switch
to the beginning
2002
Zito’s waiting for him on the sidewalk.
Mulder keeps it in his head, sitting on the floor of Eric Chavez’s hotel room, dressed for the bar but not moving. Chavez is in the bathroom, fighting with his wife on the phone. Mulder rests his head back against the wall and pictures Zito down there in the street.
Chavez’s voice rises, “You said you’d let that go!”
This has been going on for months. Chavez doesn’t sleep and doesn’t talk much, finds quiet corners and small rooms. The draw of his mouth looks painful, his shoulders like felled trees. Every throw he makes to first bounces.
“Well, I really don’t know what the fuck you want me to do about it, babe. It isn’t just a fucking job.” Chavez’s voice is giving out, rasped at the edges.
Zito, on the sidewalk, wearing a new silk shirt and his high school jacket. Zito in the streetlight, leaning on the wall and watching the people go by.
Mulder gets out his phone and calls him.
“Hey.”
“Where are you?”
Mulder glances at the shut door of the bathroom, the strip of light underneath like a highway line. “Still upstairs.”
Zito breathes into the phone, one of his less-than-stellar habits. “How much longer, do you think?”
Zito knows what’s going on. The whole team does. At some point, Mulder was tapped to take care of Eric Chavez, though he doesn’t remember anybody ever asking him if he wanted the responsibility.
“Don’t know. Sounds pretty bad.”
“Should we go without him?”
Something shatters in the bathroom, and Mulder stands. “Hang on, he’s, he’s hurt or something. Call you back.”
He faintly hears Zito saying “’kay” as he closes his phone.
Mulder raps on the bathroom door. “Chavvy? Dude, are you okay?”
Silence from inside, thick as the air and Mulder wonders for a moment what city they’re in. He pushes open the door, finds Chavez on the tile with his back against the bathtub, broken mirror glass surrounding him, his phone crumpled like a soda can in the sink.
Chavez looks up at him with dry, baleful eyes, puffy underneath. “I fucking hate her,” he spits.
Mulder nods, stepping carefully through the glass as it crunches and squeals. “Yeah.” He pulls Chavez up by the elbow, Chavez trembling with anger, the necklace he wears fallen out of his shirt, chain tangled and the cross resting on his shoulder.
He takes Chavez through the connecting door to his room, pushes him into the bathroom. “Wash your face. Zito’s waiting.”
Chavez gives him a dark look. “Oh, well, if fucking Zito’s fucking waiting, guess I better hop to, huh?”
“Just wash your face, Eric,” Mulder says tiredly. He leaves the door open and steps out into the bedroom, staring at the watercolor on the wall without really seeing it. He calls Zito back.
“You okay?”
Mulder runs his hand through his hair. “Yeah.”
“Chavvy?”
“Not so much.”
Zito sighs heavily. Mulder can see him with his eyebrows pulled down, pretty-boy face all tied up. Mulder wishes Zito was up here with him. Zito has a tendency of making stupid things easier to deal with.
“This fucking sucks, Mark.”
“Yeah.” Mulder leans to check on Chavez, who’s scrubbing fiercely at his face with a wet washcloth, bent over the sink with his shirt tugged up and a pencil-line of white briefs showing over his jeans and belt. “We’re coming down. Get a cab.”
Zito grins when he sees Chavez, like he has no idea, like he doesn’t see the minute cuts in Chavez’s knuckles. He puts his arm around Chavez’s shoulder and chatters away, willfully ignorant of Chavez’s locked-down face. They’re friends. This is how friends deal with each other when one of them is disintegrating.
Mulder watches Zito carefully, an old habit of his own.
They meet the other guys and Mulder recognizes the skyline and the humidity, the dent in the side of the TV over the bar. They’re in Tampa Bay. Mulder thinks he might have fucked Zito in the bathroom here last year.
Chavez burrows right into the back of the booth, glaring at everyone. They stay away, except for Zito, who sits right next to him and keeps getting him fresh beers, and Mulder, who sits next to Zito and leaves one hand on Zito’s knee under the table. It’s a fixed point.
Chavez gets drunk and the tension rides out of him. He doesn’t even seem to remember that he has a wife, much less that he’s losing her. He caws laughter, bangs on the table with his fist. He says, “Shut the fuck up,” every few minutes, even when no one’s talking.
Zito’s eyes follow Chavez up to the bar and then turn to Mulder. Mulder holds his breath for a second, biting the inside of his lip.
“Well,” Zito says, and pushes at Mulder’s knee with his own.
“Well,” Mulder agrees, and slides his hand up Zito’s leg a little. Zito smiles in a way that he probably shouldn’t when they’re in public.
The night goes like that and some of their teammates ask Mulder quietly if Chavez is okay, but he only shrugs. He can’t really tell. He’s never seen Chavez anything but cool and happy, so this new development is catching him off guard.
They have to carry their third baseman back to the hotel, the toes of his sneakers dragging on the sidewalk and his head rolling forward.
Later, in the whir of the air conditioning and crowd of the stars against the window, Zito sneaks into Mulder’s room, whispering, “hey,” and taking off his shirt. Mulder kicks the covers off the bed and forgets for awhile about all other things.
*
2000
In the off-season after their rookie year, Mulder wasn’t sure what Zito wanted to do. He didn’t bother asking; things had a way of working themselves out.
Zito came over to help him pack after they got back from New York, when Mulder was still stiff and finding his hands increasingly untrustworthy, not in the mood to talk about anything. Zito obliged him, folding T-shirts and separating white socks from dress.
When the posters were down off the walls and the boxes were taped up and the bedside table was on the sidewalk with a handwritten ‘FREE’ sign tacked to it, Mulder came back upstairs to find Zito lying on the floor, his jacket balled up under his head.
Liquor and dry cereal were all that was left in the kitchen, glasses and bowls packed away. Mulder’s flight to Chicago was in the morning, at an hour ungodly enough that he probably wouldn’t even bother going to sleep. Zito was driving to Hollywood at the end of the week.
He sat down near Zito’s shoulder, bite of whiskey, crunch of Kix. There wasn’t enough in the bottle to get both of them drunk.
“What are you gonna do over the winter?” Zito asked him, breaking the silence after seven hours.
Mulder slanted a look at him, Zito’s hair crinkled on his forehead, four-days unwashed because they’d had a postseason to lose and it was more important than showering.
