressing his fingers against his eye, and you wanted to tell him not to do that, it looked like it hurt. “Great.”
Stretching, kicking off the blanket, you watched to see if his eyes would land on you, letting your T-shirt ride up. But when he looked at you, he kept his gaze above your neck and he looked pretty pissed off.
“How ‘bout you get the fuck out?”
Definitely pissed off. You sighed and sat up, scratched a hand through your hair. The sun was white through the crack in the curtain, a line as thick as a crayon and drawn in neon. Your shoes were under the bed; you weren’t sure how they gotten there. Digging them out, you said reproachfully over your shoulder:
“You know, having a gay best friend willing to blow you isn’t, like, the worst thing in the world that could happen.”
“Get out.”
“Fine.”
You stood up and tried to be melodramatically affronted, tossing your head, but you couldn’t stop thinking that you’d sucked him off and he’d liked it and you liked his wife, but you liked him a fuck of a lot more.
You smiled at him, and his hands were in fists and his mouth was moving in funny ways, like he was chewing on the insides of his cheeks. “So. You know where to find me. If. You know. Whatever.”
Hudson’s jaw clenched, and he stalked over to the door, held it open for you. His arm was trembling. You wanted to push him up against the wall and kiss him, stone-cold sober and not even hungover. Johnny Walker was totally your new favorite drink. Hudson, provider of the Johnny Walker, was your new favorite person, and you knew he would bite you until you bled. He knew how to move and scratch at your ears and bring you off without even touching you, and how was that for unique and exciting?
You left and he slammed the door behind you. You couldn’t stop grinning, feeling like a particularly good pitch, one that swanned and snapped and spun in so fast the stitches singed the air. This was the beginning, and you hadn’t had a beginning in a very long time.
The days rolled down the street, shining like the metal on your spikes. You lost your lucky red guitar pick and found it in your shoe two cities on. You got your hair cut and the back of your neck was cold all the time. You followed Tim Hudson around and he never talked to you anymore.
But you’d always been persistent. You were a piece of lint, stuck to his collar. He could glare at you all he wanted, and shove your arm off when you slung it across his shoulders, and elbow you in the ribs when you came up behind him in the bar, but you were elastic and you bounced right back. You were impossible to get rid of, and you felt invincible.
You came home to California, wonked out from not really sleeping, invisible curbs thrown up to trip you. You fell into Hudson in the airport and he hissed at you, “Christ, would you watch where you’re going,” but maybe it had been intentional. Your hand was on his stomach and it was flat and hard and you appreciated that, twisting your fingers in the rip of muscle.
He pushed you away. You were starting to get used to that. He said, “Goddamn it, Barry,” with his neck flushed.
Mumbling under your breath, you rebounded into a coffee stand and, surprised to find yourself there, paid too much for a latte. Foam on your lip, you turned back and Hudson was still standing there, watching you.
Something jammed in your chest.
You trailed him, trailed the team, liking the way he ambled and the way his shoulders were held high like a confession. The shuttle took you across the highway to the Coliseum, where your cars were parked, and Hudson sat across the aisle from you, rubbing a baseball between his hands and staring out the window.
Hudson got involved in a conversation with one of the coaches in the parking garage, the place emptying out in rubber squeals and purrs of German engineering, and you skulked around your car, wasting time, reorganizing everything in your suitcase. Hudson’s footsteps tapped nearer to you and you looked up, heart in your throat, to find the place deserted, the last hanging red taillights disappearing under the gate.
Hudson stood, hands in his pockets, scowling at you. You tried to smile, but it was difficult because you could barely contain your excitement, all carbonated on the inside.
“Offer still good?” Hudson asked calmly, and his lip pulled up, triangle of white teeth and you almost fell over.
“Oh hell yes,” you managed, and grabbed his shirt, shoved him into the back of your car and climbed in after him. Slamming the hatchback closed, you knelt and licked your lips, seeing him all sprawled and arching his back to get your duffel out from under him. Bottle-rocket eyes and coppery taste of adrenaline in your mouth, you gripped his knees and jerked him towards you, and he was staring at the roof of the car, still chewing gum.
“Make it quick, will you,” Hudson said. “Kim’s waiting.”
You grinned, big enough that you half-expected the top of your head to fall off. You opened his jeans and pushed up his shirt and surprised him by setting your open mouth down on his ribs, and he bucked a little bit, sucked in air between his teeth.
It was pretty quick, though again, not what you’d intended. You were gonna do this slow sometime, once you got over how fucking hot it was when his hands went into your hair, how it sounded when he gasped, “Hurry,” in that obscene accent of his.
You were gonna take all the time in the world, soon enough, but for now you were just proud not to have ruined another pair of boxers. You were hard and his chest was heaving, stupid crawling smile at the corners of his mouth. You pressed the heel of your hand against your dick and started counting prime numbers in your head. You got to forty-seven before he spoke.
“She doesn’t like doing that.”
Hudson fixed his jeans, arching up again to pull them back up his hips. You raised your eyebrows.
“Seriously?”
Hudson shrugged. “Some girls don’t.”
You scratched your head. “Most guys do.”
He shot you a look, like he was fighting back a grin. “Well, that’s real fucking nice for you, huh.”
You beamed, and nodded, though truth be told, you hadn’t gotten head from anyone in almost a month. Which seemed like a shame, suddenly.
“So, like, I’m gonna be your, your designated mouth or something?” you asked, thinking that that should bug you, wondering why it didn’t.
Hudson’s face was permanently stained with a blush, but that was the only way he showed his discomfort, otherwise perfectly calm, supernaturally cool. He met your eyes and a static charge zinged down your spine.
“Everybody needs to get sucked off once in a while.”
You bobbed your head foolishly. “Absolutely, dude, I totally agree.”
And there was that grin, careless fuck-it grin, and he was sliding past you, popping the hatch. He touched your face with the back of his hand and then got out of the car, saying see you tomorrow.
You drove home almost crying, you were so happy.
You were aware of all the ways in which this was a terrible idea. You’d formed a little mid-summer pact to let Hudson use you and go home to his wife every night. Being in love with him didn’t change the fact that he was kinda being a prick about the whole thing, maybe deeply and dangerously repressed, maybe just thoughtlessly straight, chewing gum when you had his dick in your mouth, thinking about his wife and saying her name instead of yours. But being in love with him removed your ability to care.
It was early September of your rookie year and you’d been here for years, maybe a decade or two. You were pitching so well. Often, in the heat of the eighth inning, you would look at the out-of-town scoreboard from the dugout and this rough game in Oakland would be the last one still being played. You loved that, being all alone out here on the farthest coast.
Hudson pulled you aside a couple times a week. Equipment room, video room, hotel room, airport bathroom, the back of your car but never the back of his, because he drove a coupe and you could barely even fit in the shotgun seat. Yoga made you flexible, but it couldn’t work magic.
Without remorse, you changed him to speed dial number one on your phone, displacing your mother for the first time in your life. Your bedroom wall was growing a continent of tickets, spreading out like photographs and road maps.
Their marriage was young, anyway, younger than your professional baseball career, still a month away from the first anniversary. You looked up statistics on the internet, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, thirty percent of those end in the first year. You weren’t trying to jinx them. You knew that it didn’t count to cry no-hitter at the television if you weren’t rooting for the pitcher in the first place.
But it was important to set numbers down in your mind and to be aware that your best friend would have to overcome lousy odds to make it through. You felt certain that you could make him gay by sheer force of will, by the talent of your mouth and your left hand.
Hudson was smaller than you, a fact that you’d known intellectually but had never really gotten, because he was enormous in your mind, sixteen feet tall, arms like railroad tracks, shoulders as wide as a bat was long. But life wasn’t a folk tale and Hudson was only five foot ten barefoot, more in spikes. You could put your hand at the small of his back and your fingers would almost span the whole length. He weighed one-seventy soaking wet.
You sometimes wanted to pick him up by the hips and pin him against the wall. You never would, though. First, he’d never allow it. Second, you probably weren’t strong enough.
You settled for sucking him off on a semi-regular basis and noticed distractedly that you’d fallen into some sort of pattern. His thumb hooking in your belt loop, you’d look back and Hudson would be watching you with his eyes hot and half-closed, his mouth shrunk so that it was almost gone, and that was your green light.
Maybe hours would pass between that look and the moment when you finally got him behind closed doors, maybe fifteen seconds and an unsteady trek across the bar, either way, you got him. Humming under your breath, you’d flip the lock, flip him and lick his neck (which was as neat as you’d always imagined it would be), and open his shirt if there were buttons, push it up if there weren’t. Either way was good.
Obviously, you couldn’t leave bruises or teethmarks, and anyway, you didn’t really want to. It’d be like fucking with a painting worth more than your life. Somewhere, back of your mind, you knew it wasn’t just reverence for Tim Hudson that kept your hands light. Somewhere you still didn’t really want to be the one to break Kim’s heart. You wanted him to do that all by himself, and you’d just be the innocent bystander.
