fic: Never Tell Anybody Anything (1/5)

[likeanything]

Well, um. Here it is.

Happy belated birthday, caruso. I hope you're happy with yourself for planting this demon child in my brain. I'm sorry I've been a tease about it the last couple of days.

Never Tell Anybody Anything
44,000 words. R? Porcello/Perry, Porcello/Harden

Disclaimer: So amazingly beyond not mine (except for Wilbur and Taylor. They're totally mine). Also, if you googled yourself, go away.

Summary: Everyone keeps saying rookie year is like this for everyone. What do they know? Ryan Perry is the object of our affection, Justin Verlander dispenses all kinds of wise advice, and Rich Harden is a couple different kinds of cautionary tale.



When Rick Porcello was six years old, his family moved to a new house. His older brother was more interested in his Nintendo and his little brother was more interested in his own toes, which mostly left Rick to his own devices. There was this old treehouse a few yards down from the new house, and it quickly became his favorite place in the whole world.

It mostly just offered a view of the mossy swimming pool in the next yard down, and his mother gave it one dubious look and declared it a deathtrap, immediately forbidding his little brother from going near it. She probably would've done the same with Rick, but he was her good child, the one she trusted not to hurt himself being stupid.

Rick made friends with the older couple who owned the house and the treehouse, a banker who looked like the Godfather and his wife, who had an elegant puff of white-blonde hair and at least a hundred different jewel-toned tracksuits. Their children were grown up and gone off into the real world by then, and Mrs. Tucci always told him, "I'm so pleased somebody's getting use out of this old thing."

The treehouse was still in good shape despite what Rick's mother thought, well built in the first place with real shingles on its sloped roof and vinyl siding to match the main house. The floorboards were smooth, the walls painted a cheery yellow, and there was almost no evidence that wildlife moved in when the people moved out.

He brought friends over and they played all the games kids play in trees and jungle gyms, pirates in a ship and ghosts in the graveyard, all of which involved pegging balls at each other from high up. Rick, whose arm was deemed too good by the other kids, was usually confined to the ground, relegated to storming the castle. He was very good at that, too. His best friend, a rat-faced kid named Max who ate bugs if you double-dared him, was his partner in crime.

The first time Max saw the treehouse, he turned back to Rick and nodded very seriously. "This is a good place," he declared. "Best place on earth. Nothing bad can happen here."

Rick nodded. They climbed up and both of them flaked out on the floor because it was a hot summer that year and they'd been playing catch for hours. "You're absolutely right," Rick told him.

"Of course I am," Max said.

(Rick even had his first kiss up in the Tucci treehouse that summer, eight years old and curious, though it would be several years before he fully grasped the implications of that.)

Mostly, though, it was just Rick up in the tree. He tacked up Yankees and Indians pennants (because of Grandpa), and stretched out on the floor dreaming about wearing pinstripes or Wahoos one day, rolling a baseball between his hands. Sometimes Mrs. Tucci would notice him up there while she was doing dishes or passing by a window, and she would bring him a snack or a glass of juice, calling up the trunk, "Ricky, sweetie, it's hot out. You need to stay hydrated."

So he'd drop down like a monkey, swinging branch to branch to ground, and smile shyly because his front teeth were missing, and thank her like the polite little boy he was. Sometimes she would ask him about his day or what he was learning in school, how baseball was going. He would excitedly tell her about Sandy Alomar, Jr.'s homerun in the All-Star Game or his own ten-strikeout Little League game or learning long division, and she always laughed and told him what a good kid he was.

Time passed. Somehow Ricky became Rick, he and Max drifted apart, and he got very tall very quickly. Baseball was easy. One afternoon, late in August his freshman year of high school, he took a break from practicing his changeup against the side of the garage, his shoulder thanking him immediately. He got a drink, water dribbling down his chest because it was hot out and heat always made him careless, and something made him think of the old Tucci treehouse.

He grabbed his glove and a bottle of neatsfoot oil, dashed across three yards and hopped a fence that hadn't been there when he was eight years old, and climbed up the rungs nailed to the trunk. He had to hunch up inside, knees bent at right angles, but he still fit. He sat there with his bare shoulder blades against the window frame and idly rubbed a half dollar-sized spot of oil into the pocked of the glove, marveling at how much smaller everything seemed. He'd always been a big kid, taller and ore solidly built than most of his classmates, and Dad always boasted, "you're gonna be a skyscraper someday, kiddo," but apparently he'd grown even more than he'd thought.

He glanced out the window facing the house and saw Mrs. Tucci crossing the lawn, a little baggie with some kind of baked good in her hand and a fondly exasperated look on her face. He leaned back and stretched out his legs. They ached pretty much all the time, growing pains deep in the long bones, and he was disappointed to find that his feet bumped the far wall.

"Hi, Mrs. T," he called down once she was close enough to hear him, sticking his face in the trap door.

She waved up at him, patting at her hair. "Hi, Jake, how are you?"

He pulled a face. "It's not Jake, ma'am. It's Rick!"

She cocked her head and gave him a considering look. "Aren't you a bit big, kiddo?"

"Well, yeah," he admitted, looking around the small space. The walls were still yellow, but Jake and his friends had scribbled their names on the one wall, a lineup of jagged eight-year-old's handwriting in black Sharpie. There was an abandoned bird's nest on the windowsill, empty, cracked eggshells still inside.

He stuffed his oil bottle in one pocket and tucked his glove in the back of his pants, scooting to the ladder hole and climbing down. He gave her a sheepish look, thumbs tucked into his elbows.

She smiled and held out the cookie. "Well, here," she said. "It's peanut butter, though. Your brother's-"

"Jake's favorite, yeah," he said. He took the cookie and scratched the bridge of his nose. "I'll give it to him," he lied.

Mrs. Tucci patted him on the arm and nodded. "Sorry I thought you were your brother, Ricky. You do look quite a lot like him from a distance." He made a face at her use of his old nickname and she grinned, leaned in and added with a conspiratorial whisper, "You're much handsomer up close, though."

"Thank you, Mrs. T," he said, laughing and feeling his ears turn red and hot. He glanced at his watch and scowled. "Oh, I better get back. Got a game tonight, have to go get ready."