“Not too much, I guess.”
Zito showed his teeth. His face was unlined in an almost eerie way. “It’ll be cold there, right?”
“Yeah. You wouldn’t believe it.”
“Are there, like, places where you can go? To train and stuff?”
Mulder balanced the bottle on Zito’s chest, watching the liquid roll with every breath. “Northwestern. My brother goes there, he can get me into their team’s facilities.”
“That’s good.” Zito was almost a still-life like this, the bottle on his chest, his hands motionless at his sides. “Maybe I’ll come to see you.”
Mulder twisted a finger in Zito’s shirt and tugged a little, making the bottle rock uneasily.
“If you want.”
Zito looked up at him and Mulder couldn’t read his expression. Mulder hardly ever could, which was strange, because Zito seemed so very surface, when he was talking, when he was moving, when he was pitching. But when he went still, his face was like sand.
“Mark-”
“Are you staying tonight?” Mulder cut him off.
Zito grabbed the bottle and sat up. He glanced at the door and a piece of lank hair fell in front of his eye. The apartment was abandoned and very quiet, depressions in the carpet from where the furniture had been, pale scars in the paint of the wall from Sticky-Tac and Scotch tape.
“I think this place is haunted,” Zito said thoughtfully. “I’ll stay.”
He took a long drink, and Mulder turned his eyes away.
Mulder hadn’t told him about the space of years between when Zito had kissed him on the beach in Cape Cod and when they found themselves rookies on the same major league team. He knew Zito didn’t understand what had changed, why it was okay when they were twenty-two and had the world to lose, if it hadn’t been when they were nineteen and shiftless.
Mulder wasn’t inclined to explain things to him. Sometimes stuff just happened, and giving Zito more information to obsess over was never a good idea.
Their season was over. It was hard to get used to.
“Here,” Zito pushed the bottle into his hand. “Finish that.” He toed off his sneakers, his socks, snaked his belt out of its loops and tossed everything at the wall.
“Dude,” Mulder said in vague protest.
Zito shot him a glare. “I’m not messing up your place. There isn’t even anything in your place to mess up. So shut it.”
Mulder hooked a hand in Zito’s shirt and kissed him once, hard as always because that was the best way. He felt all fucked up and melted on the inside.
Zito blinked at him, his mouth wet. “Um.”
“Yeah,” Mulder sighed, and got to his feet. He paced the length of the room, scuff of his feet on the carpet and Zito’s lidded gaze tracking him, Zito already half turned on and showing it in the grip of his hands on his ankles, the flash of teeth going to his lower lip.
Mulder stopped at the window, looking down on the street. “Next year I’m gonna live somewhere with a better view than this.”
Angling his head to the side, Zito ghosted a smile. “When I come over here, I look for you in the window, like, force of habit, you know? Like you’ll be watching, but you never are.”
Mulder rested his shoulder against the window frame. His shoulder hurt, dully aware in a downward part of him that he should be pretty angry at Zito, for stealing his spot in the rotation, for pitching in Yankee Stadium four days ago. But Zito was on his feet, next to Mulder all of a sudden like magic.
He put his hand on Mulder’s back and pressed his mouth to Mulder’s shoulder blade, small furnace through Mulder’s shirt. “Can we do this again next year?” he wanted to know, his voice muffled and low.
Mulder leaned back into him, closing his eyes. Zito didn’t get that not everything was complicated; he always needed so many words.
“You’re gonna come see me in Chicago?” Mulder asked, and felt Zito smile against the back of his neck.
*
Zito lives in Pacific Heights this year, in three rooms that are small enough to make Mulder feel cartoonishly huge. His front windows take up most of the wall and look out on the Marina, the Golden Gate Bridge, the tumble of houses down the hill. The first morning Mulder woke up there, he carried the kitchen table across the room and set it down right there with a view of the whole world.
Zito’s asleep at the table now, his head pillowed in his arms. Mulder barely got him upstairs, Zito gibbering against his throat, clinging tight to Mulder’s waist. They were supposed to eat first, wash three cities off their bodies, then sleep, but Zito had always been on a weird schedule. He’d fallen asleep almost before he got all the way into the chair.
Mulder finds some leftover Chinese in the refrigerator, flat Coke from a two-liter bottle, and the long trip has disrupted his perception of things, bled the Marina lights, cut the bridge into paper fans.
It’s been almost two years since Zito crash-landed back in Mulder’s life for good. Mulder doesn’t count their two weeks in Vancouver in 1999 or three weeks in Sacramento at the turn of the century, because he’d only had time to get accustomed to Zito’s proximity again, not do anything about it.
Mulder didn’t recognize that his rookie season had gone as badly as it had until it was over, until he was back in Chicago, learning his numbers in disbelief. But Mulder’s never been that focused on numbers, anyway.
Zito murmurs and rubs his cheek on his arm. Mulder, looking down at him, has a partial view of one closed eye, sketched eyebrow, artfully tousled hair, still, always. Zito’s clean forehead like he’ll never age, like even time is in love with him.
Mulder gives him a few more minutes to be dissolute and ungoverned, asleep at the kitchen table like a kid, and then he pulls on Zito’s hair.
“Wake up, hey.”
Zito pushes his mouth into his arm, mumbles, “Don’ fuck with m’hair.”
Mulder tugs him a good one for that, and Zito’s eyes open, sleepily glower at him. Mulder wants to grin like an asshole, but he only pets Zito a little bit and tells him, “Eat. Then sleep. Remember?”
Propping himself up on an elbow, Zito nods grudgingly, yawning big enough that Mulder can see a silver spark of his fillings. He finishes off the Chinese and licks sticky dried Coke off the side of Mulder’s wrist. Everything’s like sleepwalking, like Mulder could pick him up and put him into the wall and Zito would just smile down at him.
Two years, and the very long time it took Zito to calm the fuck down. Two years of eating dinner at three in the morning after road trips, waking Zito up in weird places, feeling Zito’s tongue in the dent between the bones of his arm. Two years in baseball time is longer than anything that has ever happened to Mulder before.
Mulder gets him to take a shower and that wakes him up a little bit, his eyes opening more than halfway for the first time since they got off the plane. Zito’s damp, warm and red-skinned, kissing Mulder against the towel rack, hands locked on the bar to keep him in place. Mulder’s fingers go skating over Zito’s back.
