works out pretty well
shopping for my brother's birthday yesterday, i saw in the window of the giants dugout store a zito giants jersey, and man. hold me back. punks weren't even selling them yet! it was just for display. i was like, bitches! so i'll get one in phoenix, though it'll cost me a bomb. i will wear the zito a's shirt under the zito giants jersey, because representation is key.
i am driven to distraction, waiting for spring training.
Attention Junkie
By Candle Beck
You’re bored. Crosby’s playing videogames, killing zombies with a chainsaw. You’re sitting on the floor next to him, three green pills and a roll of Lifesavers in your pocket and your socks under the couch. It’s a Thursday afternoon sometime in August, and you’d be drinking if you weren’t already still kinda drunk from last night.
It’s too hot. The space above Crosby’s lip gleams, your shirt stuck to your back.
“This is a pretty disturbing game,” you note as the chainsaw squeals rustily and another zombie falls into bloody pieces on the screen.
“Wouldn’t know. Desensitized.” Crosby smiles at you sideways.
“You can see the guts and everything.”
“Yeah, the graphics are kinda ridiculous.”
Crosby’s missed the point. You pull your knees up to your chest, studying your bare feet, inched into a patch of sunlight. All year, it’s been like this, music from the stereo and rainbows in straight shots through the sliding glass door. You’re bored out of your mind, fantasizing absently about Huston Street.
“Let’s do something else,” you say.
Glancing at you out of the corner of his eye, Crosby narrowly averts having his brain eaten, throwing a corpse into the street, a skittering spray of blood when it hits the asphalt. “Like what?”
“Whatever. We’re young, we’re rich. Surely we can come up with something better than this.” Your skin is vibrating, running your fingers over the small bumps of the pills in your pocket, your mouth sticky and dry.
“Hey, I’m saving the world from the flesh-eating undead. Don’t try to take that away from me.”
You press your mouth down on your knee, feeling your lip flatten against your teeth, the bone of your kneecap fishhooked. Your leg wants to twitch, but you won’t let it, imagining that your body is covered in a thin sheet of ice, held motionless. A bead of sweat rolls down your side; you can feel it seeping into the waistband of your briefs.
The summer moves so slowly. You’re not certain if it’s you or the season. Two greens already behind you, the world seems to go by in stop-motion, the blue jitter of the pool in the edge of your vision making you suspicious. You need to get out of the fucking house. But Crosby had said, “Keep me company,” and now he’s saying:
“If you want something to do, Richie, you can make yourself useful.”
He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. You sigh, and put your hand on his knee. He shifts, the tip of his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, decay and violence dancing in his face. You walk your hand up his leg and he exhales softly, starts to hum as you press your palm to his dick through his jeans.
You get him unbuttoned and push your hand into his shorts, hot enough to match the air, and you’re counting your teeth with your tongue, slid up next to him like a shadow. He’s still playing the game, his hands held awkwardly high to give you room. You rest your forehead on his shoulder, jerking him off so clean and easy, slick and rhythm, his stark blue speedstick smell clouding your mind. You know him so well. You’ve been doing this for years.
You think idly about the dirt in Texas, which ground into Crosby’s hands and elbows and hips, and you could always feel it, slim gritty veil, no matter if he’d just taken a shower or what. Like maybe it’d come out of him, and you remember thinking that there were fucking acres underneath his skin, whole countries.
Just to be safe, you keep one ear open on the hallway, the clap of the front door, halfheartedly thinking, what if they could see me now.
Crosby’s head drops back onto the couch cushion, moaning a little bit. He lets his arm fall across yours, same hitch in his breath and click in his throat that means he’s almost almost almost there. You grin sharply, tighten your grip, lifting your head for a moment to watch the zombies swarm and attack, cracking off the top of his skull and digging their hands in. You can’t get enough of him like this, of any of them, when finally, at last, you are the only thing he cares about.
Crosby’s hips jerk and he comes all over your hand. You pull a face and wipe it off on the carpet, touch Crosby’s chest as it jackrabbits, tripping your fingers down the steps of his ribs. Your forehead has left a damp circle on Crosby’s shoulder, and you want to suck the salt out of it.
Recomposed, Crosby rolls his head to the side and smiles faintly at you. You’re chewing feverishly on the insides of your cheeks.
“Thanks, man.”
You nod, and move away from him, tucking your legs back up against your chest. You’ve got two hours before you can take another green; Crosby has never been better than ten minutes worth of distraction, and you hate him a little bit for that.
Crosby resumes his game, his shoulders lax and his eyes glassy. You like the look of him like this, his tethers cut and his heart strumming almost visibly. Still, though, you wish he’d agreed to come out with you; you’re losing your faith in the walls of your house.
An hour or two after that, you’re crashing, half-asleep already, and the front door bangs shut. There’s muffled conversation in the hallway, and then Street appears, a waxed-apple shine on his skin, all gold and white leaning on the doorframe.
“Hi, you guys, what’s up?”
You start, jamming your shoulder into the couch painfully. You’d been painstakingly daydreaming acts of bravery and heroism: performing an emergency tracheotomy on the sidewalk with your penknife and a ballpoint pen, shoving a small child out of the path of an oncoming truck, running into a burning building with an artful trail of blood snaking down your cheek.
Street is smiling down at you, looking like he’s under glass. You unpeel your tongue from the roof of your mouth and manage to say, “Bored, Huston.”
Crosby mutters something under his breath. His eyes have frosted over almost totally, the corner of his mouth fallen. On the screen, his avatar’s skin is melting and green; you hadn’t realized that the zombies were infectious.
“I brought Barry.”
You sit up a bit straighter. “Yeah?”
Street nods. “He’s stealing our alcohol.”
“He’s nothing but bad habits,” Crosby says carefully, rolling each word around in his mouth. You grin against your knee, thinking that Crosby’s pretty uptight for a guy that just got a handjob. You wonder for a minute if you can be counted as a bad habit, or merely reoccurring poor judgment.
Street slumps onto the couch, slinging his leg over your shoulder. You shove it away, your whole body flushing, and roll out from under, crouching briefly with your hands flat on the carpet, staring at the loose sprawl of Street on the couch, his head canted to the side. Something crashes in the kitchen, and you shake it off and stand up.
“Sounds like he could use a hand,” you say, badly unsettled by Street’s crumpled shirt and sleepy eyes, and you’re already turning away when Crosby snorts quietly and says:
“Well, you’re certainly qualified for that.”
You clench your fists, picturing Huston Street’s sweetly confused face, and you leave the room without looking back.
Zito’s on his knees in the kitchen, messily sweeping pieces of broken glass into a pile with the side of his hand. You grab his shoulder and pull him away, smack him upside the head.
“Idiot. That’s your fucking livelihood.”
He scowls up at you, threads of hair on his forehead. “I was being careful.”
“You wouldn’t know careful if it walked the fuck up and introduced itself. Here.” You hand him a magazine from the table and he sighs like you’re some kind of curse, but uses it to brush the glass together. The fluorescent light sparks off a speck of glass on the back of his hand. Cautiously, you kneel beside him and take his hand in your own, picking out the glass. His face is downcast.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.” You stand, your knees popping. Washing your hands at the sink, you think that you should have done this after you had your hand on Crosby’s cock, listening to the ring and clink of Zito funneling the glass into the trash.
Not quite steadily, you dig a pill out of your pocket and put it in your mouth, the powder disintegrating and turning your tongue green, as good as a Jolly Rancher. You duck your head under the faucet to wash it down, and Zito’s hand skids hard up your back, making you slam your temple into the faucet. You curse and jerk upright, pressing the wet heel of your hand down on your temple.
“Fuck. Motherfucker.”
Zito blinks at you, big dark eyes all innocent and you don’t buy that for a second. You haven’t, not for years now.
“You take too much of that shit,” he tells you.
You might have a head wound because of him. You’re in no sort of mood. Grinning maniacally, you answer, “It’s just aspirin.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
You shrug. You owe him exactly nothing. You’re distantly aware that he might be right, because you take a pill when you wake up and sometimes you count the hours until it’s time to take another one, and somehow the hours between seem to be getting shorter. Fewer. A day like today, racked out on the living room floor with fucking Crosby and his fucking zombies, a minor substance abuse problem feels like the only reasonable solution.
And there’s a candy dish of greens in the clubhouse, a skull and crossbones painted on the silver front of the coffee machine that is not regular and not decaf. Nobody really worries about it. Zito will take some occasionally, if he broke curfew the night before a start, if he’s still on East Coast time, so really, what can he say? Four and a half months into the baseball season, anything that keeps your blood moving is worth the risk.
Zito lays his fingers down on your stomach. You inhale instinctively, drawing away from him.
“I can see your ribs.”
You look down at yourself, wrinkles of your T-shirt between his fingers, squinting. “You cannot.”