"Well, good luck, then!" she said, tucking her hands into her sweatshirt pockets and looking up at the treehouse over their heads. "I'm glad you kids are getting use out of this old thing. My Jason and Danielle were never all that into it. Dani was too much of a girly-girl, and Jason… well, Jason was, too." She smiled, shook her head. "Anyway, yeah. You knock 'em dead today, okay?"

"Absolutely," he said, and then went and pitched beautifully, strong young king of the diamond. He ate the cookie on the way to the game, Jake in the backseat chattering about the Mets, Rick thinking how this was how he wanted every day of the rest of his life to go.

--

Porcello looks around the club, vaguely disgusted. The guys pretty much left him on his own the second they got him in the door, assholes, all hey, look, alcohol and boobs-let's abandon the kid. The only one Porcello can even see immediately is Verlander, who's holding court with a clutch of girls with big hair at the bar, visible in the crowd because he's like eight-foot-nine.

He briefly entertains the thought that he has somehow found the end of the world and that it's a nightclub in… wherever they are. Everything smells like sweat and cheap beer and old lady perfume some girl nearby is trying to make cool. The music sucks, of course the music is going to suck in hell, and there's this strobe light that's fucking him up hardcore-even more than whatever he pre-gamed out in the parking lot, laughing hyena-pitched with Ryan Perry, something bright-colored and alcoholic in a Gatorade bottle, their backs pressed to a stranger's car while Zumaya and Verlander looked on approvingly.

Great, he thinks. The room spins a little, just enough to hurt. He looks over at the bar and figures his odds of the bartender carding him with a better luck next time, kid smirk; decides probably. There's always something about him that immediately pings him as still in his packaging, some shine of cellophane he hasn't figured out how to tear off yet, and he always gets fucking carded, even in the diviest dives where nobody's gotten that treatment since before Derek Jeter was a rookie.

And anyway, they aren't in Detroit, so no reason for free passes or recognition, and he's got one of those faces that he knows nobody's ever going to pick out even if he wins the Rookie of the Year. Some mornings Perry comes into the kitchen of their apartment and squints at him like, wait, who are you? Porcello looks like everyone else in the world, except maybe taller.

He has to stop and think where they even are, and isn't that depressing? He hasn't even seen LA or Tampa Bay yet, cities with teams that actually matter, but sure, let's go play the Pirates in Pittsburgh. And okay, he liked Interleague as a kid, watching the Subway Series rematches and rooting for the Mets, but now that he's here he'd like to get on with it, get back to dominating the Central, thanks. He could use the ego stroke of playing the Indians right about now.

"Hey, is this Pittsburgh?" he says to the girl standing next to him, who's small and dark-haired and hot in a completely unremarkable way.

"Aw, sweetheart, are you okay?" she laughs, shifting her weight from one leg to the other and teetering on heels too tall for her shoe size. She steadies herself with a hand on his elbow. "'Cause this is definitely St. Louis," she adds, catching sight of the look on his face, which must be something like 'I'm queasy' shot through with mild panic. She has a Southern accent.

"Huh," he says, thinking, I should've known that. Thinking, I just beat the Cardinals, of course it's St. Louis. "Well, thank you," he tells her, standing up straighter and looking around again. She stands on one leg, fiddling with the buckle on one of her shoes, and she smoothes her hair back.

"You're very welcome," she says. "I'm Mel."

"So, hey, Mel. Um, dance?" he says. 'Very smooth, bro,' the Jake in his head sneers. 'Don't talk to girls much, do ya?'

She smiles, sweet and bright and not at all like girls he usually runs into in bars, not a sad-eyed, hungry groupie. She's not trying to press in close enough to break off some piece of him. She's just a girl smiling at a good-looking boy in a bar, probably not much older than him, and he finds he likes that.

"If you think you can keep up," she says, holding out her hand. It's a nice change of pace.

An hour or so later, he's in a booth with Mel in his lap. She's got very small hands and bright white teeth, and she was a great dancer. She's still sort of dancing in his lap, which has him a little interested until Perry plops down on the other side of the booth and leans over the table.

"Holy shit, are you actually hooking up with someone?" Perry brays.

Mel twists around and glares at him, and Porcello raises an eyebrow over her shoulder. "All on my own, thank you," he says tartly.

Perry rolls his eyes. "Goddamn, I know you're drunk, then. Maybe we should get back to the hotel."

"Excuse me," Mel says, "but who the hell are you?"

"Roommate," Perry says, smiling at her in a way that looks insincere and mocking. She slides to the side and stands up, smoothing her hair again and scowling at Perry. Porcello kicks Perry's shins under the table and mouths, 'you're such a dick' at him.

"It's been a fun time," she says to Porcello. "I'm sorry your friend was raised in a barn. Have a good night." And then she disappears into the crowd.

Porcello crosses his arms over his chest and kicks Perry one more time for good measure. "What the fuck."

Perry shrugs. "I'm bored, and I'm not getting any tonight. It offends me to think you might, thus: cockblock." He grins all winningly, and it's not like Porcello has defenses against that.

"Go buy me a drink," Porcello says, already forgiving him.

The team gets back to Detroit with a sweep of Milwaukee and an off day, which Porcello spends sleeping late and then helping a surly, uncooperative Perry pack up to move back to Toledo. Again.

"This is starting to turn into a bad fucking habit," Perry grumbles, doggedly trying to cram another box of crap he isn't going to need into the backseat of his ratty old Mustang. (The first time Porcello saw it he wanted to film it and send the tape to Pimp My Ride. 'He's a professional ballplayer, Xzibit, this car is shameful,' he would say. It really is, more sun-scorched and rusty than any particular color, with crumbling seats and a gaping hole in the floor on the passenger side. Somehow, Perry has the gall to rag on Porcello's Explorer, too.)

"Bet you could drive down 75 with your eyes closed by now," Porcello says, leaning against his own car with his thumbs tucked into his elbows, enjoying the show.

Perry flips him the bird. "Eat me."

