the gypsy was right
Couple weeks ago I made some mildly clever aside along the lines that a Crosby/Harden fic set in 2011 would be angstier than the angstiest Wincest fic, and some bad-influencing anon had to go and enable me! Hmph.
Bobby Crosby/Rich Harden, 6202 words, PG-13. Awkward and sad like an awkward sad thing, because what else was it ever gonna be?
Backwards in a Mirror
By Candle Beck
Rich Harden came home a week after he finally got off the DL, and there was Bobby Crosby asleep on the front lawn with a backpack under his head and a baseball cap slanting across his face. Harden thought, what the fuck, and said it too, "Bobby what the fuck," watching how Bobby snagged awake the same way he had back then, still pushed at his eyes with the heels of his hands and shook his head sharply and grinned that kinda lopsided tugging grin that Harden remembered very well. When Crosby sat up the motion sensor lights flicked on and Harden could see the new lines around Bobby's mouth, which suited him in a weird way, made him look more substantial.
Crosby started talking a million miles an hour, leaping to his feet and clapping his hand on Harden's shoulder, leaving his backpack a sad dark lump in the grass. "Just in the neighborhood," he said, which was unvarnished bullshit--Harden didn't know where Crosby was living these days, but he was pretty goddamn sure it wasn't anywhere near Oakland--"just thought I'd look you up, buddy."
Okay, whatever. Harden was maybe kinda drunk, too many beers in the clubhouse after the game, couldn't really feel his face or his right arm. He wasn't going to worry about the various things Crosby wasn't telling him, not yet.
Anyway, it had been years.
Alcohol smoothed over the awkward parts, the patches of silence. The stuff they didn't talk about was huge and encompassing. Crosby had had a wife the last time Harden had seen him, but there was no ring on his finger now. Also he'd been a major league baseball player; he'd had a team. Harden wasn't stupid enough to wonder which loss had taken the greater toll on Bobby.
Neat little house that Harden had rented sight unseen after he'd signed a contract with Billy Beane for the second time, and he hadn't yet slept a month's worth of nights there, still not used to the tree branches clawing at the windows, owls hooting spectrally, ghosts in the forest. Crosby slipped down the couch a few inches at a time, ended up passed out there eventually with one foot still on the floor. Harden rescued a half-finished beer from the loose clasp of Bobby's fingers, stood looking down at him for a few seconds, cataloguing the differences. Then he went to bed.
The next day, Harden was out the door at seven in the morning, left Crosby a half-finished box of Lucky Charms and his new cell phone number scrawled in blue Sharpie across a Cactus League schedule. He was in the weight room at the Coliseum a couple hours later when Crosby called.
He wanted Harden to leave him a ticket for the game, and Harden said, "Yeah sure." It was the very least he could do.
Bobby asked, "What're you doing there so early, anyway?" through a soggy full mouth.
"Working, Bobby," Harden said, kinda short because it should have been obvious.
"You didn't used to. I mean, not this early, since when do you get up this early?"
"Since whenever. Routine's gonna change a little bit, it's been like five years since you--since we," and he kinda hitched to a stop, breath short, not knowing where he wanted to go with that. Harden curled his hand around the padded weight bench, pressing his fingers to feel the give. His mouth was thick and sticky and sour, sweat slick on his forehead and the back of his neck. His heart was still racing, and he wished it would ease up.
"Yeah," Crosby said, sounding disgruntled. "Get me a seat behind home plate, all right?"
Day game, and Harden spotted Crosby from the dugout an hour before first pitch, planted among the scouts with sunglasses and cap camouflaging him, his mouth steadily mulling over sunflower seeds. He watched batting practice with an inscrutable expression on his face, and bought a scorecard before the game started.
Harden wasn't pitching, and it was one of those deathly slow games where it seemed like the dirt had been mixed with molasses and everybody had concrete in their spikes. The Orioles had come to town, not long after the All-Star break but the whole thing was an exercise in futility already; the two teams were a combined fifty games out of first place. Round about the sixth inning Harden almost fell asleep on the bench, nodding with his chin on his chest, jerked awake all disoriented and itchy-eyed and thinking that Bobby was there in the dugout with him, confusedly searching among the green and white mash of his teammates before he remembered.
Bobby was drinking a beer in his seat behind the plate, keeping score on his knee, canting to the side to peek at the radar gun hefted by the scout sitting next to him. Nobody had recognized him, even though every now and then Harden still saw fans wearing shirts with Crosby's name. It didn't seem to bother Crosby, watching the team he used to play for, the same field, all that green and gold. Harden thought about finding Crosby on the lawn last night, still kinda muzzy-headed and distantly convinced that it was going to prove relevant.
The A's lost. The clubhouse was quiet afterwards, everybody actively keeping their faces blank as they talked to the media, no music in the background except the over-excited chatter of SportsCenter and the commercials that were always louder than the show.
Circumstances being as they were, Harden could probably be forgiven for weighing the current team vibe against the one that had existed during his first tour with Oakland and finding it deplorably wanting. They didn't make fun of each other like they were supposed to. Nobody ever played on the arcade game, obligatory poker tournaments sometimes but never Scattegories. It was because the team had started bad and stayed that way, and everyone had taken it upon themselves to act like it didn't hurt. So they were professional, strait-laced, unemotional. It really did feel much more like a job, this time around.
He considered mentioning that to Bobby, telling him over beers on the back patio, "You're really not missing much," but there was probably about a sixty percent chance that Bobby would just punch him in the face. Harden figured he would do what he could to avoid that.
Harden picked Crosby up from in front of the BART station afterwards, and they went over to Berkeley for pizza at Zachary's, and then the bars on Shattuck. It was all yuppies with their collars popped ironically and college kids who looked vaguely homeless, and Crosby made scathing comments about the scene from the corner they'd staked out. Harden remembered this very clearly, Crosby hiding his mouth with his beer and leaning into him to mutter, "That dude is actually trying to hit on a girl while drinking a fucking grasshopper, what a world."
At some point, Crosby asked, "You still talk to any of those guys, or what?"
Harden swallowed awkwardly, like the bourbon featured soft barbs, and put the glass down. "Which guys?"
"Any of them." Crosby flipped his hand languidly through the air to indicate the sprawling roster of former teammates. "Mulder or Chavvy or whoever. Zito's still local, you see him ever?"
"Zito's got his own problems," Harden deflected, because it wasn't his place to tell Crosby about the drunken voice mail he'd received from Zito after re-signing with the A's, Zito all jumbled up and dropping key words and saying stuff like it doesn't come back, you know, and what'd you have to do to make Billy take you on again, what'd he ask for this time--not making a whole lot of sense, if Harden was ever put on the stand about it, although he'd gotten used to reading between Zito's lines half a dozen years ago.
"Yeah, I'm sure that ring on his finger is really weighing him down," Crosby said with a pretty sneer.
"He didn't have anything to do with that ring," Harden said, not thinking it through first and biting his tongue immediately.
"Still a little bitter, are we?" Crosby's grin egging him on was razor-edged and dangerous and Harden didn't know why they were talking about this, he didn't want to. The World Series was one hundred percent off-limits.
"I'm fine," he said, and took another drink. "I don't talk to him ever."
True enough--Harden hadn't called Zito back after that message, sent him a text a day or two later making fun of him for being an alcoholic because that was how you were supposed to play it, cool like that, careless. Zito did have his own problems, more even than the well-worn sports talk radio complaint that he was worth about a tenth of what the Giants were paying him. He'd landed on the DL for the first time ever this year, and Harden couldn't even begin to recapture the feeling, that first-time betrayal of your body giving out, the crippling awareness that you could set your hands where they were supposed to be and get your release point just perfect and come down on your front foot like there was a shiny dime on the dirt of the mound, do everything exactly right and it wouldn't work, and it would hurt.