Anyway, you’d streak a wet trail down his chest and even that took awhile, for Hudson to quit just shoving you to your knees. You eased him into it, licked his neck, bit the spot under his collarbone, scratched his stomach and then moved your tongue across the reddened lines. Your hand would already be inside his shorts, and he didn’t say no to you very much when that was the case.
The weird part would come after, when he was breathing in shreds and you were counting prime numbers. You almost always got hard and almost never did anything about it, because watching you jerk off would probably not do much for the instability of Hudson’s mind. You would wash your hands and clean out your mouth if there was a sink handy, just deal with it if there wasn’t, and you would be able to hear him calming down, the fabric rustle and metal zip as he got himself presentable again.
And you wouldn’t know what to say to him. You’d tried just talking like regular, so I’m thinking of buying a Corvette, so we should go to that burger place after the game, so what the fuck is up with Mulder’s hair this week, but it wouldn’t really work. Hudson would just sorta grunt and not meet your eyes.
So you stayed quiet, and the atmosphere between you was worse than before. The sexual tension was mostly one-sided, you could admit that, but this came from both of you, a holy fuck kinda electricity in the air, making you wince.
Back in the open, things would fall right back into place, and amazingly, you were still best friends. Stupid jokes and dreaming up pranks to pull, reading different sections of the newspaper at opposite ends of the couch with his leg bent and lying on top of your foot. You realized now that Hudson had actually always been pretty physical with you, and sometimes you wondered how one-sided the whole thing really was.
Overall, you were pretty psyched about the whole situation. It was like some uncle you’d never met had died and left you twenty million dollars. Out of nowhere, better than you ever thought your life would get.
Which maybe said something about the general suckiness of your life, but you weren’t thinking about that. You were thinking about two things, your rookie year and the next time that Hudson would look at you with his eyes half-closed.
Then your team was going to the playoffs and that was like a kick in the teeth, except good. That was another thing you hadn’t really expected. You got Hudson twice that day, once jittery with nerves in some hidden stadium room, and then again in the alley behind the bar where you went to celebrate. You thought he might have said your name, the second time.
You rose up his body and flattened your hand on the brick beside his head, and he smiled at you, blissful and loose in the slashed streetlight. Overtaken by your love for him, which thrummed so fast and hard within you that you could barely see straight, you leaned in and brushed a kiss across his mouth. He tasted like beer and beer was probably the reason he kissed you back.
Once, twice, your tongue touched his teeth and then the inside of his mouth, your hands on his face, and you had to pull away, dizzy. He steadied you with a hand on your side, and said unevenly, “Let’s go find the guys.”
You nodded, deaf and dumb, midnight pouring in through your ripped-open eyes. You could feel it black in your chest, you could feel his hand firm on your side, and you could not feel anything else.
The Division Series started in Oakland. The air was charged and moved like salt through water. You’d been in the major leagues for three months and weren’t afraid of anything, stretched your arms out wide and left your chest unprotected, bring it on.
Hudson went a little bit crazy, but you guessed you could forgive him. You were mostly staying sane just because you’d had a lot of experience over the course of the year. Dreams coming true were to be expected, at this point.
Hudson, though, Hudson got to the park three hours early and you found him in the weight room, drenched with sweat, damp fingerprints on his scouting reports. You picked him up and took him back to the clubhouse and gave him Gatorade and a sandwich, nodded along when he rambled nonsensically about Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte.
He fell asleep as if he hadn’t slept in months, and you played solitaire at a table near the couch he was on, big grin for anyone who came upon you. You took an odd measure of satisfaction in keeping watch over him when he wasn’t actually in danger. You could feel the madness in the twitches of his hands, the sheen on his eyes when he awoke.
Your team won the first game and lost the second, and Hudson dragged you into the video room when everybody was getting ready to go to the airport. Hudson slammed you against the wall and kissed you hard and you couldn’t believe it. You barely got yourself together enough to kiss him back. He wrenched his hands in your shirt and you thought sadly that it would wrinkle, but Hudson was pressing his teeth into your lip and you could afford more shirts.
You didn’t even have to get on your knees, just skidded your hand down his chest and into his shorts and brought him off like he was fifteen years old. He didn’t stop kissing you, gasped into your mouth, growled in the back of his throat, and you were in awe.
You wiped your hand off on the wall and he stayed pressed up against your side and told you, “Go ‘head, I don’t care,” sucking on your ear and you had to close your eyes before you went blind. It took you about five seconds to come, a new world record, and he kept you propped up there against the wall as you sank back down into yourself.
He stepped away, finally, when you were breathing somewhat normally again, and you couldn’t read his expression. He cleared his throat and told you, “We’ve got to get out of here. New York.”
Not at all sure what was going on, you grinned. You felt like you could run there and not even get winded.
New York City, bright blue, red and gold in the corners, all the flags at half-mast and you weren’t sure who’d died. Hudson was starting Game 3. The night before, he wanted you nearby, appeared to take some grain of solace in the ease with which you sat on the floor of his hotel room and drank the minibar dry.
You built a see-through castle with the empty bottles, single-serve cereal boxes walled around it. He read scouting reports on the bed and rolled his eyes when you got too drunk and started playing Destroyer of the World, flicking out the weight-bearing bottles at the bottom and sending the whole thing clattering to the carpet. You made explosion noises with your mouth, little tinny screams of the people trapped inside.
Gray fuzz over everything, you clung to the sound of Hudson murmuring, scratching notes in pencil. You could see lead smeared on his fingers. He was wearing a T-shirt that rode up his back when he leaned over, jeans all tucked and faded and molded on his legs.
With bravery that would seem ludicrous in the light of day, you crawled across the floor and leaned on your arms on the edge of the bed, fingers pattering on his knee. He slanted a look at you, glanced back at the report.
“Help you with something?”
You shook your head, but your hand was skating along the inside seam of his jeans, pressing hard into the muscle of his thigh. He smacked you away, and you fashioned a pout.
“Not before a start, kid, you know that.” Hudson wasn’t even looking at you, thin lines on his forehead and sugar at the corner of his mouth.
“It’s the playoffs, though,” you said, resting your chin atop your stacked wrists and making your eyes go big. “Different now.”
Hudson flapped the scouting report. Working on papercuts and your tumbled glass bottle castle sparkled in the lamplight behind you.
“What do we not fuck with?” he asked you pedantically.
You sighed. “We do not fuck with the luck,” you answered by rote, casting your eyes up to heaven.
“Good boy.”
You weren’t a boy, not hardly, not really, you were maybe twenty-two but not stupid. Only drunk enough to show him your best smile and say, “Kiss me, then.”
His turn to sigh, and draw tense across his shoulders and chest, his hands flexing on the report. He stared at the paper for a long time, then looked at you sideways and asked, “If I do, will you leave me alone?”
You grinned. “Nope.”
Hudson might have smiled; you’d never really remember. You suffered brief amnesia, wiped clean by his hand on your forehead, pushing back your hair and tilting your face up. He kissed you quick and you fit a hand on the back of his neck, striving up, kept him right there with your tongue moving carefully with his, until you burned for air, fell back on the carpet panting and shivering.
“That was good,” you noted to the ceiling when you’d caught your breath.
“Hmm,” he answered noncommittally.
“Huddy,” you said, tasting it in your mouth, tasting him right there too. “I’m in love with you.”
He jerked, you could see his legs twitch in your peripheral vision, could hear him shifting on the bed. You’d thrown yourself beneath a train, you didn’t care. Never in your life would you feel pain.
“You’re drunk,” Hudson told you, flat and without anger. You could thank god for that, at least.
“Hmm,” you echoed back at him, and he was quiet for awhile before a pillow came crashing out of the air and smashed you in the face. You sputtered, felt the blanket wing across your body. You smiled against the sandpaper carpet and fought out of your shirt, bundled up with the wicked cross-winds unable to reach your skin. Falling asleep that night was like diving into the ocean.
Hudson lost the next night’s game. Not by much, and not without going eight innings on a split-finger fastball that felt like your ribs were being broken, but there it was on the scoreboard at the end of the night. You thought about scars again, but mainly you were locked in on Game 4, your game, already counting outs, already ninety pitches in and reaching back for something extra.
You kept close to your heart the way you’d woken up that morning on Hudson’s floor, the way he’d left a bagel and a paper cup of coffee on the dresser for you.
Back at the hotel, quarantined by curfew, you wanted to be at peace, wanted to calmly and maturely go over the scouting reports like Hudson had done, though it hadn’t helped him much. You wanted to escape the postseason and the Bronx in October, fly back to July and live this all again.
You ended up at Hudson’s room door in the middle of the night, which was probably to be expected. Barefoot and bed-headed, you tumbled in when he opened the door, threw your arms around his waist and buried your face in his neck. He caught your shoulders in surprise.
