i fell right through the cracks

[candle_beck]

back to start

Things get back to mostly-normal pretty quickly. Street visibly forces himself to stay in your vicinity more often, and maybe you don't do anything more than painstakingly exchange small talk with him, but at least he looks at you sometimes. Burned, bitten, and shy, you retreat to Bobby, get him to suck you off until you're convinced that at least he still likes you.

You've been shoved off-balance, but you work around it. You continue to pitch even though the campaign is getting more futile by the day. There's romance in suffering for a losing cause, and you believe that right up until Bobby breaks his ankle.

It's collision at the plate, a slide that Bobby should have hooked more, the swiftest moment of dislocation. He throws his head back so hard his batting helmet comes off, choke-screams up at the sky. You are halfway up the dugout steps when Danny Haren gets hold of the back of your jersey and drags you back to the bench. He keeps a heavy hand on your shoulder until you shake your head briskly and sit back, watching helplessly as the trainers oh-so-carefully pick your boy up off the dirt.

Bobby claims it's nothing, doesn't even really trust the X-ray that shows the fracture thinner than angel hair. He says, "I've played hurt worse than this, swear to god I have," and then the coaches are muttering indecipherably as you strain your ears to hear. Eric Chavez catches you eavesdropping when he comes out of the video room, pulls you away while telling you, "You'll never hear what you want if you go listening at doors."

Bobby hits the disabled list for the second time that year, but he's in complete denial about it, staggers around the house without his crutches until you want to tie him to the couch. He snaps at you when his ankle hurts and he doesn't want to admit it. You snap back because you hate seeing him like this, hobbled and useless, and then you end up yelling at each other until Melhuse comes out of his room to bodily separate the two of you.

Just a week and a half after the collision, you catch Bobby taping up his ankle in his bedroom, his glove and bat near at hand. You block the doorway, fix him with a glare.

"The fuck do you think you're doing?"

Bobby gives you a look like maybe you're a little slow. "Gonna go down to the yard and put in some time in the cages."

"That's funny, man," you say, bracing one hand against the doorframe. "One-legged dude hitting off a tee, make sure someone gets a video of it on their phone, would ya? I definitely wanna see that shit."

He makes a humorless smile, gets to his feet and it's only because you know him so well that you can see how he tips his weight towards his good side, an infinitesimal wince pinching his face.

"Always happy to amuse you," Bobby says, and shoulders his bat, glove hanging off the top. "You mind getting out of the goddamn way?"

"Yeah I fuckin' mind," and you push him backwards, harder than you necessarily intended but he gets you so worked up. Bobby goes stumbling backwards and jams his ankle, crying out in pain and you could have happily lived your whole life never hearing that sound from him.

"What the fuck, Richie." Bobby's hands are white-knucked on the handle of his bat, held at a murderous angle but you're not scared of him at all.

"You can't even walk, you're gonna go to the cages, that's great, just fuckin' awesome."

Bobby scoffs a harsh noise, sneering at you. "Not everyone's as big a pussy as you are, all right? Some of us can play through the pain."

"Yeah, until you make it worse. You really that eager to get under the knife? You want to fucking kill yourself? Just stay down."

Bobby's face flashes, looks at you with this furious wounded expression like you've turned on him viciously and without cause or warning. You don't know what he means, looking at you like that, making that cold closing thing happen in your stomach. It's only a second and then Bobby's face shutters and becomes blank, chilling.

"Get the hell out of my way," Bobby says in a nothing voice, and you do what he tells you. You watch him limp away down the length of the hall, your heart giving a little bit every time his stride does.

A few days later Bobby runs ninety-foot stretches, back and forth, skid-stopping his feet and dropping one hand to the dirt to switch directions. You're watching from the tarp roll, seeing how he's scraped the skin off one knuckle, single bright spot of red that he doesn't even know is there. It's a pretty good effort but the coaches are still not convinced, so Bobby bounces in place for them, shows how he's learned to throw off his right foot, just a little more sidearm and he can find the first baseman almost every time.

Bobby's eyes are silvery and agonized the whole time, his mouth a carved line, but apparently everybody else on your team is fucking blind.

They put him back in the line-up. You can't believe it.

You take Zito out and get him drunk and then rail for awhile about how this goddamn team chews you up and spits you out, because nobody ever stays in Oakland forever and so they don't give a fuck. You've thrown tens of thousands of hundred mile an hour fastballs just for fun and no one ever told you to maybe go easier so you can still do it when you're thirty. Zito pays his rent on a lollipop curve that could blow out his elbow at any given moment and it's some kind of miracle that it hasn't happened yet, and still the trainers would rather hop him up on prescription-strength Sudafed than let him miss a start that one time he caught a cold. Mulder and Huddy had proven defective after years of hard use and were summarily gotten rid of, and you're not gonna let the same thing happen to Bobby; you're not gonna let him be another casualty of this insane lifelong war you've all chosen to wage.

You might have a point buried in there somewhere. Zito's gaping, fascinated and totally clueless as to what the fuck you're on about, and you wave your hand, scowling at your beer.

"He just shouldn't be playin' yet, is all," you finish in a mutter.

Zito shuts his mouth, nods and tries to look thoughtful, which works about as well for him as it ever does. He theorizes that the possibility of October is providing the necessary pain-masking endorphins, but you shake your head and dismiss that out of hand. You hear yourself saying:

"So what? I don't care if he's got a good reason, it's too fucking risky no matter what."