"Aw, Ryan, you say the sweetest things," Porcello says, laughing. Perry grunts, as good an answer as any. Porcello leverages the box against the side of the car with his hip and peers at its contents, tugging an SNES controller out of the tangle of random crap, glaring at it, then dropping it back in.

"You know what?" he says, sounding disgusted. "I don't need this shit. Not like I'm not coming back, right?" He holds out the box. "Just put it on my bed or something. And take care of my baby."

Perry's baby being Wilbur, seventeen pounds of sociopathic cat, of course. Porcello still isn't clear why the cat can't go to Toledo with Perry, but whatever. He can buy cat food and pat her occasionally, which is all she really needs. He just has to remember to keep his bedroom door closed at all times, because sometimes she gets confused on the difference between all of Rick's stuff and litterbox. Perry says that's just her way of reminding him who's really in charge.

"Your baby's in good hands, yes." Porcello sets the box down by his feet and holds up his hands, palms out.

"Better be. I'm gonna call and check up regularly. See if I can't get up here on days off, too. But we'll see, maybe Toledo's nothing but fun, fun, fun all day long." They share a grim smile. "So look, Rick," Perry says after a second, squeezing his shoulder tight and leaning forward like he's about to impart something highly insightful. Mostly it's just his face up uncomfortably close, and Porcello can't exactly slap him away. "You make good decisions, okay? Even though I'm not here. You won't do nothing stupid, right?"

Porcello coughs and tries to think if he's ever made a single good decision where Ryan Perry is concerned. "I'll be good," he promises.

"Okay, then," Perry says. He stares at Porcello for a moment more, like he wants to say something else, but then he looks over at his car and steps back. "I'm gonna be right back, I can feel it," he says. "I'm not a minor leaguer."

"I'm looking forward to not having somebody writing disparaging things on my black underwear in Clorox pen," Porcello tells him, cracking a smile.

"How are you gonna know that people think you're an uptight dick if we don't tell you, man? I say this every time," Perry laughs, grabbing him by the back of the neck and hugging him fast and hard. He steps back and both of them look away quickly, huffing or coughing into a fist. "So I'm going to go now."

"Yeah. Yeah, you better," Porcello says. Perry gets in his car, slamming the door three times to get it to catch like always.

Porcello takes a nap on the couch after Perry finally drives off, weird dreams about skydiving and getting lost in the desert, and he wakes up on the floor in front of the couch sometime around dusk, hungry and disoriented with Wilbur curled up on his chest. He feeds the cat and orders a pizza to eat in front of an NCIS marathon, and he can hear his little brother in his head sneering, "God, you're lame. How are we related? Are you a changeling? Am I a changeling? Oh, my god."

He gets up early the next morning and goes to the ballpark. The Cubs are in town, but he's not as excited about it as some of the other guys, and might care if they were going to Wrigley. As it is, it's just another team with good starting pitching but light hitting and a lengthy disabled list. He watches some video, mostly Derrek Lee feasting on pitching because Lee is Chicago's only hitter with teeth lately.

When he gets back to the locker room there's a poker game going on at the scarred table in the middle of the room. "Let's have some of that signing bonus, rook. Come play," somebody says, because Porcello can't bluff for shit and they all know it, saves all his deception for the mound.

"Got warmups," he says, nervous apologetic smile to a round of boos.

"Bullshit," somebody else says, Josh Anderson maybe, or Everett, "you ain't even pitching today." They all laugh, hyenas in Tigers clothing.

"Starting tomorrow, though," he says, shrugging. He crouches down to root through his bags for something to do, a magazine or his DS maybe. The poker game continues, and that night they walk-off and rescue Zumaya from another mess.

The next day it becomes apparent that nobody wants him to win. He has this pregame ritual that dates back to his Little League days, where he has to rub a little oil onto this ancient glove he's had since before he could actually throw a ball. He's done it before every start he's ever made, all through high school and Lakeland and two spring trainings, only ever missed it once. That once was his first Major League start; that entire night went very badly for him.

He can't find his oil. He stands there and tries to decide if it's more likely that he just left it in St. Louis after his last start or if one of the motherfuckers around him stole it thinking, oil is oil is oil, I'll just take the rookie's.

He glances over at Rodney, who's stretching on the floor nearby. "You borrow my glove oil?" he asks.

Rodney shakes his head and reaches for his toes. "Got my own," he says.

"Great," Porcello says, turning back to his locker and scowling. "Four hours 'til game time and my oil is missing. You assholes want to lose tonight?" He'd like to demonstrate just how badly things turn out when he doesn't oil his glove, destruction of planets and bad decisions and all that, but on the other hand, that's not exactly something he ever wants to talk about again.

"I don't fuck with the luck, man," Rodney says, looking up and grinning, heavy accent stretching his vowels out into foul lines.

Porcello looks around, trying to determine the most likely suspect. Normally he'd just blame Verlander, but the guy hasn't moved since Porcello got to the ballpark, dead asleep on a couch with one leg slung up over the back and a hand dragging on the floor. Every so often, somebody walks past and sticks a finger in his ear or something and barely gets a reaction, because apparently Verlander sleeps like a dead thing.

Zumaya and Galarraga are standing at the former's locker, giggling like little girls at a Jonas Brothers concert over something in the magazine they're sharing. Miner's wearing his headphones, nodding to the beat and fiddling with a ball. The position players are mostly out on the field already, everybody shellshocked about Ordoñez's haircut, making nervous Samson jokes as they went down the tunnel. The only one left in the locker room is Inge, who's sitting on the floor in front of his locker, methodically lacing up his spikes and murmuring to himself.

"I'm gonna lose this game," Porcello says again, glaring at a jersey in his own locker, twisted and sliding off its hanger. It's the one he'll probably wear tonight. "You're my witness, Rodney, you hear? Hundred bucks I don't get out of the third tonight."

Rodney frowns at him, probably still thinking about fucking with the luck, but then he shrugs and goes back to stretching. He doesn't look like he should bend in half like that, nose almost touching the carpet, and Porcello comforts himself with the thought that dammit, it's his luck to fuck with.

Zumaya and Galarraga keep giggling and Verlander talks in his sleep. Porcello does not find his glove oil.

