APRIL
Current record: 0–5
Objectively, signing a grubby baseball for a kid, minutes before a game starts, falls pretty high on the list of innocuous, nice things for a player to do.
Objectively, Gene gets that.
Subjectively, though, he hates how effortlessly Luis signs his autograph, how smooth the cursive looks on the dingy white of the ball, eleven letters collapsed into an L and an E and two elegant swoops. Luis has always been something of a perfectionist—compulsive in his practice routines, obsessive about his swing-tinkering, fastidious in his classes, and torturously private about his personal life—so it comes as no surprise that he would be careful with this, too.
Gene wishes he’d show an ounce of that perfectionism, that care, to the team Gene has built his life around. Instead, Luis has managed all of one hit in their first week, good for a 0.067 batting average. It’s a small sample size, but Gene draws conclusions nonetheless. His conclusions:
1) Luis Estrada is his least favorite teammate, on both a personal and professional level, literally ever;
2) That’s it.
Luis can cover his mouth with his glove—can spit a sharp and derisive and familiar Fuck into the leather whenever he makes a mistake—all he wants. Gene will start feeling bad for him when Luis decides to be less of a tool.
A better man than Gene might watch Luis pass the ball off to Ernie to sign and think it’s nice that he wants to give the ten-year-old fan something special to take home. Said better man would notice that Luis goofs around with the kid while she waits to get her ball back—“Does your family come to games much? Do you want my dog to sign it? Oh, it was a joke, sorry. He’d just steal the ball and run away. But who’s your favorite player? Oh, good choice. You want his autograph? That one I can get you for real.”—and would be slightly charmed by this version of Luis, less uptight and almost kind.
But Gene does not want to be a better man.
He stares at Vince’s iPad, skimming through a last-minute review of the same scouting reports they reviewed in depth before today’s game. He stops only when a baseball gets dangled in front of his face.
“What?” Gene says, eyes still on the scouting report.
“Sign it.”
Luis’s voice, which Gene could identify in his sleep.
“Why?”
Luis points at the stands. “She says you’re her favorite player.”
When Gene looks over, it’s the same girl from before, her grin the most wonky-toothed, genuine one he has ever seen. She waves, a broad-arcing thing. “She did not,” he says.
“Sign the damn ball, Nes.”
And Gene is Nes here, has always been Nes once he puts his jersey on. When his first name changed, Nes remained—eternal, comfortable, well-worn. But Luis hasn’t earned Nes, not anymore. When the word comes out of Luis’s mouth, it no longer feels like a twenty-one-year-old standing awkward in their dorm hallway after a late practice, suggesting the nickname and, in doing so, subtly dubbing Gene a part of their team a few weeks before he officially made the roster.
It’s a faint reminder of that Luis, more like a haphazard outline of who he used to be. There are few things Gene needs less than that right now.
So he’s been calling Luis by his first name, too. His nickname—Nada, because nothing gets past him! Nada!—used to slip so easily from Gene’s lips, the rhythm of it familiar and friendly. This, though—first names only and a safe distance left between them—is easier now. Impersonal.
“It’s Gene,” he corrects.
Luis stares at him. “Okay. Sign the damn ball, Gene.” He holds it in front of Gene’s face again, perched delicately between his fingers like the leather doesn’t agree with him.
Gene signs the ball. He has never perfected this; he gets asked a fraction as much as the other guys do. Most people who want autographs from minor league players want them so that they can resell the autograph later on, if the minor league player becomes a big name someday.
The minor leagues—especially Triple-A, the final stop before the major leagues—are nominally meant to serve as the last bit of seasoning before a player breaks onto the real stage. Their actual purpose is more multifaceted than that. Beaverton’s roster, like every Triple-A roster, is also peppered with players who will never be or are no longer good enough to be full-time major leaguers, players who could be on the cusp of something big, and players with fat question marks next to their names: the used-to-bes—Vince; the should-have-beens—Luis; and the leftovers—Gene.
In other words, no one expects Gene to make it to the majors, so they don’t expect his autograph to appreciate, so he has rarely needed to give it at all.