Zito allows that you're probably right, but he's just drunk and agreeable and you don't get any kind of satisfaction out of it. You finish the pitcher and then pour Zito into a cab with his address scribbled on a cocktail napkin and tucked in his shirt pocket because sometimes Zito gets mixed up between different places he's lived when he's really drunk.

You walk about a mile in the direction of the hills before you get irritated with the fresh night air and clean-looking sky, and call a cab to pick you up from wherever the hell you are. You're frustrated, kinda despondent, because you can't think of anything to do if Bobby won't listen to you. It's like a sixty-foot stone wall, shot up from the earth directly in front of you.

The door to Bobby's room is shut when you get back. You stand in the hallway shifting from foot to foot and wondering if you're gonna knock. You think about how you shouldn't have to knock; it's been more than three years.

You end up going to bed alone. You actually sleep really well that night, thick and dreamless.

Bobby plays short for the last few weeks of the season, and it doesn't make a difference. There's no spark this time, no glorious final run to be spurred out of your team, and Anaheim clinches the West with five days left to play. Everyone limps off the field, and you can't tell the physical pain from the emotional.

You are maybe not handling things so great. The past month has been very tough on you, numbness spreading out from your arm and colonizing your whole body. You've been avoiding Bobby by day and having increasingly angry sex with him by night, split into thinner and thinner pieces every time you see the marks he's left in the morning, the bruises on the insides of your thighs. You spend whole games clinging to the rail waiting for him to scream in pain again, and you can't talk to him without shouting so you just slip into his bed and take what you need, slip out once he's faking sleep and go back to your own room all shuddery and cold.

It's after you've been knocked out of the chase, still the better part of a week to play and you don't know how you'll bear it. You get home drunker than you intended to get, still pretty early because the light is on under Melhuse's door and you can hear Street banging around in the kitchen and humming Dwight Yoakam.

Bobby's gone. You don't know where; he doesn't tell you things anymore. The sight of his half-open door, the dark wedge of his room revealed, is for some reason the last straw for you, and you fold down, back against the wall and knees pulling up against your chest. You rest your head carefully on your kneecaps and weave your fingers together behind your neck, having made yourself as small as physically possible.

You stay like that for awhile. You have a fair amount of luck not thinking about any of the things that you have lost recently.

Footsteps approach from the kitchen, and you tune in, hear Street pause, floorboards creaking under carpet. After a second he coughs rather unsubtly. You smirk into the shadowy crevice formed by your legs and chest.

"What."

Street doesn't answer, and you can picture him with that big-eyed pleading look on his face, nervous little smile he gets when he can't think of the words. You miss him, suddenly and with a ferocity that takes you aback. Street always has trouble saying what he means, getting it wrong the first couple of times and digging himself into deep holes, but even when he's talking nonsense he still improves the situation just by stammering and being inadvertently hilarious.

"I don't want to play anymore," you say, because you cannot say any of the stuff about Bobby and you won't apologize to Street so that he'll be your friend again (you owe him nothing), but baseball is still safe. Baseball is where you turn when everything else has let you down.

Street stays quiet, and you're very grateful for that. You ask him to stay and even without looking you can sense his surprise and uncertainty, but he takes a seat next to you against the wall. He's shaking a little bit and you think it must just be the season, the visceral hope you've all nurtured for six months releasing its grip. Out of the corner of your eye, in the blurry dim of the unlit hallway, you can see his hands winding together and you let yourself tilt until your shoulders are together and Street is as solid against you as he is in your memory.

You get through that last week, somehow, and then you're packing up your room and Bobby comes in, closes the door behind him.

The first thing you think is that you have to make him leave. You can't let him say whatever he came in to say.

"Hey Bobby, could you actually give me a minute," you say too fast, panic running just under the words as you see yourself escaping out the window the second he turns his back.

But he only leans back against the door, looks at you like you're a book made of pictures. "I'm not breaking up with you."

You drop your clock radio and it smashes a little bit, a horizontal crack bisecting the plastic face. You pick it up, set it on the bed, and swallow hard, your hands closing into fists. Because you have more than your fair share of pride, you force yourself to meet his eyes. You don't say anything because you can't--there's something blocking off your throat and it's either relief or terror still.

"But I'm not coming with you to B.C., either," he says. He looks away, eyes falling on the loosely-organized piles of crap on your bed. "Is that my shirt?"

"Probably." You stuff the T-shirt pile into your bag vindictively. "Where are you going instead?"

Bobby shrugs. "Home. My buddy saw this awesome place for rent right on the beach and I gave 'em three months upfront to make sure I'd get it."

You nod, not sure why you feel like you just got kicked in the chest. "Smart."

"For the weather, mostly. No offense, but it's cold in Canada. And wet. And gray."

"Yeah yeah yeah." You're packing indiscriminately, blindly shoving dirty sneakers on top of clean clothes, snapping the bats off of bobbleheads. You're not looking at him, asking, "You sure you're not breaking up with me?"

Bobby doesn't answer for the longest time, and your blood runs cold.

"Maybe let's. Give it the off-season. It wouldn't be for good, just, just to get some space," he says, sounding terrible, hoarse and torn up.

Your back is to him and you are staring down at your hands, twisted up in the shirt you stole from him. You think that you should be angry; you wish you could be angry, that you could whirl and holler him down, refuse to let him do this to you. You can out-argue him, his reasons are flimsy and stupid because you love him, you love the fuck out of him and that's what counts.