Harden had long ago gotten over that particular novelty. The book on him, the one every team in the game signed on to, was that he was good for two or three months of quality pitching in between injuries. These latter days, Harden was the kind of guy who got picked up on a whim, as an afterthought, what the hell at least we don't have to pay him shit. He was pretty sure that was how it had gone for Beane, anyway.
Bobby licked his lips and the rim of the glass, and Harden's eyes dropped to watch with unconscious intent. The bar light was reddish and smoothed the lines out of Crosby's face, made him look twenty-three years old again.
"Weird how shit turns out, huh," Crosby said.
Harden eyed him, suspicious. "What do you mean?"
Letting his hand make another loose-wristed shape, heavy lids pinned down to his eyes, Crosby said, "Outta everybody on that team--those teams, and how we ended up all over the place and nobody was--nobody finished like they were supposed to. How they used to talk about us."
Crosby was making progressively less sense as the night wore on, or maybe that was Harden willfully misinterpreting him in self-defense. Nothing was ever easy anymore, not even just going to the goddamn bar. Harden hid his frustration and achey discontent behind his glass, the half-curl of his hand. He didn't ask Crosby to clarify because Harden didn't actually want to be talking about the old days.
"You want another one, man?" Harden asked instead.
"I always want another one, Richie," Crosby said with a stretched-wide smile that caused something to totter and collapse in Harden's chest, but he stowed that away, fixed a regular grin and went to get their drinks.
Later but still before midnight, Harden finished his Maker's and stood up from their table, steadying himself with a hand on his shoulder.
"I'm out, man," Harden said. "You stayin'?"
"What the hell, it's so early." Crosby mugged disapproval. "You've turned into a fifty year old, what's up with that?"
"Some of us still have jobs," Harden said, and jesus, he shouldn't have said that. A quick spasm of hurt on Crosby's face, his eyes ducking away and his lips curling in a heartless smirk. Harden fisted his hands. "I mean."
"No, it's cool." Crosby leaned back extravagantly, stretching one arm out and taking a drink, smooth as silk in the scuddy colored bar lights. "Go get your beauty sleep, god knows you need it."
Harden rolled his eyes and felt kinda sick, and left.
Later, he was woken up by Crosby cracking open his bedroom door, hard fall of yellow light cutting through the last of Harden's dream as he jerked and fisted a hand in the pillow and said, "What?"
Crosby shuffled across to the bed, fumbling dark shape and Harden's mind full of space aliens and murderous intruders, skin stiff across his bones. Crosby pushed up the blankets and one rough hand curled around Harden's ankle, a sea monster tentacle, displacement and poorly considered fear like electric shocks in the water, and Harden kicked him away instinctively.
"No, c'mon," Bobby said, kinda laughing and much drunker than he'd been when Harden had left him at the bar. "We can still, you're still gonna."
"What're you doing?" Harden asked in a stupor, even though it was obvious, incredibly so with Crosby palming at his feet and looming in a listing kneel over Harden in the bed, the wedge of light bleeding around Bobby's edges, skimming his hair. Bobby's hand felt good and scratchy as it slid up Harden's calf, pushing the hair against the grain and triggering certain inevitable reactions in Harden, but Bobby wasn't supposed to be doing that, Harden was absolutely sure of it.
"It's okay," all slurring and imprecise, blurry grin stretching Crosby's mouth. "C'mon, let me see you."
That--Harden didn't like him saying that. It had never been like that before. He bent his legs up and away, sitting up with one hand braced against the bed.
"Jesus, Bobby," Harden said, lacing it with a lot of scorn because he needed to get Crosby the fuck out of his bed, scare him off if that's what it took. "I gotta pitch tomorrow, what the fuck?"
"It's good luck," Crosby said, all stubborn inebriated charm as he swayed on his knees on the inconstant surface of the bed. "You'll pitch even better, watch an' see."
"Fuck. Don't," because Crosby was reaching for his legs again, like he couldn't stop for even ten seconds, and Harden heard the rasp in his own voice, staring at the dim smudge of Crosby's mouth in the obtuse golden angle of the hallway light.
"Why not?"
"You're drunk, and, and I gotta pitch-"
"It helps, you'll be fuckin' lights out," Crosby insisted with black-blazing eyes, and a frayed string snapped in the back of Harden's mind.
"What the fuck would you know about it? If you got some miracle routine then how come you don't have a team?"
Crosby--well. Harden couldn't really see because the light was where it was, but something about how his shoulders kinda shivered and went still, something about it made Harden think that the blood had dropped out of Crosby's face, like he'd gone abruptly and cruelly as white as bone.
Immediately, Harden really fucking regretted having said that.
"Just get out of here, man," Harden pled, for both their sakes, clinging to fistfuls of the bedclothes, his throat on fire. "Please, we, we can talk about it later, just go, okay?"
Shock released Crosby a second later, and he got off the bed in jerky stages, his body not really working right, which was of course an old theme. Harden wanted to say sorry and I didn't mean it, but he didn't. He didn't know why he didn't, the desire sat bright and hot in his chest and the words were right there in his mouth, but he just watched Crosby leave without saying a thing.
Bobby left the door open a crack behind him, and the light in the hallway on. Harden didn't get much sleep, staring up at the faded wash of gray and yellow on the ceiling and listening to the tree branches trying to get in the windows. Around four in the morning there was a minor earthquake that knocked his hitters book off the dresser, the binder flopping open with looseleaf like wings, the pages all bent.
It honestly surprised Harden that Crosby even still thought of him like that. It was never even that big of a deal.
Just a few incidents, over the course of the several years that they had known each other--"close encounters" was how Harden thought about it, though only ever inside his own head because he knew it would sound really geeky to anybody else. That was the phrase that had stuck in his head the first time, way back in the minors when Crosby had leaned in too close at a Texas bar and sniffed at Harden with his nose brushing Harden's jaw, unexpectedly intimate in the midst of their swaggering boyish playacting, close encounter, and Harden just sitting there dumbly on the busted red leatherette stool, breath caught up in his chest, not pushing him away, never even thinking that he should.
Just a few cheap men's room blowjobs that had felt like the height of daring, like the best part of being all grown up even though Rich Harden had in fact been very very young when it started. It had seemed to fit in with the fundamental romance of the whole endeavor, playing baseball for money out here on these alien badland fields, sleeping on rattly buses, backcountry highways. It made Harden feel like a different person entirely, like he was only truly conscious on the field and everything else was dreamlike and obscured, unrecorded by history unlike every pitch he threw. So occasionally he fucked around with his shortstop. There were no cameras on him in bar bathrooms, no scouts or coaches. Just Bobby on his knees, pushing Harden's leg over his solid shoulder, sucking a bruise at the edge of Harden's hip, running his hand up under Harden's shirt, kinda messy and uncoordinated about it but always good--Harden remembered it being uniformly very good, although being drunk as hell and ramped up on about six different kinds of endorphins probably helped out with that.
It had only happened once after they'd both come up with the A's, when a game had been rained out in New York City and they ended up spending the day drinking everything in the minibar, lying around on the floor of a hotel room that cost more per night than Harden's dad made in a week. When Crosby rolled Harden onto his back and tugged his shirt up, it had felt like a flashback, a misplaced scene, about a million miles away from the honky-tonk where Harden had last stuck his hand down Crosby's pants. Kind of confusing but Harden went along with it because why the hell not?