Mulder pushes him away, a stupid half-grin on his face. “Okay, okay. Go.” Zito grins back, disappears into the bedroom.
He’s brushing his teeth and looking forward to a number of things, when his phone starts trilling in the next room.
“Phone’s ringing!” Zito calls.
Mulder spits, catches sight of himself rolling his eyes in the mirror. “You’re, like, twice as helpful as a normal person, you know that?” he says as he follows the sound, trying to remember where he put his jacket.
“Special talent,” Zito answers, mid-yawn. Mulder doesn’t have much time. The next time Zito falls asleep, it’ll be for good. He considers leaving the phone to catch a missed call, but that’ll just be a distraction.
It’s Chavez, glowing on the green screen, and a curl of disappointment makes itself known in Mulder’s stomach.
“Hello?”
“She threw me out,” Chavez says without preamble. “Fucking threw me out.” His voice is harsh, wind noise rushing behind him.
“Are you serious?”
“Of course I’m fucking serious!” Chavez screams, and Mulder winces, takes the phone away from his ear. Zito’s watching him from the bed, dark eyes and everything good in the world. “I’m coming over to your place, okay? Jesus. I can’t fucking believe this.”
“Whoa, hang on, you’re, you can’t come to my place.” Mulder’s mind is flashing, Chavez is about to wrap his car around a tree and they can’t win without him, no matter how good Mulder pitches, or Zito. “Calm down for a second.”
“Fuck you. Where the fuck else am I supposed to go?” Mulder can hear him pounding his fist on the steering wheel.
“Chavvy, would you just. C’mon. Don’t get all crazy.”
“I don’t really have much of a choice. The fuck is the matter with you?”
Mulder presses his fingers into his eye. “I’m not there. I’m in the city.”
Chavez barely pauses. “Tell Zito you’ll have to fuck him later and get back here or I’ll break a window, swear to god I will.” He hangs up, rough scramble of static and then nothing.
Taking a breath, Mulder looks over at Zito, who matches him evenly, odd resignation in his face. “I’ve got to go.”
“Gathered that.” Zito’s eyes glitter and he stretches slowly, pull and arch of the muscles in his chest and stomach. Mulder glares at him, dragging his jeans back on.
“And I coulda done without that, too, thanks.”
Zito shrugs, entirely unrepentant. “You’ve just ruined my night.”
“Whatever. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He doesn’t kiss Zito goodbye, because they don’t do that, but he does look over his shoulder as he leaves, imagining in the bedside light that he can see Zito’s skin cooling and paling.
Chavez knows because during spring training, two months ago, he’d seen Mulder and Zito falling out of a steamed-up car together, Zito’s shirt buttoned up wrong, Mulder’s lip swelling. Zito had freaked because he thought Mulder would freak, but it had all been sorted in the end.
Maybe that’s why this is his job now, Mulder considers as he vanishes into the tunnel of the bridge. Because Chavez holds a secret of his and it’s only fair for it to go both ways.
*
They didn’t see each other again until after Thanksgiving.
Mulder learned quickly that he wasn’t any good on the phone with Zito, or Zito wasn’t good with him, either way. There were awkward silences and cleared throats up until Halloween, and then they gave up on that. Two weeks of nothing, then Zito sent a long and misspelled email with the subject line: ‘I am durnk.’
That was better. Zito went on tangents in emails that he usually forestalled saying out loud, likely enjoying the fact that no one was giving him shut-up-for-one-goddamn-second looks. Mulder found out that the attic in Cape Cod had reminded Zito of horror movies he’d seen when he was a kid, and that’s why he’d never liked being up there after dark. He found out that Zito had slept with six girls and four guys, and Mulder was the only one he’d had sex with in different cities, which apparently meant something to Zito. He found out that Zito had thrown rocks through the windows of Mulder’s Sacramento apartment because Mulder wasn’t in them.
Mulder replied back to every one, checked his inbox first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It wasn’t like he had a whole lot else to do. He couldn’t talk like Zito did, couldn’t write like it either, didn’t really want to, because Zito left so much showing. Self-preservation was unknown to him. Mulder erased the emails after he answered them.
At the end of November, then, Mulder got an email saying that Zito was coming to Chicago. He wrote back, ‘when?’ and was still waiting for a reply when Zito knocked on his door.
Zito looked worn down, artificially blurring with energy though his eyes were heavy and low, his shirt ripped along his ribs. He had a bag with him and he grinned when he saw Mulder, his shoulders falling.
“Hello,” Zito said.
Mulder shook his head and took the bag from Zito, led him through the house and into the kitchen. He made sandwiches and wouldn’t let Zito drink anything with caffeine in it, seeing how his throat twitched and the skin on the undersides of his wrists shuddered.
“You might’ve called.”
Zito’s brow furrowed. “It’s a bad time? You’ve got, like. Other things going on. I can go. It’s okay.”
He was half-standing, and Mulder put a hand on his shoulder, shoved him back down into the chair. “Didn’t say that. I just said, you should have called.”
Zito sat back, studying him warily. “I have a hard time keeping track of details.”
“I’ve noticed that.” Mulder kinda smiled, the tension in his back and the phantom pain in his shoulder gone. He was using the off-season as an analgesic, which only worked a little bit. Zito was a breathing reminder of the team, but it didn’t hurt like everything else did.
Zito tapped his fingers on the table. The crusts from his sandwiches made brackets on his plate. “So. Is everything okay?”
Mulder shrugged, got them both a 7-Up. He stayed standing, liking the downward view of Zito, the way Zito’s gaze scraped up his body. “It’s the off-season. It’s as good as can be expected.”
“You don’t say much, in your emails.”
“Well, you balance that out nicely, don’t you think?”
Zito flashed a grin. “Sorry.” Mulder waved his hand dismissively. “What have you been doing?”
Shrugging again, Mulder answered, “I wake up, I go for a run. I go to the college and work out for a little while. See my brother, sometimes we go out to the bars. Watch a lot of TV. Read your emails. You know.”
Zito nodded, his fine mouth carefully set. Mulder wanted to touch him something awful, push his hands under Zito’s shirt, bend him over the table. It’d been a slow night and a slow winter, not even half-over yet.
