look away, look away, dixieland
oh, mark mulder, you magnificent bastard. that was, like. actually a really pretty swing. all long and those arms, man. looked totally goofy running the bases, but i don't think we have to worry about it being a trend or anything. still unsupportably bitter at him, though, my personified broken heart. that giants-a's game the day before the season started, there was a kid wearing a mulder a's jersey, except he'd taped over the name on the back. i wanted to offer him a sharpie so he could write street's name over it.
but! because you have hit your first major league home run, your due reward.
This Is A Happy Ending
Eric Chavez, asleep on the couch, has forgotten that the Arizona sunlight is magnified by the clean windows, and his arm and back turn pink. Uneven, because he’s slumped over with his face on his mitt and there’s a cushion half-covering him. Sweat slicks at his hairline and his waist under his swimsuit, and he’s dreaming all slow and falling, winter in Scottsdale and they’re all getting into a car, must be ten of them already shoulder to shoulder, driving through Memphis.
His dog chews on his hand for awhile and Chavez awakens slowly, his burned skin tingling.
“’Kay, all right,” he mumbles, rubbing his face on the soft leather of his mitt, and Tank barks right in his ear. Chavez jolts, fully aware, his hand crashing down onto the carpet.
He gets up and pushes his dog away. Yawns and his jaw pops. It’s a Sunday in November and his wife has taken the baby and gone to visit her mother. Chavez can feel his strength running off him in waves, a month and a half since the season ended.
He makes himself some eggs, tomato and cheese, best meal he knows, and eats in the whitewashed kitchen, leafing through his pitcher notebook. His mind is broke up with cutters and two-and-one off-speed stuff, because Chavez is going about this winter different, better prepared in all things. He’s not gonna start slow next year.
Chavez calls his wife, skidding his heels on the tile, and she sounds frozen on the Eastern Seaboard, her voice chattery, but happy to hear from him. She lets Diego babble at him and Chavez says to his son, “Yeah, that sounds great, kid,” smiling like an idiot.
Alex gets back on the phone and asks, “Taking care of yourself?” Alex tends to talk in half sentences, fragments, which Chavez has always found pretty endearing.
“Sure.” He stretches out his arms and feels the skin pull, tight and hot. “Got me a real nice sunburn just now.”
She laughs, silverware clinking in the background-Diego’s obsessed with spoons. “Green stuff in the hall bathroom. After-Sun gel, I think it’s called.”
“On it,” Chavez answers, though he won’t do anything about it today, liking the way the burn feels like summer.
They’re quiet for a minute, and Chavez gets a little uneasy the way he always does, certain that they’ve finally run out of things to talk about, and they’ll spend their life together staring awkwardly at each other and clearing their throats, inchoately in love. But then Alex is talking about the snow and the black ice on the roads, and Chavez is relieved. He’s pretty sure they’re not in the same world right now, because it’s seventy degrees outside and his wife is worried about their son getting frostbite.
They say goodbye same way as always-“ love you,” “times two,”-and then Chavez is whistling as he rinses his dishes and puts on a T-shirt. Baseball cards and ATM receipts litter the top of the dresser, friends and teammates grinning at him from photographs stuck to the walls.
Calling for Tank and rattling the leash, numb blue day outside to meet them, a world where the Red and White Sox no longer live under curses, where Eric Chavez is still working on his recovery.
He takes Tank for a long walk, familiar streets with brown scrub brush and the ground as hard as the sidewalk. Tank shies away from the cacti, eyeing it balefully, having painfully learned his lesson when Chavez’s small family moved down here three winters ago.
Right turn on Arbolejos Road and the scope of the sky above him like every good pitch he’s ever seen, all at once. Barbed wire and rotted wooden fencing at his side, sockless and his sneakers slapping in perfect rhythm to the soft thump of his heart. A mile and a half later, he’s knocking on Mark Mulder’s door, three quick knocks and two slow, just to let Mulder know he’s here, and then he walks around to the backyard, shutting the gate behind him and letting Tank off his leash to bound across the baked land.