Much of Harden's relationship with Crosby seemed to boil down to 'why the hell not.' The next morning, Harden woke up alone on the hotel room floor, badly hungover and distantly pissed off for reasons that he didn't really want to analyze. Crosby had been shifty and awkward for a little while after that, like he thought he'd done something wrong, and Harden was really irritated with him, but then he'd gotten hurt and the whole soap opera stopped mattering very much, in the scheme of things.
And now, what? Now Crosby had washed out of baseball and left (been left by?) his wife, and he'd showed up at Harden's house without explanation, got drunk and crawled into his bed like that was maybe the whole point.
Fuck.
Harden was up real early the next morning, not having slept much. Crosby was shirtless on the couch, face scrunched up even in sleep, one arm trailing on the floor. Harden bit his lip and glared at him for a few seconds, and then went to the ballpark where it was mostly deserted and dark and felt like an unmanned space station, blind television sets watching him from the corners. He set himself up on a stationary bike and watched video of the Minnesota lineup on his iPad until his eyes started to burn.
It took a lot more effort, these days. Not just the physical stuff, which would have been bad enough, but also the new guys coming up all the time, new names and weaknesses to learn, holes on the inside corner, a susceptibility to sliders off the plate. The league was a river that you could never pitch to the same way twice, and Harden had all he could handle just trying to keep up.
Eventually one of the trainers came in and told him to take a fuckin' break before you have an aneurysm, man, christ. Harden didn't realize how short of breath he was until he got off the bike. He changed his shirt and went to lie down in an unused coach's office, and fell asleep for five hours. When he woke up it felt like whole years had passed.
He called Crosby from the clubhouse with his back to the wall and his teammates beginning to trickle in, tucked into their headphones and touching knuckles in greeting. Crosby's phone went right to voicemail.
"Hey man. I, uh, I didn't know if you wanted to come to the game tonight but I'll leave you a ticket, okay? I'll leave you the same ticket, so. If you wanna come you can. Or, I, I guess I'll see you back at the house?"
Harden swallowed, irritated with the veneer of hesitation coating his voice. He used to be better at this stuff.
"Listen, I'm sorry I said that stuff last night," Harden said fast, thinking that it would be easier like this, without having to see Crosby's face. "Don't. Don't take it badly, all right? 'cause I was just talking shit." He paused, watching the loose confederacy of the team draw together again. "I hope you come to the game. I'll--see you later, Bobby."
But Crosby didn't come to the game. Only strangers behind the screen tonight.
Harden pitched tolerably well, good control with the two-seam even if his change-up's season-long mutiny against him was progressing apace. In the bottom of the fifth, Kurt Suzuki got into it with the plate umpire after getting rung up looking at a nasty curveball, and after that the strike zone disappeared for Harden, which was some bullshit. He got pulled after allowing a run in the sixth and one in the seventh, left them loaded.
When he was getting his arm iced and wrapped, Zuk came down clattering down to the trainer's room still wearing his leg guards with his face sweat-flushed and dirt ground into his hands, spitting invectives about that cocksucker behind the plate and how Richie had had Kubel struck out twice before he got that bullshit fucking walk, how it shouldn't have fucking gone down like that, and Harden identified the apology buried in all the profanity, held out his left hand for his catcher to grip feverishly, penitently, before Zuk stomped back up to the dugout to try and make up for it.
They lost the game anyway. Harden went home itchy and unsatisfied, like the drive-in movie projector had burned out during the climactic Mexican standoff and he'd never know how the scene ended.
His house was empty. Bobby's backpack was gone, the blanket folded neatly over the arm of the couch. Harden dropped heavily, dragged his hands over his hair and face a few times, feeling useless and abandoned and other darkish stuff like that. His right arm felt swelled and distant from him, jelly-shouldered, barely attached.
He slept on the couch that night, dreaming strangely nostalgic dreams. When he woke up in the morning, Bobby Crosby was eating a McDonald's breakfast at his kitchen table.
Harden leaned in the doorway and blinked at him.
"You're back."
Crosby shrugged with one shoulder, mouth full of Egg McMuffin. He sucked a bit of melted cheese off his thumb. "So it would seem."
"What. Where'd you go?"
"A place."
Harden narrowed his eyes with some effort. "Yeah, thanks."
"I got you hashbrowns." Crosby poked the white bag towards him. He wasn't really looking at Harden, sorta tracing his outline, flicking glances like playing cards, slick and sharp.
"How'd you get in here, anyway?" Harden asked, and Crosby smirked.
"You left your keys in the door, chief. You're lucky you didn't get killed in your sleep."
Harden scoffed that away, rolling his eyes. Unable to resist the siren call of hashbrowns, he went to dig into the McDonald's bag, taking the seat across from Crosby. They ate in a companionably strained silence for a few minutes.
Then Crosby asked, "How'd it go last night?"
"You didn't watch?"
"What, did you pitch a no-hitter or something?"
"No. Jesus." Harden tapped his knuckles on the underside of the table, a reflex pretty much every time anybody even said the word, prevention being worth a pound of cure and all. You could never be too lucky. "I was okay. Nobody ever gets any goddamn hits on this team."
"Yeah, I think I remember what that's like," Crosby said, his mouth quirking.
"We were talking," and Harden waved his hand indistinctly towards the stadium, "me and a couple of the other guys in the rotation, trying to figure out if it's worse losing because of a shitty bullpen or losing because the boys never put any runs across for you."
"Bullpen," Crosby answered, and then, "Hope you weren't having that conversation within earshot of, like, anybody else on the team."
"Nah, we were shagging flies," Harden said, smirking. "We're not total assholes, you know."
"Starting pitchers do seem to have a corner on the market, gotta say."
Crosby smirked right back, and a wave of déjà vu so visceral it felt like an acid flashback washed over Harden. For a second he was mixed up and woozy, gauzy impressions of Texas and Sacramento saturating his mind, places that they'd been together, the many other kitchens in the East Bay where they had eaten out of paper bags and licked their fingers clean, kept each other company like they were doing now, and Harden was confused, expecting to see a younger man when he blinked his eyes clear.
Crosby sucked salt out from under his thumbnail, and bumped his foot into Harden's under the table. Harden shifted away naturally, but then a couple of seconds later Crosby's foot was back nudging into his ankle, scuffing against the floor.
A cold anxious curling thing happening in Harden's stomach. He put down the orange juice box Crosby had gotten him because five years ago Harden never drank coffee, and licked his lips, looking up at Crosby's neatly innocent face.
"So," Harden said carefully. "What's going on with you?"
Crosby's eyebrows went up, staying cool. "Not much, man, what's up with you?"
"No, Bobby, I mean, what's going on?" and Harden twisted his foot against Crosby's, knobby ankles banging together painfully. Hissing, Crosby drew back, chair legs squeaking on the tile. His face closed down, sullen and caught.
"What?"
"Footsie?" Harden asked with no more scorn than was appropriate.
Sneering, Crosby crossed his arms over his chest, fists locked in place. A visible war fought itself out across his features, before he said defiantly, "You said it was 'cause I was drunk, so, I'm not fuckin' drunk now."
"That's not-" what I said, but Harden only got halfway through it because he didn't actually remember; it seemed to have happened several years ago, was that really just two nights ago?
"Well, what's the problem then?" Crosby demanded, rusty-hot blush on his face--he was arguing at least partly just for the sake of it. "You decided you don't like dick anymore?"
Harden rolled his eyes, impatient. "Yeah, because that's really gonna happen."
"Then what?" Bobby's voice broke. They both ignored that. "We used to all the time, it never mattered to you before."