“Whoa, hey.”
You nosed into his shoulder and it was still cold from being iced down. You said ‘please’ once or twice, dragging your nails up his spine. When he nodded, you felt it in the scrape of his cheek on your forehead.
On the bed, you kissed him and he let you, he still let you, it was inexplicable. His wedding ring made an acidic sting spur on the skin of your face. He had been drinking away the loss, your situations reversed. You were sober as a funeral and his mouth was fired on the inside, his eyes swollen. He mumbled incoherently and you’d never had a rule about sex before a start. You had more than enough luck, you could fuck with it a little.
He was kissing you like he actually wanted to, like it wasn’t something he was doing to shut you up or distract you. His hands were up under your shirt and you thought maybe you were growing on him, the long smooth slope of your back and your hair biting in his eyes. You could dream, anyway.
You got him started off nicely, hard in your hand and his jeans tugged off his hips. He cursed, his nails sketching letters on your skull, and you were becoming unhinged just like always, pulling off to lick the hollow of his hip and regain your composure.
Studying him from far away with your teeth on the place where his leg and stomach met, you knew it was win or go home and you wanted to win, then go home. You wanted to leave the East Coast behind and not believe in hotel rooms in New York City anymore than you believed in the New York Yankees.
You swiped a wet streak over your fingers on his dick, and Hudson shuddered. You raised your head and offered without hesitation, “You can fuck me, if you want.”
Hudson pushed up on an elbow, still breathing raggedly, staring at you like you’d opened your mouth and showed a World Series ring resting on your tongue. He licked his lips unconsciously and you were shaking, clinging to his legs. He nodded with his eyes turned silver.
“Yeah, okay, okay.”
He kept saying it over and over again, “yeah yeah okay sure yeah,” convincing himself that it was really happening. You were doing the same thing, but in your head, and yours was more electrocuted and crowded with profanity. As in, fuck okay yeah jesus fuck shit okay okay.
Hudson pulled you up by your hands until you straddling him, then paused, confused. He didn’t know what to do next. You didn’t either, because you’d never had sex with someone who’d never had sex with a guy before. You figured to start at the beginning and unbuttoned your jeans. He put his hand on your hip and swallowed so hard you could hear his throat click.
You remembered suddenly and said, “Fuck, hang on,” and sprang off the bed. You darted out of the room, hearing him half-shout, “What the fuck,” but you were speeding down the hallway with your jeans open and the force of everything slamming your mind to pieces.
You got what you needed from your room and dashed back to his room, where he was sitting up on the bed and looked so stupid and so lost that you broke into laughter. You tossed your supplies at him and he blinked at them, gnawing on the corner of his lip. Flicking off the light, throwing the deadbolt, you climbed back on top of him and felt him fold down under you. He liked it better in the dark, muttering into your mouth. You got his jeans pulled off and then yours too, and rolled off him because you didn’t want to freak him out, even now you couldn’t stop thinking of how fragile it was. The most important game of your short life was waiting for you out there in the daylight, and all you needed to get there was this.
You did everything yourself. You understood on some very basic level that you couldn’t ask him to do it for you. You’d already asked for too much.
Hudson touched your back carefully, up on his knees behind you, slow stroke down your spine that made you writhe faintly. His hands on your hips were too tight, and you knew he was finding his way by instinct, not thinking that he could hurt you because you were a guy, not thinking that he could take it slow because you weren’t his wife. You didn’t mind.
You’d take him like this, whiskey-hot breath on your ear, wide palm on the stretch of your ribs. You’d take him like this and he’d take you and it wouldn’t matter what he said in the morning to invalidate it. It was the postseason and you could only live for one game at a time.
All the same, it stunned you, somewhere way deep down, when he made it last, when he dragged his forehead from the nape of your neck to the sloped space just under your shoulderblades. Stunned you when he bit into your shoulder, said your name, said jesus christ and c’mon and you felt wires snap inside you, felt his hips snap into you. You filled your mouth with the blanket and braced yourself fully on your right arm.
By the end, you were chanting, half-panicked, “Love you, dude, love the fuck out of you,” and he didn’t even seem to hear it. You were pretty sure that was a good thing.
He slid off and rolled onto his back, oxygen paling his face, making his stomach flutter and snag when you laid your hand there. You had the hysterical urge to say, bet she doesn’t like doing that either, but that would be the end of your life and anyway, you weren’t like that.
Hudson breathed out and put his hand over yours. You knew then that the series would go five games. You knew he’d caged you and made you into something new, something you’d spend the next five years learning to recognize in the mirror.
So of course you won Game 4. You didn’t go eight innings, not even six, but only allowed one run, and your ribs weren’t broken, the curveball was really more of a soft tissue injury. Hudson was there in the dugout with his eyes glittering. Your team had a ten-run lead and the fans shouted at you as you left the field, “Come pitch here,” but that was the future and for now you had a plane to catch.
For now you had three thousand miles and a night sky when you left, night sky when you landed. It seemed vaguely wrong. You were used to flying into the sunrise, though not really, because you spent more time going west than east. You ran flight plans in your mind, leave at midnight, land at eight in the morning. Shifting hours back and forth, time-changing, and you were thinking about stupid stuff like that. You weren’t smart enough to hold it all inside your brain.
You were remembering Tim Hudson, missing him in a raw achy way even though he was right there, two rows ahead of you, an inch of him visible through the crack in the seats. There was a push under your fingertips, scratching for stitches.
On the bus from the airport, you heard him saying to Kim, “Yeah, team bonding, we’re all going out. Might crash at Chavvy’s place.” Your skin ran cold; nobody had said anything about going out tonight. Hudson paused. “You know I would, babe, but it’s for the team, okay?”
You mouthed at the smeary window, for the team, and liked the sound of it.
Hudson tipped against you in the parking lot as you were getting the last-minute instructions from the coaches, and you put your arm around his shoulders without thinking. It wasn’t too out of place. Chavez had his face buried in Mulder’s back. The elder Giambi had the younger in a headlock. Hudson fit easily against you, exhaustion evident in every muscle.
Hudson grabbed your ear and tugged your head lightly down, whispered in your ear, “I’m coming over to your place tonight.”
You nodded so hard your fillings felt loose.
Hudson tailgated you all the way over the bridge. You almost crashed fourteen times, checking the mirror for his steady driving face, the visible rattle of his hands on the wheel.
You got lost in your own neighborhood, circled the same familiar block over and over as Hudson leaned out the window and shouted uncomplimentary things at you. It wasn’t your fault. The streets all looked the same, like every day and every night and nothing was changing except that Hudson had followed you home. You were gonna do anything he wanted, even the stuff he didn’t, corrupt him like rust in metal, get stuck in his head like a pop song.
Up in your apartment, once you finally found it, Hudson toed off his shoes and left his keys on the coat hook, wordlessly unbuttoning his pants, fine thin wool to appease the road-trip dress code, and you fell to your knees right there. You sucked him off so quick, like the blur of an eighty-five pitch complete game, and then you watched television with him until he was ready to go again.
He’d been drinking Cokes all night. He wanted to keep you up for hours. Neither of you would pitch tomorrow, and he mumbled into your shoulder, “you did so good, couldn’t believe it,” and you were mildly affronted that he hadn’t expected it of you. You could shut down the Yankees any day of the week, twice on Sundays if time went backwards and you were allowed to start both games of a doubleheader.
You knew that things were going fast for Hudson now; a week ago he hadn’t wanted to kiss you, and now he was baring his throat. You didn’t want to bring it up, didn’t want to draw his attention to it. Maybe he just hadn’t noticed. Your equilibrium was shot, and you were thankful for the bed under your back and his slim tough chest available for you to rest your weight atop.
He fucked you on your back this time and you got to see his face and you could sketch him in three simple lines, slash of his mouth, squeezed-shut eyes, flatland of his jaw, teeth clenched together and his arms holding your legs. You crowed. This would be your life forever.
Afterwards, he was quickly asleep, sprawled on his stomach, and you pressed your face into the back of his neck, whispering about how you were going to win, nails drawing pennants on his back. You had to go the distance, because if you didn’t, neither of you would pitch again this baseball season, which was unthinkable.
You awoke with your arm over his back, and your phone was ringing. You were confused, a ringtone you’d never heard before, but your jeans were vibrating and one of you teammates must have fucked with your settings again. You answered it blearily and it was Tim Hudson’s wife.
She wanted to know where her husband was.
Her husband was muttering and turning his face into the pillow, fingerprints on his lower back. You swallowed hard and said you didn’t know, you thought maybe at Eric Chavez’s house?
But she’d already tried Chavvy. Hudson’s phone was turned off. He was missing in action, hidden in your bed. Kim’s voice was breaking, right along with your heart and your guilt complex rearing up inside you. You didn’t want to hear it.
You promised to keep an eye out for him, wished her well and crawled back into bed, kissed Hudson’s shoulder and scruffed your hand over his head until he rolled over and blinked at you, his mouth moving sticky.