But you're not angry. You're very very tired, almost sick from it.

"Yeah," you say without looking at him. "Whatever, Bobby."

He stands there for almost half a minute, staring at your back as you stare at your hands, and then you hear him leave, the clap of your door followed seconds later by Bobby's. You're able to fall then, just kinda collapsing on all the junk you've accumulated this year, face buried in the slippery material of a warm-up jacket and your hands holding your head like there are bombs falling.

You go home to Canada thinking that it's over. It's bullshit for Bobby to say it's just for the off-season, just a break and not a break-up. You have this awful suspicion that he could string you along for years and years if you let him. You spend way too much time wondering if it would be worth it.

Really bad ideas are all that occur to you these days, and so sometime before the World Series you go to this club you know in Vancouver, done up like all the other scenester kids with your hair spiked and kohl on your eyelids to make the blue twice as bright. You consciously search out Bobby's opposite, slight dark-haired boy more pretty than handsome, and you take him into the backroom drunk out of your goddamn mind because it's the only way you can keep from flinching every time he touches you.

You're barely coherent. You don't let him suck you off because you can't look down and see somebody else's face, not yet. You turn him around and bend him over, hands on the wall and shirt rucked up to his arms, and you run a hand up his skinny back, into his hair that you can tell now is dyed black, odd plastic look to it. Pull his head back and he's making all the little noises you'd expect, squirming back against you. You're not even kinda hard though you've got a hand in your shorts half-heartedly working at it, and you know you could fix that if you just let your mind go where it wants.

You won't fuck this kid thinking about Bobby, though, that's the kind of cliché to which you never intend to lower yourself. You realize after a minute that you can't fuck him at all.

"Never mind," you mumble, biting the kid's throat and pulling him back around. "Better idea," and then he's up against the wall, you're on your knees, and you don't need to get hard to do this.

He fucks it up, scratches your ears instead of holding the back of your head like he's supposed to, and he doesn't go as deep as he should or moan your name. You never even told this kid your name. You get him off as quickly as you can and then have to fake like you jerked yourself off so he doesn't go reaching for you. You're reeling, the walls closing in around you, and you have to get out of here.

You throw up for like a half an hour in the alley. If nothing else, it gets you sober enough to drive home.

The next few days are pretty much the worst of your life so far.

You can't sleep, you can't eat. The goddamn clichés have caught up with you after all. Your mind never shuts down; lying in bed thinking about Bobby Crosby has become one of your most recent definitions of torture. You skip breakfast and lunch because of the stone that lives in your belly now, and force something down at dinner when your body begins to feel frail. You can't keep this up very long. You don't have any weight to spare, just muscle and you need that, that's how you pitch.

You are flatly miserable, dreaming up nightmare scenarios all day long, the various tragic courses your life might take from here. You can't remember how to sit around watching bad television without him. You can't remember the point of anything.

You're staying with your folks because it dramatically decreases your chances of being found dead in the bathroom only when the smell reaches the hallway, and they are very worried about you. Your dad is always making you your favorite sandwiches and Klondike bars with chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven on top. Your mom plays street hockey with you in the driveway like she used to when you were nine or ten years old, switching off tending the masking-tape goal on the garage door. It helps but not much, and every night finds you shut away in your childhood bedroom, fingers bloody from your guitar strings, headphones plugged into the mini-amp so you can exist ephemerally in a totally contained world.

In the back of your mind you are able to coldly calculate how much longer you'll be able to survive like this, black and white numbers counting intractably downwards. It's only been maybe three weeks since you left Oakland.

The White Sox are three games up on the Astros in the Series, and you're watching the start of Game 4 when Bobby calls you.

You stare uncomprehendingly at your phone for a moment, trying to figure out an explanation other than the obvious, because Bobby can't be calling you. You have stripped yourself of that expectation.

There's nothing for it. You open your phone, say cautiously, "Hello?"

"Hey Richie."

Your body goes slack, sinking you into the couch. Bobby's voice is all roughed up and plainly American in that way California boys have, and it doesn't mean anything special, him calling you Richie, because that is what Bobby always calls you, no matter how angry at each other you might be.

"Hey Bobby."

There's a protracted exchange of breaths, and you think that even this is helping, audible proof that Bobby's alive on the other end of the line; you wish you could do this twice a day.

"How's it treating you, man?" Bobby asks eventually. You assume he means the off-season and not the broken heart.

"Brutally," you answer, which is true enough for both.

Bobby makes a rusty sighing sound. "Yeah."

Quiet again, and you lay your hand across your eyes, blocking out the room and the television and the World Series and everything. You think about how unfortunate it is that you are not the kind of man who begs.

But then Bobby says, "So, that was kinda stupid, what I did," and your eyes go wide behind your hand.

"Which?" you manage.

"Going home alone. Turns out. Turns out it's not very good for me."

You hold very still, thinking that if you wake up right now you might have to kill yourself. The moment passes, taking with it the clutching grip on your heart. Your lungs fill with a sudden gasp of air, and you bite the inside of your cheek to keep from loosing a ragged sob of relief.

"Yeah," you say very carefully. "Not for either of us."

"So maybe. Maybe you wanna come down here now?"

You don't answer for a second because your brain isn't really working right now and you can't think of any of the words you're sure you know. Bobby's breath hitches nervously, and you think about how he broke your heart, and how you could return the favor right now, just crush him flat.