Shaking his head, swallowing hard to clear the obstruction in his throat, Harden didn't say that was the problem, because it was cliché and also he was like sixty percent sure it wasn't even true; he could barely remember what it had been like back when they both played, just a few singular moments retained, snapshots and not much else. It was always so weird and good, so brief like a dream. It was never all the time, that was just Crosby rewriting history again.
"You can't just, like," as Harden swung a thoughtless hand, almost knocked the orange juice carton off the table. "You just showed up here, Bobby, just, like, out of the blue."
Crosby leaned back, fresh hurt sparking in his eyes and that wasn't fair, not even a little bit fair. "I'm not invited anymore?"
"Yeah, of course you are, don't--quit being stupid. But you didn't even call and you still haven't told me why or what happened-"
"You know what happened," Crosby snapped. Harden shook his head some more, teeth set to the inside of his lip.
"All I know is that Arizona released you and then you, you just dropped off the face of the earth."
"Yeah, that's what fucking happened," Crosby said with his voice rising a notch, splintering. "Is that not a good enough reason for you? Was there some other explanation that you were expecting?"
And--no. Harden's mouth shut with a click. He wasn't expecting anything else from Crosby. He hadn't even really expected to ever see him again.
Crosby fidgeted, cracked his knuckle against the tabletop. His eyes flitted, catching the light and looking like hard polished silver, faltering shields
"What are you gonna do?" Harden asked him.
Crosby shook his head slowly. "I. Don't know. I've been trying to--figure that out. Trying to think of, of, of what to do now."
"Yeah?" Harden wove his fingers together on his knee under the table, his throat aching. Bobby was looking down, looking like he had a thousand pounds on his back.
"Haven't really had much luck. It's weird out here, you know? It's all. Different now."
Harden stared at the lines digging deeper on Crosby's face, feeling wholly punchless and sick with frustration and almost unbelievably sad. Stupid pointless way to feel, especially considering that no one was dead, and getting run out of major league baseball really wasn't all that big of a tragedy.
"I wish I could help you," Harden said as honestly as he knew how.
"Yeah," Bobby said with the smallest smile. "So do I."
Ten minutes later, Harden let Crosby lay him down on the unmade sheets of his bed, rough eager hands stroking hot under Harden's shirt and making his hips jerk like there were hidden triggers under his skin. Crosby looked desperately relieved to have a body against his own again, lowering his head to tongue across Harden's ribs, scraping the coarse grain of his cheek against Harden's belly to get him to shiver and curse. His face was blood-hot against the palm of Harden's hand, glassy blue eyes doped with want and half-closed, and Harden pushed his thumb over Bobby's lips .
It wasn't pity, or at least, not entirely. Harden was having trouble working out the specifics.
Something about muscle memory, the thought that somewhere under Bobby's skin was the memory of Harden's twenty-one year old hands, the quickness and surety he'd had, and maybe Harden could get to it if he pressed close enough, like transference could work like that, or transubstantiation or whatever it was, whatever could give him back the better part of his life. The young men they'd been the last time they'd done this were taking up space in the room like voyeurs, and Harden closed his eyes, pushed his face into Crosby's throat, not wanting to see any differences in him.
And then later, lying with Crosby's arm over his hips, Harden said, "You're gonna stick around for awhile, right?"
"Hmm," Crosby murmured, and tipped his head so his buzzed hair scuffed on Harden's shoulder, and Harden took that as a yes, which in retrospect was a pretty dumb move.
They napped and then got up and showered and went for burritos before Harden had to get to the ballpark. Bobby came to the game, came down to the rail to talk shit to Harden while he was tossing a short session off the bullpen mound. Harden's control suffered from the distraction and the pitching coach barked at him, and Crosby grinned, trying to spit sunflower seed shells at Harden's feet.
That night, Guillermo Moscoso took a perfect game into the eighth inning for the A's. Harden watched from the bench with a look that got progressively more dumbfounded as the game wore on and the guy just kept it up, sliders and cutters and change-ups and nothing that didn't move, nothing straight or flat. Just the purest stuff, every pitch out of his hand nothing but potential. When the Twins broke it up with a cheap broken-bat flare over the head of Weeks at second, the crowd moaned its dismay, and then roared back with a rapturous ovation for their pitcher, who popped the next guy up and came off the field tipping his cap, looking kinda wistful and modest like he didn't feel as if he'd done anything so special.
Harden kept an eye on the ball, snagged it from the ball boy when he brought it in to toss in the bucket. There was just the slightest smudge on white leather where the ball had chipped off the bat--just the smallest mark showing. It really didn't take much at all.
They won the game, anyway.
It was getaway day that night, redeye all the way to Chicago to play the White Sox. Harden ducked out of the clubhouse where everyone was packing their shit and stuffing candy and energy bars into their suitcases, ran stealthily through the players lot to meet Bobby on the other side of the fence, where his black Escalade idled, rimless and dusty along the bottom of the side panels.
Harden climbed in. "Hey."
"How much time do you have?"
"Bus leaves in thirty . . . four minutes," Harden said, doing the math in his head.
"In-n-Out it is, then," Bobby said, and steered them over the highway.
They got their burgers drive-thru, and then parked in the far corner of the Wal-Mart parking lot, a long ways from the A's fans eating under the red and white pinwheel umbrellas. The Coliseum glowed hugely on the other side of the highway, searing blocks of white light against the night sky, and past the stadium the streetlights on the hills looked like merry orange fires. Harden and Crosby ate in the car, watching the last cars eke out of the ballpark lot.
"Three games in Chicago and then what is it?" Bobby asked, pulling his fingers one at a time through a white paper napkin.
"Four in Texas," Harden told him. "Then home."
"That's not so bad."
"Yeah it's okay." Harden glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. "You think you'll be here when I get back?"
Crosby exhaled, and shrugged. "It's one of several possibilities."
Harden kinda wanted more to go on than that, just so he could plan his month, but he didn't feel cool actually asking for it. It was weird, with Crosby. He couldn't tell what Bobby was gonna do, or what he wanted Bobby to do, or what they were supposed to be doing, or anything. Harden was mostly just playing blind; it was getting late for him.
Harden took a noisy ice-filled pull at his almost-empty soda, then pulled the baseball out of his pocket and rubbed it between his palms before offering it to Bobby. "Here, I got you this."
"Wow, what a rare and precious gift, wherever did you find it?"
"It's the ball that broke up the no-hitter."
"No shit?"
Harden shook his head. Crosby was studying the ball, tracing his thumb around the blackish smudge of impact. He had a smile playing on his lips, but it was kind of pinched, torn at the edges.
"Thanks man," Crosby said easily enough. Harden nodded, feeling dumb and uncertain. "C'mon, we gotta get you back."
"Yeah," Harden said, and then leaned forward quickly, kissing Crosby on the mouth, not for the first time but the first without anybody's hand in anybody else's pants. Crosby jerked and made a little startled noise, but he got into it soon enough, parting his lips against Harden's and lifting a hand to the back of his head, knocking Harden's cap askew. Harden turned it into a deep serious kiss, wanting it to mean something though he wasn't sure what, and when he pulled back Crosby was dazed and grinning like an idiot.
"The fuck was that for?"
Harden swallowed hard. His mouth felt branded, like a physically different thing. "Just--'cause we can't. Over there, in the lot, we won't be able to, so, uh. It was like a goodbye kiss."
"Right." Crosby was still grinning, his eyes crinkled at the corners, and it made something rusty and sharp turn over in Harden's chest, made him really really hope that Crosby would still be here when he got back. "Smart thinking."
Then Bobby pulled him close and licked a second sweet kiss out of his mouth, drew back far enough to breathe warmly with their foreheads together and their hearts beating at two different rates, and Bobby said, "Bye Richie."