Chavez goes in through the sliding glass door and kicks off his shoes. He shouts hey and Mulder shouts it back down the hall from his room. Chavez gets a beer and cracks the top off on the bottle opener Mulder’s got screwed into the wall next to the calendar. Sharp aerial shots of ballparks, high enough to make his stomach drop, and the calendar is still stuck on March, because Mulder doesn’t really pay attention to these things.
He can heard the music bleeding through the plaster walls, rough beat and pitched spiky electronic noises like a pulse on a heart monitor. He can picture Mulder in jeans worn away at the knees, shirt without sleeves and farmer’s tan, fucking around on his computer, and for a moment it’s enough just to see it in his mind’s eye, knows it better than he’s known maybe anything. Mulder travels in straight lines and Chavez hates it when things change.
“Dude,” Mulder says from behind him, and Chavez turns, smiles. Just like he thought, Gold’s Gym logo on his chest and his hair wet-soft, easy with the off-season and his big hands still showing teethmarks from last night, when it’s possible that they got a little too drunk at the club and ended up in the farthest bathroom stall, and Mulder had to gag Chavez to keep him quiet.
“’Sup?”
“Very little,” Mulder answers, getting his own beer and perfunctorily clacking it against Chavez’s before taking a drink. “What’d you do today?”
Chavez shrugs, thinking that he’d woken up with Mulder’s Bacardi Limon taste in his mouth, too hungover to go to church. He’d played with his dog in the yard and walked down to the store to buy milk and something with cinnamon that turned out to be Life cereal. Went for a swim with the whole world perfectly quiet, underwater and above, crows on the power lines screeching occasionally and making him flinch, his hand scraping the side of the pool and now maybe his knuckles are torn. Towel dry, still wet, stretched out on the couch and halfheartedly watched a football game, called Eric Munson but Munson didn’t pick up, and Chavez fell asleep, got a sunburn. Woke up for the second time in one day.
“Regular stuff.” The off-season doesn’t really require explanation, at least not when it’s Mulder here in front of him, Mulder who has been so good about refusing to change in spite of everything, and Chavez’s life isn’t crashing down around him anymore, he’s on solid ground again.
Mulder is staring over Chavez’s shoulder, distracted by the play of palm trees in the thin air. Chavez doesn’t mind. He’s never needed Mulder’s full attention, just the parts that matter.
“I’m going home tomorrow.”
“Yeah?” Chavez starts to ask, what’ve you got going on in Oakland, but then he remembers that it was never like that, and feels kinda stupid. He taps his wedding ring against the bottle, chime like the high parts of Mulder’s favorite music, still playing muffled from Mulder’s room. “Fuckin’ cold in Chicago, man.”
“Yeah, well.” Mulder looks at him again, sticker-shock of Mulder’s eyes and they’ve been fucking around for six years now, doesn’t matter because every time is somehow unexpected. “Thanksgiving, right, and I thought maybe I’d kick around for a little while, see some people.”
Chavez nods, doesn’t bother saying anything. For whatever reason, he never worries about running out of things to say to Mulder. Fifty years they could spend talking about Fernando Valenzuela and Joe DiMaggio, die side-by-side with floater dead fish pitches to send them off.
Chavez’s phone trills loudly in his pocket, making them both jump. Mulder mutters, “Jesus,” and Chavez checks the caller id, sighs and silences it.
“Zito,” he says meaningfully. Mulder nods, knowing smirk, and Chavez studies him carefully, but Mulder’s jaw isn’t twitching and his hand is loose on the bottle. Chavez isn’t really sure what happened between the two of them, but he knows it hit Zito harder, because Mulder kept thinking it was okay to call, and Zito whipped his phone into the side of the building one night in May, cracking it into two pieces, blank silver in the moonlight. Chavez eventually had to tell Mulder to stop, though the anger seemed pretty good for Zito’s game, it wasn’t at all good for the twenty-four of them who had to spend the majority of their time with him.
Now Zito’s having a tough winter, and if he gets traded the way everyone says he will, Chavez doesn’t think his mind will hold; nobody on his new team will know the right way to calm him down and buy him Dr. Pepper. Chavez doesn’t have time for that today, though.
He gets worried for a second, thinking that he must be a bad friend. He’s gonna ask Mulder about it, but Mulder is flipping through the newspaper on the counter and Chavez can’t even remember if they were ever friends, thinks maybe they went from acquaintances to roommates to sleeping together without any space in between.