“Have you noticed, does it seem like this is worse than the off-season last year?” Zito asked.
Mulder thought about that, coming home from Vancouver in September and sleeping in his childhood bed again, his feet hanging off the end. Last year, all he’d been able to think about was that next year he’d make the big leagues, break in during spring training or break in soon thereafter, and he tried to make the winter months fly, out every night, running every day. It hadn’t worked, counting days never did.
Then again, last year he didn’t have his failed rookie season hanging over him like a bad omen.
“I guess it’s about the same,” he told Zito.
Zito’s face wrenched, looking down at his soda. “Sick of it. December’s gonna kill me.”
Mulder scoffed, about to call him melodramatic, but Zito shot him a black look and he kept his mouth shut.
“Anyway,” Zito said. “Thanks for the sandwich.” He took his plate to the sink to wash it off, bumping elbows with Mulder. “You want to go out or something?”
Mulder closed his hand on Zito’s belt and jerked him closer, the plate crashing into the sink, Zito’s face wide-open and surprised.
“No,” Mulder answered, and licked Zito’s ear. Zito shivered, one wet hand sliding up Mulder’s arm and under his shirtsleeve. Zito turned his head and Mulder opened Zito’s mouth with his tongue, jackrabbit thoughts in his mind. Citrus-clean and overly sweet from the soda, Zito put his other hand on the back of Mulder’s head and angled him nearer.
His mind went fuzzy like being up for thirty hours. He tugged Zito’s shirt up and Zito lifted his arms, let Mulder strip it off him. Mulder caught a grin under the fabric, Zito’s hair wild and highlit blonde.
“I didn’t call,” Zito said against his mouth, his hands busy undoing Mulder’s belt, his breath so hot that Mulder couldn’t believe in snow anymore. “Because you might have told me not to come. Fuck. It might have been a. A bad idea.”
Mulder sucked a bruise under his jaw, raked his teeth and Zito’s chest vibrated as he moaned. Zito pressed the back of his hand into Mulder’s jeans, strange bumpy feel of knuckles and no fingertips through his shorts.
“Still fucking stupid,” he muttered, kissing Zito on the mouth again. “Kept me waiting.”
“Oh Jesus Christ, Mark,” Zito said, half exasperated and half joyful. Zito grabbed Mulder by the shoulder and held him still, Zito’s face buried in Mulder’s neck, his other hand pushing Mulder’s jeans off his hips. “You never said anything.”
Mulder gritted his teeth, banged his head on the cabinets. “Fucking saying it now, would you please-”
Zito didn’t let him finish, fell to his knees and Mulder couldn’t see him then, Zito’s hair hiding his face and Mulder’s eyes were squeezed shut anyway, it didn’t make a difference.
*
Chavez is still on the couch when Mulder gets up in the morning, but he’s not asleep, blank eyes staring at the dead television. He’d turned down the blanket Mulder offered, shivering now in his T-shirt and bare feet, creases from the couch fabric on his cheek.
Mulder makes some coffee and wonders if he has time to go over the city before they have to be at the ballpark. He wonders if he should just make Chavez an extra key.
He listens to the dogs barking in the neighbor’s yard and the airplanes passing overhead. He can see already that the day will be perfect blue and as still as glass, a baseball-playing day if ever there was one.
Chavez comes in when Mulder’s settled at the table, reading the paper and eating a cold Pop-Tart. He gets himself a cup of coffee and sits across from Mulder, tracing his finger around the grain of the wood.
“Sorry about last night,” Chavez says tonelessly, then winces. “Sorry about the whole thing, really.”
Mulder tears the corner of the paper off, rolling it into a little ball between his finger and thumb. “Don’t worry about it.”
“No.” Chavez shakes his head. His face is painfully tight, his shoulders drawn up near his ears, ruffled black hair and brown shadows under his eyes. He doesn’t look up, staring at the tabletop. “I’ve been a jerk.”
“You’ve got reason, Eric, okay? It’s no big deal.” Mulder sighs inwardly, wishing people would just let stuff be, once in a while, stop trying to talk it out of existence.
Chavez takes a sip of coffee, his eyes squinting as he burns his tongue. “I might have to stay for a little while,” he almost whispers. Mulder figures that the reason that Chavez isn’t looking at him is that he’s on the edge of tears, which makes Mulder extremely uncomfortable.
“Whatever you need, man.” Just don’t cry.
Smiling uneasily at the table, Chavez shakes his head again, the strict red indentation lines running parallel to his cheekbones making him look bizarrely warrior-like.
“Is she allowed to keep me out of the house, do you think?” Chavez asks, sounding totally lost. “I mean, I paid for it.”
Mulder gets up to put some more milk in his coffee, hopefully give Chavez a chance to pull himself together while Mulder’s back is turned.
“I guess, if you want to go that far, like, lawyers or cops or whatever, then it’s your house and she’ll have to leave.”
“But I don’t want her to leave.”
Mulder shuts his eyes briefly, thinking about how much better his morning would be if he’d gotten to stay at Zito’s place last night.
“You also don’t want to sleep on my couch for the rest of the season,” he points out.
He turns back, leaning on the counter, a default position of his for years, since standing, he was taller than most everyone else on the planet. Chavez is looking at him now, bad wounded expression, dirty hair on his forehead.
“Are you even gonna ask what happened?”
Mulder crosses his arms over his chest. “Did you want me to?”
“Well, Christ, Mulder, it’s kinda standard when someone calls you at two in the morning needing to crash at your house.”
“I’m sorry, was it something different than the usual shit between you and her?” Mulder says without thinking, and Chavez flinches hard, his head snagging to the side. Mulder sighs. “Sorry,” he mutters.
Chavez weaves his fingers together, taking a deep breath. It’s all way too emotional for Mulder, who might otherwise be getting blown by Zito right now. He kinda hates his life at the moment.
“She’s just,” Chavez starts, then stops, doesn’t say anything for a minute. Mulder stays quiet. “She knows what it’s like. On the road. Away. That I can’t, can’t be held responsible, because sometimes it just happens, you know? It’s not that I don’t love her. That’s supposed to be the important thing.”
Mulder nods, the usual shit, brought to boil by the pressure of years. Chavez puts his elbows on the table and rests his forehead on his folded hands. Mulder doesn’t have anything to tell him, no advice, no warnings. Mulder does his very best not to get involved in things.