You told him to go home.
Dressed, his T-shirt on inside out under his button-up, you kissed him at the door and didn’t warn him about what awaited on the other side of the bridge. Hudson was mostly asleep and yawning into your mouth.
It was only once he was gone that you realized you could have guiltlessly alibied him, you could have said, yeah Kim, he’s right here, we came back to have another couple of drinks. You could have pretended he was asleep on the couch instead of your bed. Tired from being hungover and not from being up half the night fucking you. You could have even given him a beer for breakfast so that he would taste right when she kissed him.
It hadn’t occurred to you, and now you were to blame. You’d just wanted to erase him, cover him up with a white sheet and poof, vanish, destroy the evidence. Rediscover his still-breathing body in your closet when you got back from the ballpark.
You spent a long day taking down your photographs and the wall of baseball tickets, folding up the maps, rolling the posters and sliding them into cardboard tubes. You vacuumed and Pine-Soled everything, your fingernails shiny and your hands creased. You got to the ballpark late, and no one noticed.
Hudson pulled you aside first thing, like you’d known he would, his face all scraped-up, bruises from lying endlessly to his wife in his eyes. The equipment room door snicked shut and you faced the far wall, your back to him. You knew what he was gonna say.
“Listen.”
You studied the yellowed news clippings tacked to the bulletin board, the dynasty a quarter-century past, the earthquake Series, gaps and holes remaining for your team to fill in. Hudson sighed behind you.
“I’m real sorry, man,” he said. You hated his voice. Hated everything about him.
You exhaled. “It’s okay.”
“No, I just. I’m not really this kinda guy. I don’t fuck around on her.”
You closed your hands on the lip of the table, trying to breathe through your eyelids. “That’s not exactly true.”
“I don’t,” he insisted. “I don’t want to.”
“Two different things.”
He was quiet for awhile. You imagined that you could hear his heartbeat, though of course that was impossible. Your head was invaded with the leather and oil, sawdust and mildew smell of the room.
“So, look. Season’s almost over-” (and how you wanted to spin at that, lash out, how fucking dare you, we’ve got nine more games to win) “-so we can just let it go. All right?”
You watched your hands on the wood, splinters ineffectually digging at your calluses, thinking absently that surely your legs would give out, surely you weren’t built to withstand this. You took a deep breath.
“You let it go,” you said to the wall, the history of your team. “I’m just gonna be. Over here. Where nothing’s changed.” You shut your eyes so tight you saw stars.
“Hey-” he tried to say, footsteps scraping near you. You flung yourself around and seeing his face was the worst thing you could have done to yourself in that moment.
“I, really. Don’t worry about it,” you told him, arms back and hands clinging to the table. You schooled your expression, you were so cool and nothing could touch you. You’d stood up in Yankee Stadium and it had blown over you like a car going past, close enough to clip your elbow.
You smiled at him, wanting him back, wanting him gone, wanting one of you to be traded and sent a thousand miles away. You prayed for the National League.
“I didn’t really expect much, man,” you said, and he looked just fucking miserable. “So don’t worry about it.”
Hudson kept his gaze on you for a long time, bleeding confusion and doubt through his eyes, fisted hands twitching. You thought cruelly that you were the one who hadn’t yet lost in October. You were the one who could take a betrayal like this.
He rubbed his hand over his face, air pushing out between his fingers. “I didn’t mean it. Just so you know,” he said, and then left, and you stood there for awhile, wondering what the fuck he meant by that.
You had an awful suspicion that you’d be wondering for awhile.
You put yourself back together in jigsaw fashion, Zen breathing exercises and blinking fast to avoid crying. Your rookie year was almost over, you could feel it departing your body like an ambulance siren growing faint. You went to the bathroom, washed your face and slicked your hair down. You changed your clothes and silently walked up the ballpark tunnel, into the dawn-colored twilight, where your team would lose one last game and you would finally be allowed to go home.
THE END
Windfall
See, back when it started you knew what you were doing and you could map out every day, trace letters in the dust on the windshield. Xeroxed pages smeared ink on your hands, your schedule for the next week folded up into eighths and tucked into your pocket, and you were always running late, always miscalculating the traffic on the bridge and paying rookie fines. Driving ninety miles an hour, two hundred feet above the water, you wove between the other cars like you were being chased by the cops.
Back when it started you were twenty-two years old.
That was okay. Youth lent everything a drumbeat. You wanted to climb up the Coliseum’s light standards and shout it out over the highway. You were twenty-two years old and this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to you. You taped a green and yellow ticket from every game to your bedroom wall.
Summer like being slingshot into the sky, and Tim Hudson was there too, calling you kid and stressing the importance of changing speeds. You learned how to throw Sandy Koufax’s curveball, fingers tight on the twist of the stitches and your thumb pushing over top, hidden from the batter’s eye. Hudson sat on the grass and whistled low as your best pitch crashlanded, and you believed a curve like this was a better invention than the wheel.
You went quickly from teammates to friends to pretty much inseparable, and then all of a sudden you were in love with him. Irreversible like waking up from your first surgery and looking down at the loop of ugly black sutures over your kneecap. Not all scars are on the outside, though, and not all scars are bad, because Hudson was funny as all hell and had forgotten more about pitching than you would ever know and his eyes were a mixed-up color between silver and blue.
He took you to these little white-trash bars that reminded him of home, drank shitty beer and plugged quarters into the juke to play Merle Haggard, and you developed a taste for Natty Light and songs that made you want to kill yourself. Initials and angels carved into the wooden tables and Hudson was talking about Little League and this one time when he’d gotten thrown out of the game for arguing balls and strikes with the umpire, who happened to be his father.
You had stories of your own, though not too many, and three weeks in, Hudson was grinning and holding up two fingers, that’s the second time you’ve told me that. By August, he held up four fingers, and by September he needed both hands, flashing you signs like a pick-off play. You blushed and stumbled to a stop, and he shook his head, nah, tell me anyway. Tell me different this time.
You changed the endings of things, this time you actually lost your virginity in the janitor’s closet your junior year of high school, this time you made it to the College World Series, this time you weren’t able to talk yourself out of being arrested. Your life sounded so much more interesting when Hudson wanted to hear something new.
You were so fucking in love with him. It was still July and it really shouldn’t have caught you off-balance the way it did. You were born like this, deviance lived in you like an unborn twin, and you’d always had a weakness for tough good-looking men with accents and good right hooks.
And it was totally fucking useless, because Hudson was your best friend and his wife was small and blonde and adorable and made you a marble cake one time when you were feeling homesick, white icing with those chewy rainbow chip things that you used to eat by the spoonful, and you couldn’t do anything about that, no more than you could stop wanting to lick her husband’s neck. Straight was just a word, a bad label, and maybe sometimes it could be overcome, but Hudson was crazy about Kim, and that was clear as a stoplight.
Bound yourself desperately to baseball, because on the field you had him all to yourself. Between the lines, under a sky like water, Hudson kept trying to teach you to throw a splitter and you kept giving up with your fingertips feeling burned and raw. You fell onto the grass, propped up on your elbows, and watched him throw for awhile. Breathing in the warm air, the whip of his shadow over your body, you tried to think of somewhere better, but couldn’t.
Between the lines, Hudson squinted against the sun and didn’t seem to mind that you were always running late and always losing things. There were a million reasons that you’d been given for why you were impossible to be with: you’re thoughtless (really just forgetful, but it evened out to the same); you’re too hard to read; you care too much about baseball; your jokes aren’t funny; you’re just really weird, Barry. But all the stuff that you were certain would doom you forever, Hudson barely seemed to notice.
You fell deeper every day. He was cutting you up from the inside out, and you couldn’t even bring yourself to care.
There was something in the way he looked at you, too, and his hand in your hair, and his leg against your own in the dugout all warm and strong, making you think giddily, maybe, but you’d been through this before and you knew wishful thinking when it sucker-punched you in the back of the head.
A night in Baltimore, then, drowned in the staggered depth of the East Coast summer, the windows cracking under the weight of the humidity, and you were drunk, he was drunk, the world was beautiful.
Hudson was laughing, sitting on the edge of bed and bent over his knees, his head in his hands. You didn’t even remember what was so funny, and you could hear the rustle of his fingers over his buzzed hair. Halfway brown-rust color that spiked into individual pieces when he sweat and softened like a meadow when he didn’t, and his pale beaten fingers rested in backslashes over the curve of his skull.
His neck was flushed from laughing so hard, his T-shirt collar twisted and his legs long as chopsticks in his jeans. You were sitting on the floor, unsure how you’d gotten down there, and the room rolled all carnival-bright and the hundred-degree weather outside had migrated into your mind. So fucking drunk, you could hardly trust yourself to stay upright, even sitting was a challenge.