“When you’re not wearing a shirt-”
“I can see your ribs when you take off your shirt, too,” you say, and Zito rolls his eyes, takes his hand off you. You’re surprised to find that you kinda miss it, small arch of pressure points fading until you’re not sure where exactly he’d touched you.
Zito rummages around in the cabinets, liberating the jelly glasses with cartoon characters that Street’s parents had shipped him, neatly bubble-wrapped, when he finally gave up looking for a place of his own and admitted that he’d moved in. He gets the vodka out of the freezer and makes up some screwdrivers, sucking orange juice off the edge of his hand.
“This is why I don’t really listen to yourself about this stuff, you know,” you tell him, and hop up onto the counter, tapping your cup against his. “It’s two in the afternoon, and there’s too much vodka in this.”
“Too much vodka for two in the afternoon, or too much vodka in general?” Zito asks, unconcerned.
You don’t bother to answer, studying his messy hair and good face. Zito looks like he’s sleepwalking most of the time, only really wakes up on the field, in the sun. You’ve been trying to figure out if he likes you better than Crosby does, than Mulder did, but Zito acts like this with everybody, widening his eyes and worrying briefly, fixing drinks, licking his bottom lip.
“What were you doing with Huston?”
Lifting one shoulder, Zito starts gnawing on his thumbnail, another bad habit to add to the list.
“We went to Chuck E. Cheese for lunch.”
You laugh in disbelief. “Bullshit you did. Chuck E. Cheese?”
He shrugs again. “Good pizza. He wanted to play skee-ball.”
“That’s hilarious.”
Zito sorta smirks and looks down at his drink. You finish most of yours, knowing that the alcohol will dull the speed, keep you from twitching. Zito scratches the back of his leg with his foot, eyeing you speculatively, dark in a way that you have come to recognize.
“Well,” he says, drawling a little. You’re reminded of how Mulder got when he was drunk, slow and oddly graceful, his hands open low on your stomach, and you were just the nearest warm body.
You hop off the counter, your bare feet sticking to the linoleum. “C’mon,” you say, and he quick polishes off his drink, his mouth shining, following you down the hall.
Inside your room, you press him up against the door and say, “Couple hours with the kid, you must be going out of your mind. All look, no touch.”
Zito tips his head back and smiles up at the ceiling. “Don’t project your shit onto me, man.”
You bite his neck for that one, suck a bruise just under his jaw. He smells brightly of orange juice, the bitter sting of aftershave on your tongue. His hand slides up around your back, latches onto your shoulder. He pushes you to your knees, but honestly, you go down without a fight.
Zito has always preferred your mouth, same as Mulder, which distinguishes them from Crosby, who only ever wants you to jerk him off. Zito’s the only one of the three of them who you’ve ever thought might return the favor, though, seeing the way he looks at you sometimes, the way he gets stupid and reckless around Danny Haren and Huston Street. If Zito doesn’t get traded, if he lives through to free agency here in Oakland, you think maybe he’ll even fuck you, if you ask real nice.
Of course, you’re pretty sure you’ll never ask.
It’s of no consequence at the moment. You mouth his stomach with one hand holding up his shirt and the other unbuckling his belt. You pull his zipper down with your teeth because it makes him breathe out a laugh and pet your hair, his hands not quite steady. Fitting your thumbs into his hips, you go down until your forehead rests on his stomach. He’s muttering, his head dropped forward when you glance up, hair like a shield in front of his closed eyes.
Zito doesn’t take you seriously, no more than you take him, but you very much love the sounds he makes, staggers and coughs and whistles, his fingers hooked around your ears. As usual, there’s a tremble as he struggles to keep his hips from moving and then he gives up, pushing forward, and it breaks your heart a little bit, but you’re not sure if it’s that he tries to stay still or that he fails.
You have to hold onto the wall beside his body as you get to your feet again. The speed is all through you now, bloodstreamed and dissolved, and you have no faith in your legs to support you. Zito is catching his breath, a dim crooked smile rising on his face. You offer him a Lifesaver, but he shakes his head. You pop two, red and yellow, because you hate this taste in your mouth-always have.
Zito goes into a full-body shiver and you just step back, having seen it before. The room is dark because you didn’t bother to open the curtains this morning, and Zito framed by the door looks like a photograph that wasn’t properly exposed.
Contentment pours off him like smoke. He smiles sleepily at you and says, “We should get back.”
You crunch into the candy, one of your back teeth aching, and the light in the hallway cuts into your eyes like acid. You blink away the white spots, trailing Zito.
Crosby and Street are just where you’d left them, though the game has changed, bile-dripping monsters instead of zombies, and you could do without any of this right now. Street is laughing, his teeth showing, and you experience a small jolt in your chest, pushing it away resolutely, because you might be a fuck-up, but you’re not fucking stupid.
You crawl over Street to the other side of the couch, not wanting to deal with the rat’s nest of black wires snaking across the floor. With your equilibrium shot, you’d end up on your ass, Crosby crowing and never letting you forget it.
Street’s almost painfully warm beneath you, sucking in his stomach and touching your side briefly. You know that it doesn’t mean anything, and curl up against the arm of the couch. Zito plops down on the floor next to Crosby and bites Street’s knee, just a joke, Street yelping and folding his legs Indian-style. Your pulse threads along, weaving together the pill you took and the drink Zito made you. If you look real close, you can see the thin skin over the insides of your wrists flickering.
Zito and Crosby and Street are talking abnormally loud, but you think that might just be you. They seem to have forgotten that you’re in the room, which is kinda annoying, considering two-thirds of them got off today because of you.
That’s nothing new, though. You’ve been getting Crosby off since Double-A, when he kept forgetting your name and then kept trying to convince you to let him call you Ricky. Crosby’s pathological need to be the coolest person in any given room had been even more pronounced back then, before they’d met Mark Mulder, who was cooler without even trying, and it had been your favorite victory, breaking him down to shudders and moans, panting against your shoulder with your slick hand down the front of his pants.
Zito’d seen you once sucking Mulder off in the bathroom of your old house, when you’d idiotically left the window cracked open, too occupied with keeping Mulder from ripping the towel rack out of the wall. Incredibly drunk that night, tile harder than glass under your knees, and you’d glanced up, one arm wrapped around the backs of Mulder’s legs, to see Zito’s reflection in the mirror, in the slash of the open window, slack and blurry-eyed with surprise. He’d asked you, a few days later, if you and Mulder were, like, a thing, and you’d blown him in the showers after everyone else had left to demonstrate just how much of a thing you and Mulder were not.
You keep it secret and held close on the inside, Mulder and Crosby and Zito, and then Mulder was gone, but that doesn’t bother you too much. You still have enough to keep you busy.
None of them have ever been at all good for you, but when you get them alone, they go where you lead and pay attention to you and you are, in short intervals, the focus of the world. It calms you down.
“Hey, space cadet.” Crosby punches you right in the center of your knee cap, funny bone buzz and ring of pain. You hiss and huddle closer to the arm of the couch, pulling your legs up.
“What.”
“You should go on a beer run.”
You glare at him. Street is folded like an envelope, his knee near his chin in a way that makes you wonder exactly how flexible he is. Zito is playing the controller like it’s a piano, using his fingers instead of his thumbs. The monsters have disappeared, replaced by shiny futuristic cars and rainy gleaming streets.
“You want beer, you can go your own damn self.”
“Can’t. Me and Barry are in the middle of a tournament. Come on, please? I’ll buy.”
You sigh. Crosby’s not even looking at you. You kinda want to smooth your fingers across the back of his neck, where the line of his hair is as straight as a pencil. Zito glances back at you, wedged corner of his eye.
“I’ll go with you, man,” Street says softly.
Gritting your teeth, you carefully bend your legs out. Your foot’s asleep. Street stands and offers you a hand, and you grip his forearm and allow yourself to be leveraged off the couch, leaning into him a little bit more than balance requires. He’s so fucking warm, cotton and summer rolled up.
“Heineken,” Crosby orders. You kick him.
“Money.”
He rolls his eyes and passes you a moist crumpled twenty, soft as Street’s T-shirt against the back of your arm. You casually toss an arm around Street’s shoulders and Zito asks you to get him some Chex Mix and a peanut butter cookie, looking up at you like he wants to bend you over something, but that’s typical Zito, and has nothing to do with you. You say whatever, trying to memorize the solid feel of Street under your arm, the neat slim nape of his neck and the ridged bones on top of his shoulders through his shirt.
You leave without bothering to put on your shoes. Street zips through the radio stations, and the world streaks past you like smeared paint, your thoughts broken up same as the music. Your eyes are huge, the white sunlight soaking in.
“A-One?” Street asks, naming the closest liquor store.
You shake your head. “They don’t have Chex Mix there.”
“We could go there and then Walgreens.”
“They’re not gonna let me in Walgreens without shoes on.”