THE END
Endnotes: Pretty random George Carlin quote for the title--"Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror"--I don't even know what that means. Somehow seems to fit.
Bobby Crosby/Rich Harden, 6202 words, PG-13. Awkward and sad like an awkward sad thing, because what else was it ever gonna be?
Backwards in a Mirror
By Candle Beck
Rich Harden came home a week after he finally got off the DL, and there was Bobby Crosby asleep on the front lawn with a backpack under his head and a baseball cap slanting across his face. Harden thought, what the fuck, and said it too, "Bobby what the fuck," watching how Bobby snagged awake the same way he had back then, still pushed at his eyes with the heels of his hands and shook his head sharply and grinned that kinda lopsided tugging grin that Harden remembered very well. When Crosby sat up the motion sensor lights flicked on and Harden could see the new lines around Bobby's mouth, which suited him in a weird way, made him look more substantial.
Crosby started talking a million miles an hour, leaping to his feet and clapping his hand on Harden's shoulder, leaving his backpack a sad dark lump in the grass. "Just in the neighborhood," he said, which was unvarnished bullshit--Harden didn't know where Crosby was living these days, but he was pretty goddamn sure it wasn't anywhere near Oakland--"just thought I'd look you up, buddy."
Okay, whatever. Harden was maybe kinda drunk, too many beers in the clubhouse after the game, couldn't really feel his face or his right arm. He wasn't going to worry about the various things Crosby wasn't telling him, not yet.
Anyway, it had been years.
Alcohol smoothed over the awkward parts, the patches of silence. The stuff they didn't talk about was huge and encompassing. Crosby had had a wife the last time Harden had seen him, but there was no ring on his finger now. Also he'd been a major league baseball player; he'd had a team. Harden wasn't stupid enough to wonder which loss had taken the greater toll on Bobby.
Neat little house that Harden had rented sight unseen after he'd signed a contract with Billy Beane for the second time, and he hadn't yet slept a month's worth of nights there, still not used to the tree branches clawing at the windows, owls hooting spectrally, ghosts in the forest. Crosby slipped down the couch a few inches at a time, ended up passed out there eventually with one foot still on the floor. Harden rescued a half-finished beer from the loose clasp of Bobby's fingers, stood looking down at him for a few seconds, cataloguing the differences. Then he went to bed.
The next day, Harden was out the door at seven in the morning, left Crosby a half-finished box of Lucky Charms and his new cell phone number scrawled in blue Sharpie across a Cactus League schedule. He was in the weight room at the Coliseum a couple hours later when Crosby called.
He wanted Harden to leave him a ticket for the game, and Harden said, "Yeah sure." It was the very least he could do.
Bobby asked, "What're you doing there so early, anyway?" through a soggy full mouth.
"Working, Bobby," Harden said, kinda short because it should have been obvious.
"You didn't used to. I mean, not this early, since when do you get up this early?"
"Since whenever. Routine's gonna change a little bit, it's been like five years since you--since we," and he kinda hitched to a stop, breath short, not knowing where he wanted to go with that. Harden curled his hand around the padded weight bench, pressing his fingers to feel the give. His mouth was thick and sticky and sour, sweat slick on his forehead and the back of his neck. His heart was still racing, and he wished it would ease up.
"Yeah," Crosby said, sounding disgruntled. "Get me a seat behind home plate, all right?"
Day game, and Harden spotted Crosby from the dugout an hour before first pitch, planted among the scouts with sunglasses and cap camouflaging him, his mouth steadily mulling over sunflower seeds. He watched batting practice with an inscrutable expression on his face, and bought a scorecard before the game started.
Harden wasn't pitching, and it was one of those deathly slow games where it seemed like the dirt had been mixed with molasses and everybody had concrete in their spikes. The Orioles had come to town, not long after the All-Star break but the whole thing was an exercise in futility already; the two teams were a combined fifty games out of first place. Round about the sixth inning Harden almost fell asleep on the bench, nodding with his chin on his chest, jerked awake all disoriented and itchy-eyed and thinking that Bobby was there in the dugout with him, confusedly searching among the green and white mash of his teammates before he remembered.
Bobby was drinking a beer in his seat behind the plate, keeping score on his knee, canting to the side to peek at the radar gun hefted by the scout sitting next to him. Nobody had recognized him, even though every now and then Harden still saw fans wearing shirts with Crosby's name. It didn't seem to bother Crosby, watching the team he used to play for, the same field, all that green and gold. Harden thought about finding Crosby on the lawn last night, still kinda muzzy-headed and distantly convinced that it was going to prove relevant.
The A's lost. The clubhouse was quiet afterwards, everybody actively keeping their faces blank as they talked to the media, no music in the background except the over-excited chatter of SportsCenter and the commercials that were always louder than the show.
Circumstances being as they were, Harden could probably be forgiven for weighing the current team vibe against the one that had existed during his first tour with Oakland and finding it deplorably wanting. They didn't make fun of each other like they were supposed to. Nobody ever played on the arcade game, obligatory poker tournaments sometimes but never Scattegories. It was because the team had started bad and stayed that way, and everyone had taken it upon themselves to act like it didn't hurt. So they were professional, strait-laced, unemotional. It really did feel much more like a job, this time around.
He considered mentioning that to Bobby, telling him over beers on the back patio, "You're really not missing much," but there was probably about a sixty percent chance that Bobby would just punch him in the face. Harden figured he would do what he could to avoid that.
Harden picked Crosby up from in front of the BART station afterwards, and they went over to Berkeley for pizza at Zachary's, and then the bars on Shattuck. It was all yuppies with their collars popped ironically and college kids who looked vaguely homeless, and Crosby made scathing comments about the scene from the corner they'd staked out. Harden remembered this very clearly, Crosby hiding his mouth with his beer and leaning into him to mutter, "That dude is actually trying to hit on a girl while drinking a fucking grasshopper, what a world."
At some point, Crosby asked, "You still talk to any of those guys, or what?"
Harden swallowed awkwardly, like the bourbon featured soft barbs, and put the glass down. "Which guys?"
"Any of them." Crosby flipped his hand languidly through the air to indicate the sprawling roster of former teammates. "Mulder or Chavvy or whoever. Zito's still local, you see him ever?"
"Zito's got his own problems," Harden deflected, because it wasn't his place to tell Crosby about the drunken voice mail he'd received from Zito after re-signing with the A's, Zito all jumbled up and dropping key words and saying stuff like it doesn't come back, you know, and what'd you have to do to make Billy take you on again, what'd he ask for this time--not making a whole lot of sense, if Harden was ever put on the stand about it, although he'd gotten used to reading between Zito's lines half a dozen years ago.
"Yeah, I'm sure that ring on his finger is really weighing him down," Crosby said with a pretty sneer.
"He didn't have anything to do with that ring," Harden said, not thinking it through first and biting his tongue immediately.
"Still a little bitter, are we?" Crosby's grin egging him on was razor-edged and dangerous and Harden didn't know why they were talking about this, he didn't want to. The World Series was one hundred percent off-limits.
"I'm fine," he said, and took another drink. "I don't talk to him ever."
True enough--Harden hadn't called Zito back after that message, sent him a text a day or two later making fun of him for being an alcoholic because that was how you were supposed to play it, cool like that, careless. Zito did have his own problems, more even than the well-worn sports talk radio complaint that he was worth about a tenth of what the Giants were paying him. He'd landed on the DL for the first time ever this year, and Harden couldn't even begin to recapture the feeling, that first-time betrayal of your body giving out, the crippling awareness that you could set your hands where they were supposed to be and get your release point just perfect and come down on your front foot like there was a shiny dime on the dirt of the mound, do everything exactly right and it wouldn't work, and it would hurt.