And you wanted to touch him, just your fingers on the prod of his ankle bone, under the cuff of his jeans, wanted his laughter to fall onto your lips and his hammered-metal body to tighten and give under your hands. You wanted everything.
Something about being a rookie and the brilliance of your year so far, your curveball the best it had been since you were nine years old and the only kid in the league who knew how to throw a breaking pitch, when it had made you a thousand feet tall and convinced that you would never die. Rookie year.
You rose up onto your knees and put your hands on his legs, yank of muscle through his jeans. He hiccupped and lifted his head, and you were already saying, “Please, just, dude, let me, please,” your hands scrabbling at his belt.
He looked down at you with a strange frozen expression on his face. Looked at you like you were a photograph that had come alive and started talking to him. You got his belt open and slid your hand inside his briefs, no time for foreplay or second thought, just heat in your palm and he gasped a little through his teeth.
You were too drunk to be afraid, and that would astonish you later, the boldness of it, maybe fifteen seconds separating you on the floor and your hand on his dick. He ground out something (fuck, kid) that you wouldn’t remember.
Nice feel and the lights were on, enough for you to see the blood rising and the tremble in his stomach as you began to jerk him off and knee-walked closer, ducking your head and breathing on the inside of his thigh. Too drunk to realize that you were about to be beat within an inch of your life, and maybe that’s why Hudson didn’t even try to backhand you.
It was supposed to be the Best Blowjob Ever, good enough to turn straight men gay and addict Hudson to you forever, make him leave his kind wife and spotless life and come live in sin with you in your messy San Francisco apartment. You were thinking about graham crackers and daytime television, sprawled on the couch with him on an off-day and necking during commercials, planning your fiftieth anniversary even as you took him in your mouth for the first time, because that was the kind of guy you were.
The Best Blowjob Ever was slow and careful and painstakingly meaningful, but Hudson fucked it up. He fisted his hands in your hair and jerked his hips and destroyed your cautious rhythm, and it was so hot you lost track. It became wet and clumsy and amateur (amateur! The injustice of it all, after your college career), and he fell back on the bed, didn’t even want to watch, didn’t want to see your mouth stretched or the way you were rubbing your dick through your pants with your free hand, and that was his loss, you guessed.
He pulled on your ears, split your lip, and you came first, in your pants like a fucking teenager. You might have cared, had circumstances been different, but you were wrapped up all silver and gold and you’d sucked Tim Hudson’s dick and the world was still outside the window. His hands were still on your head.
You dropped back after he’d finished, slick white taste of him, and you wanted to look in the mirror and see if your eyes really looked like they felt, saucer-sized and stunned with light. You said his name a couple of times and peeked over the bed when he didn’t answer. He was asleep, passed out all long in your perspective and his jeans open, showing everything. You had dents in your fingers from the rivets in the denim.
Even drunk, you knew that climbing up onto the bed beside him and curling near, tucking your head into the space where his ribs met his stomach, that was a bad idea. You borrowed his toothbrush and got rid of the taste because you knew how sour it would turn by morning, and stole pillows and the spare blanket from the hallway closet.
You slept on the floor, absently aware that this wasn’t much better than sleeping in his bed, but nothing was the same on the outside, and you didn’t want to open the door and have to recalibrate your existence, not yet. The guy you were secretly in love with had come down your throat. It was hard not to feel triumphant. You dreamt of peacocks, happily listening to Hudson breathe.
In the morning, you awoke to him talking to Kim.
You were stricken with terror, thinking that she was in the room somehow, woman’s intuition and a plane chasing the tail of the team’s. She’d known, impossibly, felt it clutch in her chest when you popped the button on Hudson’s jeans, when you’d gone down so far your mouth hit your fingers around the base of his dick, when he’d wrenched his hands in your hair and moaned and said her name into the dense air. She must have heard.
And why were you only remembering that now?
You raised your head fearfully, blanket still pulled high so that your feet stuck out bare and cold at the other end. Kim was going to be so disappointed in you. No more home-cooked dinners, no more marble cake ever. Blinking at Hudson from under the edge, you breathed out. He was on the phone, pacing around the way he did, his hand on the back of his head.
Hudson shot you a look from under his eyelashes and you shivered. His hips had pushed up, he had torn your hair out by the roots. You were sticky-stiff inside your boxers, and you grinned at him. He wasn’t looking at you, though, which was probably lucky, he probably didn’t want to see you grinning right then.
He said, “Yeah, babe, love you too, see you in a couple of days,” and you waved your hand, caught his eyes, stupidly mouthed, ‘tell her I say hi.’ Hudson stared at you aghast, stuttering a little bit.
You lay back on the floor, folding your hands under your head. You kept thinking about how you sucked him off and it wasn’t like you thought it’d be, not perfect like you’d planned, and yet.
Hudson came looming over you, tree-tall and you could look up his shirt, see the shadowy muscles of his stomach and chest. It was a nice view.
“So you’re gay now?” He sounded like he was talking through glass.
You shrugged awkwardly. “Well. Not just now. More like. Always.”
Hudson put his hand on his face, pressing his fingers against his eye, and you wanted to tell him not to do that, it looked like it hurt. “Great.”
Stretching, kicking off the blanket, you watched to see if his eyes would land on you, letting your T-shirt ride up. But when he looked at you, he kept his gaze above your neck and he looked pretty pissed off.
“How ‘bout you get the fuck out?”
Definitely pissed off. You sighed and sat up, scratched a hand through your hair. The sun was white through the crack in the curtain, a line as thick as a crayon and drawn in neon. Your shoes were under the bed; you weren’t sure how they gotten there. Digging them out, you said reproachfully over your shoulder:
“You know, having a gay best friend willing to blow you isn’t, like, the worst thing in the world that could happen.”
“Get out.”
“Fine.”
You stood up and tried to be melodramatically affronted, tossing your head, but you couldn’t stop thinking that you’d sucked him off and he’d liked it and you liked his wife, but you liked him a fuck of a lot more.
You smiled at him, and his hands were in fists and his mouth was moving in funny ways, like he was chewing on the insides of his cheeks. “So. You know where to find me. If. You know. Whatever.”
Hudson’s jaw clenched, and he stalked over to the door, held it open for you. His arm was trembling. You wanted to push him up against the wall and kiss him, stone-cold sober and not even hungover. Johnny Walker was totally your new favorite drink. Hudson, provider of the Johnny Walker, was your new favorite person, and you knew he would bite you until you bled. He knew how to move and scratch at your ears and bring you off without even touching you, and how was that for unique and exciting?
You left and he slammed the door behind you. You couldn’t stop grinning, feeling like a particularly good pitch, one that swanned and snapped and spun in so fast the stitches singed the air. This was the beginning, and you hadn’t had a beginning in a very long time.
The days rolled down the street, shining like the metal on your spikes. You lost your lucky red guitar pick and found it in your shoe two cities on. You got your hair cut and the back of your neck was cold all the time. You followed Tim Hudson around and he never talked to you anymore.
But you’d always been persistent. You were a piece of lint, stuck to his collar. He could glare at you all he wanted, and shove your arm off when you slung it across his shoulders, and elbow you in the ribs when you came up behind him in the bar, but you were elastic and you bounced right back. You were impossible to get rid of, and you felt invincible.
You came home to California, wonked out from not really sleeping, invisible curbs thrown up to trip you. You fell into Hudson in the airport and he hissed at you, “Christ, would you watch where you’re going,” but maybe it had been intentional. Your hand was on his stomach and it was flat and hard and you appreciated that, twisting your fingers in the rip of muscle.
He pushed you away. You were starting to get used to that. He said, “Goddamn it, Barry,” with his neck flushed.
Mumbling under your breath, you rebounded into a coffee stand and, surprised to find yourself there, paid too much for a latte. Foam on your lip, you turned back and Hudson was still standing there, watching you.
Something jammed in your chest.
You trailed him, trailed the team, liking the way he ambled and the way his shoulders were held high like a confession. The shuttle took you across the highway to the Coliseum, where your cars were parked, and Hudson sat across the aisle from you, rubbing a baseball between his hands and staring out the window.
Hudson got involved in a conversation with one of the coaches in the parking garage, the place emptying out in rubber squeals and purrs of German engineering, and you skulked around your car, wasting time, reorganizing everything in your suitcase. Hudson’s footsteps tapped nearer to you and you looked up, heart in your throat, to find the place deserted, the last hanging red taillights disappearing under the gate.
Hudson stood, hands in his pockets, scowling at you. You tried to smile, but it was difficult because you could barely contain your excitement, all carbonated on the inside.
“Offer still good?” Hudson asked calmly, and his lip pulled up, triangle of white teeth and you almost fell over.
“Oh hell yes,” you managed, and grabbed his shirt, shoved him into the back of your car and climbed in after him. Slamming the hatchback closed, you knelt and licked your lips, seeing him all sprawled and arching his back to get your duffel out from under him. Bottle-rocket eyes and coppery taste of adrenaline in your mouth, you gripped his knees and jerked him towards you, and he was staring at the roof of the car, still chewing gum.