“I think she’s gonna leave me, though,” Chavez says, putting clear effort into sounding matter-of-fact. He looks at Mulder expectantly.
“Well,” Mulder replies, and stares at the floor.
Chavez exhales heavily, and nobody speaks for a little while. Mulder is beginning to relax, thinking that soon they’ll turn to neutral territory, something about the team or the weather or, god, anything, when Chavez says:
“You and Zito.”
Mulder’s muscles go still under his skin. He raises his head, meeting Chavez’s gaze evenly.
“Yeah?”
Chavez narrows his eyes, heartbreak and exhaustion bent in the corners of his mouth. He’s known, seen Zito freaking out in the parking lot in Phoenix and swearing that it wasn’t what it looked like, until Mulder cuffed him upside the head and asked Chavez with forced steel in his voice, is this gonna be a problem? Chavez has known, he’d said it wouldn’t be, whatever, man, do what you want. He’s been true to his word.
“You’ve been. You know. For awhile?”
Mulder moves his shoulders and focuses on the wall to the left of Chavez’s head, scratched-off plaster. “Couple of years.”
He has no intention of explaining the whole mess to Chavez. Not what happened in Cape Cod and not the years in between when Mulder had looked at guys sometimes just to see what it might do to him, if he could recover the feeling of being bonfire-lit, drunk on a beach with his most recent best friend beside him. Not the several times he’d done more than just look, clumsy pushing exchanges in small dorm rooms, wide mouths and hair that wasn’t quite long enough under his fingers. Not the way Zito had smiled in Vancouver and fallen against him in Sacramento and rolled him over in Oakland. Not the way Zito asked too many questions and didn’t care when Mulder couldn’t really answer, and not the ruin in Mulder’s chest when he spotted Zito at the end of the hall.
It’s not the kind of thing you tell other people.
Chavez looks down into the steam rising from his coffee. “You’re with him all the time, though,” he says, ticking his fingers out one at a time. “How do you. How can you stand being with someone so much?”
“I don’t really think about it.” That, Mulder realizes in something like astonishment, is the truth.
Chavez shakes his head slowly. “I don’t get that.”
“It’s not exactly your concern, Chavvy.”
Chavez darts his eyes up and then away again, staring out the window at the trees and the holey wood fence. “It must be easier,” he says almost absently. “Because he’s a guy.”
Mulder half-laughs, caught out in surprise. “Yeah, no fucking worries there.”
“But he couldn’t do anything to hurt you that you couldn’t do back,” Chavez argues.
“You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. And I, why are you even asking me about this stuff?”
“What?” Chavez cuts in sharply, his black eyes flashing. “My wife never wants to see me again. I can’t make fucking conversation?”
Mulder shakes his head, turns away. He goes into the living room and drops onto the couch, rubbing his face. He misses living down by the water, near downtown with the ambulances howling and the crazy people shouting at nothing. So quiet out here, cupped by the hills and shielded by trees.
His fingers itch. Chavez’s chair screeches on the linoleum and a moment later, he’s in the doorway, shorter than Zito and broader in the shoulders, the muscles in his arms more defined, dark all the time and not just at certain angles.
“I’m trying to figure out how this happened,” Chavez tells him, digging his hands into his pockets. Mulder’s surrounded by the warmth left by Chavez’s body.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it. Neither did Zito, so you can just leave us out of it, okay?” Mulder scratches at the armrest, not looking back.
“It just makes no sense.” Chavez’s hands fist, his pockets bulging. “This is all so twisted. So fucking stupid.”
Mulder twitches, the words familiar but he can’t place them. He’s done with this, more drama than he needs in one morning. He finds his shoes on the far side of the couch and pulls them on, rough without socks. Rising, he sees panic slice across Chavez’s face briefly.
“You’re leaving?” he asks with his voice weak.
“Look, here.” Mulder detaches his car key from the ring and hands the rest to Chavez, touching for a moment the callused heel of Chavez’s hand, different from Zito because Zito doesn’t take at-bats. “You can stay as long as you need to.”
Chavez nods, his jaw moving carefully. Mulder hesitates, but he doesn’t know what to say. He ducks his head and gets his jacket, halfway out the door when Chavez says, “Thanks, Mark,” so soft Mulder’s pretty sure it was a hallucination.
He flies, breaks records and ends up at Zito’s high apartment, leaning wearily on the door. Zito catches him, sets him upright, hands steady on Mulder’s hips. Mulder lets Zito take him inside without pause, without second thought.
“Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes,” Zito whispers, not at all surprised to see him, something unreadable snaking along the underside of the old joke. He lays his fingertips on the line of Mulder’s jaw. Mulder smiles, rests his forehead on Zito’s cheek.
*
Zito stayed with him in Chicago for three weeks. Mulder thought that Zito had obligations back in Hollywood, his phone blinking with missed calls and voicemails, his watch still on California time. Zito didn’t seem to care, though, so Mulder didn’t either.
Well-secured packages arrived from the West Coast, Zito’s CDs and favorite blanket, two extra pairs of jeans, books and a flashlight, until Mulder didn’t recognize half the things in his house. He made fun of Zito for not being able to travel light. He got bored one afternoon and took apart Zito’s clock radio, dismantled it like a bomb and forgot how to put it back together again.
The snow was complicit, padding on the brownstone steps, ice in the trees. Zito was always underdressed, wearing Mulder’s old coat that hung on his slight shoulders, his slender arms. Mulder knew most everything there was to know about Zito’s body at this point, baffled by the aversion he had to injury or illness despite the sink of his ribs and his thin skin.
Their runaway winter, reflected in storefronts and the stick figures Zito drew on damp bar napkins. Mulder felt time speeding up, his peripheral vision blurred. Zito went skidding down frosted sidewalks on his heels, dared Mulder to lick metal. On Mulder’s stomach, Zito’s fingers were so cold they left gray marks.
Mulder would be happy just to let this happen, let Zito exist on the left side of the bed, leave Zito in record stores on long afternoons when Mulder went to see his brother or his few remaining childhood friends. He’d be happy taking Zito with him to the gym at Northwestern and seeing the sweat glaze Zito’s face and chest, the baseball scars rising again on the palms of his hands. Zito made him forget for hours at a time how his rookie year had ended.