But you're not the vengeful type. And you're still so fucking gone on him, it's disgusting.

"Took you fuckin' long enough," you say, kinda strangled but not too bad. Bobby laughs, coarse disbelieving sound.

"Just hurry, Richie," he tells you, and you do. You're on a plane nine hours later, before the celebration has ended in Chicago.

Bobby's house is just as promised, so close to the beach sand blows across the sidewalks and only palm trees will grow in the yard. He's sitting on the front steps when your cab pulls up, watching guardedly and making no move to get up, so you drop your bag on the walk, climb on top of him and kiss him so hard you forget what country you're in.

He takes you to bed and keeps you there for twenty hours. You have peanut butter sandwiches and Gatorade to keep your strength up, and you have sex until you run out of rubbers, both Bobby's and the half-empty box that lives at the bottom of your road trip bag. Bobby pushes his hands across every part of your body, single-minded and intense. You wrap your legs around his waist and plead, "Come on, faster, harder," because it makes his eyes go stormy and black.

You don't talk like you should. At first you're too occupied fucking each other back and forth across the bed, passing out insensate and waking up to find the whole right side of your body alive with pins and needles because Bobby's lying on it. And then once you've finally taken the edge off, the peace that the two of you establish is fragile at best and you want to do nothing that might disturb it.

So you don't get to ask Bobby why he sorta broke up with you, and you're obliged to come up with your own explanations. It was circumstantial, you're almost sure. It was such a hard month, September when the team couldn't win and Street wouldn't look at you and Bobby couldn't run. Everything just piled up at once, and the two of you got in over your heads, turned on each other because that's what you do when you're scared, you take vicious swings, lash out at those closest, and of course Bobby's no different.

Southern California's a good place to let go of shit, anyway, the ocean smooth dark blue and green, staring right back at you when you sit out on the beach watching Bobby surf and crash in white foam, disappearing for brief stretches of time. You are woken up by earthquake tremors in the middle of the night that everybody else sleeps through and doesn't remember in the morning. The mailman never has any recognition on his face no matter how many times you're at the door to take the handful from him. Each day the world gets erased and rubbed clean again. Nothing sticks down here.

In keeping with the theme of obliteration, you and Bobby have been getting drunk a lot.

You don't think anything of it at first. Drunk makes it easier to talk, and easier not to care when you can't, and it lets you sleep the night through instead of the both of you rolled away from each other, just pretending. And it's not like you've got shit to do, no team or responsibilities to keep your head on straight. You have nothing to endanger except yourselves.

It's really simple to crack your first beer with lunch (because you kicked lazily at Bobby's feet under the table and he folded his legs in so you couldn't reach), and just kinda not stop for the rest of the day (because Bobby kept calling other friends and talking to them for twenty, thirty minutes at a stretch while you sat on the couch watching Top Chef and trying to ignore how you were being ignored). You don't get totally wasted or anything (because then you might say something you'll regret), but you maintain a foggy buzz all day long, a messy sorta grin whenever Bobby glances over. Bobby keeps up with you (because you call him girl names until he opens a fresh beer), and usually you end up making out on the floor all crazy and mindless like it used to be, the room whirling and the windows trembling, the piercing ring of glass right on the verge of shattering.

A few times a week, you meet up with Haren or Zito or some of Bobby's friends from school, go to cantina-inspired bars and too-loud clubs where you show off how good you've gotten at it, pounding shots and hanging off your boy's shoulders. Bobby is happier when there are other people around, seems to like you better. He smiles at you across scratched bar tables, remembers to order you a rum and Dr. Pepper instead of the traditional, slouches close at the end of the night when the two of you are in the backseat, heads together and your hand down his pants, snickering like children as Zito complains, "Quit jerking him off, Rich, that's gross," his scandalized eyes wide in the rearview.

Once it's just the two of you alone in Bobby's creaky little house, the tension crawls back up your spine, subtle poison in the air. Bobby looks at you with a small vertical line pressed between his eyebrows, like he's distantly trying to figure out what you're doing there. You ask over and over again, "What, what?" but Bobby never even knows what you're talking about.

Bobby thinks he drives better when he's drunk and so you have to steal his keys a lot of the time. He regains consciousness in the shotgun seat and bitches at you for driving his car like a fuckin' maniac until an alcoholic wave overcomes him again and he thankfully falls quiet. You have lost all your natural grace and you trip over carpet, throw elbows into lamps, walk into door frames. Bobby makes fun of you, spaz, freak, goddamn walking disaster area, and you dwell over each one; you take it more seriously than it's probably meant.

Then one night you're sacked out on the couch and Bobby comes back from hitting the bars with his high school buddies. You hear him fighting with his shoes in the hallway, swearing all thick and packed with slurs, and little frissons of excitement go through you because usually when he goes out without you he comes home wanting to screw around, and you've been well-conditioned.

Bobby appears in the doorway and you push up on your elbow, blinking. He looks like he's been dragged for miles, skeleton slumping under his skin and his hollow eyes glittering feverishly. He grins big at you, wolfish and unsettling.

"You, motherfucker," Bobby says, sounding mostly pleased. He struggles out of his overshirt, hiking up his T-shirt in the process and he doesn't bother tugging it back down, half his stomach showing pale and hard as he comes over to you.

"What," you ask distractedly, reaching for his belt. Bobby twists his hips away, smirking down at you.