“Make it quick, will you,” Hudson said. “Kim’s waiting.”
You grinned, big enough that you half-expected the top of your head to fall off. You opened his jeans and pushed up his shirt and surprised him by setting your open mouth down on his ribs, and he bucked a little bit, sucked in air between his teeth.
It was pretty quick, though again, not what you’d intended. You were gonna do this slow sometime, once you got over how fucking hot it was when his hands went into your hair, how it sounded when he gasped, “Hurry,” in that obscene accent of his.
You were gonna take all the time in the world, soon enough, but for now you were just proud not to have ruined another pair of boxers. You were hard and his chest was heaving, stupid crawling smile at the corners of his mouth. You pressed the heel of your hand against your dick and started counting prime numbers in your head. You got to forty-seven before he spoke.
“She doesn’t like doing that.”
Hudson fixed his jeans, arching up again to pull them back up his hips. You raised your eyebrows.
“Seriously?”
Hudson shrugged. “Some girls don’t.”
You scratched your head. “Most guys do.”
He shot you a look, like he was fighting back a grin. “Well, that’s real fucking nice for you, huh.”
You beamed, and nodded, though truth be told, you hadn’t gotten head from anyone in almost a month. Which seemed like a shame, suddenly.
“So, like, I’m gonna be your, your designated mouth or something?” you asked, thinking that that should bug you, wondering why it didn’t.
Hudson’s face was permanently stained with a blush, but that was the only way he showed his discomfort, otherwise perfectly calm, supernaturally cool. He met your eyes and a static charge zinged down your spine.
“Everybody needs to get sucked off once in a while.”
You bobbed your head foolishly. “Absolutely, dude, I totally agree.”
And there was that grin, careless fuck-it grin, and he was sliding past you, popping the hatch. He touched your face with the back of his hand and then got out of the car, saying see you tomorrow.
You drove home almost crying, you were so happy.
You were aware of all the ways in which this was a terrible idea. You’d formed a little mid-summer pact to let Hudson use you and go home to his wife every night. Being in love with him didn’t change the fact that he was kinda being a prick about the whole thing, maybe deeply and dangerously repressed, maybe just thoughtlessly straight, chewing gum when you had his dick in your mouth, thinking about his wife and saying her name instead of yours. But being in love with him removed your ability to care.
It was early September of your rookie year and you’d been here for years, maybe a decade or two. You were pitching so well. Often, in the heat of the eighth inning, you would look at the out-of-town scoreboard from the dugout and this rough game in Oakland would be the last one still being played. You loved that, being all alone out here on the farthest coast.
Hudson pulled you aside a couple times a week. Equipment room, video room, hotel room, airport bathroom, the back of your car but never the back of his, because he drove a coupe and you could barely even fit in the shotgun seat. Yoga made you flexible, but it couldn’t work magic.
Without remorse, you changed him to speed dial number one on your phone, displacing your mother for the first time in your life. Your bedroom wall was growing a continent of tickets, spreading out like photographs and road maps.
Their marriage was young, anyway, younger than your professional baseball career, still a month away from the first anniversary. You looked up statistics on the internet, fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, thirty percent of those end in the first year. You weren’t trying to jinx them. You knew that it didn’t count to cry no-hitter at the television if you weren’t rooting for the pitcher in the first place.
But it was important to set numbers down in your mind and to be aware that your best friend would have to overcome lousy odds to make it through. You felt certain that you could make him gay by sheer force of will, by the talent of your mouth and your left hand.
Hudson was smaller than you, a fact that you’d known intellectually but had never really gotten, because he was enormous in your mind, sixteen feet tall, arms like railroad tracks, shoulders as wide as a bat was long. But life wasn’t a folk tale and Hudson was only five foot ten barefoot, more in spikes. You could put your hand at the small of his back and your fingers would almost span the whole length. He weighed one-seventy soaking wet.
You sometimes wanted to pick him up by the hips and pin him against the wall. You never would, though. First, he’d never allow it. Second, you probably weren’t strong enough.
You settled for sucking him off on a semi-regular basis and noticed distractedly that you’d fallen into some sort of pattern. His thumb hooking in your belt loop, you’d look back and Hudson would be watching you with his eyes hot and half-closed, his mouth shrunk so that it was almost gone, and that was your green light.
Maybe hours would pass between that look and the moment when you finally got him behind closed doors, maybe fifteen seconds and an unsteady trek across the bar, either way, you got him. Humming under your breath, you’d flip the lock, flip him and lick his neck (which was as neat as you’d always imagined it would be), and open his shirt if there were buttons, push it up if there weren’t. Either way was good.
Obviously, you couldn’t leave bruises or teethmarks, and anyway, you didn’t really want to. It’d be like fucking with a painting worth more than your life. Somewhere, back of your mind, you knew it wasn’t just reverence for Tim Hudson that kept your hands light. Somewhere you still didn’t really want to be the one to break Kim’s heart. You wanted him to do that all by himself, and you’d just be the innocent bystander.
Anyway, you’d streak a wet trail down his chest and even that took awhile, for Hudson to quit just shoving you to your knees. You eased him into it, licked his neck, bit the spot under his collarbone, scratched his stomach and then moved your tongue across the reddened lines. Your hand would already be inside his shorts, and he didn’t say no to you very much when that was the case.
The weird part would come after, when he was breathing in shreds and you were counting prime numbers. You almost always got hard and almost never did anything about it, because watching you jerk off would probably not do much for the instability of Hudson’s mind. You would wash your hands and clean out your mouth if there was a sink handy, just deal with it if there wasn’t, and you would be able to hear him calming down, the fabric rustle and metal zip as he got himself presentable again.
And you wouldn’t know what to say to him. You’d tried just talking like regular, so I’m thinking of buying a Corvette, so we should go to that burger place after the game, so what the fuck is up with Mulder’s hair this week, but it wouldn’t really work. Hudson would just sorta grunt and not meet your eyes.
So you stayed quiet, and the atmosphere between you was worse than before. The sexual tension was mostly one-sided, you could admit that, but this came from both of you, a holy fuck kinda electricity in the air, making you wince.
Back in the open, things would fall right back into place, and amazingly, you were still best friends. Stupid jokes and dreaming up pranks to pull, reading different sections of the newspaper at opposite ends of the couch with his leg bent and lying on top of your foot. You realized now that Hudson had actually always been pretty physical with you, and sometimes you wondered how one-sided the whole thing really was.
Overall, you were pretty psyched about the whole situation. It was like some uncle you’d never met had died and left you twenty million dollars. Out of nowhere, better than you ever thought your life would get.
Which maybe said something about the general suckiness of your life, but you weren’t thinking about that. You were thinking about two things, your rookie year and the next time that Hudson would look at you with his eyes half-closed.
Then your team was going to the playoffs and that was like a kick in the teeth, except good. That was another thing you hadn’t really expected. You got Hudson twice that day, once jittery with nerves in some hidden stadium room, and then again in the alley behind the bar where you went to celebrate. You thought he might have said your name, the second time.
You rose up his body and flattened your hand on the brick beside his head, and he smiled at you, blissful and loose in the slashed streetlight. Overtaken by your love for him, which thrummed so fast and hard within you that you could barely see straight, you leaned in and brushed a kiss across his mouth. He tasted like beer and beer was probably the reason he kissed you back.
Once, twice, your tongue touched his teeth and then the inside of his mouth, your hands on his face, and you had to pull away, dizzy. He steadied you with a hand on your side, and said unevenly, “Let’s go find the guys.”
You nodded, deaf and dumb, midnight pouring in through your ripped-open eyes. You could feel it black in your chest, you could feel his hand firm on your side, and you could not feel anything else.
The Division Series started in Oakland. The air was charged and moved like salt through water. You’d been in the major leagues for three months and weren’t afraid of anything, stretched your arms out wide and left your chest unprotected, bring it on.
Hudson went a little bit crazy, but you guessed you could forgive him. You were mostly staying sane just because you’d had a lot of experience over the course of the year. Dreams coming true were to be expected, at this point.
Hudson, though, Hudson got to the park three hours early and you found him in the weight room, drenched with sweat, damp fingerprints on his scouting reports. You picked him up and took him back to the clubhouse and gave him Gatorade and a sandwich, nodded along when he rambled nonsensically about Mariano Rivera and Andy Pettitte.
He fell asleep as if he hadn’t slept in months, and you played solitaire at a table near the couch he was on, big grin for anyone who came upon you. You took an odd measure of satisfaction in keeping watch over him when he wasn’t actually in danger. You could feel the madness in the twitches of his hands, the sheen on his eyes when he awoke.
Your team won the first game and lost the second, and Hudson dragged you into the video room when everybody was getting ready to go to the airport. Hudson slammed you against the wall and kissed you hard and you couldn’t believe it. You barely got yourself together enough to kiss him back. He wrenched his hands in your shirt and you thought sadly that it would wrinkle, but Hudson was pressing his teeth into your lip and you could afford more shirts.