That can’t be right. They’re friends. They’re friends who fuck around. It isn’t mutually exclusive.
“We going out tonight?” Mulder asks, sounding like Alex, which should be disturbing but is actually kinda comforting, because Alex is far away right now and Mulder will be tomorrow.
“Guess so.” Blue-pink-black light at some club somewhere, the VIP room with a couple of the other guys who live down here in the off-season, high above the dance floor. The buttons on Mulder’s shirt always seeming to gleam like runway lights, drunk enough to prop each other up and fall into the far stall in the bathroom, warm night air when they come outside again, curling around them and that is another thing that Chavez never expects.
“I don’t know, man, I think maybe we should take a night off?” Mulder opens the refrigerator, looks in for a minute, and then closes it again. Mulder is like Crosby in that he can’t stay still for longer than a minute, but he covers it better, always looks like he’s doing something.
They’ve been out every night since Alex went to Boston. Chavez keeps looking up and finding that it’s two in the morning and the bar’s lights have been turned on. Keeps downing blue Gatorade to beat the hangover, asleep on the couch, staying underwater until his lungs burn.
“Yeah, maybe,” Chavez says. “That’s probably a good idea.” He remembers suddenly, and says, “Oh, hey, I left that tape here, that Royals game? Did you see it?”
“You’ve got to lighten up with that shit. All you’ve done since you’ve been down here is watching fucking tape.”
Mulder sneers the last over his shoulder, four-letter word, wash your mouth out with soap, and he’s going into the living room. Mulder’s got wonderful arms, even with the demarcated line between tan and pale halfway to his elbows, it’s just two different temperatures and Chavez follows him, licking his lips.
Mulder gets the tape off the top of the television, but he’s looking out the window at where Tank is barking invisibly from around the side of the garage, lights off and the orange-purple sunset coating the walls, and Mulder’s face half-shadowed like this is familiar, but Chavez can’t place it.
“Goddamn it, Chavvy, did you leave your fucking dog in my yard again? I told you-”
And Chavez grabs him, a hand on Mulder’s belt and a hand on the back of his neck, kisses him joyfully, immediately open-mouthed and Mulder’s next curse swallowed up, the tape of the Royals game clattering to the carpet. Mostly to shut him up, because Chavez won’t hear shit talked about his dog, but also because Mulder’s shirt doesn’t have any sleeves and they’re not remotely buzzed, one beer for each and it’s barely five o’clock. Bridge between afternoon and evening, Mulder’s hands bridging his shoulders and pushing up into his hair and tipping his head back so that it can go deeper and go more and Chavez fucking loves this.
He can’t remember the last time they were so clear. The off-season gives them all substance abuse problems, painkillers and gin, game tape and pitcher notebooks and scratching at the veins of his arms. Mulder is licking the insides of his mouth and Chavez gets dizzy, lack of oxygen and Mulder’s body with his wide chest and his trim hips, cutting space around him like snipping newspaper photos for a scrapbook.
Presses his face into Mulder’s throat and bites him there, taste of shaving cream and it’s their first winter after a season apart, so it makes sense for it to get so fast so quick. Mulder tumbles him onto the couch and stretches out on top, hands hard on Chavez’s stomach. Chavez’s legs fall open like a million times before.
Strange to think now, strange to get disappointed over losing Mulder when Mulder’s right here. Mulder was crazy last winter, and Chavez was no better, screaming at him about abandonment and trying to draw blood, but all that is long behind them now. Can’t remember the date, but it’s halfway through November and at the end of March he’ll drive Mulder to the airport again, shake his hand at the curb and send him off to St. Louis once more.
Chavez is counting the days.
Slow down because Chavez’s mind is going to the bad place, and Mulder senses it in him, distracted in the draw of his hands down Mulder’s back, the spark of his teeth against Mulder’s upper arm. Slowslow down until they’re lazy like summer again, relaxed against each other. Mulder’s fingers slip into Chavez’s sleeve and rake down his arm, and Chavez hisses in pain.