Street cocks his head, angling to look at your feet on the pedals. “Whyn’t you put on your shoes?”
“Too fucking hot for shoes.”
Street grins, nods. You stare at the road, halfheartedly wishing he would take a five minute break from being the cutest goddamn thing you’ve ever seen.
“We’ll go to Eddie’s,” you say without looking at him. You feel like you’re going double the speed limit, but the gauge says thirty and maybe you’re just high.
“I like that place,” Street says. “I like that guy’s dog.”
“Yeah.” It’s a good dog, skinny mutt with patches of over-long fur on its flanks. It wanders the aisles at the liquor store, poking its nose into the backs of the customers’ knees. Once, it came trotting up to you with a bag of Skittles in its mouth.
“Oh, I forgot to show you.” Street digs around in his pocket, hiking his hips up off the seat. Your mouth goes dry, seeing the edge of his hipbone where his shirt has fallen away. You almost run off the road, tightening your hands around the wheel. No one who wears his jeans that tight could be completely straight.
Street pulls out a little plastic toy, a goggle-eyed alien in blue and green. He looks so happy it makes your stomach wrench. “I won it at the arcade. Cost thirty tickets, but look, it’s got a pencil sharpener in it.”
You aren’t breathing. You realize this as spots pound across your eyes, and you very carefully guide the car to the shoulder, viciously twisting the key with a shaking hand. Resting your forehead on the wheel, you work on inhale, exhale, wondering how many fucking kids you killed in your past life to deserve this.
“Um. Richie?”
Street’s hand alights on your shoulder, and you shy away from it, hunching against the door. You’re tweaked all to hell and back, your heart filling your throat. You want him so much, worse than air.
Forcefully, you remind yourself that you are a fuck-up. Your mouth is numb from the Lifesavers that you ate to erase Zito’s taste. You are running errands for Crosby on the off-chance that he needs more from you than a handjob. This thing, what you do for them, these favors, it’s cheap and sordid and a poor excuse for anything. You don’t want to drag Street into it. Your head is throbbing.
“Hey?”
Street sounds worried, not letting you move away from his hand again because there’s nowhere left for you to go, your shoulder flush to the door. His hand slides across your back. You suck in oxygen through your teeth.
“I’m fine.” You try to shrug him off but he won’t go. “Seriously, I just, I, stupid brain thing. I got dizzy.”
“Oh. I can drive?”
“No, it’s okay.” You straighten, scrub your hands across your face. Goddamn him. Fucking rookie. “I’m okay.”
You glance over at Street, and he’s staring at you, worrying his lip with his teeth. You have to look away, the day outside the car huge and bright. Your throat clicks several times as you attempt to swallow, locking your gaze on a red squirrel flitting through the trees, waiting until your heart isn’t beating quite so fast.
You wonder, if you leaned across the seat and kissed Street on the mouth, your hand across the back of his neck, what would he do? It’s somehow impossibly easy to imagine his arms looping around your neck, his forehead clonking into yours as he tries to press too close too soon. He’d be sweet and warm as honey. You could close your hand around his, feel the smooth corners of the little plastic alien poking out between his fingers.
Shaking it off, you bend a slight smile in his direction, clenching your teeth. “Never a dull moment, huh?”
Street sinks slowly back in his seat, raising his knee to rest it on the glove compartment. “You let me know if you need me to drive, okay? I really don’t mind.”
He’s not helping. You start the car again, swiping the back of your hand across your eyes. You’re fine. You took too many of those fucking pills, lost track of time.
It’s quiet for awhile as you pull yourself together, staring at the broken yellow line, the sun as thin as a match and bleeding through the cracks of the trees. Riding down from higher ground, your ears refuse to pop, pressure building so that everything is diluted, like on an airplane with the engines thrumming and beating so loud it almost sounds like silence. You look over to see Street gazing out the window with his forehead creased, his thumb tapping on his knee.
He’s freaked out, you think, slightly panicked. Freaked out or bored with you, and either is unacceptable, so you start talking about baseball, your eyes fixed on the road and you don’t even know exactly what you’re saying. You’re cracking jokes and making up stories about the American League East and Street starts to snicker, his shoulders relaxing back against the seat and making you realize too late that he’d been sitting tensely, strung tight by you and cut loose now by easier conversation.
It’s really something. Baseball’s the single constant in your life, in all your lives. Crosby and Zito are baseball nuts, it’s all they think about. Mulder was able to leave the game mostly on the field, but he mumbled about it in his sleep an awful lot. Street talks about baseball without accent, without stuttering, his face lit up and his hands molding the air. It takes you down and brings you back and reminds you that you have a better reason to be in Oakland than just waiting around for your heart to get broken.
By the time you get to the liquor store, Street seems to have forgotten about your little, whatever, inconsequential psychotic break in the car. You buy a pack of gum straight off, shoving three pieces into your mouth, needing something substantial between your teeth. Street wanders, whistling low so that the mutt will follow him around, tongue lolling out, gazing up at Street adoringly. You can sympathize.
You get Crosby’s beer and Zito’s Chex Mix and a chocolate chip cookie because you can’t find a peanut butter one, and Street buys a twist of beef jerky that he feeds to the dog, kneeling on the dirty floor and smiling up at you. You wish idly for something to disfigure him, a lightning strike or a comebacker through the box, smash his cheekbones, black his eyes, break his perfect teeth.
On the drive back, you’re feeling rough and uneasy, and you say out of the blue, “Zito’s got a crush on you.”
Street flinches in your peripheral vision, but his voice is steady as he answers, “Yeah, I know.”
You glance at him in surprise. “You do?”
Street shrugs, a flush spreading up his neck. “He told me. A little while ago.”
“No shit?” You think grudgingly that Zito’s got balls to burn, more than you could ever hope to have.
Embarrassed, folding his hands on his lap, Street keeps his eyes down, visibly trying to stay cool. “We were, um. We went out to this bar and I guess he got drunk? And he wanted to explain it, like. You know how he gets?”
“Dude’s in love with the sound of his own voice,” you say, and Street smiles briefly.
“Yeah. He went into all this. This crazy stuff. I mean, it was, like, almost at the beginning. I barely knew him. He kept saying how I was all funny and cool and stuff, and it wasn’t, um, not physical at all, but if I wanted to sleep with him he wouldn’t say no.”
You snort. Street’s whole face is bright red. “How romantic.”
“It’s not like that,” Street protests, picking at the seam of his jeans. “It’s just. He likes me. Whatever. I don’t think he’s even, like, you know. I think he’s just kinda screwed up.”
You turn that over in your mind for awhile. You wonder if you were less of a fuck-up, would you be straight?
“What are you doing, Rich?” Street asks quietly. You twitch and dig the bones of your thumbs into the underside of the wheel.
“What do you mean?”
“If you didn’t think I knew about Barry, why in the world were you telling me?”
Caught, you check the speedometer and fiddle the headlights on and off, trying to pick out the illumination on the sunlit road, but it’s no good. You’re pissed off at him for a second, for questioning your motives, as if you fucking have any.
“I just thought you should know.”
“Dude, it’s a secret. It’s his secret.”
Street sounds weirdly betrayed, righteously indignant on Zito’s behalf. You scowl, your gum small and gray and tasteless between your back teeth. You’re doing him a favor, because shit like this has ruined better men than him, and you, and Barry Zito.
“Whatever,” you mutter. “Excuse me for caring, but you shouldn’t let him fuck with you.”
“I think I can be the judge of who gets to fuck with me, thanks.”
You start, astonished. Street’s tucked in the shotgun seat with his leg drawn up, the side of his face unlined, though his mouth is shrunk and tight. You underestimate him, but you’ve known that for a long time now, or really, just the past few months that he’s been in your consciousness, crowding the space like steam. It’s easy to think of him as sweet and sheltered and kinda dim, but you were on this team when you were twenty-one, too, fucking around with the rest of the rotation and acting like there was nothing you needed to learn.
“Anyway,” he says, sighing. “It’s really not a big deal. Barry, I think he just wants me to like him.”
“Well. Yeah.”
“No, I mean, even just as a friend. Because he’s kinda doing the same thing with Danny. And. You, sometimes.” Street stares hard at his hands, his ears dull red. “I think it’s just for the attention.”
You’ve been hearing that your whole life. Cutting up in class, shining and talking fast at going away parties, giving head without being asked, seeking out trouble because you can’t stand it when people don’t remember you. You’re scared most of all of being erased, dismissed. Worse than speed, you are addicted to being watched, thankful for your blue eyes and powerful arms. Your dad used to get so mad at you.
“So, what?” you say, playing it off. “You’re stringing him along?”
“No.” Street glares at you. “He knows nothing’s gonna happen.”
“Does he?” you say with a slight sneer. “You told him that?”
“I told him that I respected his honesty,” Street says loftily. “And that I very much wanted to be his friend and whatever else happens, happens.”