You didn’t even have to get on your knees, just skidded your hand down his chest and into his shorts and brought him off like he was fifteen years old. He didn’t stop kissing you, gasped into your mouth, growled in the back of his throat, and you were in awe.
You wiped your hand off on the wall and he stayed pressed up against your side and told you, “Go ‘head, I don’t care,” sucking on your ear and you had to close your eyes before you went blind. It took you about five seconds to come, a new world record, and he kept you propped up there against the wall as you sank back down into yourself.
He stepped away, finally, when you were breathing somewhat normally again, and you couldn’t read his expression. He cleared his throat and told you, “We’ve got to get out of here. New York.”
Not at all sure what was going on, you grinned. You felt like you could run there and not even get winded.
New York City, bright blue, red and gold in the corners, all the flags at half-mast and you weren’t sure who’d died. Hudson was starting Game 3. The night before, he wanted you nearby, appeared to take some grain of solace in the ease with which you sat on the floor of his hotel room and drank the minibar dry.
You built a see-through castle with the empty bottles, single-serve cereal boxes walled around it. He read scouting reports on the bed and rolled his eyes when you got too drunk and started playing Destroyer of the World, flicking out the weight-bearing bottles at the bottom and sending the whole thing clattering to the carpet. You made explosion noises with your mouth, little tinny screams of the people trapped inside.
Gray fuzz over everything, you clung to the sound of Hudson murmuring, scratching notes in pencil. You could see lead smeared on his fingers. He was wearing a T-shirt that rode up his back when he leaned over, jeans all tucked and faded and molded on his legs.
With bravery that would seem ludicrous in the light of day, you crawled across the floor and leaned on your arms on the edge of the bed, fingers pattering on his knee. He slanted a look at you, glanced back at the report.
“Help you with something?”
You shook your head, but your hand was skating along the inside seam of his jeans, pressing hard into the muscle of his thigh. He smacked you away, and you fashioned a pout.
“Not before a start, kid, you know that.” Hudson wasn’t even looking at you, thin lines on his forehead and sugar at the corner of his mouth.
“It’s the playoffs, though,” you said, resting your chin atop your stacked wrists and making your eyes go big. “Different now.”
Hudson flapped the scouting report. Working on papercuts and your tumbled glass bottle castle sparkled in the lamplight behind you.
“What do we not fuck with?” he asked you pedantically.
You sighed. “We do not fuck with the luck,” you answered by rote, casting your eyes up to heaven.
“Good boy.”
You weren’t a boy, not hardly, not really, you were maybe twenty-two but not stupid. Only drunk enough to show him your best smile and say, “Kiss me, then.”
His turn to sigh, and draw tense across his shoulders and chest, his hands flexing on the report. He stared at the paper for a long time, then looked at you sideways and asked, “If I do, will you leave me alone?”
You grinned. “Nope.”
Hudson might have smiled; you’d never really remember. You suffered brief amnesia, wiped clean by his hand on your forehead, pushing back your hair and tilting your face up. He kissed you quick and you fit a hand on the back of his neck, striving up, kept him right there with your tongue moving carefully with his, until you burned for air, fell back on the carpet panting and shivering.
“That was good,” you noted to the ceiling when you’d caught your breath.
“Hmm,” he answered noncommittally.
“Huddy,” you said, tasting it in your mouth, tasting him right there too. “I’m in love with you.”
He jerked, you could see his legs twitch in your peripheral vision, could hear him shifting on the bed. You’d thrown yourself beneath a train, you didn’t care. Never in your life would you feel pain.
“You’re drunk,” Hudson told you, flat and without anger. You could thank god for that, at least.
“Hmm,” you echoed back at him, and he was quiet for awhile before a pillow came crashing out of the air and smashed you in the face. You sputtered, felt the blanket wing across your body. You smiled against the sandpaper carpet and fought out of your shirt, bundled up with the wicked cross-winds unable to reach your skin. Falling asleep that night was like diving into the ocean.
Hudson lost the next night’s game. Not by much, and not without going eight innings on a split-finger fastball that felt like your ribs were being broken, but there it was on the scoreboard at the end of the night. You thought about scars again, but mainly you were locked in on Game 4, your game, already counting outs, already ninety pitches in and reaching back for something extra.
You kept close to your heart the way you’d woken up that morning on Hudson’s floor, the way he’d left a bagel and a paper cup of coffee on the dresser for you.
Back at the hotel, quarantined by curfew, you wanted to be at peace, wanted to calmly and maturely go over the scouting reports like Hudson had done, though it hadn’t helped him much. You wanted to escape the postseason and the Bronx in October, fly back to July and live this all again.
You ended up at Hudson’s room door in the middle of the night, which was probably to be expected. Barefoot and bed-headed, you tumbled in when he opened the door, threw your arms around his waist and buried your face in his neck. He caught your shoulders in surprise.
“Whoa, hey.”
You nosed into his shoulder and it was still cold from being iced down. You said ‘please’ once or twice, dragging your nails up his spine. When he nodded, you felt it in the scrape of his cheek on your forehead.
On the bed, you kissed him and he let you, he still let you, it was inexplicable. His wedding ring made an acidic sting spur on the skin of your face. He had been drinking away the loss, your situations reversed. You were sober as a funeral and his mouth was fired on the inside, his eyes swollen. He mumbled incoherently and you’d never had a rule about sex before a start. You had more than enough luck, you could fuck with it a little.
He was kissing you like he actually wanted to, like it wasn’t something he was doing to shut you up or distract you. His hands were up under your shirt and you thought maybe you were growing on him, the long smooth slope of your back and your hair biting in his eyes. You could dream, anyway.
You got him started off nicely, hard in your hand and his jeans tugged off his hips. He cursed, his nails sketching letters on your skull, and you were becoming unhinged just like always, pulling off to lick the hollow of his hip and regain your composure.
Studying him from far away with your teeth on the place where his leg and stomach met, you knew it was win or go home and you wanted to win, then go home. You wanted to leave the East Coast behind and not believe in hotel rooms in New York City anymore than you believed in the New York Yankees.
You swiped a wet streak over your fingers on his dick, and Hudson shuddered. You raised your head and offered without hesitation, “You can fuck me, if you want.”
Hudson pushed up on an elbow, still breathing raggedly, staring at you like you’d opened your mouth and showed a World Series ring resting on your tongue. He licked his lips unconsciously and you were shaking, clinging to his legs. He nodded with his eyes turned silver.
“Yeah, okay, okay.”
He kept saying it over and over again, “yeah yeah okay sure yeah,” convincing himself that it was really happening. You were doing the same thing, but in your head, and yours was more electrocuted and crowded with profanity. As in, fuck okay yeah jesus fuck shit okay okay.
Hudson pulled you up by your hands until you straddling him, then paused, confused. He didn’t know what to do next. You didn’t either, because you’d never had sex with someone who’d never had sex with a guy before. You figured to start at the beginning and unbuttoned your jeans. He put his hand on your hip and swallowed so hard you could hear his throat click.
You remembered suddenly and said, “Fuck, hang on,” and sprang off the bed. You darted out of the room, hearing him half-shout, “What the fuck,” but you were speeding down the hallway with your jeans open and the force of everything slamming your mind to pieces.
You got what you needed from your room and dashed back to his room, where he was sitting up on the bed and looked so stupid and so lost that you broke into laughter. You tossed your supplies at him and he blinked at them, gnawing on the corner of his lip. Flicking off the light, throwing the deadbolt, you climbed back on top of him and felt him fold down under you. He liked it better in the dark, muttering into your mouth. You got his jeans pulled off and then yours too, and rolled off him because you didn’t want to freak him out, even now you couldn’t stop thinking of how fragile it was. The most important game of your short life was waiting for you out there in the daylight, and all you needed to get there was this.
You did everything yourself. You understood on some very basic level that you couldn’t ask him to do it for you. You’d already asked for too much.
Hudson touched your back carefully, up on his knees behind you, slow stroke down your spine that made you writhe faintly. His hands on your hips were too tight, and you knew he was finding his way by instinct, not thinking that he could hurt you because you were a guy, not thinking that he could take it slow because you weren’t his wife. You didn’t mind.
You’d take him like this, whiskey-hot breath on your ear, wide palm on the stretch of your ribs. You’d take him like this and he’d take you and it wouldn’t matter what he said in the morning to invalidate it. It was the postseason and you could only live for one game at a time.
All the same, it stunned you, somewhere way deep down, when he made it last, when he dragged his forehead from the nape of your neck to the sloped space just under your shoulderblades. Stunned you when he bit into your shoulder, said your name, said jesus christ and c’mon and you felt wires snap inside you, felt his hips snap into you. You filled your mouth with the blanket and braced yourself fully on your right arm.