"Look what you've done to me."

Bobby spreads his arms out wide, offering himself up, and you study him, your thoughts heated and confused. He's not steady, but still strong, fine muscles of his stomach outlined, his chest pulled wide. You think he looks wonderful; it makes you ache how much you want him.

"Yeah, still really hot," you say, and try to pull him down, but he pushes your hands away, shaking his head. His face knots, frustrated lines drawing across his forehead.

"You listen to me, listen," he insists, and abruptly jerks his T-shirt up and over his head. You stare up at him, mouth hanging open a little. "You see how fucked up I am?"

"What was it, Jaeger?"

"Shut up." He thwaps you across the face with his shirt and you kinda sputter out a laugh. All your attention is fixed on him, perfect body and wrecked swimming eyes. "Missing the point, you're always missin' the goddamn point."

"So tell me." You hook a hand in his belt, don't let him get away this time. "You're so smart, lemme know."

Bobby makes this awful crooked smile. He looks like he's about to cry. "Everything about me is exactly like it should be, except for you."

You let go of him immediately. He sways as your hand clips out of his belt, looming over you and you think that if he falls, if he crushes you, that will be an okay way to go. Bobby's still kinda smiling down at you, and you wish to god that he would stop.

"I. I'm sorry?" you say, hating the weak question in it but you don't know what Bobby wants to hear from you.

Bobby points at you, wavery and accusatory. "An' you did it on purpose. I told you, I always said I didn't know what the fuck I was doing but you were always like, oh it's okay, just suck me off, Bobby, just fuck me again, fuckin' move in with me and follow me around and tell everybody about it and never fuck another girl again, and what, when was I supposed to tell you to stop?"

He shakes his head, looking faintly amazed. You are motionless, petrified.

"I couldn't," he continues, frayed edge to his voice, his drunk eyes blazing at you and making wild toppling things happen in your chest. "I don't know how it happened, but I can't do anything without you and I don't understand. This isn't what I'm supposed to be."

Your hand is closed in a sewn-tight fist, pressed hard against the side of your leg, and he is looking at you so earnestly, sincere distress bleeding out of him and you think it's insane that he doesn't see what he's doing to you.

"You love me," you manage to say, chiseling each word. "Quit trying to, to figure it out. It happened because it happens all the time; nobody's ever supposed to fall in love."

Bobby laughs a little bit and it rallies you somewhat, hope shooting through you for a split second before he starts shaking his head again. He pushes you back into the coach and straddles your body, settling in with his hands on your face, thumbing over your cheekbones.

"This is just, it's so close to the life I actually want," Bobby says, and then he kisses you, which is good because you might have hit him otherwise. You might have burst into fucking tears.

You get your arms around and wrestle him under you, leaning your elbows on his bare chest and touching your forehead to his. You can feel his breath on your mouth, smell the alcohol clinging so brightly to him. His eyes are the palest blue, watering down more than longer you know him.

He's waiting for you, half-smirking because he doesn't seem to realize that that was a terrifically cruel thing for him to say to you. You don't know why he can't see it on your face, and you think that you must just look pissed off; Bobby's used to you looking pissed off.

You tell him you're gonna fuck him and his eyebrows go up but he's okay with it. You only ask a few times a year, and you're not asking this time. You're stripping his pants off and pushing his legs up to drape over your shoulders, and he's watching you with that steady almost-happy look on his face. You growl, sneer. You fold him in half to get at his mouth, bite the smirk away. He can't keep quiet, gasping and moaning as you fuck into him and his hand is clawing at your arm, his heel thumping on your back. You close your eyes and kiss him again, deeply aware that this is the life you actually want.

This is the only life you know how to live.

In the morning Bobby is reticent and apologetic. It's plain that he doesn't remember exactly what he said, only that it caused you harm, and he tries to make it up with chocolate chip pancakes, runs down to the bodega to get some no-pulp O.J. because you finished the bottle off yesterday.

You stay close to him for a few days; everywhere he goes, you go. Something is happening between the two of you. It hasn't been right since you've come down to Long Beach, but you are going to get through this; you're going to hold on to him no matter what.

Danny Haren fucks off to Austin for a long weekend and comes back with Huston Street in tow. He said he was gonna, but you guess you never really believed him. Haren and Zito are both notorious for making grandiose plans and never following through, and anyway, Huston's all weird now, he probably won't want to come.

You go over to Haren's place early on accounta the tee time you've got, and you're spearing Cheerios with a fork (it's a game of your own invention) when Street comes stumbling out of the spare bedroom all disoriented and out of whack, mad cork-screwing hair catching the light and looking for a second the exact color Bobby's gets when he lets it grow out long enough to curl.

You're very happy to see him, for some reason. You must have missed him or something.

He's stiff when you hug him, barely scrapes his hands on your back before you're pulling away. Quick warm shot of sweat and skin and Street is trying to smile but he doesn't quite make it there. Then Danny's in the room, throwing you into a headlock for finishing the milk although you left enough for at least two cups of coffee in there, and then everything starts to feel mostly normal again.

You and Bobby hang around at Danny's house watching soap operas, and it's only after you've been doing it for half an hour that you second-guess your arm around Bobby's shoulders with Huston and all his obnoxious issues sitting right there, but then you remember: fuck him.

Anyway, you've always been handsy when you're drunk.