“What?” Mulder asks, pushing himself up with one hand buried in the couch beside Chavez’s head, bleary-eyed and his mouth all wrecked. “You okay?”
Chavez nods with a wince, carefully shifting. “Sunburn.”
“Ah. Well.” Mulder grins and Mulder looks twenty-two years old, the Oakland green somehow bringing out the blue in his eyes, skinny enough that he could be snapped in half. The picture disintegrates, and this is Mulder version 2.0, Mulder who is quieter this year than he has been in the past, Mulder who spent the first three months of the season calling Eric Chavez pretty much every day, until Chavez forgot that they weren’t teammates anymore, knowing the names of Mulder’s neighbors and the shortcut he took to Busch Stadium.
Mulder kneels on the couch, bracketing Chavez’s legs, and pulls him up, gingerly lifting Chavez’s arms and taking his shirt off. The air-conditioned air slippers across Chavez’s reddened skin and he shivers, too-intense sensation of goosebumps rising. Mulder’s knuckles alight on his stomach, like, one two three four and keeping time for a waltz.
“Looks pretty bad, man.”
“It’s fine. Come here.” Chavez fists his hands in Mulder’s shirt and attempts to put their mouths together again, but Mulder is working off a different plan and he bends down, long lick across Chavez’s shoulder where the burn is the worst, and every nerve ending in Chavez’s body jerks.
“Okay,” Chavez says unsteadily, gripping Mulder tight. “Second thought. Don’t come here. Do that again.”
But Mulder’s a contrary motherfucker and he touches their foreheads together, breathing shallowly on Chavez’s lips. Chavez closes his eyes; Mulder’s too close to be seen and being cross-eyed makes his head ache.
“You know what I was thinking about today?” Mulder says, quiet enough that Chavez can still hear Tank yapping outside, and the birds swooping and dive-bombing.
Chavez sighs, placing his hands on Mulder’s hips. “What?”
“How we always had to check the closets for Huddy before doing anything.”
Chavez snorts a laugh. “And somebody would always come knocking.”
“Or your wife would call.”
“Or my wife would call,” Chavez agrees, smiling. Mulder kisses him briefly. “We never were very good at timing.”
“Whatever. We did all right,” Mulder says, and takes off his own shirt, balling it up and tossing it across the room. He’s still in game-day shape, always is, really. No bruises or scrapes on his chest and shoulders, because golf isn’t exactly a contact sport. Chavez can remember comebackers and violet marks on Mulder’s body, traces his fingers over the places where Mulder had once been hurt.
Chavez is pretty sure that they shouldn’t be talking in the past tense. Tim Hudson is still jumping out of closets and Chavez still has a wife and Mulder is still his favorite baseball card, the one he’ll never trade or sell no matter what he’s offered for it.
“Mark?”
“Hmm.” Mulder’s busy, tongue following teeth on Chavez’s chest and his nails write letters on Chavez’s arm, an E and an X and an infinity symbol, stark white against the red and fading swiftly.
Chavez can’t remember what he was going to say, gray swatches filming his vision, idly missing Alex, though he misses Mulder when he’s with her, so maybe it’s just the missing that appeals to him so greatly. Crying shame that he can’t put them in the same room together, because Mulder gets monosyllabic and starts sounding like the worst interview he’s ever given, and Alex laughs nervously and clutches at Chavez’s hand.
Mulder moves down the couch and his mouth is nitrogen now on Chavez’s stomach. Chavez thinks that nothing can matter right now, happy enough to cry. “Nothing. Let’s not go out tonight.”
Stay right here and let the sun set outside without notice, until Mulder is a well-built shadow and Chavez can map things on the backs of his eyelids, trained himself young to field while blind.
“Okay,” Mulder mumbles, chewing on the buttons of Chavez’s jeans, and Chavez has everything he could ever want.
Something rising up like rebel forces inside Chavez, and the winter will be a long one, as every winter is, long hours to talk about stuff that happened half a decade ago and get better at this every day. Chavez and Mulder are allowed to renege on the promises they’ve made, because after six years, stopping would feel like an amputation.
Never say that out loud, though, officially this is just killing time, brightly complicated strategies for surviving the off-season, waiting to be repaired by spring.