His signature comes out clumsy, out of place next to Luis’s. He adds a smiley face like an apology.
“I know it’s ugly,” he says when he tosses the ball back.
“She’s not going to care.” Luis doesn’t comment any further, doesn’t even look at the ball before he’s walking away and lobbing it back into the stands. He asked the girl who her favorite player was, then got Gene to sign the ball, and Gene is forced to believe one of two things: either she said he was her favorite player—improbable, leaning toward impossible; or Luis came over and asked him unprompted—so far beyond impossible it makes the first option seem almost likely.
When Luis returns to the bench and settles two careful feet away from him, Gene chooses not to think about any of it.
Luis has stayed at shortstop all week, despite posting defense far shoddier than Gene has come to expect from him—four errors in five games does not a shortstop make. Maybe, if Portland—perpetually desperate for infielders but never desperate enough for Gene’s name to get called—didn’t seem so publicly hell-bent on developing Luis to be their next franchise shortstop, Baker would move them around. Give Gene a shot, give Luis a rest. But there Luis’s name is, up on that green board, batting ninth, SS next to his name.
Gene, no longer used to second base, has also played like shit. He and Luis have led the team to a rousing five consecutive losses. The only silver lining is that Luis will get called up someday, and, just like when Luis left Stanford, Gene will get to be shortstop again. He’ll have room to breathe and space to play. His life might turn out less dream-shaped than Luis’s, but it’ll be his, and it’ll be good.
But today, Vince will get his second start of the season, and there’s a kid in the stands who likes the Beaverton Beavers enough to have a favorite player, whether or not that player is Gene. He can see no reason why they shouldn’t try to win a game for Vince, for that kid, for Baker, whose always-short nails have been bitten to stubs as her team has shit the bed over the past week.
If they’re going to win, he and Luis will need to play…okay, not well together, but competently, at least. Which they have accomplished precisely zero times thus far.
Gene takes a deep breath and begs it to steady him before he slides a few feet to the left, iPad held out and opened to the scouting report, until his elbow and knee bump up against Luis’s.
At the contact, Luis jerks his leg away, his arm banging against the dugout bench’s wooden back with a faint thud, followed by a frustrated “Shit,” then an exasperated “Jesus,” in rapid succession. Gene watches it all, somewhere between confusion and horror, and, while Luis settles back in a few careful inches away, Gene wonders how, exactly, Luis has survived this long in the notoriously close quarters of the minor leagues if he can’t tolerate sharing a bench with a teammate.
Luis rubs at his elbow—not quite massaging it, just prodding, as if feeling for a bruise. An itch at the back of Gene’s mind says: he might react this way only to Gene, and Gene hasn’t gotten such a negative response from a teammate in years.
Luis Estrada is Gene’s least favorite teammate, but the idea that Gene might be Luis’s, too, bothers him in a way he doesn’t expect. Like his skin has been pulled too tight.
They lose. So thoroughly that the only real thing to do when the game ends is hop in the showers and wash the whole thing away.
Gene shuffles into his usual stall and stands under the water while he waits for it to warm. Beaverton’s stadium, as old as it is, still boasts the best showers Gene has found thus far in the minor leagues—generally at least semi-clean, with acceptable water pressure and walls that divide the stalls from each other. The stalls don’t have doors, though, and as he turns to wash the soap from his back, Luis walks by.
Luis keeps his eyes to himself, but Gene doesn’t.
Gene, in spite of the way his brain revolts against him for doing it, watches.
He watches Luis’s careful, measured steps, the way he keeps his shoulders up by his ears. They’re good shoulders, if Gene is honest with himself, which he would really rather not be about this, but there’s the thought anyway, persistently gay: they’re good shoulders. Not especially broad, but broader than the rest of Luis’s body might suggest they’d be. Sparsely and darkly freckled.
He does not, Gene notes, have back hair, in contrast to what his chest hair would lead one to expect. Maybe he waxes. Maybe he lucked into a surprisingly hairless, absurdly sexy back.