You snort, something small and warm curling in your stomach, because Street didn’t say that he never would, he’s left the possibility open. “Stringing him along.”
“At least he told me,” Street says low. You bite the inside of your cheek, blood-sour and hot, wishing helplessly that he wouldn’t say things like that when you’re trying to drive.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Street gives you a wounded look, then turns away, resting his chin on his knee, his arms wound around his shin.
“Nothing. I just, I don’t need a whole bunch of drama right now.”
“Fuck, who does?” you ask rhetorically, though if you were at all honest, you’d admit that you are sickly attracted to it, playing Crosby and Zito and Street against each other, running on two hours of sleep, trying to see how far you can go without getting caught. It’s a goddamn good thing that you are not honest.
“I’m saying, if you’re trying to stir up trouble, or, like, getting back at Zito for something he did to you, I really wish you’d leave me out of it.”
“You think I’d do that? Use you like that?” You sound more curious than you intended, actually wanting to figure out what’s going on inside your head.
Street exhales against his jeans, fitting his eye socket into the cup of his knee. “I don’t know, Richie. I don’t really know any of you guys that well.”
That pretty much sums it up, you think, and you let the quiet crawl in between you, the road carrying you into the hills, all the way back home.
At your house, you shout a greeting towards the living room on your way to the kitchen, watching Street’s soft shadow move across the wall. You put one of the six-packs in the refrigerator and take the other along with Zito’s junk into the living room. Crosby’s alone, his eyes bloodshot and plasticky, still playing the race game.
Taking a beer out of the cardboard holder, you pass it down to Crosby. “You need to get a life, man.”
“What? What?” He doesn’t look away from the screen, tucking the bottle into the bend of his knee.
“You’ve been playing videogames for like six hours now.”
“So? Shut up.”
Street stifles a laugh behind you, and you turn, grinning at him and rolling your eyes. He mirrors it back to you, a fast shot to the chest, and you only turn back because Crosby’s weakly kicking at your ankle.
“Rich, Richie,” he says, still without looking at you. “Open my beer for me.”
You look at him in disbelief. “How about you hit pause?”
He shakes his head, biting his lip. “I’m gonna break my record. It requires undisturbed concentration, man, please? Please?”
You sigh, but reach down and get his beer. He’s impossible. You crack the bottle open on your belt buckle and set it down beside him. “There. Lazy useless motherfucker.”
Crosby bobs his head happily, and you wonder if his eyes are more gray or blue right now. They change, sometimes. Street takes up his seat on the couch again, toeing off his sneakers, and you push your hands into your pockets, feeling awkward.
“Where’s Barry?” Street asks.
Crosby sneers. “He’s being a little bitch. I kept beating him and he got all pissy. Ran off out back.”
You glance at Street and his face is unreadable, watching Crosby’s car spin and explode into a wall, Crosby cursing. You lick your teeth and leave the room, stepping barefoot onto the patio deck.
Before you and Crosby and Street and Melhuse moved into this empty crackerbox of a house, it was a family place, and there’s still a play structure on the far side of the pool, a swing set and monkey bars and a flat silver slide, half-buried in the overgrown grass. Zito has climbed up on top of the monkey bars, his legs hanging loose. He’s above the fence line, cut out of the sky.
The sun is still high; the days last for so long, especially off-days like this one.
You stand under him and touch his ankle, squinting up at him. “You’re cute when you sulk.”
Zito half-smiles for a second before he wipes it off his face. “Bobby’s being a jerk. He’s got this cheat, he found it online? He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Kept making fun of me when I was losing.”
He kicks his foot idly, and you let your hand travel with it, fingers hooked in the top of his shoe. His shoes have red lights in the heels, and they flash in arrhythmic patterns.
“Talked to Huston,” you say.
“Did you, now.”
“Here I was thinking that I was the one corrupting this team, but you know what even I wouldn’t do? Make a fucking pass at the fucking child who still goes to church.”
The edge of Zito’s mouth twists up. He’s staring over the fence into the neighbor’s empty yard, green and trim as a pool table. You’d like to be mad at him, for having the balls to say that to Street when you can barely even keep it together when you’re alone with him. But you’re not, really, because both you and Zito are a particular kind of walking wounded, and you have to take the good wherever it occurs.
“You could try for a million years and never corrupt this team,” Zito tells you. “We were fucked up long before you got here.”
You curl your toes in the grass, cool and bright, the sun glinting off the metal of the structure. You never did figure out what went on before you got here, but you know that Mulder accepted your mouth on his dick much more easily than you’d expected. You know that Zito gets special treatment from almost everyone, even though he’s only half the pitcher he once was, and getting worse by the fucking day.
“And I didn’t make a pass at him.”
“Sure as hell sounded like it.” You let go of Zito’s foot and latch your hands onto the bar, bending your knees so that your feet lift off the ground, the muscles in your arms stretching and straining. You drift back and forth slowly.
“You know, for someone who’ll suck off straight guys, you’re awful judgmental.”
“What fucking straight guy did I-”
“You want a fucking list?”
You shut up, glaring at Zito’s dirty kid’s sneakers. You are aware that you have made mistakes. You are still in the process of making mistakes. You don’t need that pointed out to you; friends are supposed to lie to each other about this kind of stuff.
You’re both quiet for a moment, you hanging and Zito’s feet swinging in short perfect arcs.
“You know what you are, man?” Zito says eventually.
“Oh, god, please tell me what I am.” You let yourself drop off the bar and thump onto your back on the grass. The sun is directly behind Zito’s head and it blocks him out almost totally. “How did I live this long without you around to fucking psychoanalyze me?”
Ignoring that, Zito tells you plainly, “You’re a sorority slut.”
You blink up at the whitened sky, pretty sure that you’re gonna be incredibly offended by whatever he says next.
“You’re that girl, the one that all the guys know is a sure thing. And they take her out somewhere cheap for dinner and then nail her, and then go back to their buddies and compare stories about all the shit she did for them.”
Stung worse than you want to admit, you pull up your lip over your teeth, closing your eyes. “You compare stories about me?” you ask, your voice breaking.
“No, jesus. You think I want Bobby fucking Crosby knowing anything about my sex life?”
You weren’t aware that Zito considered you part of his sex life, knowing that Crosby doesn’t, that Mulder never did, something small and unacknowledged on the side of their real lives, but it doesn’t make it any better to hear. The simple fact that Zito is saying this to you means that he doesn’t care for you at all. You never wanted him to, you remind yourself, and that doesn’t help either.
“For the record?” you manage. “This is the kind of thing that will generally make me disinclined to keep blowing you.”
Zito laughs, odd cackling laugh that sends a bird bursting out from the tree, leaves fluttering down in its wake.
“No, Richie, I don’t think it will. This is how you get people to like you.”
You lie on the grass feeling gut-shot. You’re easy, of course you’re easy, it’s a defining feature of your personality, but it’s just something you can do for them, something you’re good at, your second-best thing after pitching. You haven’t had a gag reflex since you were sixteen. You’ve never believed that reciprocation is necessary for decent sex, and maybe that means you’re screwed up, wanting Zito to slump against you all happy and hot and damp more than you want to kiss him, wanting Crosby to call for you when he’s bored more than you want him to stop treating you like a fucking puppy. Maybe you’re screwed up, but you’re doing this because it’s a nice thing to do and it’s fucking cruel of Zito to throw that back in your face.
The ground thumps, and you inch open your eyes to see Zito crouching over you, his head cocked to the side curiously.
“You don’t really care, though, right?” Zito asks you.
You almost laugh. You press your teeth into the inside of your lip and force yourself to think that you’re crashing, that’s all it is, the speed’s wearing off. That’s why it feels like your skin doesn’t fit, and why your hands won’t keep still, trembling in the grass.
“I don’t care,” you whisper.
Zito smiles at you, weirdly proud. “Good,” he says, and leans down, kisses you fast on the mouth and you’re too surprised to do anything about it. He stands up, amazingly tall, and sets his feet down to either side of your body, the two of you making a perpendicular angle.
“I’m still gonna get Huston, though,” Zito adds, as you’re staring up at him helplessly. “You know why?”
You move your mouth, silently asking, why?
Zito taps his foot into your ribs, the red light on his shoe blinkering crazily. “He’d never understand why you do the things you do. He’d never forgive you for it.”
And he steps away, leaving you like that. You open your eyes as wide as they will go, the sunlight searing in and washing out the green, the blue, the rusted metal of the swing set. He’s such an asshole. You never asked for any of this. Running your tongue across your lips, you try to catch some vague dim taste of him, something sweeter than what he usually leaves behind him
It’s no good. You’re alone in the yard, the shadows of the monkey bars slicing across your chest, wondering how long you’ll have to stay out here before one of them comes to get you, wondering which of the three of them it will be.