It's not a pretty game. Nobody plays well, really, none of them and none of the Cubs. It's one of those forgettable midsummer games that nobody even realizes was played come September, October (if they're lucky)-wait, they'll ask, when did we play the Cubs? Did we win?

Hand of God or something, Porcello does manage to get past the third, but neither he nor the Chicago starter can get out of the sixth. Harden comes out the worse off, leaving with runners on that his bullpen pretty much immediately lets score. Porcello sits on the bench in the dugout and misses Perry, just a little.

"You. No more long face," says Verlander, appearing in the doorway to the trainer's room after the game and football-tossing a bottle of Gatorade at his head.

"C'mon, get dressed," Zumaya says, coming in behind Verlander.

Porcello refuses, still packed in ice and pissed off about pretty much everything, from his pitch selection to Soto in the fifth to Rodney stopping by pretty much immediately after the post-game fistbump to collect his hundred bucks ("Your fine, rookie, for make stupid wager. I call you Pete Rose, you do this again, sí?").

"I'm going home, I'm taking a hot shower, I'm eating a Toaster Strudel, and I'm going to bed," he says. "Fuck you." He takes a punctuating drink and glares at them over the bottle. Verlander does not look swayed, and Zumaya actually laughs.

"Wrong," he says. "Come on, up. We're going out."

"This is the kind of shit we're here to teach you to shake off," Verlander says, plopping down on the cot next to him. "Come on, rook."

Which is how Porcello ends up getting dragged out to another smelly club, though this one's a stumble more upscale than their usual haunts. He still doesn't know why they don't just hole up in somebody's apartment, drink cheap beer and play Mario Kart until somebody wants to break the TV because Zumaya knows all the cheats but won't share, but it's not like he's paying for anything so whatever. The bouncer recognizes him, tells him good game, man even though it wasn't, and Porcello thanks God for Detroit.

Verlander is loudly berating pretty much the entire Cubs lineup, clearly jealous he won't get a crack at it himself, pausing every so often to knock back another shot. Zumaya nods and matches him, sneaking in a zinger or two about the hole in Soriano's swing with a lime still between his teeth. Porcello, already lightheaded and sleepy from trying to keep up, sways against the bar and decides maybe that's enough.

"I'm going to. You know, not do this anymore, I think," he says. He takes a step backward, reeling and dizzy. He steadies himself with a hand on Verlander's shoulder, rubs his temples with the thumb and pinky of his free hand.

"Motherfucker," Zumaya says, but he's apparently talking to the tequila bottle they told the bartender leave, turning it around in his hands and squinting at the label.

"Lightweight," Verlander says, still annoyingly sober. "See, that's how I know you didn't go to college, Ricky. Didn't build up no tolerance. 'Cause what else is there to do in college but dabble in alcoholism, am I right?"

Verlander can rhapsodize about many things: 90's gangsta rap, for example, and his girlfriend's weird compulsion for buying soap. Brushbacks and how he loves brawls, his mom's cooking, Everlasting Gobstoppers. Verlander talks more than anybody Porcello has ever met (except for maybe Jake, and the idea of introducing the two of them is terrifying). Verlander's favorite topic, however, is alcohol.

"If you say so," Porcello says. He figures that he and Perry did all right for themselves in Lakeland last summer, whole huge swaths of July and August Porcello couldn't remember if there were a gun to his testicles.

"'Migo," Zumaya says, draping an arm around his shoulders, "you are entirely too serious, you know that?"

"Here, I got this one," Verlander says, grinning. It's a devious grin, all the more devilish with the goatee and the dark eyes. Porcello swallows, already resigning himself to waking up and wondering, the hell did I do last night?

Verlander continues, "You can go sit down or whatever but first you gotta take one for the road." He takes the tequila bottle from Zumaya and sloshes it down a line of shot glasses that seem to have grown out of the bartop while Porcello wasn't looking, and naturally his hand is steady enough that he doesn't even spill.

"I'm going to die," Porcello tells him. "I hope you know that. I am going to die and it will be your fault."

"You'll be fine," Zumaya says, handing him the saltshaker and saluting him.

Porcello looks around the club, considering his options. Truth is, this is Detroit, so his options are limited to girls, and most of the girls in the place have blue eyeshadow and yellow teeth. That is pretty typical for these dives Verlander and Zumaya are so fond of. Porcello has a feeling he's going to do this shot and then go make bad decisions. But whatever, he figures. He's already drunk.

"You, you keep your eye on this motherfucker," Porcello says to Zumaya after he slams the shot glass back to the bar. He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and wonders if it's a bad sign that his lips have gone completely numb. "Think he's pouring his on the floor when we're not looking." With that, he clenches his teeth around a lime wedge and grins a green slash at them.

Zumaya whoops with laughter, banging Verlander on the shoulder and looking absolutely delighted. "He's onto you, you hollow-legged fuck."

"Oh, what's that, Zoom?" Verlander says, mild but eyebrows up in challenge. "You want the skinny gringo to drink you under the table? What?" He clucks his tongue in pity, sad sight to behold, man. "C'mon, have some dignity, Zoom. This is tequila. Your people invented tequila. This is just a sad thing to watch."

"You call me a beaner again and see what happens, cabrón," Zumaya growls, licking the back of his hand and clumsily shaking salt on the wet. "Between you and me, I ain't the one who glows under a blacklight."

Porcello wanders away, way too drunk to listen to them have another stupid spat that ends in them laughing about something that happened one time in Tampa Bay in '06, hey remember that, dude? And Verlander will be all nostalgic and teary-eyed, yeah, that girl with the hair, yeah. Man, those were the days, and Zumaya will put his arm around him, and Porcello will sigh, deeply put-upon, thinking, knock it off already with the memory lane crap. And anyway, they've pretty much completely forgotten he's there.

Maybe he's tipping over into blackout mode or something, because he suddenly feels a lot less about-to-vomit and a lot more bulletproof. The music is good, a driving techno beat that helps to obliterate any rational thought the alcohol hasn't killed yet, and he heads for the writhing mass of the dancefloor hoping he can maybe sweat some of the tequila out.