They woke up into a blizzard, lashing flag-wide on the glass, strong enough that Mulder expected the snow to climb the three-story wall and crush through his bedroom windows, soak into the carpet and whitely bury their discarded jeans. Zito put his chin on Mulder’s arm and blinked at the storm.
“Dude,” Zito whispered in awe. “Natural disaster.”
Mulder’s jaw popped as he yawned. “Go back to sleep.”
“I can’t, the world’s ending out there.”
Turning to look at the alarm clock, Mulder groaned and rolled onto his stomach, dislodging Zito. He slung an arm across Zito’s chest to hold him down. “Three in the goddamn morning. You’re out of your mind.”
“How can you say that, look at it. I’ve never seen it snow like this.”
“Happens all the time. C’mon. Sleep.”
Zito bit his arm, sharp white teeth in the crease of Mulder’s elbow. “Because we’ve got so much to do tomorrow,” he said sarcastically. “That ‘Real World’ marathon isn’t going to watch itself.”
Mulder smirked involuntarily, liking it here with his eyes closed and Zito warm under him, the fading sting in his arm, Zito bitching familiarly in his ear.
“What exactly do you want to do?” he mumbled into the pillow, trailing his fingers on the sheet on the far side of Zito’s body. “Don’t think for a second I’m going out in that.”
“No, no,” Zito answered, sounding thoughtful, the back of his hand brushing across Mulder’s side. “We can’t go out there. We might die.”
“That’s just great, Barry.”
“We should do something, though,” Zito continued, ignoring the interruption. His breath was hot on Mulder’s arm and it made Mulder doubt the truth of the storm outside, the idea that he could ever be cold.
Mulder slid his arm down, draw of Zito’s skin, the room painted silver, streetlights hidden and the snow seemed to give off a glow of its own. Zito fairly vibrated with energy, his irritating tendency to jumpstart awake instead of fumbling slowly through it. Mulder felt Zito’s stomach jerking against the inside of his wrist.
“I could fuck you again,” he offered sleepily. “Just. Gimme a minute.” He sighed, sank back downwards as Zito stayed quiet. Soft clean blizzard thoughts, wondering distantly how Zito would react to a tornado.
“Are you falling back asleep?”
Mulder wished there was enough light for him to glare. He settled for clenching his fingers on Zito’s side, making him squirm nicely, his feet kicking at Mulder’s.
“The snow will still be there in the morning,” Mulder said, his mouth against Zito’s shoulder now, unsure when that had happened. “You know. Later in the morning.” His head was clouded, his eyelids so heavy he couldn’t get them to open.
“It won’t be the same.”
Zito had been born in the desert, brought up near the Mexican border. He matched summer effortlessly, lying sun-dry on the ocean the day Mulder met him, sweat-dark hair whenever Mulder thought of him without planning it. Seeing him against the white and the wind of Chicago in December was like a whole different person, jittery and iced over where his skin was exposed. It was remarkable, figuring him out for the second time.
Mulder thought maybe he should give Zito a break. He scuffed his cheek and said, “You’re right. It’ll stick, be up to your knees on the street tomorrow. But it won’t fall like this. It never does in the daytime.”
Zito breathed shallowly, Mulder’s arm moving with it. “See, I think that’s amazing.”
“You would.” Mulder smiled at nothing in particular. He tried to see if he could hear the thrush of the snow on the windows, ghost-wind howling fearfully, second-degree removed.
For several minutes, Zito remained still, goosebumps prickling and fading on his skin over and over again, Mulder tracking their progress. Mulder couldn’t remember how long it’d been since Zito had shown up uninvited. He drifted without paying attention to where he was going.
“Mark?” Zito whispered. Mulder hummed faintly, wiry red veins on the backs of his eyelids. “I’ve got to go home pretty soon."
“Yeah?”
Zito nodded, his chin brushing Mulder’s forehead. “Christmas. And New Year’s too.”
Opening his mouth slightly on Zito’s shoulder, Mulder answered muffled, “Of course.”
It was smooth, the way Zito tensed. Mulder imagined this was what he must feel like at the moment when he went into set position on the mound, his hands at his belt, his fingers crossing the stitches, his stomach drum-tight the way it was now. Mulder exhaled, tapping his thumb on Zito’s ribs, wordlessly urging him to calm.
“I guess.” Zito’s throat clicked, weirdly loud with Mulder this close. “I’ll see you in Phoenix.”
Mulder considered that, melting snow and the stretch of January like condemnation, all the things he’d done wrong in his life come back to punish him.
“Fuck Phoenix. You’ll come back here after New Year’s.” Mulder grinned, his teeth pressing into Zito’s shoulder, hearing Zito pull in a strange ragged breath, as if Mulder had followed through on his promise to fuck him again. Which Mulder would follow through on, in another minute, when the storm died down long enough for him to get his head on straight again.
“Is that. You want me to?” Zito moved, pushed himself up onto his elbow so that Mulder fell off like water. Mulder felt Zito staring at him, funny shocked look.
He rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, losing all contact with Zito. The snow flickered on Zito’s face. He wondered how long it would take Zito to stop second-guessing, stop thinking that Mulder was just killing time. In an unknown and backward part of his mind, Mulder also wondered how long it would be before he got tired of Zito. He’d been waiting for almost five months now, surprised every day that it didn’t happen.
“All your stuff’s here, anyway,” Mulder told him, watching Zito’s mouth and listening to the weather outside like it was reason enough to stay here behind locked doors forever, trusting the windows not to break.
*
Chavez’s divorce goes through just after the All-Star break. Mulder waits in the car when Chavez is in his lawyer’s office, signing the paperwork. It seems unnatural, for Chavez’s wrecked life to be reduced to his famous signature, though Mulder supposes that they all signed big league contracts and all signed autographs and everything comes back to their names.
A cop clinks on his window and tells him to get out of the red zone. Mulder obligingly pulls up around the corner, his phone buzzing in the cup holder. It’s Zito. Mulder hasn’t seen him in three days, since before the break.
They talk distractedly about Milwaukee, the impossibility of a tie game in baseball, the absurdity of Zito only facing one batter for a team that would eventually run out of pitchers. Mulder doesn’t care much that Zito made the trip and he didn’t. They’re both still very young.