You wait for almost two hours, the sun melting down behind the fence. You’re crying when you finally get to your feet; no one cares.
THE END
i want to write another au. ideas?
i am driven to distraction, waiting for spring training.
Attention Junkie
By Candle Beck
You’re bored. Crosby’s playing videogames, killing zombies with a chainsaw. You’re sitting on the floor next to him, three green pills and a roll of Lifesavers in your pocket and your socks under the couch. It’s a Thursday afternoon sometime in August, and you’d be drinking if you weren’t already still kinda drunk from last night.
It’s too hot. The space above Crosby’s lip gleams, your shirt stuck to your back.
“This is a pretty disturbing game,” you note as the chainsaw squeals rustily and another zombie falls into bloody pieces on the screen.
“Wouldn’t know. Desensitized.” Crosby smiles at you sideways.
“You can see the guts and everything.”
“Yeah, the graphics are kinda ridiculous.”
Crosby’s missed the point. You pull your knees up to your chest, studying your bare feet, inched into a patch of sunlight. All year, it’s been like this, music from the stereo and rainbows in straight shots through the sliding glass door. You’re bored out of your mind, fantasizing absently about Huston Street.
“Let’s do something else,” you say.
Glancing at you out of the corner of his eye, Crosby narrowly averts having his brain eaten, throwing a corpse into the street, a skittering spray of blood when it hits the asphalt. “Like what?”
“Whatever. We’re young, we’re rich. Surely we can come up with something better than this.” Your skin is vibrating, running your fingers over the small bumps of the pills in your pocket, your mouth sticky and dry.
“Hey, I’m saving the world from the flesh-eating undead. Don’t try to take that away from me.”
You press your mouth down on your knee, feeling your lip flatten against your teeth, the bone of your kneecap fishhooked. Your leg wants to twitch, but you won’t let it, imagining that your body is covered in a thin sheet of ice, held motionless. A bead of sweat rolls down your side; you can feel it seeping into the waistband of your briefs.
The summer moves so slowly. You’re not certain if it’s you or the season. Two greens already behind you, the world seems to go by in stop-motion, the blue jitter of the pool in the edge of your vision making you suspicious. You need to get out of the fucking house. But Crosby had said, “Keep me company,” and now he’s saying:
“If you want something to do, Richie, you can make yourself useful.”
He doesn’t take his eyes off the screen. You sigh, and put your hand on his knee. He shifts, the tip of his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, decay and violence dancing in his face. You walk your hand up his leg and he exhales softly, starts to hum as you press your palm to his dick through his jeans.
You get him unbuttoned and push your hand into his shorts, hot enough to match the air, and you’re counting your teeth with your tongue, slid up next to him like a shadow. He’s still playing the game, his hands held awkwardly high to give you room. You rest your forehead on his shoulder, jerking him off so clean and easy, slick and rhythm, his stark blue speedstick smell clouding your mind. You know him so well. You’ve been doing this for years.
You think idly about the dirt in Texas, which ground into Crosby’s hands and elbows and hips, and you could always feel it, slim gritty veil, no matter if he’d just taken a shower or what. Like maybe it’d come out of him, and you remember thinking that there were fucking acres underneath his skin, whole countries.
Just to be safe, you keep one ear open on the hallway, the clap of the front door, halfheartedly thinking, what if they could see me now.
Crosby’s head drops back onto the couch cushion, moaning a little bit. He lets his arm fall across yours, same hitch in his breath and click in his throat that means he’s almost almost almost there. You grin sharply, tighten your grip, lifting your head for a moment to watch the zombies swarm and attack, cracking off the top of his skull and digging their hands in. You can’t get enough of him like this, of any of them, when finally, at last, you are the only thing he cares about.
Crosby’s hips jerk and he comes all over your hand. You pull a face and wipe it off on the carpet, touch Crosby’s chest as it jackrabbits, tripping your fingers down the steps of his ribs. Your forehead has left a damp circle on Crosby’s shoulder, and you want to suck the salt out of it.
Recomposed, Crosby rolls his head to the side and smiles faintly at you. You’re chewing feverishly on the insides of your cheeks.
“Thanks, man.”
You nod, and move away from him, tucking your legs back up against your chest. You’ve got two hours before you can take another green; Crosby has never been better than ten minutes worth of distraction, and you hate him a little bit for that.
Crosby resumes his game, his shoulders lax and his eyes glassy. You like the look of him like this, his tethers cut and his heart strumming almost visibly. Still, though, you wish he’d agreed to come out with you; you’re losing your faith in the walls of your house.
An hour or two after that, you’re crashing, half-asleep already, and the front door bangs shut. There’s muffled conversation in the hallway, and then Street appears, a waxed-apple shine on his skin, all gold and white leaning on the doorframe.
“Hi, you guys, what’s up?”
You start, jamming your shoulder into the couch painfully. You’d been painstakingly daydreaming acts of bravery and heroism: performing an emergency tracheotomy on the sidewalk with your penknife and a ballpoint pen, shoving a small child out of the path of an oncoming truck, running into a burning building with an artful trail of blood snaking down your cheek.
Street is smiling down at you, looking like he’s under glass. You unpeel your tongue from the roof of your mouth and manage to say, “Bored, Huston.”
Crosby mutters something under his breath. His eyes have frosted over almost totally, the corner of his mouth fallen. On the screen, his avatar’s skin is melting and green; you hadn’t realized that the zombies were infectious.
“I brought Barry.”
You sit up a bit straighter. “Yeah?”
Street nods. “He’s stealing our alcohol.”
“He’s nothing but bad habits,” Crosby says carefully, rolling each word around in his mouth. You grin against your knee, thinking that Crosby’s pretty uptight for a guy that just got a handjob. You wonder for a minute if you can be counted as a bad habit, or merely reoccurring poor judgment.
Street slumps onto the couch, slinging his leg over your shoulder. You shove it away, your whole body flushing, and roll out from under, crouching briefly with your hands flat on the carpet, staring at the loose sprawl of Street on the couch, his head canted to the side. Something crashes in the kitchen, and you shake it off and stand up.
“Sounds like he could use a hand,” you say, badly unsettled by Street’s crumpled shirt and sleepy eyes, and you’re already turning away when Crosby snorts quietly and says:
“Well, you’re certainly qualified for that.”
You clench your fists, picturing Huston Street’s sweetly confused face, and you leave the room without looking back.
Zito’s on his knees in the kitchen, messily sweeping pieces of broken glass into a pile with the side of his hand. You grab his shoulder and pull him away, smack him upside the head.
“Idiot. That’s your fucking livelihood.”
He scowls up at you, threads of hair on his forehead. “I was being careful.”
“You wouldn’t know careful if it walked the fuck up and introduced itself. Here.” You hand him a magazine from the table and he sighs like you’re some kind of curse, but uses it to brush the glass together. The fluorescent light sparks off a speck of glass on the back of his hand. Cautiously, you kneel beside him and take his hand in your own, picking out the glass. His face is downcast.
“Thanks.”
“Sure.” You stand, your knees popping. Washing your hands at the sink, you think that you should have done this after you had your hand on Crosby’s cock, listening to the ring and clink of Zito funneling the glass into the trash.
Not quite steadily, you dig a pill out of your pocket and put it in your mouth, the powder disintegrating and turning your tongue green, as good as a Jolly Rancher. You duck your head under the faucet to wash it down, and Zito’s hand skids hard up your back, making you slam your temple into the faucet. You curse and jerk upright, pressing the wet heel of your hand down on your temple.
“Fuck. Motherfucker.”
Zito blinks at you, big dark eyes all innocent and you don’t buy that for a second. You haven’t, not for years now.
“You take too much of that shit,” he tells you.
You might have a head wound because of him. You’re in no sort of mood. Grinning maniacally, you answer, “It’s just aspirin.”
“Oh, bullshit.”
You shrug. You owe him exactly nothing. You’re distantly aware that he might be right, because you take a pill when you wake up and sometimes you count the hours until it’s time to take another one, and somehow the hours between seem to be getting shorter. Fewer. A day like today, racked out on the living room floor with fucking Crosby and his fucking zombies, a minor substance abuse problem feels like the only reasonable solution.
And there’s a candy dish of greens in the clubhouse, a skull and crossbones painted on the silver front of the coffee machine that is not regular and not decaf. Nobody really worries about it. Zito will take some occasionally, if he broke curfew the night before a start, if he’s still on East Coast time, so really, what can he say? Four and a half months into the baseball season, anything that keeps your blood moving is worth the risk.
Zito lays his fingers down on your stomach. You inhale instinctively, drawing away from him.
“I can see your ribs.”
You look down at yourself, wrinkles of your T-shirt between his fingers, squinting. “You cannot.”
“When you’re not wearing a shirt-”
“I can see your ribs when you take off your shirt, too,” you say, and Zito rolls his eyes, takes his hand off you. You’re surprised to find that you kinda miss it, small arch of pressure points fading until you’re not sure where exactly he’d touched you.