He lets a girl with a crooked Bump-It drag him to the middle of the floor and then loses her immediately, dances with a guy with huge hands for a second, and eventually finds himself behind a red-haired girl in a bone-tight green miniskirt. She's pretty and sleek, probably too classy for this place, and would it kill those assholes to pick a place that doesn't make him feel like he's slumming? Porcello puts his hands on her hips and thinks how he'd love to take a leak in a bathroom sink sometime and not worry that some STI is going to crawl up the stream of piss and render him sterile. But they're always like, "Kid, this is where Todd Jones brought us. You too good for Todd Jones? Huh?" He's never met the guy, but he always looks around and sneers and wonders why that's such a horrible thought.

The DJ slides into a manic-tempo M.I.A. song, which Porcello recognizes because that's what Galarraga has been playing in the clubhouse before his starts lately. The redhead leans back against him, slithering, and reaches up behind her to hook her hand on his neck. She's tall, near six feet in her heels, and she has a great ass that he's very interested in getting to know better, even with the great view he's already got down the long line of her.

She turns, presses herself against him all the way up, but she's looking over her shoulder at somebody in the crowd, so Porcello looks, too. He doesn't know what he's expecting, can't see her face and doesn't know if she's saying 'so there' to an ex or 'look what I found' to a tittering girlfriend. The only person over there is a guy leaning against the wall like a coat on a hook, watching everything with a lazy, unimpressed look on his face. Porcello squints, thinks the guy looks kind of familiar, but the girl keeps moving against him and yeah, that's pretty distracting.

The girl tosses her hair, leaning forward just as an overhead light flashes green over them, cutting them out bright against the rest of the crowd. The guy by the wall raises an eyebrow, looking interested for a second. Porcello puts his hand on the girl's back, watches out of the corner of his eye as the guy at the wall watches her and then tracks his eyes up to Porcello's face. His eyes widen, mouth open a little, and Porcello has a wave of disappointment that he's drunk enough to put in the "Ryan Perry is not gay" category he has in his head, groaning silently, great, a fan. But that's not quite it. It's not quite recognition on the guy's face, and then Porcello watches as the guy's expression flashes from surprise to shuttered and vaguely hunted to more interested than before.

Huh, Porcello thinks.

Then the guy smiles, pointed and only half-formed. A trapezoid of colored light falls across his face, he looks like somebody Porcello knows but nobody he can place, because there's this salty-limey, Verlander-and-Zumaya-shaped fog in Porcello's brain. He leans back against the wall, face tipped just slightly away but eyes still bright on Porcello, and he's very, very good-looking.

The girl turns and looks up at Porcello's face, smiling fierce and hot, tongue darting across her lower lip. She glances over her shoulder again, pretty guy at the wall standing up straighter over there, and leans up close to Porcello's ear.

"I'm game if you are," she whispers with licked lips, a hand around the back of his neck. She rolls her hips. It's alarming is what it is, but Porcello is drunk and it's not like this is the first time he's done this. Any of this, and he has a feeling it'll work out better with strangers.

He's game.

The smirk on the guy's face sharpens into something that's probably going to hurt later, and Porcello can't seem to look away, even if his hands are searching for stitches on the redhead's hipbones. So he says, "Okay," and hopes it doesn't come out too excited. This is acceptable, he figures, only a little weird.

She squeezes the back of his neck and throws her head back, tosses her hair like she's in a comic book, then she walks her fingers down his arm and tugs him off the dancefloor.

--

"So I'm thinking that we make the drive just you and me this year," said Jake, over breakfast one morning right after school was out, the summer Rick was sixteen. He was eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch with orange juice instead of milk because he was disgusting, talking with his mouth full and generally making Rick wish Mom was around to yell at him.

Rick raised his eyebrows. "How come?"

Jake was the planner, a hundred ridiculous schemes running in his head any given minute. He was massively popular with anyone he ever met, which wasn't irritating or anything. "Well," he said, pausing for effect, "I figure 'cause you got your license now, and Zach's lame and, like, old. And I'm pretty sure he wants to just stay home and fuck his girlfriend and not deal with his kid brothers."

"Considering one of us is you, I don't blame him," said Rick, mild as you please. Jake catapulted a spoonful of cereal in his general direction, but it didn't fly too far, barely even dribbled orange juice on the table between them.

"But no, seriously. Just me and you, okay?"

"But it's a thing," said Rick, the stickler for habit. The three of them had this tradition that dated back to when Zach got his license, the three of them piling into a car and driving the whole length of the Parkway down to Cape May. It was always one of his favorite parts of the summer.

Jake got up and pointed at the New Jersey map Dad had tacked up between the table and the stove, traced his finger down the long green line of the Parkway. The map was riddled with Sharpie scribbles and pushpins, little markers for places they had been or wanted to go or had won heartbreakers against better teams. "I dunno. I mean, we can do it again with him, but how about just us this time?"

"Yeah," said Rick, smiling and eating a handful of cereal dry from the box, "okay. Yeah. All the way down to Cape May?"

"Duh. I want to eat salt water taffy 'til I barf."

Cape May, where they would play skeeball for hours on the boardwalk, chase sandpipers on the beach and maybe fuck with tourists with Philly accents. Rick wanted to bring his tackle box and go fishing while they were there, but Jake shot that down and accused him of secretly being seventy years old. Jake just wanted to play the radio too loud and stick his head out the window, fourteen going on seven as he was, and Rick mostly was content to play along.

They left early the next morning, stopped at a 7-Eleven on the way and bought a twelve of Mountain Dew, two bags of Doritos, and a roll of Necco wafers because Jake was nuts about them.

"Hey, you eat chalk, too?" Rick ribbed him while they waited on line. It was still so early in the morning that the sunlight was gritty and new outside.

"At least I don't drink glove oil," Jake shot back. "How else are you always buying new?"

"I have rituals, you little punk," Rick said, rolling his eyes and pulling out his wallet. The clerk behind the counter was a tiny, seen-everything old man with an impenetrable accent, his skin nut-brown and his head bald and gleaming. Rick shoved the change in his front pocket in a crumpled wad, said thank you to the old man. "It makes me a better pitcher."