THE END
Notes: I figured it out, you guys. The way to give Eric Chavez a happy ending is to completely remove his sense of guilt. So easy!
Wrote this through an awful headache. Better than codeine.
Brought to you by Ivory Soap, the soap that floats.
but! because you have hit your first major league home run, your due reward.
This Is A Happy Ending
Eric Chavez, asleep on the couch, has forgotten that the Arizona sunlight is magnified by the clean windows, and his arm and back turn pink. Uneven, because he’s slumped over with his face on his mitt and there’s a cushion half-covering him. Sweat slicks at his hairline and his waist under his swimsuit, and he’s dreaming all slow and falling, winter in Scottsdale and they’re all getting into a car, must be ten of them already shoulder to shoulder, driving through Memphis.
His dog chews on his hand for awhile and Chavez awakens slowly, his burned skin tingling.
“’Kay, all right,” he mumbles, rubbing his face on the soft leather of his mitt, and Tank barks right in his ear. Chavez jolts, fully aware, his hand crashing down onto the carpet.
He gets up and pushes his dog away. Yawns and his jaw pops. It’s a Sunday in November and his wife has taken the baby and gone to visit her mother. Chavez can feel his strength running off him in waves, a month and a half since the season ended.
He makes himself some eggs, tomato and cheese, best meal he knows, and eats in the whitewashed kitchen, leafing through his pitcher notebook. His mind is broke up with cutters and two-and-one off-speed stuff, because Chavez is going about this winter different, better prepared in all things. He’s not gonna start slow next year.
Chavez calls his wife, skidding his heels on the tile, and she sounds frozen on the Eastern Seaboard, her voice chattery, but happy to hear from him. She lets Diego babble at him and Chavez says to his son, “Yeah, that sounds great, kid,” smiling like an idiot.
Alex gets back on the phone and asks, “Taking care of yourself?” Alex tends to talk in half sentences, fragments, which Chavez has always found pretty endearing.
“Sure.” He stretches out his arms and feels the skin pull, tight and hot. “Got me a real nice sunburn just now.”
She laughs, silverware clinking in the background-Diego’s obsessed with spoons. “Green stuff in the hall bathroom. After-Sun gel, I think it’s called.”
“On it,” Chavez answers, though he won’t do anything about it today, liking the way the burn feels like summer.
They’re quiet for a minute, and Chavez gets a little uneasy the way he always does, certain that they’ve finally run out of things to talk about, and they’ll spend their life together staring awkwardly at each other and clearing their throats, inchoately in love. But then Alex is talking about the snow and the black ice on the roads, and Chavez is relieved. He’s pretty sure they’re not in the same world right now, because it’s seventy degrees outside and his wife is worried about their son getting frostbite.
They say goodbye same way as always-“ love you,” “times two,”-and then Chavez is whistling as he rinses his dishes and puts on a T-shirt. Baseball cards and ATM receipts litter the top of the dresser, friends and teammates grinning at him from photographs stuck to the walls.
Calling for Tank and rattling the leash, numb blue day outside to meet them, a world where the Red and White Sox no longer live under curses, where Eric Chavez is still working on his recovery.
He takes Tank for a long walk, familiar streets with brown scrub brush and the ground as hard as the sidewalk. Tank shies away from the cacti, eyeing it balefully, having painfully learned his lesson when Chavez’s small family moved down here three winters ago.
Right turn on Arbolejos Road and the scope of the sky above him like every good pitch he’s ever seen, all at once. Barbed wire and rotted wooden fencing at his side, sockless and his sneakers slapping in perfect rhythm to the soft thump of his heart. A mile and a half later, he’s knocking on Mark Mulder’s door, three quick knocks and two slow, just to let Mulder know he’s here, and then he walks around to the backyard, shutting the gate behind him and letting Tank off his leash to bound across the baked land.
Chavez goes in through the sliding glass door and kicks off his shoes. He shouts hey and Mulder shouts it back down the hall from his room. Chavez gets a beer and cracks the top off on the bottle opener Mulder’s got screwed into the wall next to the calendar. Sharp aerial shots of ballparks, high enough to make his stomach drop, and the calendar is still stuck on March, because Mulder doesn’t really pay attention to these things.