Zito rummages around in the cabinets, liberating the jelly glasses with cartoon characters that Street’s parents had shipped him, neatly bubble-wrapped, when he finally gave up looking for a place of his own and admitted that he’d moved in. He gets the vodka out of the freezer and makes up some screwdrivers, sucking orange juice off the edge of his hand.
“This is why I don’t really listen to yourself about this stuff, you know,” you tell him, and hop up onto the counter, tapping your cup against his. “It’s two in the afternoon, and there’s too much vodka in this.”
“Too much vodka for two in the afternoon, or too much vodka in general?” Zito asks, unconcerned.
You don’t bother to answer, studying his messy hair and good face. Zito looks like he’s sleepwalking most of the time, only really wakes up on the field, in the sun. You’ve been trying to figure out if he likes you better than Crosby does, than Mulder did, but Zito acts like this with everybody, widening his eyes and worrying briefly, fixing drinks, licking his bottom lip.
“What were you doing with Huston?”
Lifting one shoulder, Zito starts gnawing on his thumbnail, another bad habit to add to the list.
“We went to Chuck E. Cheese for lunch.”
You laugh in disbelief. “Bullshit you did. Chuck E. Cheese?”
He shrugs again. “Good pizza. He wanted to play skee-ball.”
“That’s hilarious.”
Zito sorta smirks and looks down at his drink. You finish most of yours, knowing that the alcohol will dull the speed, keep you from twitching. Zito scratches the back of his leg with his foot, eyeing you speculatively, dark in a way that you have come to recognize.
“Well,” he says, drawling a little. You’re reminded of how Mulder got when he was drunk, slow and oddly graceful, his hands open low on your stomach, and you were just the nearest warm body.
You hop off the counter, your bare feet sticking to the linoleum. “C’mon,” you say, and he quick polishes off his drink, his mouth shining, following you down the hall.
Inside your room, you press him up against the door and say, “Couple hours with the kid, you must be going out of your mind. All look, no touch.”
Zito tips his head back and smiles up at the ceiling. “Don’t project your shit onto me, man.”
You bite his neck for that one, suck a bruise just under his jaw. He smells brightly of orange juice, the bitter sting of aftershave on your tongue. His hand slides up around your back, latches onto your shoulder. He pushes you to your knees, but honestly, you go down without a fight.
Zito has always preferred your mouth, same as Mulder, which distinguishes them from Crosby, who only ever wants you to jerk him off. Zito’s the only one of the three of them who you’ve ever thought might return the favor, though, seeing the way he looks at you sometimes, the way he gets stupid and reckless around Danny Haren and Huston Street. If Zito doesn’t get traded, if he lives through to free agency here in Oakland, you think maybe he’ll even fuck you, if you ask real nice.
Of course, you’re pretty sure you’ll never ask.
It’s of no consequence at the moment. You mouth his stomach with one hand holding up his shirt and the other unbuckling his belt. You pull his zipper down with your teeth because it makes him breathe out a laugh and pet your hair, his hands not quite steady. Fitting your thumbs into his hips, you go down until your forehead rests on his stomach. He’s muttering, his head dropped forward when you glance up, hair like a shield in front of his closed eyes.
Zito doesn’t take you seriously, no more than you take him, but you very much love the sounds he makes, staggers and coughs and whistles, his fingers hooked around your ears. As usual, there’s a tremble as he struggles to keep his hips from moving and then he gives up, pushing forward, and it breaks your heart a little bit, but you’re not sure if it’s that he tries to stay still or that he fails.
You have to hold onto the wall beside his body as you get to your feet again. The speed is all through you now, bloodstreamed and dissolved, and you have no faith in your legs to support you. Zito is catching his breath, a dim crooked smile rising on his face. You offer him a Lifesaver, but he shakes his head. You pop two, red and yellow, because you hate this taste in your mouth-always have.
Zito goes into a full-body shiver and you just step back, having seen it before. The room is dark because you didn’t bother to open the curtains this morning, and Zito framed by the door looks like a photograph that wasn’t properly exposed.
Contentment pours off him like smoke. He smiles sleepily at you and says, “We should get back.”
You crunch into the candy, one of your back teeth aching, and the light in the hallway cuts into your eyes like acid. You blink away the white spots, trailing Zito.
Crosby and Street are just where you’d left them, though the game has changed, bile-dripping monsters instead of zombies, and you could do without any of this right now. Street is laughing, his teeth showing, and you experience a small jolt in your chest, pushing it away resolutely, because you might be a fuck-up, but you’re not fucking stupid.
You crawl over Street to the other side of the couch, not wanting to deal with the rat’s nest of black wires snaking across the floor. With your equilibrium shot, you’d end up on your ass, Crosby crowing and never letting you forget it.
Street’s almost painfully warm beneath you, sucking in his stomach and touching your side briefly. You know that it doesn’t mean anything, and curl up against the arm of the couch. Zito plops down on the floor next to Crosby and bites Street’s knee, just a joke, Street yelping and folding his legs Indian-style. Your pulse threads along, weaving together the pill you took and the drink Zito made you. If you look real close, you can see the thin skin over the insides of your wrists flickering.
Zito and Crosby and Street are talking abnormally loud, but you think that might just be you. They seem to have forgotten that you’re in the room, which is kinda annoying, considering two-thirds of them got off today because of you.
That’s nothing new, though. You’ve been getting Crosby off since Double-A, when he kept forgetting your name and then kept trying to convince you to let him call you Ricky. Crosby’s pathological need to be the coolest person in any given room had been even more pronounced back then, before they’d met Mark Mulder, who was cooler without even trying, and it had been your favorite victory, breaking him down to shudders and moans, panting against your shoulder with your slick hand down the front of his pants.
Zito’d seen you once sucking Mulder off in the bathroom of your old house, when you’d idiotically left the window cracked open, too occupied with keeping Mulder from ripping the towel rack out of the wall. Incredibly drunk that night, tile harder than glass under your knees, and you’d glanced up, one arm wrapped around the backs of Mulder’s legs, to see Zito’s reflection in the mirror, in the slash of the open window, slack and blurry-eyed with surprise. He’d asked you, a few days later, if you and Mulder were, like, a thing, and you’d blown him in the showers after everyone else had left to demonstrate just how much of a thing you and Mulder were not.
You keep it secret and held close on the inside, Mulder and Crosby and Zito, and then Mulder was gone, but that doesn’t bother you too much. You still have enough to keep you busy.
None of them have ever been at all good for you, but when you get them alone, they go where you lead and pay attention to you and you are, in short intervals, the focus of the world. It calms you down.
“Hey, space cadet.” Crosby punches you right in the center of your knee cap, funny bone buzz and ring of pain. You hiss and huddle closer to the arm of the couch, pulling your legs up.
“What.”
“You should go on a beer run.”
You glare at him. Street is folded like an envelope, his knee near his chin in a way that makes you wonder exactly how flexible he is. Zito is playing the controller like it’s a piano, using his fingers instead of his thumbs. The monsters have disappeared, replaced by shiny futuristic cars and rainy gleaming streets.
“You want beer, you can go your own damn self.”
“Can’t. Me and Barry are in the middle of a tournament. Come on, please? I’ll buy.”
You sigh. Crosby’s not even looking at you. You kinda want to smooth your fingers across the back of his neck, where the line of his hair is as straight as a pencil. Zito glances back at you, wedged corner of his eye.
“I’ll go with you, man,” Street says softly.
Gritting your teeth, you carefully bend your legs out. Your foot’s asleep. Street stands and offers you a hand, and you grip his forearm and allow yourself to be leveraged off the couch, leaning into him a little bit more than balance requires. He’s so fucking warm, cotton and summer rolled up.
“Heineken,” Crosby orders. You kick him.
“Money.”
He rolls his eyes and passes you a moist crumpled twenty, soft as Street’s T-shirt against the back of your arm. You casually toss an arm around Street’s shoulders and Zito asks you to get him some Chex Mix and a peanut butter cookie, looking up at you like he wants to bend you over something, but that’s typical Zito, and has nothing to do with you. You say whatever, trying to memorize the solid feel of Street under your arm, the neat slim nape of his neck and the ridged bones on top of his shoulders through his shirt.
You leave without bothering to put on your shoes. Street zips through the radio stations, and the world streaks past you like smeared paint, your thoughts broken up same as the music. Your eyes are huge, the white sunlight soaking in.
“A-One?” Street asks, naming the closest liquor store.
You shake your head. “They don’t have Chex Mix there.”
“We could go there and then Walgreens.”
“They’re not gonna let me in Walgreens without shoes on.”
Street cocks his head, angling to look at your feet on the pedals. “Whyn’t you put on your shoes?”
“Too fucking hot for shoes.”