"Yeah? What do you do, jerk off with it? Gross," said Jake, shooting a scandalized over his shoulder on the way to the door. Rick cuffed him on the back of the head and made him carry the stuff out to the car, Dad's SUV all theirs for the day with Dad's blessing.

Jake finished his candy before they were even out of town, naturally, and then bogarted most of the bag of ranch Doritos even though those were supposed to be Rick's, claiming in his best little brother voice, "You're driving. You can't eat and drive. You'll crash and we'll die." Rick punched him in the neck and stole the chips, crumpling the bag between his thigh and the door.

They stopped for lunch in Ocean City, opening the back hatch and sitting with their legs dangling in a dry cleaner's empty parking lot, eating Wendy's baked potatoes and junior bacon cheeseburgers washed down with Frosties salty from French fries.

"You're going to be a star, you know," said Jake.

"You think?" said Rick, not really paying attention. There was a school across the street, and a bunch of really tiny kids were playing kickball. He never really liked kickball, never really liked any game that didn't involve throwing something really hard.

"Dude," Jake scoffed. "You don't hear what the scouts say about you when they're sitting up in the bleachers, bro. It's creepy, actually, all these old dudes with their radar guns and their little notebooks, creaming themselves over your sinker. Like, I'm pretty sure they go and jack off in the men's room between innings thinking about it."

Rick wrinkled his nose. "Thanks for that visual," he said.

Rick's cellphone went off just as they were heading back to the Parkway and Jake answered.

"Mom?"

Rick followed a U-turn and only half paid attention to the conversation in the passenger seat. Jake was placating, voice overclocked and almost cracking. Apparently somebody forgot to tell Mom where they were going. Rick thought she probably should have noticed before eleven-thirty, but he kept his mouth closed and his eyes on the highway, right hand at two and his left in the bag of Doritos.

"What do you mean, 'why go places you don't need to go?'" Jake asked, aghast and horrified like only a fourteen-year-old boy can be. "Dad knew we're doing this. We're just driving the Parkway, you know, like we do every year? We didn't even get mugged in East Orange." He grinned over at Rick, who could actually hear Mom's shrieking reaction to that over the roar of traffic. "That was a joke, Mom, jeez," Jake added, wincing.

Rick flicked his turn signal, merged left, and thought, yes, this trip is absolutely necessary. He crunched a chip between his molars and smiled to himself, thinking about green fields and sand, and he turned the radio up once Jake hung up the phone. It was a day game, the Phillies hosting the Braves.

"Hey, pedal to the metal, slow-ass," said Jake, poking him hard in the ribs. "Go faster. We got places we don't need to be."

All the windows were down and it was such a beautiful day, nothing but strands of cirrus clouds stretched like saltwater taffy in the blue, and Rick agreed. He drove faster.

--

Porcello lets the redhead pull him along, following as the guy pushes off the wall and turns the corner. The hallway is long and dotted with couples of varying composition making out, not just girls in trashy dresses with their hands down the pants of skeevy dudes wearing cocked flat-brim Tigers hats. There's a black guy in a Pistons jersey pressing a skinny white guy into the wall, huge hand on the side of his head, dark skin standing out against the white guy's blond hair. Porcello can't tell if it's a fight or what, and he doesn't think he wants to know. He ducks his head, praying nobody recognizes him and interrupts this for a fucking autograph, because no way will he be able to continue on if that happens. The hallway forks at the end, busy restrooms and way too much light to one side, shadows and closed doors to the other, and the other guy is leaning against one of those closed doors, hands in his pockets, face tipped up toward the ceiling to bare an awful lot of throat.

It looks so good it stops Porcello dead.

"Jesus Christ, I'm drunk," he says, shaking his head hoping that might clear it. Not so much, it turns out; mostly just makes him a little dizzy.

The girl grins at him, pats his chest. "That a problem?"

He doesn't even bother answering that, palming the back of her head and kissing her. She's soft like girls should be. She laughs against his mouth, high-pitched and happy, leaning into it just for a second, then pulls back and tugs him into the shadows. She fits herself against the other guy and holds out her hand.

Things move very fast after that. He presses the girl up against the door, takes a good handful of her hair to pull her head to the side, and fastens his mouth to her throat. He feels somebody's hand on his stomach, another on the small of his back, and he doesn't care whose. He loses track of things for a while.

"Let's get out of here," the guy murmurs against Porcello's neck. He's a few inches shorter than Porcello is but built more powerfully, a lot of hard lean muscle packed on a smaller frame.

"Wait, I have to-" the girl gasps, jerking away and taking a few stumbling new-foal steps to regain her balance. Porcello barely notices, back against the wall with his hands starfished on the guy's shoulder blades, more interested in the hard thigh between his legs than the girl.

"Hey, come on," the guy says, pulling away and flattening a palm to Porcello's cheek.

Porcello realizes the girl is gone, not sure how that happened, and the guy is alarmingly blue-eyed and staring at him like he's not sure Porcello isn't a ghost. Porcello smiles, kind of unsure but willing to go with it, and the guy leans back in, sinking his teeth into Porcello's bottom lip and making him forget that this wasn't the original idea. Anyway, it's a fantastic idea, much better than anything else. He'd rather have this than a soft breakable girl any day, but usually he's got to be drunk to admit it.

That is not a problem tonight.

Porcello has the vague impression of leaving the club and groping in the backseat of a taxi that he does not remember calling, conscious enough to keep his face in shadows so the irritated cab driver can't recognize him. That's easy enough, he realizes, if he just keeps touching the guy, keeps nipping at his jaw. The guy seems a little annoyed that Porcello isn't smaller, isn't a little more pliable.

Then there's a hotel lobby, an elevator with mirrored walls and too-bright lights and the guy's hand down his shorts. There's a silent hallway dotted with empty room service plates, long because the guy breaks away and won't even look at him until they get to a door near the end. They stumble inside and Porcello registers that he can hear a television on the other side of the connecting door, but then he finds himself pinned between the wall and a hot mouth on his stomach, his belt disappearing, and he doesn't care if the connecting door is even closed. Then there's a bed and that's really excellent as well because this guy is very good at everything he does, big hands and a wide mouth and strong thighs.