He can heard the music bleeding through the plaster walls, rough beat and pitched spiky electronic noises like a pulse on a heart monitor. He can picture Mulder in jeans worn away at the knees, shirt without sleeves and farmer’s tan, fucking around on his computer, and for a moment it’s enough just to see it in his mind’s eye, knows it better than he’s known maybe anything. Mulder travels in straight lines and Chavez hates it when things change.
“Dude,” Mulder says from behind him, and Chavez turns, smiles. Just like he thought, Gold’s Gym logo on his chest and his hair wet-soft, easy with the off-season and his big hands still showing teethmarks from last night, when it’s possible that they got a little too drunk at the club and ended up in the farthest bathroom stall, and Mulder had to gag Chavez to keep him quiet.
“’Sup?”
“Very little,” Mulder answers, getting his own beer and perfunctorily clacking it against Chavez’s before taking a drink. “What’d you do today?”
Chavez shrugs, thinking that he’d woken up with Mulder’s Bacardi Limon taste in his mouth, too hungover to go to church. He’d played with his dog in the yard and walked down to the store to buy milk and something with cinnamon that turned out to be Life cereal. Went for a swim with the whole world perfectly quiet, underwater and above, crows on the power lines screeching occasionally and making him flinch, his hand scraping the side of the pool and now maybe his knuckles are torn. Towel dry, still wet, stretched out on the couch and halfheartedly watched a football game, called Eric Munson but Munson didn’t pick up, and Chavez fell asleep, got a sunburn. Woke up for the second time in one day.
“Regular stuff.” The off-season doesn’t really require explanation, at least not when it’s Mulder here in front of him, Mulder who has been so good about refusing to change in spite of everything, and Chavez’s life isn’t crashing down around him anymore, he’s on solid ground again.
Mulder is staring over Chavez’s shoulder, distracted by the play of palm trees in the thin air. Chavez doesn’t mind. He’s never needed Mulder’s full attention, just the parts that matter.
“I’m going home tomorrow.”
“Yeah?” Chavez starts to ask, what’ve you got going on in Oakland, but then he remembers that it was never like that, and feels kinda stupid. He taps his wedding ring against the bottle, chime like the high parts of Mulder’s favorite music, still playing muffled from Mulder’s room. “Fuckin’ cold in Chicago, man.”
“Yeah, well.” Mulder looks at him again, sticker-shock of Mulder’s eyes and they’ve been fucking around for six years now, doesn’t matter because every time is somehow unexpected. “Thanksgiving, right, and I thought maybe I’d kick around for a little while, see some people.”
Chavez nods, doesn’t bother saying anything. For whatever reason, he never worries about running out of things to say to Mulder. Fifty years they could spend talking about Fernando Valenzuela and Joe DiMaggio, die side-by-side with floater dead fish pitches to send them off.
Chavez’s phone trills loudly in his pocket, making them both jump. Mulder mutters, “Jesus,” and Chavez checks the caller id, sighs and silences it.
“Zito,” he says meaningfully. Mulder nods, knowing smirk, and Chavez studies him carefully, but Mulder’s jaw isn’t twitching and his hand is loose on the bottle. Chavez isn’t really sure what happened between the two of them, but he knows it hit Zito harder, because Mulder kept thinking it was okay to call, and Zito whipped his phone into the side of the building one night in May, cracking it into two pieces, blank silver in the moonlight. Chavez eventually had to tell Mulder to stop, though the anger seemed pretty good for Zito’s game, it wasn’t at all good for the twenty-four of them who had to spend the majority of their time with him.
Now Zito’s having a tough winter, and if he gets traded the way everyone says he will, Chavez doesn’t think his mind will hold; nobody on his new team will know the right way to calm him down and buy him Dr. Pepper. Chavez doesn’t have time for that today, though.
He gets worried for a second, thinking that he must be a bad friend. He’s gonna ask Mulder about it, but Mulder is flipping through the newspaper on the counter and Chavez can’t even remember if they were ever friends, thinks maybe they went from acquaintances to roommates to sleeping together without any space in between.
That can’t be right. They’re friends. They’re friends who fuck around. It isn’t mutually exclusive.