Street grins, nods. You stare at the road, halfheartedly wishing he would take a five minute break from being the cutest goddamn thing you’ve ever seen.
“We’ll go to Eddie’s,” you say without looking at him. You feel like you’re going double the speed limit, but the gauge says thirty and maybe you’re just high.
“I like that place,” Street says. “I like that guy’s dog.”
“Yeah.” It’s a good dog, skinny mutt with patches of over-long fur on its flanks. It wanders the aisles at the liquor store, poking its nose into the backs of the customers’ knees. Once, it came trotting up to you with a bag of Skittles in its mouth.
“Oh, I forgot to show you.” Street digs around in his pocket, hiking his hips up off the seat. Your mouth goes dry, seeing the edge of his hipbone where his shirt has fallen away. You almost run off the road, tightening your hands around the wheel. No one who wears his jeans that tight could be completely straight.
Street pulls out a little plastic toy, a goggle-eyed alien in blue and green. He looks so happy it makes your stomach wrench. “I won it at the arcade. Cost thirty tickets, but look, it’s got a pencil sharpener in it.”
You aren’t breathing. You realize this as spots pound across your eyes, and you very carefully guide the car to the shoulder, viciously twisting the key with a shaking hand. Resting your forehead on the wheel, you work on inhale, exhale, wondering how many fucking kids you killed in your past life to deserve this.
“Um. Richie?”
Street’s hand alights on your shoulder, and you shy away from it, hunching against the door. You’re tweaked all to hell and back, your heart filling your throat. You want him so much, worse than air.
Forcefully, you remind yourself that you are a fuck-up. Your mouth is numb from the Lifesavers that you ate to erase Zito’s taste. You are running errands for Crosby on the off-chance that he needs more from you than a handjob. This thing, what you do for them, these favors, it’s cheap and sordid and a poor excuse for anything. You don’t want to drag Street into it. Your head is throbbing.
“Hey?”
Street sounds worried, not letting you move away from his hand again because there’s nowhere left for you to go, your shoulder flush to the door. His hand slides across your back. You suck in oxygen through your teeth.
“I’m fine.” You try to shrug him off but he won’t go. “Seriously, I just, I, stupid brain thing. I got dizzy.”
“Oh. I can drive?”
“No, it’s okay.” You straighten, scrub your hands across your face. Goddamn him. Fucking rookie. “I’m okay.”
You glance over at Street, and he’s staring at you, worrying his lip with his teeth. You have to look away, the day outside the car huge and bright. Your throat clicks several times as you attempt to swallow, locking your gaze on a red squirrel flitting through the trees, waiting until your heart isn’t beating quite so fast.
You wonder, if you leaned across the seat and kissed Street on the mouth, your hand across the back of his neck, what would he do? It’s somehow impossibly easy to imagine his arms looping around your neck, his forehead clonking into yours as he tries to press too close too soon. He’d be sweet and warm as honey. You could close your hand around his, feel the smooth corners of the little plastic alien poking out between his fingers.
Shaking it off, you bend a slight smile in his direction, clenching your teeth. “Never a dull moment, huh?”
Street sinks slowly back in his seat, raising his knee to rest it on the glove compartment. “You let me know if you need me to drive, okay? I really don’t mind.”
He’s not helping. You start the car again, swiping the back of your hand across your eyes. You’re fine. You took too many of those fucking pills, lost track of time.
It’s quiet for awhile as you pull yourself together, staring at the broken yellow line, the sun as thin as a match and bleeding through the cracks of the trees. Riding down from higher ground, your ears refuse to pop, pressure building so that everything is diluted, like on an airplane with the engines thrumming and beating so loud it almost sounds like silence. You look over to see Street gazing out the window with his forehead creased, his thumb tapping on his knee.
He’s freaked out, you think, slightly panicked. Freaked out or bored with you, and either is unacceptable, so you start talking about baseball, your eyes fixed on the road and you don’t even know exactly what you’re saying. You’re cracking jokes and making up stories about the American League East and Street starts to snicker, his shoulders relaxing back against the seat and making you realize too late that he’d been sitting tensely, strung tight by you and cut loose now by easier conversation.
It’s really something. Baseball’s the single constant in your life, in all your lives. Crosby and Zito are baseball nuts, it’s all they think about. Mulder was able to leave the game mostly on the field, but he mumbled about it in his sleep an awful lot. Street talks about baseball without accent, without stuttering, his face lit up and his hands molding the air. It takes you down and brings you back and reminds you that you have a better reason to be in Oakland than just waiting around for your heart to get broken.
By the time you get to the liquor store, Street seems to have forgotten about your little, whatever, inconsequential psychotic break in the car. You buy a pack of gum straight off, shoving three pieces into your mouth, needing something substantial between your teeth. Street wanders, whistling low so that the mutt will follow him around, tongue lolling out, gazing up at Street adoringly. You can sympathize.
You get Crosby’s beer and Zito’s Chex Mix and a chocolate chip cookie because you can’t find a peanut butter one, and Street buys a twist of beef jerky that he feeds to the dog, kneeling on the dirty floor and smiling up at you. You wish idly for something to disfigure him, a lightning strike or a comebacker through the box, smash his cheekbones, black his eyes, break his perfect teeth.
On the drive back, you’re feeling rough and uneasy, and you say out of the blue, “Zito’s got a crush on you.”
Street flinches in your peripheral vision, but his voice is steady as he answers, “Yeah, I know.”
You glance at him in surprise. “You do?”
Street shrugs, a flush spreading up his neck. “He told me. A little while ago.”
“No shit?” You think grudgingly that Zito’s got balls to burn, more than you could ever hope to have.
Embarrassed, folding his hands on his lap, Street keeps his eyes down, visibly trying to stay cool. “We were, um. We went out to this bar and I guess he got drunk? And he wanted to explain it, like. You know how he gets?”
“Dude’s in love with the sound of his own voice,” you say, and Street smiles briefly.
“Yeah. He went into all this. This crazy stuff. I mean, it was, like, almost at the beginning. I barely knew him. He kept saying how I was all funny and cool and stuff, and it wasn’t, um, not physical at all, but if I wanted to sleep with him he wouldn’t say no.”
You snort. Street’s whole face is bright red. “How romantic.”
“It’s not like that,” Street protests, picking at the seam of his jeans. “It’s just. He likes me. Whatever. I don’t think he’s even, like, you know. I think he’s just kinda screwed up.”
You turn that over in your mind for awhile. You wonder if you were less of a fuck-up, would you be straight?
“What are you doing, Rich?” Street asks quietly. You twitch and dig the bones of your thumbs into the underside of the wheel.
“What do you mean?”
“If you didn’t think I knew about Barry, why in the world were you telling me?”
Caught, you check the speedometer and fiddle the headlights on and off, trying to pick out the illumination on the sunlit road, but it’s no good. You’re pissed off at him for a second, for questioning your motives, as if you fucking have any.
“I just thought you should know.”
“Dude, it’s a secret. It’s his secret.”
Street sounds weirdly betrayed, righteously indignant on Zito’s behalf. You scowl, your gum small and gray and tasteless between your back teeth. You’re doing him a favor, because shit like this has ruined better men than him, and you, and Barry Zito.
“Whatever,” you mutter. “Excuse me for caring, but you shouldn’t let him fuck with you.”
“I think I can be the judge of who gets to fuck with me, thanks.”
You start, astonished. Street’s tucked in the shotgun seat with his leg drawn up, the side of his face unlined, though his mouth is shrunk and tight. You underestimate him, but you’ve known that for a long time now, or really, just the past few months that he’s been in your consciousness, crowding the space like steam. It’s easy to think of him as sweet and sheltered and kinda dim, but you were on this team when you were twenty-one, too, fucking around with the rest of the rotation and acting like there was nothing you needed to learn.
“Anyway,” he says, sighing. “It’s really not a big deal. Barry, I think he just wants me to like him.”
“Well. Yeah.”
“No, I mean, even just as a friend. Because he’s kinda doing the same thing with Danny. And. You, sometimes.” Street stares hard at his hands, his ears dull red. “I think it’s just for the attention.”
You’ve been hearing that your whole life. Cutting up in class, shining and talking fast at going away parties, giving head without being asked, seeking out trouble because you can’t stand it when people don’t remember you. You’re scared most of all of being erased, dismissed. Worse than speed, you are addicted to being watched, thankful for your blue eyes and powerful arms. Your dad used to get so mad at you.
“So, what?” you say, playing it off. “You’re stringing him along?”
“No.” Street glares at you. “He knows nothing’s gonna happen.”
“Does he?” you say with a slight sneer. “You told him that?”
“I told him that I respected his honesty,” Street says loftily. “And that I very much wanted to be his friend and whatever else happens, happens.”
You snort, something small and warm curling in your stomach, because Street didn’t say that he never would, he’s left the possibility open. “Stringing him along.”