He wakes up around dawn, naked and on his stomach with his face mashed into a pillow, one arm dangling over the edge of the mattress, legs tangled in a high threadcount sheet. Everything in the room, which is a well-appointed hotel suite not unlike the places where the team stays on the road, has a muffled haze in the half-light. There's somebody's hair sweat-stiff against his ribcage, the points of knuckles pressing shallowly into his side, and he rolls his neck to try to dissipate the headache blooming up from his jaw.

It tastes like something died bitterly in his mouth, so he slides out of the bed and pads gingerly across to the bathroom, a gleaming white room with brass fixtures. It's a beautiful bathroom. He doesn't flick on the light, trips over the plush rug in the middle of the floor, and takes a leisurely piss with his forearm braced on the glass shower enclosure. When he finishes, he grabs one of the cut-glass tumblers next to the faucet and rinses his mouth, glad to gargle the taste out of the back of his throat. He spits and considers the ratty green toothbrush a careless person discarded in the sink, but it looks like maybe its main purpose is grooming somebody's pubes, and all Porcello knows is that's not going anywhere near his mouth.

Fuck, he thinks, pressing his thumbs into his eyes and doggedly hating everything as the whole body ache of a real tequila hangover sets in. He decides to hunt for some kind of painkiller in the mess of toiletries scattered on the counter, and that's when he realizes that there's a can of Barbasol next to the sink, a teal and purple handful of condoms, and a really, really nice man's watch coiled around itself.

Which, that's fine, he thinks. He remembers the redhead from the club, remembers the blue-eyed guy. There's a definite lack of girly shit on the counter, and he leans his head around the doorframe to check how many bodies he's left behind in the bed. All he can see is a man's bare back, pale and broad and quite nice. That explains the taste in his mouth, not to mention why he's sore in the expected places.

It sort of feels like a success.

He squints at himself in the mirror, grimacing at the greenish tinge to his skin, and then he notices the Cubs cap hooked on the towel bar behind him, blue like a bruise against the pearly pale wallpaper.

He pivots slowly and picks up the hat, flipping it over. There's some writing scribbled in Sharpie on the underside of the bill, words and numbers he can't quite make out. The handwriting is spidery and cramped anyway, and stained over with sweat and salt. He turns it back over, finding a rosin smear on the back in the shape of three fingers, another smudge on the brim. He puts the hat back on the corner of the towel bar, Adam's apple bobbing painfully, and turns back to the mirror.

He's got some bruises scattered down his chest and stomach, the shape of a mouth on his collarbone. He can feel that maybe the skin is broken over one of his shoulderblades, teeth marks probably. He's sticky in uncomfortable places. And there, on his right hip, just under the cut of bone, is the perfect outline of a handprint, darker at the fingertips where the guy that Cubs hat belongs to really dug his fingers in. Porcello takes a moment to be a little sorry he doesn't really remember that, and then he feels kind of sick.

The night is starting to come back to him in splinters and pieces. He braces his hands on the edge of the counter and runs through last night's lineup, Granderson-Polanco-Cabrera-please tell me I'm not this stupid. On the counter, there's a baseball, scuffed beyond any hope of seeing another game. He looks at the hat in the reflection and thinks about last night's game, thinks, yep, looks like I am that stupid.

"Yeah, so I'm gonna need aspirin," he mutters, staring at his bottle-shocked reflection. His eyes are sinking into his skull as he watches. He has a pretty good idea where this is going and he doesn't want to think about it.

There isn't any aspirin in the little black toiletries bag, naturally, but there are several orange prescription bottles. He takes them out and examines them, discarding two bottles with names that end in -cillin and another with a long, unpronounceable name he doesn't recognize but figures can't possibly help his headache. But one of them is for Percocet, which works. He grabs the glass of water he left on the back of the sink and takes two, hoping that they'll kick in by the time he's dressed and out of the room and on his way home to Perry's cat's judgmental looks.

He picks the bottle up to put the cap back on, but he gets distracted by the label. It's a pretty strong dose, a heavy-duty your-shit's-fucked-up prescription, take one tablet with food every eight hours as needed. He's pretty sure Bonderman has a similar bottle in his locker at Comerica.

"You okay in there?"

Startled, Porcello drops the bottle with a terrific clatter. Pills go everywhere and he nearly cracks his head open on the towel bar trying to spin around and then tripping over the rug again. Catching his weight against the wall, he pauses and listens as hot-guy-with-injury-problems disentangles himself from the bedsheets and starts moving around.

"What? Oh. Just a second," says Porcello, dropping to his knees to try and herd the scattered pills up and get them back in the bottle. It's narrow, tedious work that makes his head hurt even more than before. He gets them back in, though, swearing because it's much harder than it should be and his hands just won't cooperate with him. He snaps the cap back on the bottle, and that's just about the time he realizes why the guy he went home with looked so familiar last night, because the name on the bottle says Harden, which combined with the hat means Porcello has bigger problems than he thought.

Porcello stares at himself in the mirror, horrified and thinking maybe a blood vessel has popped in his brain or something. He is also entirely too naked to walk out there and face this shit. He sits down on the closed lid of the toilet and scratches his hands through his hair as hard as he can. He can't even feel it.

Granderson in center, Polanco at second, Cabrera at first, he thinks to himself, if it's a one-two-three first. Thames DHing, then Kelly out in left, then Inge-

"Uh, hey. Here."

Porcello looks up to find Rich Harden in the bathroom doorway, looking pretty miserable himself. So there's that, at least. He's wearing black underwear that clings obscenely, and there's a bite mark just under his navel that Porcello distinctly remembers putting there. He's got a look on his face like somebody just pinched him really hard, like he'd rather be anywhere else, Porcello's boxers in his outstretched hand. He tosses them over with a flick of his wrist, arm muscles moving smoothly under his skin.

Porcello catches them with his left hand. "Oh, um. Thanks," he says, keeping his eyes very carefully trained on the ground. He spots a pill he missed, right at the edge of the rug.

Harden disappears again. It takes a lot of effort not to bend down and grab the stray pill, but Porcello isn't so sure a third Percocet won't put him into a coma or something. The bottle's got a warning label. As soon as that thought passes through his head, he wonders if it would be so terrible, but that's just the embarrassment talking. He can't imagine a third one will make much difference, so he swipes it and tosses it back.