Maybe it is too much for the kid, though, because the gang of you goes out to a bar and you're pressing close to Bobby's back to make sure he gets the specifics of your order, your hand familiarly in place just above his belt, and suddenly Street knocks your arm aside. When you turn on him he looks shocked himself, his hands pulled halfway up defensively.

"Careful," Street tells you, his eyes darting like you terrify him, like you're just wrong on a basic level and he can't bear seeing it in you. "You should. Be careful."

You're thinking about redneck bars in Utah and everything you've gone through just to have a boy that you could touch whenever you wanted, and you sneer at him. "I wasn't gonna blow him on the dance floor or anything, dude."

Street's face pulls in disgust, something horrified flashing through his eyes, and then he's saying, voice all shattered, "Just don't act like such a-"

He stops suddenly but you won't, you know that word he's too much of a mama's boy to say out loud, that filthy word scrawled all over his face. Red slams into you as you shove him backwards into a cluster of preppie kids, and you shout the punchline for all to hear:

"Like what? Like a fucking faggot, Huston, you little bitch?"

Street is devastated, jerking back like he's been shot and then spinning, shouldering recklessly through the crowd and heading for the open night. You're breathing too fast, hands fisted and you want to go after him, kick the shit out of him because what the fuck is he doing, can't he tell that you're already only hanging by a motherfucking thread?

Instead you whirl back to the bar and swiftly relocate Bobby. He's doing shots with Danny and you push close, kiss him hard while he's still halfway through being surprised to see you there out of nowhere all of a sudden. You open his mouth expertly, licking across his fire-tasting tongue, your hand keeping his head placed just so, and in the background you can hear Danny saying, "Whoa. Um. Ew?"

Bobby shoves you off, gasping, "The fuck, you horny fucker, get away from me."

You shake your head, fury and dismay at violent war within you. "That fucking kid, I'm gonna fucking kill him."

"Jesus," Bobby groans. "If I give you permission to fuck him just once, will it end the constant drama? Because I might be okay with that."

You punch him hard enough on the shoulder that he squawks. Haren's watching the two of you with car-wreck fascination, but you're pretty drunk and you're not worried about if you're making a scene, if you're the kinda guy who makes scenes now.

"He just. I. Fuck. He said I was acting too gay or some shit--he's a little bitch," and you're spitting the words, gnashing over them.

Bobby's lit himself, and he jolts up from his casual slump on the bar, muscles tensing and eyes going metallic. "Did you hit him?"

"No, I was, I'm gonna," but you're just talking shit, and Haren discreetly rolls his eyes, pounds another shot before saying to Bobby, "I'll deal with him. You deal with Rich."

You bare your teeth at Danny because you are not some problem to be dealt with, and you can kick his ass too, but anyway, Bobby's saying, "And Richie, you gotta deal with me 'cause I want to go beat up the kid too, you gotta hold me back."

You nod, happy to have a job, and his arm finds its way around you and you fit yourself in where you belong. Bobby feeds you a shot and rolls his head on your shoulder and no one tells him to stop. You can feel the fight sinking out of you as the music hammering overhead switches to a remix of an AC/DC song that you know by heart. Bobby's smiling at you, shiny in the blacklight. You press even closer, his arm slipping securely down your chest. You'll act as gay you goddamn please.

A little while later you get a voicemail from Huston Street saying, "I'm sorry," a bunch of times and even though you are getting hella tired of hearing that from him, you have to admit that he's still really selling it.

You let it go, anyway, even if you're not comfortable alone in the room with him. You're still teammates and you really want this to work out, somehow. Life was ten times more fun before Street found out you were gay and decided it had to fuck everything up. You keep thinking if you can just get Street to be okay with it, then getting Bobby to be okay with it will be a piece of cake.

You probably need to stop drinking so much.

Bobby scares the hell out of Street in Zito's kitchen, telling him to never say anything like that again, and he gives you warning so you can watch for Street's frightened-rabbit expression when he comes back into the living room. You take a measure of satisfaction in that, but it's pretty small.

Street leaves after a week, and you happen to be over at Haren's house when he leaves to take the kid to the airport and you tag along just because Bobby isn't returning your calls today and you have nothing better to do. You keep up conversation pretty good in the car, shaking his hand instead of hugging him when you say goodbye because he didn't really hug you back the first time and it might be awkward and you'd rather not go out like that.

Street manages a smile, says, "Tell Bobby I said see you later," and if you flinch it's only because that is definitely the last thing you are going to be doing.

The rest of the winter passes in jags, a three-day stretch over the border that you are mostly blacked out for and so it feels like half an hour, and then the two weeks when Bobby is barely talking to you and you would swear the clocks are moving backwards. You are hyper-aging, a year for every day until you find yourself shedding memories and watching the silverware in your hand shake.

You have to sober up as spring training approaches, you and Bobby both, and it's one more thing you don't need right now, halfway detoxing and all it does is shorten your tempers and make you feel like shit. Bobby takes the excuse and runs with it, starts picking a lot of unnecessary fights. You try to be sympathetic but it's hard when you're going through the exact same shit and he couldn't give a fuck, just piling on.

You can feel some kind of total nervous collapse waiting in your future, and you think that you'd rather have your arms broken. Bones heal. If you go crazy, you think that you might not come back.

Bobby says that you look like hell and it's not kindhearted like it might have been once, just a basic observation about the world: the sky is blue, the lock on the bathroom door is busted, you look like hell. You always thank him really sarcastically, but he only tips an eyebrow, smoothly shifts over into ignoring you.