“We going out tonight?” Mulder asks, sounding like Alex, which should be disturbing but is actually kinda comforting, because Alex is far away right now and Mulder will be tomorrow.
“Guess so.” Blue-pink-black light at some club somewhere, the VIP room with a couple of the other guys who live down here in the off-season, high above the dance floor. The buttons on Mulder’s shirt always seeming to gleam like runway lights, drunk enough to prop each other up and fall into the far stall in the bathroom, warm night air when they come outside again, curling around them and that is another thing that Chavez never expects.
“I don’t know, man, I think maybe we should take a night off?” Mulder opens the refrigerator, looks in for a minute, and then closes it again. Mulder is like Crosby in that he can’t stay still for longer than a minute, but he covers it better, always looks like he’s doing something.
They’ve been out every night since Alex went to Boston. Chavez keeps looking up and finding that it’s two in the morning and the bar’s lights have been turned on. Keeps downing blue Gatorade to beat the hangover, asleep on the couch, staying underwater until his lungs burn.
“Yeah, maybe,” Chavez says. “That’s probably a good idea.” He remembers suddenly, and says, “Oh, hey, I left that tape here, that Royals game? Did you see it?”
“You’ve got to lighten up with that shit. All you’ve done since you’ve been down here is watching fucking tape.”
Mulder sneers the last over his shoulder, four-letter word, wash your mouth out with soap, and he’s going into the living room. Mulder’s got wonderful arms, even with the demarcated line between tan and pale halfway to his elbows, it’s just two different temperatures and Chavez follows him, licking his lips.
Mulder gets the tape off the top of the television, but he’s looking out the window at where Tank is barking invisibly from around the side of the garage, lights off and the orange-purple sunset coating the walls, and Mulder’s face half-shadowed like this is familiar, but Chavez can’t place it.
“Goddamn it, Chavvy, did you leave your fucking dog in my yard again? I told you-”
And Chavez grabs him, a hand on Mulder’s belt and a hand on the back of his neck, kisses him joyfully, immediately open-mouthed and Mulder’s next curse swallowed up, the tape of the Royals game clattering to the carpet. Mostly to shut him up, because Chavez won’t hear shit talked about his dog, but also because Mulder’s shirt doesn’t have any sleeves and they’re not remotely buzzed, one beer for each and it’s barely five o’clock. Bridge between afternoon and evening, Mulder’s hands bridging his shoulders and pushing up into his hair and tipping his head back so that it can go deeper and go more and Chavez fucking loves this.
He can’t remember the last time they were so clear. The off-season gives them all substance abuse problems, painkillers and gin, game tape and pitcher notebooks and scratching at the veins of his arms. Mulder is licking the insides of his mouth and Chavez gets dizzy, lack of oxygen and Mulder’s body with his wide chest and his trim hips, cutting space around him like snipping newspaper photos for a scrapbook.
Presses his face into Mulder’s throat and bites him there, taste of shaving cream and it’s their first winter after a season apart, so it makes sense for it to get so fast so quick. Mulder tumbles him onto the couch and stretches out on top, hands hard on Chavez’s stomach. Chavez’s legs fall open like a million times before.
Strange to think now, strange to get disappointed over losing Mulder when Mulder’s right here. Mulder was crazy last winter, and Chavez was no better, screaming at him about abandonment and trying to draw blood, but all that is long behind them now. Can’t remember the date, but it’s halfway through November and at the end of March he’ll drive Mulder to the airport again, shake his hand at the curb and send him off to St. Louis once more.
Chavez is counting the days.
Slow down because Chavez’s mind is going to the bad place, and Mulder senses it in him, distracted in the draw of his hands down Mulder’s back, the spark of his teeth against Mulder’s upper arm. Slowslow down until they’re lazy like summer again, relaxed against each other. Mulder’s fingers slip into Chavez’s sleeve and rake down his arm, and Chavez hisses in pain.
“What?” Mulder asks, pushing himself up with one hand buried in the couch beside Chavez’s head, bleary-eyed and his mouth all wrecked. “You okay?”
Chavez nods with a wince, carefully shifting. “Sunburn.”