“At least he told me,” Street says low. You bite the inside of your cheek, blood-sour and hot, wishing helplessly that he wouldn’t say things like that when you’re trying to drive.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Street gives you a wounded look, then turns away, resting his chin on his knee, his arms wound around his shin.
“Nothing. I just, I don’t need a whole bunch of drama right now.”
“Fuck, who does?” you ask rhetorically, though if you were at all honest, you’d admit that you are sickly attracted to it, playing Crosby and Zito and Street against each other, running on two hours of sleep, trying to see how far you can go without getting caught. It’s a goddamn good thing that you are not honest.
“I’m saying, if you’re trying to stir up trouble, or, like, getting back at Zito for something he did to you, I really wish you’d leave me out of it.”
“You think I’d do that? Use you like that?” You sound more curious than you intended, actually wanting to figure out what’s going on inside your head.
Street exhales against his jeans, fitting his eye socket into the cup of his knee. “I don’t know, Richie. I don’t really know any of you guys that well.”
That pretty much sums it up, you think, and you let the quiet crawl in between you, the road carrying you into the hills, all the way back home.
At your house, you shout a greeting towards the living room on your way to the kitchen, watching Street’s soft shadow move across the wall. You put one of the six-packs in the refrigerator and take the other along with Zito’s junk into the living room. Crosby’s alone, his eyes bloodshot and plasticky, still playing the race game.
Taking a beer out of the cardboard holder, you pass it down to Crosby. “You need to get a life, man.”
“What? What?” He doesn’t look away from the screen, tucking the bottle into the bend of his knee.
“You’ve been playing videogames for like six hours now.”
“So? Shut up.”
Street stifles a laugh behind you, and you turn, grinning at him and rolling your eyes. He mirrors it back to you, a fast shot to the chest, and you only turn back because Crosby’s weakly kicking at your ankle.
“Rich, Richie,” he says, still without looking at you. “Open my beer for me.”
You look at him in disbelief. “How about you hit pause?”
He shakes his head, biting his lip. “I’m gonna break my record. It requires undisturbed concentration, man, please? Please?”
You sigh, but reach down and get his beer. He’s impossible. You crack the bottle open on your belt buckle and set it down beside him. “There. Lazy useless motherfucker.”
Crosby bobs his head happily, and you wonder if his eyes are more gray or blue right now. They change, sometimes. Street takes up his seat on the couch again, toeing off his sneakers, and you push your hands into your pockets, feeling awkward.
“Where’s Barry?” Street asks.
Crosby sneers. “He’s being a little bitch. I kept beating him and he got all pissy. Ran off out back.”
You glance at Street and his face is unreadable, watching Crosby’s car spin and explode into a wall, Crosby cursing. You lick your teeth and leave the room, stepping barefoot onto the patio deck.
Before you and Crosby and Street and Melhuse moved into this empty crackerbox of a house, it was a family place, and there’s still a play structure on the far side of the pool, a swing set and monkey bars and a flat silver slide, half-buried in the overgrown grass. Zito has climbed up on top of the monkey bars, his legs hanging loose. He’s above the fence line, cut out of the sky.
The sun is still high; the days last for so long, especially off-days like this one.
You stand under him and touch his ankle, squinting up at him. “You’re cute when you sulk.”
Zito half-smiles for a second before he wipes it off his face. “Bobby’s being a jerk. He’s got this cheat, he found it online? He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Kept making fun of me when I was losing.”
He kicks his foot idly, and you let your hand travel with it, fingers hooked in the top of his shoe. His shoes have red lights in the heels, and they flash in arrhythmic patterns.
“Talked to Huston,” you say.
“Did you, now.”
“Here I was thinking that I was the one corrupting this team, but you know what even I wouldn’t do? Make a fucking pass at the fucking child who still goes to church.”
The edge of Zito’s mouth twists up. He’s staring over the fence into the neighbor’s empty yard, green and trim as a pool table. You’d like to be mad at him, for having the balls to say that to Street when you can barely even keep it together when you’re alone with him. But you’re not, really, because both you and Zito are a particular kind of walking wounded, and you have to take the good wherever it occurs.
“You could try for a million years and never corrupt this team,” Zito tells you. “We were fucked up long before you got here.”
You curl your toes in the grass, cool and bright, the sun glinting off the metal of the structure. You never did figure out what went on before you got here, but you know that Mulder accepted your mouth on his dick much more easily than you’d expected. You know that Zito gets special treatment from almost everyone, even though he’s only half the pitcher he once was, and getting worse by the fucking day.
“And I didn’t make a pass at him.”
“Sure as hell sounded like it.” You let go of Zito’s foot and latch your hands onto the bar, bending your knees so that your feet lift off the ground, the muscles in your arms stretching and straining. You drift back and forth slowly.
“You know, for someone who’ll suck off straight guys, you’re awful judgmental.”
“What fucking straight guy did I-”
“You want a fucking list?”
You shut up, glaring at Zito’s dirty kid’s sneakers. You are aware that you have made mistakes. You are still in the process of making mistakes. You don’t need that pointed out to you; friends are supposed to lie to each other about this kind of stuff.
You’re both quiet for a moment, you hanging and Zito’s feet swinging in short perfect arcs.
“You know what you are, man?” Zito says eventually.
“Oh, god, please tell me what I am.” You let yourself drop off the bar and thump onto your back on the grass. The sun is directly behind Zito’s head and it blocks him out almost totally. “How did I live this long without you around to fucking psychoanalyze me?”
Ignoring that, Zito tells you plainly, “You’re a sorority slut.”
You blink up at the whitened sky, pretty sure that you’re gonna be incredibly offended by whatever he says next.
“You’re that girl, the one that all the guys know is a sure thing. And they take her out somewhere cheap for dinner and then nail her, and then go back to their buddies and compare stories about all the shit she did for them.”
Stung worse than you want to admit, you pull up your lip over your teeth, closing your eyes. “You compare stories about me?” you ask, your voice breaking.
“No, jesus. You think I want Bobby fucking Crosby knowing anything about my sex life?”
You weren’t aware that Zito considered you part of his sex life, knowing that Crosby doesn’t, that Mulder never did, something small and unacknowledged on the side of their real lives, but it doesn’t make it any better to hear. The simple fact that Zito is saying this to you means that he doesn’t care for you at all. You never wanted him to, you remind yourself, and that doesn’t help either.
“For the record?” you manage. “This is the kind of thing that will generally make me disinclined to keep blowing you.”
Zito laughs, odd cackling laugh that sends a bird bursting out from the tree, leaves fluttering down in its wake.
“No, Richie, I don’t think it will. This is how you get people to like you.”
You lie on the grass feeling gut-shot. You’re easy, of course you’re easy, it’s a defining feature of your personality, but it’s just something you can do for them, something you’re good at, your second-best thing after pitching. You haven’t had a gag reflex since you were sixteen. You’ve never believed that reciprocation is necessary for decent sex, and maybe that means you’re screwed up, wanting Zito to slump against you all happy and hot and damp more than you want to kiss him, wanting Crosby to call for you when he’s bored more than you want him to stop treating you like a fucking puppy. Maybe you’re screwed up, but you’re doing this because it’s a nice thing to do and it’s fucking cruel of Zito to throw that back in your face.
The ground thumps, and you inch open your eyes to see Zito crouching over you, his head cocked to the side curiously.
“You don’t really care, though, right?” Zito asks you.
You almost laugh. You press your teeth into the inside of your lip and force yourself to think that you’re crashing, that’s all it is, the speed’s wearing off. That’s why it feels like your skin doesn’t fit, and why your hands won’t keep still, trembling in the grass.
“I don’t care,” you whisper.
Zito smiles at you, weirdly proud. “Good,” he says, and leans down, kisses you fast on the mouth and you’re too surprised to do anything about it. He stands up, amazingly tall, and sets his feet down to either side of your body, the two of you making a perpendicular angle.
“I’m still gonna get Huston, though,” Zito adds, as you’re staring up at him helplessly. “You know why?”
You move your mouth, silently asking, why?
Zito taps his foot into your ribs, the red light on his shoe blinkering crazily. “He’d never understand why you do the things you do. He’d never forgive you for it.”
And he steps away, leaving you like that. You open your eyes as wide as they will go, the sunlight searing in and washing out the green, the blue, the rusted metal of the swing set. He’s such an asshole. You never asked for any of this. Running your tongue across your lips, you try to catch some vague dim taste of him, something sweeter than what he usually leaves behind him
It’s no good. You’re alone in the yard, the shadows of the monkey bars slicing across your chest, wondering how long you’ll have to stay out here before one of them comes to get you, wondering which of the three of them it will be.
You wait for almost two hours, the sun melting down behind the fence. You’re crying when you finally get to your feet; no one cares.
THE END
i want to write another au. ideas?