He doesn't look much better, honestly, although you still have something like restraint and don't throw it back at him too often. You don't even want to mention his mournful cast, because it makes you sad in a hateful balky kind of way, this broken thing you can do nothing to fix. Bobby's face has hollowed and become dimly vulpine, the rings around his eyes darkening by the day, and he's taken to chewing on his lower lip nervously, so it's all ragged and chapped. He doesn't smile for real, just this kinda half-smiling smirk that won't draw blood to his abused mouth.

You are each trapped in an airlessly tight orbit around the other, and you keep colliding, pieces chipping off and cartwheeling away to become meteors. It's sort of like a holding pattern, pretty bad but not yet beyond tolerable, and you feel like you should be counting days again, bracing yourself. You've been falling for a long time, and now all you're doing is waiting for the sudden stop.

Soon enough, though, it's time to go back to Phoenix.

Bobby comes along with you when pitchers and catchers are due, which you are pitifully grateful for even though there's a sneaking rat's voice in the back of your mind that knows the two weeks apart would have done you both good. It's hard enough seeing him every day; you can't imagine going without.

Just to emphasize how every decision you make these days is the wrong one, you and Bobby get into a fight right after arriving. It starts off being about the ice cream sandwich you accidentally dropped on the seat of Bobby's car, but spirals quickly out of control because Bobby doesn't accept your first apology and you refuse to fucking grovel, even though he probably only wants you to sound a little more sincere, get that nasty curl out of your lip, but fuck him, you said you were sorry.

It ends with Bobby slamming an empty cabinet door so hard it snaps right off its hinges, and he calls you a selfish fuck (which you are not), storms out of the condo without looking back. You chuck the cabinet door off the balcony into the pool, thinking about how Bobby's name is on the rental agreement because he happened to be the one standing closest to the landlord when she put the papers on the kitchen counter, so if anyone gets in trouble it'll be him, and good, it's the very least he deserves. Then you kick Bobby's duffel bag into the wall over and over again, until it feels like you're kicking a body, dead weight and soft because you've pulverized every bone, and you force yourself to stop.

You go over to Haren's place and he's out in the yard, futzing around with a soccer ball and talking about how he coulda picked up a soccer scholarship just as easy if Pepperdine hadn't come through, and you're leaning against the side of the house not believing anything that he says. You've got a song stuck in your head, fingers tapping absently at your side, looking as close to directly into the sun as you dare.

From behind there are footsteps, and when you look over, narrow-eyed because you don't like people sneaking up on you, and it's Huston Street with his hands pocketed, looking kind of poleaxed. You say hey and he just stares at you, making you a little uncomfortable but then Danny's yelling and coming over and you don't want Haren to see the way Street is looking at you, so you go inside, one hand loose against your aching head. Too much fucking sunlight out there.

The three of you hit up a bar. You order double shots from the start and Haren gives you a look but you're not interested in what he thinks. You've been really good all week, only passing out drunk a couple of times, and you've earned it.

Street isn't talking hardly at all, trying to smile at your little jokes but always a second or too late, his timing shot. He keeps grabbing at Haren, scratching at his watchband, and you eye him askance, thinking bitterly that Street probably still hates looking at you, still using your teammates as human shields.

And then Danny misses a call from his girlfriend and goes outside where it's quieter to call her back. Street is sitting across from you staring at his hands, his mouth twisted into a stricken bow, obscured panic rioting on his features.

"So," you say, glaring at him. He glances up but his eyes skid off your face without ever touching down, gives an absentminded hum of acknowledgement that makes something snap in you.

"Fuck you, man," you say with relish, and you have just enough time to see his expression collapse into a kind of astonished dismay, and then you're making for the door, the cool clean air.

You want to punch something inanimate--you want to punch something animate, maybe something animated in motherfucking Texas, but you also don't want to get arrested or suspended or god knows what other calamities. There is this vast fog of rage and indignation and despair encompassing you, blurring your better senses. You're off-kilter, thrown to all hell because you usually have things so well in hand. You are usually so cool.

You shove your hands into your pockets before they can do any damage, and you watch Street emerging from the bar, looking around and his shoulders hunching as he spots you, walking over as slow as the last batter in a ten-run rout.

He says your name like it might break, and you snarl, trying your best to hate him right back, but he looks so sad all the time.

"You can't even talk to me anymore?" you demand. "You can't even, like, sit in the bar and say something about the fucking weather?"

Street's mouth fishes, but he doesn't say anything, and you toss your hands, turning away in self-preservation. You feel fucking terrible, abandoned and unloved. "Fine. Jesus. Can't even fucking talk to me. Disgust you that much, great. Real great."

"You, you didn't give me a chance," Street protests. You sneer at the sky, not looking at him.

"Well shit, man, go right the fuck ahead. Is somebody stopping you?"

It's a risk, that moment when the turn around second has been made and the ball is bobbled ever-so-slightly out in right field: if you try to stretch you better fuckin' make it. Asking Street to tell you the truth, it's that same type of terrifying adrenaline burst scouring acidic through your veins, and you can recognize it even though you hardly ever get to run the bases anymore.

Street, chest hitching, says, "I'm sorry," and you spit back at him, "Jesus, would you quit saying that," and watch his whole body jag in reflex. Street slumps on the stone wall at his back, his eyes pleading at you, let it go, let it go, but you won't, you can't.