“Are you gonna come over tonight?” Zito asks, seagulls cawing behind his voice.
“Maybe. I don’t know. He’s gonna have a rough time, I think.” Chavez hasn’t been dealing well with any of this, and Mulder doesn’t expect that to change now that it’s really over.
Zito exhales into the receiver, thinking almost audibly. “Do you really think it’s a good idea for him to move in with you?”
“He’s got nowhere else to go, man.”
“He makes two million dollars a year, Mark, I think he can afford a hotel room.”
Mulder keeps watch on the side mirror, half view of his face and the suited downtown people congregating on the sidewalks and plazas for lunch. He idly wonders how many people will recognize Chavez when he comes out, how well Chavez will be able to fake his charming public smile.
“You’ve got a real admirable loyalty to your friends, you know, it’s one of my favorite things about you,” Mulder says, seeing his mouth warp.
“Hey. Shut up. I’m loyal. It’s just. He’s been so fucked up recently.”
“Yeah, well, he fits in pretty well.” Chavez emerged, his head down against the sun. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Whatever.” Zito pauses. “Tell him. Tell him I said I’m sorry.”
Mulder hangs up. Loyalty’s not really Zito’s problem. He doesn’t have faith in Chavez to stay on the right side of the line, doesn’t trust Mulder to keep Chavez there, but he’d still die for either of them without question.
Chavez gets in the car, still holding an expensive ballpoint pen, which Mulder thinks is pretty perverse, all things considered. He looks like he’s been hollowed out.
Mulder clears his throat. “You wanna do something?”
“No.” Chavez stares out the window, the line of his jaw strict.
Starting the car, Mulder flips the radio volume up high and puts his hand on the back of Chavez’s seat as he turns to look behind him. “Okay,” he says, feeling Chavez’s hair rustle on his hand.
They get back to Mulder’s house, their house, without speaking. Chavez is still sleeping on the couch, but that’s only until Mulder gets the shit cleared out of the spare room and buys a mattress.
Chavez goes right for the liquor on top of the refrigerator, tearing the label off and spinning the cap across the room like he doesn’t intend to stop drinking until the bottle’s empty. Mulder gets glasses as an afterthought, but Chavez is already on the couch, his throat working.
Mulder didn’t expect much else from tonight. The ballpoint pen sticks out of Chavez’s pocket, waiting to be thrown into the ocean. Chavez is the kind of man who would put bullets through old photographs, burn postcards, spit on the ground, use his hands to shatter everything she’s ever touched. Mulder has invited pure destruction into his home, said he could stay as long as he needed.
After half the bottle, the room feels like it’s in the grips of a low-level earthquake. Chavez’s eyes are swollen.
“This is terrible,” Chavez says after a long stretch of silence. “This isn’t something I know how to do.”
Mulder shifts, drinking from the bottle with the glasses spotless on the coffee table. “I don’t think anybody does, man.”
Chavez glances at him. They’ve been friends for a very long time, since before Zito played in the major leagues. Mulder would count him as a timeline, but Chavez never remembers anything that’s happened.
“What would you do?”
“What would I do, what?”
“If this happened to you. If Zito, like, called you motherfucker and told you never to come back.”
Mulder almost laughs at the image. It would never end like that for them. Zito wouldn’t break things cleanly, he’d much prefer to drag it out and scar every inch of skin. Zito’s hands would clench in his shirt and haul him back in, swear against Mulder’s body that he’d follow them down no matter how far they went. It would be a bad way to go, crippling instead of merciful, and ten years later, Zito would still be calling to tell him about weather he’d survived.
“We’re not married,” Mulder reminds him. “It’s not exactly the same thing.”
“Bullshit.” Chavez is slurring, but he doesn’t continue. Watery gray sunlight fights through the trees outside, closing in on dusk. Chavez’s balled-up socks are scattered on the floor.
They drink for a while longer. Mulder’s vision telescopes in and out, Chavez’s knee against his own. The sun disappears altogether, and Mulder almost electrocutes himself turning on the lamp. The edges of Chavez’s face are rounded by liquor and sixty yellow watts.
“New question,” Chavez says, and Mulder blinks at him, not remembering the old one. “You’re not actually gay.”
Under normal circumstances, Mulder would probably get angry, as angry as he ever gets, anyway, because he’s helping out a friend, not offering himself up for dissection. As it is, he can barely remember to keep drawing breath.
“That’s not a question.”
Chavez snickers, drunker than Mulder even though Mulder is drunk enough to fear the walls. He clocks his knee into Mulder’s. “’Kay. You’re not gay. You just sleep with Zito. Did you. Before, or, or after. During? Did he change you?”
Mulder gives that more thought than it warrants. He remembers the guys after Cape Cod, names but not faces. He’d always made sure that he’d never have to see them again. He remembers feeling like Zito had pulled something out of him on the beach, twisted his hand in so deep.
“Maybe a little,” he acknowledges. Chavez presses the bottle into his hand like surely Mulder needs a drink after that, but it’s empty.
“You shouldn’t have let him do that.”
Mulder shrugs, closing his eyes. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“That’s. That’s awful, Mark.” Chavez sounds heartbroken; he has all night long, but Mulder’s far enough gone now that he can hear it without making some idiot joke.
“It’s okay,” Mulder says. He’d gotten over this crisis four years ago, before he’d learned that Zito had been drafted by the A’s, before Zito had sped through the minors and reoccurred in Mulder’s consciousness for two weeks in Vancouver, three weeks in Sacramento, before anything important had happened. He can look back on it with odd fondness, like how he used to be scared of elevators.
“Doesn’t make much sense.” Chavez’s fingers fold against Mulder’s shoulder. “He’s not, like. The type of guy who should be able to do that to you.”
Shrugging again, Mulder leans slightly into Chavez’s hand. He’s never had any luck explaining what Zito does to him, not to himself, certainly not to another person.
“He’s different. You don’t see him like that.” Mulder is aware of Chavez’s hand opening, smoothing over his shoulder. Mulder’s shirt pulls and catches and Chavez’s thumb touches bare skin.
“Change,” Chavez says, bloodshot and forever altered by the first real failure of his life. “I hate being like this.”