By the end, you were chanting, half-panicked, “Love you, dude, love the fuck out of you,” and he didn’t even seem to hear it. You were pretty sure that was a good thing.
He slid off and rolled onto his back, oxygen paling his face, making his stomach flutter and snag when you laid your hand there. You had the hysterical urge to say, bet she doesn’t like doing that either, but that would be the end of your life and anyway, you weren’t like that.
Hudson breathed out and put his hand over yours. You knew then that the series would go five games. You knew he’d caged you and made you into something new, something you’d spend the next five years learning to recognize in the mirror.
So of course you won Game 4. You didn’t go eight innings, not even six, but only allowed one run, and your ribs weren’t broken, the curveball was really more of a soft tissue injury. Hudson was there in the dugout with his eyes glittering. Your team had a ten-run lead and the fans shouted at you as you left the field, “Come pitch here,” but that was the future and for now you had a plane to catch.
For now you had three thousand miles and a night sky when you left, night sky when you landed. It seemed vaguely wrong. You were used to flying into the sunrise, though not really, because you spent more time going west than east. You ran flight plans in your mind, leave at midnight, land at eight in the morning. Shifting hours back and forth, time-changing, and you were thinking about stupid stuff like that. You weren’t smart enough to hold it all inside your brain.
You were remembering Tim Hudson, missing him in a raw achy way even though he was right there, two rows ahead of you, an inch of him visible through the crack in the seats. There was a push under your fingertips, scratching for stitches.
On the bus from the airport, you heard him saying to Kim, “Yeah, team bonding, we’re all going out. Might crash at Chavvy’s place.” Your skin ran cold; nobody had said anything about going out tonight. Hudson paused. “You know I would, babe, but it’s for the team, okay?”
You mouthed at the smeary window, for the team, and liked the sound of it.
Hudson tipped against you in the parking lot as you were getting the last-minute instructions from the coaches, and you put your arm around his shoulders without thinking. It wasn’t too out of place. Chavez had his face buried in Mulder’s back. The elder Giambi had the younger in a headlock. Hudson fit easily against you, exhaustion evident in every muscle.
Hudson grabbed your ear and tugged your head lightly down, whispered in your ear, “I’m coming over to your place tonight.”
You nodded so hard your fillings felt loose.
Hudson tailgated you all the way over the bridge. You almost crashed fourteen times, checking the mirror for his steady driving face, the visible rattle of his hands on the wheel.
You got lost in your own neighborhood, circled the same familiar block over and over as Hudson leaned out the window and shouted uncomplimentary things at you. It wasn’t your fault. The streets all looked the same, like every day and every night and nothing was changing except that Hudson had followed you home. You were gonna do anything he wanted, even the stuff he didn’t, corrupt him like rust in metal, get stuck in his head like a pop song.
Up in your apartment, once you finally found it, Hudson toed off his shoes and left his keys on the coat hook, wordlessly unbuttoning his pants, fine thin wool to appease the road-trip dress code, and you fell to your knees right there. You sucked him off so quick, like the blur of an eighty-five pitch complete game, and then you watched television with him until he was ready to go again.
He’d been drinking Cokes all night. He wanted to keep you up for hours. Neither of you would pitch tomorrow, and he mumbled into your shoulder, “you did so good, couldn’t believe it,” and you were mildly affronted that he hadn’t expected it of you. You could shut down the Yankees any day of the week, twice on Sundays if time went backwards and you were allowed to start both games of a doubleheader.
You knew that things were going fast for Hudson now; a week ago he hadn’t wanted to kiss you, and now he was baring his throat. You didn’t want to bring it up, didn’t want to draw his attention to it. Maybe he just hadn’t noticed. Your equilibrium was shot, and you were thankful for the bed under your back and his slim tough chest available for you to rest your weight atop.
He fucked you on your back this time and you got to see his face and you could sketch him in three simple lines, slash of his mouth, squeezed-shut eyes, flatland of his jaw, teeth clenched together and his arms holding your legs. You crowed. This would be your life forever.
Afterwards, he was quickly asleep, sprawled on his stomach, and you pressed your face into the back of his neck, whispering about how you were going to win, nails drawing pennants on his back. You had to go the distance, because if you didn’t, neither of you would pitch again this baseball season, which was unthinkable.
You awoke with your arm over his back, and your phone was ringing. You were confused, a ringtone you’d never heard before, but your jeans were vibrating and one of you teammates must have fucked with your settings again. You answered it blearily and it was Tim Hudson’s wife.
She wanted to know where her husband was.
Her husband was muttering and turning his face into the pillow, fingerprints on his lower back. You swallowed hard and said you didn’t know, you thought maybe at Eric Chavez’s house?
But she’d already tried Chavvy. Hudson’s phone was turned off. He was missing in action, hidden in your bed. Kim’s voice was breaking, right along with your heart and your guilt complex rearing up inside you. You didn’t want to hear it.
You promised to keep an eye out for him, wished her well and crawled back into bed, kissed Hudson’s shoulder and scruffed your hand over his head until he rolled over and blinked at you, his mouth moving sticky.
You told him to go home.
Dressed, his T-shirt on inside out under his button-up, you kissed him at the door and didn’t warn him about what awaited on the other side of the bridge. Hudson was mostly asleep and yawning into your mouth.
It was only once he was gone that you realized you could have guiltlessly alibied him, you could have said, yeah Kim, he’s right here, we came back to have another couple of drinks. You could have pretended he was asleep on the couch instead of your bed. Tired from being hungover and not from being up half the night fucking you. You could have even given him a beer for breakfast so that he would taste right when she kissed him.
It hadn’t occurred to you, and now you were to blame. You’d just wanted to erase him, cover him up with a white sheet and poof, vanish, destroy the evidence. Rediscover his still-breathing body in your closet when you got back from the ballpark.
You spent a long day taking down your photographs and the wall of baseball tickets, folding up the maps, rolling the posters and sliding them into cardboard tubes. You vacuumed and Pine-Soled everything, your fingernails shiny and your hands creased. You got to the ballpark late, and no one noticed.
Hudson pulled you aside first thing, like you’d known he would, his face all scraped-up, bruises from lying endlessly to his wife in his eyes. The equipment room door snicked shut and you faced the far wall, your back to him. You knew what he was gonna say.
“Listen.”
You studied the yellowed news clippings tacked to the bulletin board, the dynasty a quarter-century past, the earthquake Series, gaps and holes remaining for your team to fill in. Hudson sighed behind you.
“I’m real sorry, man,” he said. You hated his voice. Hated everything about him.
You exhaled. “It’s okay.”
“No, I just. I’m not really this kinda guy. I don’t fuck around on her.”
You closed your hands on the lip of the table, trying to breathe through your eyelids. “That’s not exactly true.”
“I don’t,” he insisted. “I don’t want to.”
“Two different things.”
He was quiet for awhile. You imagined that you could hear his heartbeat, though of course that was impossible. Your head was invaded with the leather and oil, sawdust and mildew smell of the room.
“So, look. Season’s almost over-” (and how you wanted to spin at that, lash out, how fucking dare you, we’ve got nine more games to win) “-so we can just let it go. All right?”
You watched your hands on the wood, splinters ineffectually digging at your calluses, thinking absently that surely your legs would give out, surely you weren’t built to withstand this. You took a deep breath.
“You let it go,” you said to the wall, the history of your team. “I’m just gonna be. Over here. Where nothing’s changed.” You shut your eyes so tight you saw stars.
“Hey-” he tried to say, footsteps scraping near you. You flung yourself around and seeing his face was the worst thing you could have done to yourself in that moment.
“I, really. Don’t worry about it,” you told him, arms back and hands clinging to the table. You schooled your expression, you were so cool and nothing could touch you. You’d stood up in Yankee Stadium and it had blown over you like a car going past, close enough to clip your elbow.
You smiled at him, wanting him back, wanting him gone, wanting one of you to be traded and sent a thousand miles away. You prayed for the National League.
“I didn’t really expect much, man,” you said, and he looked just fucking miserable. “So don’t worry about it.”
Hudson kept his gaze on you for a long time, bleeding confusion and doubt through his eyes, fisted hands twitching. You thought cruelly that you were the one who hadn’t yet lost in October. You were the one who could take a betrayal like this.
He rubbed his hand over his face, air pushing out between his fingers. “I didn’t mean it. Just so you know,” he said, and then left, and you stood there for awhile, wondering what the fuck he meant by that.
You had an awful suspicion that you’d be wondering for awhile.
You put yourself back together in jigsaw fashion, Zen breathing exercises and blinking fast to avoid crying. Your rookie year was almost over, you could feel it departing your body like an ambulance siren growing faint. You went to the bathroom, washed your face and slicked your hair down. You changed your clothes and silently walked up the ballpark tunnel, into the dawn-colored twilight, where your team would lose one last game and you would finally be allowed to go home.
THE END