"You said you were cool with it," you tell him.

"I am."

"Then fucking act like it, Huston. God." He can't be as obtuse as he pretends; he's probably just hiding his revulsion as well as he can, so you should probably stop pushing him.

"What do you want me to say?" and there's a frenetic edge of Street's voice that has you turning back to face him. "I mean. I said we were cool, we are, okay? But I can't, can't talk like this. I don't know what you want me to say."

There's color on his face, just visible in the yellow streetlight that muffles the scene. He looks so pained, older than his years with his features all screwed up like that. It could be the thing that infuriates you the most, this idea that Street thinks he has the right to suffer over you being queer, and you wonder if he's taken the burden of your sins onto his own soul because his WWJD bracelet told him to.

You exhale. You cut back to facts, trying to remember that he's just a dumbfuck kid and he needs stuff laid out for him, plain and clear.

"I can't spend the whole season waiting for you to decide it's too weird and bug out again."

Street shakes his head, schooling his face a little. "I won't."

You scoff, your palms aching because as it turns out you've had your hands wrenched in fists. "The fuck you won't. I'm sure you've, like, never had to deal with it before, but just, deal with it, would you? Because I don't." You stop, swallow. Your voice was about to crack there. "I don't want to not be friends with you anymore."

You look quickly away, scowling at two drunk girls chasing down a cab in stilettos. You can feel your face heating; you hope he remembers you as well as you remember him. You hope you haven't been ruined for him.

But Street just says okay a couple of times, and puts his hand on the bend of your arm, keeps it there when you instinctively try to pull away. You meet his eyes and read a pretty goddamn good semblance of veracity if it's not the real thing, and he tries to smile and it works better than it has in awhile, and the rough side of his palm is against skin, just under your T-shirt sleeve. You're terrifically aware of it, kind of appalled to find yourself believing him, just this once.

The two of you go back into the bar, mortal injuries patched up with Band-Aids and an intractable thirst in your throats. Street is moderately more at ease, arguing for Garth Brooks over the Jackson 5 until you have to bang your head on the table in consternation, and meanwhile Danny absconds to the jukebox with your quarters and overrules you both in favor of some Grand Funk.

The night ends on an odd note, out on the sidewalk after bodily placing Haren in a cab, you and Street standing right near the spot where you had your big dramatic moment earlier. You offer him a ride before really thinking about it, but luckily he turns you down, and then you say something about Bobby waiting up and he gets a strange look, didn't know that it's actually 'pitchers and catchers and Bobby' as far as you're concerned.

Something about that look on Street's face could almost be mistaken for some kind of hopeless longing, and so when he claps your shoulder in farewell, you catch his wrist and hold him in place for a moment. You want to tip his chin into the light, get a better study of him. He swallows and wrecks it by offering you a shaky smile, and against your fingers his pulse is thundering along like secretly the two of you are standing in the middle of a minefield that only Huston Street can see.

You let him go, and the drunk rolls over you. Your muddily esoteric thoughts and suspicions fall to babbling like a tower's been knocked down in your brain, and you spin on your heel, striding away with your legs feeling stiff and unused. You claw for a touchstone and arrive at Bobby, chanting his name under your breath as you flag down a taxi and stare out at the Phoenix strip malls sweeping past like a cartoon's repeating chase-scene background.

Bobby's not home when you get there. You're drunk enough to throw dignity under the bus and call his phone about twenty times in five minutes. The last time, head aching and occluded as the black-out swims nearer, you finally leave a message:

"You get your ass home, an' you hurry, Bobby, you fuckin' run. Not going down like this no matter what you do to me, see? I still want you here so ha. Ha, Bobby! You can't get rid of me, thought you could but I'm not like that, man, you should know by now. I go in for life, I fuckin' stick, you get me? You're that way too, you're just dumb an' never figured it out, but come home, come on home, Bobby. It's not really as tough as it seems."

Then you pass out, leaving another thirteen minutes of snoring and static on the open line before mercifully rolling your cheek over the 'end call' button.

The next morning you wake up still alone in the house, but there's a milky cereal bowl on the counter and half a pot of coffee in the maker, so you know Bobby's been through. You wander around with a hand curled over your forehead, looking for a note without any real hope of success.

You spend the day watching television and wikisurfing in a morbidly desultory way, all fatal childhood diseases and decimating plague epidemics. Workouts start tomorrow so you can't get as drunk as you'd like, but you take a couple painkillers from Bobby's stash and that helps some.

Bobby comes home late, and you go skittish as he stands in the doorway and passes his eyes over you as if checking for defects. You glower at the America's Next Top Model rerun you're watching, all tense and expecting Bobby to lay into you again, but instead he says in a normal-sounding voice:

"Don't leave shit like that on my voicemail, okay? I lose my phone like twice a month and all anyone has to do is press one."

You press back into the couch, feeling scolded and immediately contrary even though he said it pretty nice.

"Maybe you should pick up when I call, then. Eliminates the need for messages altogether."

Bobby gives you a cold uneven smile. "Doesn't do shit for me not wanting to talk to you, though, does it? G'night, Richie."

And then he's gone, vanished down the hall. You sit very still, staring sightless at the TV. You only remember about half of what you said on the message, enough to know it can only have made matters worse. Bobby doesn't need to hear you vowing fidelity right now; 'for life' is nothing he wishes from you.

and to the end