Harden had long ago gotten over that particular novelty. The book on him, the one every team in the game signed on to, was that he was good for two or three months of quality pitching in between injuries. These latter days, Harden was the kind of guy who got picked up on a whim, as an afterthought, what the hell at least we don't have to pay him shit. He was pretty sure that was how it had gone for Beane, anyway.
Bobby licked his lips and the rim of the glass, and Harden's eyes dropped to watch with unconscious intent. The bar light was reddish and smoothed the lines out of Crosby's face, made him look twenty-three years old again.
"Weird how shit turns out, huh," Crosby said.
Harden eyed him, suspicious. "What do you mean?"
Letting his hand make another loose-wristed shape, heavy lids pinned down to his eyes, Crosby said, "Outta everybody on that team--those teams, and how we ended up all over the place and nobody was--nobody finished like they were supposed to. How they used to talk about us."
Crosby was making progressively less sense as the night wore on, or maybe that was Harden willfully misinterpreting him in self-defense. Nothing was ever easy anymore, not even just going to the goddamn bar. Harden hid his frustration and achey discontent behind his glass, the half-curl of his hand. He didn't ask Crosby to clarify because Harden didn't actually want to be talking about the old days.
"You want another one, man?" Harden asked instead.
"I always want another one, Richie," Crosby said with a stretched-wide smile that caused something to totter and collapse in Harden's chest, but he stowed that away, fixed a regular grin and went to get their drinks.
Later but still before midnight, Harden finished his Maker's and stood up from their table, steadying himself with a hand on his shoulder.
"I'm out, man," Harden said. "You stayin'?"
"What the hell, it's so early." Crosby mugged disapproval. "You've turned into a fifty year old, what's up with that?"
"Some of us still have jobs," Harden said, and jesus, he shouldn't have said that. A quick spasm of hurt on Crosby's face, his eyes ducking away and his lips curling in a heartless smirk. Harden fisted his hands. "I mean."
"No, it's cool." Crosby leaned back extravagantly, stretching one arm out and taking a drink, smooth as silk in the scuddy colored bar lights. "Go get your beauty sleep, god knows you need it."
Harden rolled his eyes and felt kinda sick, and left.
Later, he was woken up by Crosby cracking open his bedroom door, hard fall of yellow light cutting through the last of Harden's dream as he jerked and fisted a hand in the pillow and said, "What?"
Crosby shuffled across to the bed, fumbling dark shape and Harden's mind full of space aliens and murderous intruders, skin stiff across his bones. Crosby pushed up the blankets and one rough hand curled around Harden's ankle, a sea monster tentacle, displacement and poorly considered fear like electric shocks in the water, and Harden kicked him away instinctively.
"No, c'mon," Bobby said, kinda laughing and much drunker than he'd been when Harden had left him at the bar. "We can still, you're still gonna."
"What're you doing?" Harden asked in a stupor, even though it was obvious, incredibly so with Crosby palming at his feet and looming in a listing kneel over Harden in the bed, the wedge of light bleeding around Bobby's edges, skimming his hair. Bobby's hand felt good and scratchy as it slid up Harden's calf, pushing the hair against the grain and triggering certain inevitable reactions in Harden, but Bobby wasn't supposed to be doing that, Harden was absolutely sure of it.
"It's okay," all slurring and imprecise, blurry grin stretching Crosby's mouth. "C'mon, let me see you."
That--Harden didn't like him saying that. It had never been like that before. He bent his legs up and away, sitting up with one hand braced against the bed.
"Jesus, Bobby," Harden said, lacing it with a lot of scorn because he needed to get Crosby the fuck out of his bed, scare him off if that's what it took. "I gotta pitch tomorrow, what the fuck?"
"It's good luck," Crosby said, all stubborn inebriated charm as he swayed on his knees on the inconstant surface of the bed. "You'll pitch even better, watch an' see."
"Fuck. Don't," because Crosby was reaching for his legs again, like he couldn't stop for even ten seconds, and Harden heard the rasp in his own voice, staring at the dim smudge of Crosby's mouth in the obtuse golden angle of the hallway light.
"Why not?"
"You're drunk, and, and I gotta pitch-"
"It helps, you'll be fuckin' lights out," Crosby insisted with black-blazing eyes, and a frayed string snapped in the back of Harden's mind.
"What the fuck would you know about it? If you got some miracle routine then how come you don't have a team?"
Crosby--well. Harden couldn't really see because the light was where it was, but something about how his shoulders kinda shivered and went still, something about it made Harden think that the blood had dropped out of Crosby's face, like he'd gone abruptly and cruelly as white as bone.
Immediately, Harden really fucking regretted having said that.
"Just get out of here, man," Harden pled, for both their sakes, clinging to fistfuls of the bedclothes, his throat on fire. "Please, we, we can talk about it later, just go, okay?"
Shock released Crosby a second later, and he got off the bed in jerky stages, his body not really working right, which was of course an old theme. Harden wanted to say sorry and I didn't mean it, but he didn't. He didn't know why he didn't, the desire sat bright and hot in his chest and the words were right there in his mouth, but he just watched Crosby leave without saying a thing.
Bobby left the door open a crack behind him, and the light in the hallway on. Harden didn't get much sleep, staring up at the faded wash of gray and yellow on the ceiling and listening to the tree branches trying to get in the windows. Around four in the morning there was a minor earthquake that knocked his hitters book off the dresser, the binder flopping open with looseleaf like wings, the pages all bent.
It honestly surprised Harden that Crosby even still thought of him like that. It was never even that big of a deal.
Just a few incidents, over the course of the several years that they had known each other--"close encounters" was how Harden thought about it, though only ever inside his own head because he knew it would sound really geeky to anybody else. That was the phrase that had stuck in his head the first time, way back in the minors when Crosby had leaned in too close at a Texas bar and sniffed at Harden with his nose brushing Harden's jaw, unexpectedly intimate in the midst of their swaggering boyish playacting, close encounter, and Harden just sitting there dumbly on the busted red leatherette stool, breath caught up in his chest, not pushing him away, never even thinking that he should.
Just a few cheap men's room blowjobs that had felt like the height of daring, like the best part of being all grown up even though Rich Harden had in fact been very very young when it started. It had seemed to fit in with the fundamental romance of the whole endeavor, playing baseball for money out here on these alien badland fields, sleeping on rattly buses, backcountry highways. It made Harden feel like a different person entirely, like he was only truly conscious on the field and everything else was dreamlike and obscured, unrecorded by history unlike every pitch he threw. So occasionally he fucked around with his shortstop. There were no cameras on him in bar bathrooms, no scouts or coaches. Just Bobby on his knees, pushing Harden's leg over his solid shoulder, sucking a bruise at the edge of Harden's hip, running his hand up under Harden's shirt, kinda messy and uncoordinated about it but always good--Harden remembered it being uniformly very good, although being drunk as hell and ramped up on about six different kinds of endorphins probably helped out with that.
It had only happened once after they'd both come up with the A's, when a game had been rained out in New York City and they ended up spending the day drinking everything in the minibar, lying around on the floor of a hotel room that cost more per night than Harden's dad made in a week. When Crosby rolled Harden onto his back and tugged his shirt up, it had felt like a flashback, a misplaced scene, about a million miles away from the honky-tonk where Harden had last stuck his hand down Crosby's pants. Kind of confusing but Harden went along with it because why the hell not?
Much of Harden's relationship with Crosby seemed to boil down to 'why the hell not.' The next morning, Harden woke up alone on the hotel room floor, badly hungover and distantly pissed off for reasons that he didn't really want to analyze. Crosby had been shifty and awkward for a little while after that, like he thought he'd done something wrong, and Harden was really irritated with him, but then he'd gotten hurt and the whole soap opera stopped mattering very much, in the scheme of things.