He dry-swallows and stands back up, his knee creaking like he's older than Leyland and his head swimming. He braces himself against the shower door for a moment and he puts his boxers on when the nausea passes, even though the thought of wearing dirty underwear makes his skin crawl.

The room is kind of a sty, discarded clothes everywhere but none of them Porcello's, some takeout wrappers on the floor. There's a hard-shell guitar case leaning against the wall and a thin silver laptop on top of the dresser.

Harden is squatting with his head and shoulders in the closet when Porcello comes out of the bathroom, and he doesn't turn around even as Porcello stands there awkwardly with his hands clenched in front of his crotch, looking around for his stuff.

He's not sure what to make of it when he notices everything is gathered up in a thoughtful neat little pile on the end of the bed, especially since the sheets and whatever are still all over the floor. He stands there with what's got to be a dumb fucking look on his face, watching with his mouth open a little as the muscles in Harden's back bunch and smooth and then disappear under fabric as he pulls on a t-shirt. He darts across the room, stumbling over air or a ghost or something, grabbing his own shirt just as Harden finally stands up and turns around.

They both take big, dramatic deep breaths, which seems to strike both of them as funny at the same time. That relieves the tension a little, at least. Porcello snorts and wrinkles his nose, and Harden's mouth kind of bends awkwardly.

"So," Porcello says, clearing his throat when the word comes out all garbled. He fishmouths for a second and Harden just lets him, fiddling with one of his sleeves. Finally, Porcello looks away and yanks his t-shirt over his head hard enough to probably tear the collar. Or maybe the collar was already torn. He can't quite remember.

"So," Harden replies. His smile is a little more comfortable when Porcello looks at him again, small and a little malformed at the edge that actually curls up. It's mostly just the cautious look you give to a friend's nervous pet so that it'll come out from under the coffee table and let you scratch behind its ears, not gonna eat you, promise. "Rick Porcello. Huh. You're, uh, taller than you seemed yesterday. I mean. Yeah."

"I've never had sex with another ballplayer before," Porcello blurts out, and then he claps his hand over his mouth, which might actually be more humiliating than his statement.

Harden gives him a strange look that Porcello's not even going to try to figure out, kind of oddly guarded, then he bares his teeth. "Uh, sorry?" He doesn't exactly look apologetic, rueful maybe, a little grim. But that might be his default setting, for all Porcello knows. What Porcello does know is that he just slept with a walking cautionary tale: don't throw so much when you're young or you'll break and stay broken, and people will shake their heads when your name comes up. All that talent, too bad he can't stay healthy.

"It wasn't your, uh, first time or anything, right?" Harden asks, sounding like he'd rather ask just about anything else.

"Oh, god, no," says Porcello, and then he wants to smack himself again, another thing he didn't mean to just out and say. He shrugs into his button-down, though he doesn't bother to button it up. Harden looks kind of relieved and doesn’t reply. After a moment, Porcello sighs and sits down on the edge of the bed, careful and slow and still kind of sore. He grabs his jeans and looks around for his belt, notices it coiled and ready to strike by the door.

"Right," he says, biting his bottom lip and looking down. Harden closes the closet door and picks up something from the bedside table, which turns out to be Porcello's cell phone. He fiddles with it for a moment, flicking up a look at Porcello when he figures out how to unlock the touchscreen.

"You have four missed calls," he says. He has a weird accent, strange vowels and flat-sounding consonants.

"Probably Verlander," Porcello says, distracted, more focused on trying to thread his feet into his jeans and stand up at the same time. Then he freezes, stooped over halfway and tugging on belt loops. "Oh, Jesus. They probably think I got kidnapped or something."

Harden makes a funny huffing sound. "Why did this seem like a good idea last night?" he says after a second, squinting in the general direction of the windows. It's just a gray view of the city, not quite light enough outside to give the building shapes any detail.

Porcello looks over at him and has to smile a little, just a sliver but enough that Harden's eyes widen. "Tequila," he says.

"It's, uh, still early," Harden says, breaking eye contact to check the time on Porcello's phone. He looks brittle all of a sudden, worn through and uncomfortable, and he seems to have shrunk in on himself. "Not even six. Nobody much should be in the hall. Should be good to go there." He scratches the back of his neck and makes a face. "And someday I'm not going to have to say that."

"What?" Porcello blinks.

"Walk of shame?" Harden makes a vague gesture with one of his hands, then gives up and lobs Porcello's phone at him. "Hallway. Teammates. Uh, you're a dude. And, you know. Who you are."

"Oh. Right." Porcello locks his screen and shifts his weight, feeling stupid and young. This is the kind of thing nobody teaches you, the kind of thing normal people get to learn in college. Not for the first time, he wonders what other normal things he's missed out on by being able to pitch.

They stand there for another minute or so, Harden pacing and sucking his teeth occasionally, clearly upset about something, while Porcello inches his way toward his belt and the door. Finally, Harden thumps his fist against the wall again and exhales sharply through his nose. "I'm sorry. I can't. You're just. This is too. I'm sorry." He shows a weak smile that looks helpless then ducks into the bathroom. Porcello stands there for a second, staring after him, then he grabs his shoes, his belt, and he's out of there.

The corridor is empty as predicted, abandoned room service cleaned up in the night and nobody up for breakfast or workouts just yet. Porcello stands like a flamingo and puts his shoes on in the elevator, grossed out that he forgot his socks but certainly not going back for them.

He calls a cab when he gets to the lobby, and he checks his voicemail while he waits, Verlander saying, "So, we're not sure what happened to you, but we saw you dancing with that hot redhead, so we figure you're havin' fun wherever you are. 'Bout time your balls drop," and Zumaya slurring something unintelligible in the background. The second message is from Perry, whining, "The links in Toledo fucking suck. Does no one in Ohio golf? Fuck. I'm drunk and had to tell someone. Sorry."

He deletes the rest of the messages without listening to them, and the painkillers start to kick in around the time the cab arrives. By the time he collapses into his own bed, fully clothed, he's not feeling much of anything at all.

continues