“Ah. Well.” Mulder grins and Mulder looks twenty-two years old, the Oakland green somehow bringing out the blue in his eyes, skinny enough that he could be snapped in half. The picture disintegrates, and this is Mulder version 2.0, Mulder who is quieter this year than he has been in the past, Mulder who spent the first three months of the season calling Eric Chavez pretty much every day, until Chavez forgot that they weren’t teammates anymore, knowing the names of Mulder’s neighbors and the shortcut he took to Busch Stadium.
Mulder kneels on the couch, bracketing Chavez’s legs, and pulls him up, gingerly lifting Chavez’s arms and taking his shirt off. The air-conditioned air slippers across Chavez’s reddened skin and he shivers, too-intense sensation of goosebumps rising. Mulder’s knuckles alight on his stomach, like, one two three four and keeping time for a waltz.
“Looks pretty bad, man.”
“It’s fine. Come here.” Chavez fists his hands in Mulder’s shirt and attempts to put their mouths together again, but Mulder is working off a different plan and he bends down, long lick across Chavez’s shoulder where the burn is the worst, and every nerve ending in Chavez’s body jerks.
“Okay,” Chavez says unsteadily, gripping Mulder tight. “Second thought. Don’t come here. Do that again.”
But Mulder’s a contrary motherfucker and he touches their foreheads together, breathing shallowly on Chavez’s lips. Chavez closes his eyes; Mulder’s too close to be seen and being cross-eyed makes his head ache.
“You know what I was thinking about today?” Mulder says, quiet enough that Chavez can still hear Tank yapping outside, and the birds swooping and dive-bombing.
Chavez sighs, placing his hands on Mulder’s hips. “What?”
“How we always had to check the closets for Huddy before doing anything.”
Chavez snorts a laugh. “And somebody would always come knocking.”
“Or your wife would call.”
“Or my wife would call,” Chavez agrees, smiling. Mulder kisses him briefly. “We never were very good at timing.”
“Whatever. We did all right,” Mulder says, and takes off his own shirt, balling it up and tossing it across the room. He’s still in game-day shape, always is, really. No bruises or scrapes on his chest and shoulders, because golf isn’t exactly a contact sport. Chavez can remember comebackers and violet marks on Mulder’s body, traces his fingers over the places where Mulder had once been hurt.
Chavez is pretty sure that they shouldn’t be talking in the past tense. Tim Hudson is still jumping out of closets and Chavez still has a wife and Mulder is still his favorite baseball card, the one he’ll never trade or sell no matter what he’s offered for it.
“Mark?”
“Hmm.” Mulder’s busy, tongue following teeth on Chavez’s chest and his nails write letters on Chavez’s arm, an E and an X and an infinity symbol, stark white against the red and fading swiftly.
Chavez can’t remember what he was going to say, gray swatches filming his vision, idly missing Alex, though he misses Mulder when he’s with her, so maybe it’s just the missing that appeals to him so greatly. Crying shame that he can’t put them in the same room together, because Mulder gets monosyllabic and starts sounding like the worst interview he’s ever given, and Alex laughs nervously and clutches at Chavez’s hand.
Mulder moves down the couch and his mouth is nitrogen now on Chavez’s stomach. Chavez thinks that nothing can matter right now, happy enough to cry. “Nothing. Let’s not go out tonight.”
Stay right here and let the sun set outside without notice, until Mulder is a well-built shadow and Chavez can map things on the backs of his eyelids, trained himself young to field while blind.
“Okay,” Mulder mumbles, chewing on the buttons of Chavez’s jeans, and Chavez has everything he could ever want.
Something rising up like rebel forces inside Chavez, and the winter will be a long one, as every winter is, long hours to talk about stuff that happened half a decade ago and get better at this every day. Chavez and Mulder are allowed to renege on the promises they’ve made, because after six years, stopping would feel like an amputation.
Never say that out loud, though, officially this is just killing time, brightly complicated strategies for surviving the off-season, waiting to be repaired by spring.
THE END
Notes: I figured it out, you guys. The way to give Eric Chavez a happy ending is to completely remove his sense of guilt. So easy!
Wrote this through an awful headache. Better than codeine.
Brought to you by Ivory Soap, the soap that floats.