And now, what? Now Crosby had washed out of baseball and left (been left by?) his wife, and he'd showed up at Harden's house without explanation, got drunk and crawled into his bed like that was maybe the whole point.
Fuck.
Harden was up real early the next morning, not having slept much. Crosby was shirtless on the couch, face scrunched up even in sleep, one arm trailing on the floor. Harden bit his lip and glared at him for a few seconds, and then went to the ballpark where it was mostly deserted and dark and felt like an unmanned space station, blind television sets watching him from the corners. He set himself up on a stationary bike and watched video of the Minnesota lineup on his iPad until his eyes started to burn.
It took a lot more effort, these days. Not just the physical stuff, which would have been bad enough, but also the new guys coming up all the time, new names and weaknesses to learn, holes on the inside corner, a susceptibility to sliders off the plate. The league was a river that you could never pitch to the same way twice, and Harden had all he could handle just trying to keep up.
Eventually one of the trainers came in and told him to take a fuckin' break before you have an aneurysm, man, christ. Harden didn't realize how short of breath he was until he got off the bike. He changed his shirt and went to lie down in an unused coach's office, and fell asleep for five hours. When he woke up it felt like whole years had passed.
He called Crosby from the clubhouse with his back to the wall and his teammates beginning to trickle in, tucked into their headphones and touching knuckles in greeting. Crosby's phone went right to voicemail.
"Hey man. I, uh, I didn't know if you wanted to come to the game tonight but I'll leave you a ticket, okay? I'll leave you the same ticket, so. If you wanna come you can. Or, I, I guess I'll see you back at the house?"
Harden swallowed, irritated with the veneer of hesitation coating his voice. He used to be better at this stuff.
"Listen, I'm sorry I said that stuff last night," Harden said fast, thinking that it would be easier like this, without having to see Crosby's face. "Don't. Don't take it badly, all right? 'cause I was just talking shit." He paused, watching the loose confederacy of the team draw together again. "I hope you come to the game. I'll--see you later, Bobby."
But Crosby didn't come to the game. Only strangers behind the screen tonight.
Harden pitched tolerably well, good control with the two-seam even if his change-up's season-long mutiny against him was progressing apace. In the bottom of the fifth, Kurt Suzuki got into it with the plate umpire after getting rung up looking at a nasty curveball, and after that the strike zone disappeared for Harden, which was some bullshit. He got pulled after allowing a run in the sixth and one in the seventh, left them loaded.
When he was getting his arm iced and wrapped, Zuk came down clattering down to the trainer's room still wearing his leg guards with his face sweat-flushed and dirt ground into his hands, spitting invectives about that cocksucker behind the plate and how Richie had had Kubel struck out twice before he got that bullshit fucking walk, how it shouldn't have fucking gone down like that, and Harden identified the apology buried in all the profanity, held out his left hand for his catcher to grip feverishly, penitently, before Zuk stomped back up to the dugout to try and make up for it.
They lost the game anyway. Harden went home itchy and unsatisfied, like the drive-in movie projector had burned out during the climactic Mexican standoff and he'd never know how the scene ended.
His house was empty. Bobby's backpack was gone, the blanket folded neatly over the arm of the couch. Harden dropped heavily, dragged his hands over his hair and face a few times, feeling useless and abandoned and other darkish stuff like that. His right arm felt swelled and distant from him, jelly-shouldered, barely attached.
He slept on the couch that night, dreaming strangely nostalgic dreams. When he woke up in the morning, Bobby Crosby was eating a McDonald's breakfast at his kitchen table.
Harden leaned in the doorway and blinked at him.
"You're back."
Crosby shrugged with one shoulder, mouth full of Egg McMuffin. He sucked a bit of melted cheese off his thumb. "So it would seem."
"What. Where'd you go?"
"A place."
Harden narrowed his eyes with some effort. "Yeah, thanks."
"I got you hashbrowns." Crosby poked the white bag towards him. He wasn't really looking at Harden, sorta tracing his outline, flicking glances like playing cards, slick and sharp.
"How'd you get in here, anyway?" Harden asked, and Crosby smirked.
"You left your keys in the door, chief. You're lucky you didn't get killed in your sleep."
Harden scoffed that away, rolling his eyes. Unable to resist the siren call of hashbrowns, he went to dig into the McDonald's bag, taking the seat across from Crosby. They ate in a companionably strained silence for a few minutes.
Then Crosby asked, "How'd it go last night?"
"You didn't watch?"
"What, did you pitch a no-hitter or something?"
"No. Jesus." Harden tapped his knuckles on the underside of the table, a reflex pretty much every time anybody even said the word, prevention being worth a pound of cure and all. You could never be too lucky. "I was okay. Nobody ever gets any goddamn hits on this team."
"Yeah, I think I remember what that's like," Crosby said, his mouth quirking.
"We were talking," and Harden waved his hand indistinctly towards the stadium, "me and a couple of the other guys in the rotation, trying to figure out if it's worse losing because of a shitty bullpen or losing because the boys never put any runs across for you."
"Bullpen," Crosby answered, and then, "Hope you weren't having that conversation within earshot of, like, anybody else on the team."
"Nah, we were shagging flies," Harden said, smirking. "We're not total assholes, you know."
"Starting pitchers do seem to have a corner on the market, gotta say."
Crosby smirked right back, and a wave of déjà vu so visceral it felt like an acid flashback washed over Harden. For a second he was mixed up and woozy, gauzy impressions of Texas and Sacramento saturating his mind, places that they'd been together, the many other kitchens in the East Bay where they had eaten out of paper bags and licked their fingers clean, kept each other company like they were doing now, and Harden was confused, expecting to see a younger man when he blinked his eyes clear.
Crosby sucked salt out from under his thumbnail, and bumped his foot into Harden's under the table. Harden shifted away naturally, but then a couple of seconds later Crosby's foot was back nudging into his ankle, scuffing against the floor.
A cold anxious curling thing happening in Harden's stomach. He put down the orange juice box Crosby had gotten him because five years ago Harden never drank coffee, and licked his lips, looking up at Crosby's neatly innocent face.
"So," Harden said carefully. "What's going on with you?"
Crosby's eyebrows went up, staying cool. "Not much, man, what's up with you?"
"No, Bobby, I mean, what's going on?" and Harden twisted his foot against Crosby's, knobby ankles banging together painfully. Hissing, Crosby drew back, chair legs squeaking on the tile. His face closed down, sullen and caught.
"What?"
"Footsie?" Harden asked with no more scorn than was appropriate.
Sneering, Crosby crossed his arms over his chest, fists locked in place. A visible war fought itself out across his features, before he said defiantly, "You said it was 'cause I was drunk, so, I'm not fuckin' drunk now."
"That's not-" what I said, but Harden only got halfway through it because he didn't actually remember; it seemed to have happened several years ago, was that really just two nights ago?
"Well, what's the problem then?" Crosby demanded, rusty-hot blush on his face--he was arguing at least partly just for the sake of it. "You decided you don't like dick anymore?"
Harden rolled his eyes, impatient. "Yeah, because that's really gonna happen."
"Then what?" Bobby's voice broke. They both ignored that. "We used to all the time, it never mattered to you before."
Shaking his head, swallowing hard to clear the obstruction in his throat, Harden didn't say that was the problem, because it was cliché and also he was like sixty percent sure it wasn't even true; he could barely remember what it had been like back when they both played, just a few singular moments retained, snapshots and not much else. It was always so weird and good, so brief like a dream. It was never all the time, that was just Crosby rewriting history again.