Then he kisses Mulder, hot on Mulder’s jaw and on the corner of his mouth, teeth snicking, his fingers sweeping under Mulder’s shirt. Mulder rolls his head back and his equilibrium is shot, his mind skewing widely off-center. He raises his hand to the side of Chavez’s face and kisses him back.
There’s no marked difference in taste. Zito likes whiskey too, licking at the mouth of the bottle, licking at the roof of Mulder’s mouth, and once they’d lain together on the floor with Mulder’s life in boxes around them. Chavez’s hair isn’t as long, sticky with gel, and the callus on the heel of his palm scrapes at the base of Mulder’s throat. Warm and so drunk, Chavez pushing him back onto the couch, hard edge of Chavez’s body lining up with Mulder’s stomach.
A thought flashes through Mulder’s mind, wondering if Zito will want to hear this story as he has wanted to hear everything else. Zito digs for Mulder’s near-death experiences, defining moments, first time he saw the ocean, first time he kissed a girl, first time he kissed a boy, though of course Zito was there for that one. Zito wants to map him out, write down their separate histories so that he can see the moment when they began to intersect, and Mulder knows he’ll have to tell Zito this because it’s too incredible not to, the time Eric Chavez kissed me and it wasn’t too bad. He tries foggily to imagine how he’d feel if situations were reversed, but he stalls out.
Chavez’s hand presses flat on Mulder through his jeans, and his back arches a little, breathing into it. Chavez says Mulder’s name and he sounds like he’s crying. Mulder wants to skip ahead, get to the part where Chavez is scratching his shoulders and his heels are jammed into Mulder’s back.
Instead, Chavez rises for air and Mulder can see him then, his eyes screwed shut and his mouth contorted, and that’s not right. Zito always looks at him. Zito smiles so clean, spanning his hands on Mulder’s body and asking him in awe, jesus, did you feel that?
He shoves Chavez away. Chavez falls off the couch and cracks his head into the coffee table, a slash of red at his temple and blood inching down the thin path between his eye and his hair. The look on Chavez’s face is beyond priceless.
“Don’t do that again,” Mulder tells him, his mouth feeling strange and bitten. Chavez blinks at him, ideal in his shock. Mulder stands, and Chavez’s hand darts, grasping for a moment at Mulder’s leg before Mulder kicks him away. He almost loses his balance, his vision teary and stuttered, his stomach roiling.
“Goddamn it, Mark, don’t you dare,” Chavez half-screams from the floor, but Mulder doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
“Living the fucking consequence, Eric.” Mulder holds the doorframe to steady himself. “How bad do you feel right now, you think I want that to happen to me?”
He leaves Chavez cursing and bleeding on the floor, follows the hallway to his bedroom and locks the door. Falling down onto his bed, he stares at things that don’t move until he’s sure he’s not going to throw up. A near memory throws itself at him, Chavez’s hair coming unstuck under Mulder’s fingers, curling at the ends.
An hour or two passes. Mulder lets the drunk run slowly in him, dampening his thoughts. The knock at his window scares him so bad he bites his tongue.
He carefully lifts his head, sees Zito standing spirit-like, flattening his hand on the glass so that fog sinks out around his fingers, mouthing something indistinct. Mulder is certain that he’s a hallucination, a dream, until he sees the ash on Zito’s fingers leaving pale streaks, too specific a detail.
Zito grins at him as he opens the window, standing out there in the grass. “Hiya.”
Mulder fists his hand in Zito’s shirt. “Get in here.” Zito climbs through the window, gawky like fourteen years old and suddenly six feet tall. Mulder is shaken, having trouble fighting his way through this.
Zito touches Mulder’s forehead. “Are you okay?”
Mulder shakes his head. “Fucked up. Fucked up night, you shoulda seen it.”
He collapses back onto the bed, feeling the mattress give as Zito sits next to him. “What happened?”
Waving his hand indistinctly, Mulder runs his tongue over the back of his teeth, finding no trace of Chavez, nothing but liquor now. “Chavez? Crazy. Crazier than we thought.”
Zito pushes his hand across Mulder’s stomach, setting off sparks because Mulder was more than half turned-on by previous events, and anyway, he hasn’t seen Zito since before the break. Maybe that’s why, a three day drought and any wet mouth would have been welcome.
“What’d he do?” Zito asks.
Something creaks in the rafters of the house. Mulder can picture Chavez tossing on the couch, too long, still sleeping in his jeans. “Wanted to. You know. Put his hands on me. Like, wow. Couldn’t believe it.”
Zito’s hand stops, hovering with fingertips defining an arc on flatland under Mulder’s ribs. Mulder’s eyes are closed, raced pieces of cotton and flint sparkling.
“Wait. What? You, he did what?” Zito’s voice is climbing panic.
Mulder places his hand on top of Zito’s, forcing it down, sweet pressure and air-thin T-shirt, heat gathering. “I didn’t let him. I told him not to.”
“You didn’t sleep with him?” Zito’s hand is wriggling, drag of knuckles, scratch of fingertips. His heartbeat is going so fast Mulder can hear it.
“Nah.”
Zito pauses. “Did you want to?”
And fuck Zito for not taking a straight answer and letting it be; he’ll get what he deserves.
Mulder shrugs. “Yeah.”
Long long moment of silence. Zito’s breath whistles. Mulder waits him out, wanting to feel Zito’s hand move on his stomach again.
Mulder’s almost asleep again, and Zito whispers, “But you didn’t.”
He links his fingers with Zito’s, his palm fit into the back of Zito’s hand. “He couldn’t do anything to me.”
Counting back, it’s been better than a year and a half since he slept with someone who wasn’t Zito. Astonishing thing to realize, like waking up in August of his minor league year, when baseball was everything behind him and everything before him too. At the heart of it, Mulder doesn’t really see the point in fucking around if means he might not get to fuck Zito anymore. Everything is so easy, sex for free except during the All-Star break.
He looks up to find Zito staring at him with a mix of confusion and relief and probably anger, somewhere below all the rest of it. Mulder smiles. “Quit worrying, man. C’mon. I’m drunk, so. Take off your shirt.”
And Zito barely hesitates before he obeys, stretch of skin and arms and Mulder won’t risk it. Mulder is overheated, slicing his hands over Zito’s shoulders, wanting nothing more than for life to stay the same as it is now. He learned a long time ago not to fuck with a good thing.
*
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