"You can't just, like," as Harden swung a thoughtless hand, almost knocked the orange juice carton off the table. "You just showed up here, Bobby, just, like, out of the blue."
Crosby leaned back, fresh hurt sparking in his eyes and that wasn't fair, not even a little bit fair. "I'm not invited anymore?"
"Yeah, of course you are, don't--quit being stupid. But you didn't even call and you still haven't told me why or what happened-"
"You know what happened," Crosby snapped. Harden shook his head some more, teeth set to the inside of his lip.
"All I know is that Arizona released you and then you, you just dropped off the face of the earth."
"Yeah, that's what fucking happened," Crosby said with his voice rising a notch, splintering. "Is that not a good enough reason for you? Was there some other explanation that you were expecting?"
And--no. Harden's mouth shut with a click. He wasn't expecting anything else from Crosby. He hadn't even really expected to ever see him again.
Crosby fidgeted, cracked his knuckle against the tabletop. His eyes flitted, catching the light and looking like hard polished silver, faltering shields
"What are you gonna do?" Harden asked him.
Crosby shook his head slowly. "I. Don't know. I've been trying to--figure that out. Trying to think of, of, of what to do now."
"Yeah?" Harden wove his fingers together on his knee under the table, his throat aching. Bobby was looking down, looking like he had a thousand pounds on his back.
"Haven't really had much luck. It's weird out here, you know? It's all. Different now."
Harden stared at the lines digging deeper on Crosby's face, feeling wholly punchless and sick with frustration and almost unbelievably sad. Stupid pointless way to feel, especially considering that no one was dead, and getting run out of major league baseball really wasn't all that big of a tragedy.
"I wish I could help you," Harden said as honestly as he knew how.
"Yeah," Bobby said with the smallest smile. "So do I."
Ten minutes later, Harden let Crosby lay him down on the unmade sheets of his bed, rough eager hands stroking hot under Harden's shirt and making his hips jerk like there were hidden triggers under his skin. Crosby looked desperately relieved to have a body against his own again, lowering his head to tongue across Harden's ribs, scraping the coarse grain of his cheek against Harden's belly to get him to shiver and curse. His face was blood-hot against the palm of Harden's hand, glassy blue eyes doped with want and half-closed, and Harden pushed his thumb over Bobby's lips .
It wasn't pity, or at least, not entirely. Harden was having trouble working out the specifics.
Something about muscle memory, the thought that somewhere under Bobby's skin was the memory of Harden's twenty-one year old hands, the quickness and surety he'd had, and maybe Harden could get to it if he pressed close enough, like transference could work like that, or transubstantiation or whatever it was, whatever could give him back the better part of his life. The young men they'd been the last time they'd done this were taking up space in the room like voyeurs, and Harden closed his eyes, pushed his face into Crosby's throat, not wanting to see any differences in him.
And then later, lying with Crosby's arm over his hips, Harden said, "You're gonna stick around for awhile, right?"
"Hmm," Crosby murmured, and tipped his head so his buzzed hair scuffed on Harden's shoulder, and Harden took that as a yes, which in retrospect was a pretty dumb move.
They napped and then got up and showered and went for burritos before Harden had to get to the ballpark. Bobby came to the game, came down to the rail to talk shit to Harden while he was tossing a short session off the bullpen mound. Harden's control suffered from the distraction and the pitching coach barked at him, and Crosby grinned, trying to spit sunflower seed shells at Harden's feet.
That night, Guillermo Moscoso took a perfect game into the eighth inning for the A's. Harden watched from the bench with a look that got progressively more dumbfounded as the game wore on and the guy just kept it up, sliders and cutters and change-ups and nothing that didn't move, nothing straight or flat. Just the purest stuff, every pitch out of his hand nothing but potential. When the Twins broke it up with a cheap broken-bat flare over the head of Weeks at second, the crowd moaned its dismay, and then roared back with a rapturous ovation for their pitcher, who popped the next guy up and came off the field tipping his cap, looking kinda wistful and modest like he didn't feel as if he'd done anything so special.
Harden kept an eye on the ball, snagged it from the ball boy when he brought it in to toss in the bucket. There was just the slightest smudge on white leather where the ball had chipped off the bat--just the smallest mark showing. It really didn't take much at all.
They won the game, anyway.
It was getaway day that night, redeye all the way to Chicago to play the White Sox. Harden ducked out of the clubhouse where everyone was packing their shit and stuffing candy and energy bars into their suitcases, ran stealthily through the players lot to meet Bobby on the other side of the fence, where his black Escalade idled, rimless and dusty along the bottom of the side panels.
Harden climbed in. "Hey."
"How much time do you have?"
"Bus leaves in thirty . . . four minutes," Harden said, doing the math in his head.
"In-n-Out it is, then," Bobby said, and steered them over the highway.
They got their burgers drive-thru, and then parked in the far corner of the Wal-Mart parking lot, a long ways from the A's fans eating under the red and white pinwheel umbrellas. The Coliseum glowed hugely on the other side of the highway, searing blocks of white light against the night sky, and past the stadium the streetlights on the hills looked like merry orange fires. Harden and Crosby ate in the car, watching the last cars eke out of the ballpark lot.
"Three games in Chicago and then what is it?" Bobby asked, pulling his fingers one at a time through a white paper napkin.
"Four in Texas," Harden told him. "Then home."
"That's not so bad."
"Yeah it's okay." Harden glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. "You think you'll be here when I get back?"
Crosby exhaled, and shrugged. "It's one of several possibilities."
Harden kinda wanted more to go on than that, just so he could plan his month, but he didn't feel cool actually asking for it. It was weird, with Crosby. He couldn't tell what Bobby was gonna do, or what he wanted Bobby to do, or what they were supposed to be doing, or anything. Harden was mostly just playing blind; it was getting late for him.
Harden took a noisy ice-filled pull at his almost-empty soda, then pulled the baseball out of his pocket and rubbed it between his palms before offering it to Bobby. "Here, I got you this."
"Wow, what a rare and precious gift, wherever did you find it?"
"It's the ball that broke up the no-hitter."
"No shit?"
Harden shook his head. Crosby was studying the ball, tracing his thumb around the blackish smudge of impact. He had a smile playing on his lips, but it was kind of pinched, torn at the edges.
"Thanks man," Crosby said easily enough. Harden nodded, feeling dumb and uncertain. "C'mon, we gotta get you back."
"Yeah," Harden said, and then leaned forward quickly, kissing Crosby on the mouth, not for the first time but the first without anybody's hand in anybody else's pants. Crosby jerked and made a little startled noise, but he got into it soon enough, parting his lips against Harden's and lifting a hand to the back of his head, knocking Harden's cap askew. Harden turned it into a deep serious kiss, wanting it to mean something though he wasn't sure what, and when he pulled back Crosby was dazed and grinning like an idiot.
"The fuck was that for?"
Harden swallowed hard. His mouth felt branded, like a physically different thing. "Just--'cause we can't. Over there, in the lot, we won't be able to, so, uh. It was like a goodbye kiss."
"Right." Crosby was still grinning, his eyes crinkled at the corners, and it made something rusty and sharp turn over in Harden's chest, made him really really hope that Crosby would still be here when he got back. "Smart thinking."
Then Bobby pulled him close and licked a second sweet kiss out of his mouth, drew back far enough to breathe warmly with their foreheads together and their hearts beating at two different rates, and Bobby said, "Bye Richie."
THE END
Endnotes: Pretty random George Carlin quote for the title--"Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror"--I don't even know what that means. Somehow seems to fit.