It’s that thought that makes Gene’s skin go cold under the shower’s warm spray. It’s that thought that makes Gene turn around and face the wall, any remaining soap on his back be damned.
He does not find his teammates attractive, as a rule. Not a general rule—a firm one, with no exceptions to date. It keeps his too-big heart safe, never to get disappointed by the usually straight and always cis men who populate his day-to-day life. It also means that Beaverton’s clubhouse has always felt comfortable to him—everyone, including Gene, can walk around as naked as they want, and no ounce of him needs to feel self-conscious about it.
At Stanford, Gene got ready in the women’s locker room, cordoned off from the rest of the team until he came out two years after Luis had already left. While he noticed—lightly, casually, unobtrusively, of course—that Luis was at least semi-nice to look at, there was not much of an opportunity to care beyond that. Between the teammate factor and the then-impenetrable walls of Gene’s own closet, he didn’t consider it overmuch.
But tonight, with those walls gone and the shape and gentle curve of Luis’s back instantly memorized, Gene does feel self-conscious.
Not because his body doesn’t look like Luis’s, or the rest of his teammates’—he’s fine with that, is more comfortable about that in Beaverton than he’s ever been anywhere else. No, he feels self-conscious because the possibility exists that Luis might see Gene’s body now, that he might have an opinion about it, and some small, traitorous part of Gene wants that opinion to be positive.
Gene yanks the shower knob to the right, until the water runs so cold it’s almost hot again.
When he eventually emerges, wrapped in his towel, his fingers pruny, he gets dressed as quickly as he can manage, the fabric of his sweatshirt and shorts sticking to his still-wet skin.
He finds Vince sitting in Baker’s office, the two of them tossing a baseball back and forth. Luis’s dog sits next to Baker’s desk and watches the ball sail between them. Gene’s dad and Baker played together a couple of seasons, so Gene knows few catchers’ tosses better than hers. When he was six and she was twenty-seven, she would play catch with him by the backstop while his dad took fly balls in the field. Her toss hasn’t changed.
He used to dream of being Baker someday—a woman, playing in the majors, in the same uniform and eye black as the guys. This was well over a decade before Gene realized that he was, after all, literally one of the guys, but the sentiment never entirely left him. Something about her being out there—crouched behind home plate and calling the game—felt like possibility.
She lobs the ball to Gene, silently inviting him into the conversation. The casualness of it amazes him, sometimes.
“Shit game tonight,” she says, from her office in the stadium where she coaches, and he plays, and that amazes him, too.
“Yep,” he agrees. He pops the p.
He went three-for-five at the plate but got caught trying to steal a base. The latter fact, of course, will be the one that keeps him awake tonight.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” he adds, because he really does want to believe that tomorrow will be different than today, than the days that led up to today. It’s the way Gene approaches baseball—not just day-to-day, but inning-to-inning, play-to-play. The ability for one pitch, one hit to change the tide of a game has always made baseball special: it is a rare sport where, truly, the game doesn’t end until it ends.
Baker gives him a mock salute when Gene tosses the ball back to her. Vince grabs his jacket and keys.
The night air is cooler than it was during the game, almost sharp. They’re teetering on spring’s precipice, these final weeks of unpredictability before they topple into summer’s heady, nonstop heat. Gene likes these weeks best, when it’s still easy to be an optimist. They’ve lost six games in a row, won zero, but a lot can happen with so much of the season still to go.
In the car, Vince tosses his phone into Gene’s lap. “Pick a playlist?”
Gene clicks through Vince’s music library, past a dozen albums any white dad might play on his way to the hardware store, until he lands on an option they can both enjoy. Vince turns the volume up, and Gene opens Twitter—logged into the nameless, locked account that Vince uses mostly to follow all his real-life queer friends. All ten of them, including Gene. Gene types his own name into the search bar, and, yep—there it is, from a Twitter handle Gene recognizes and wishes he didn’t.
@Lumberjax_Brandon71: Thought Ionescu was supposed to be good at this??? lmaooooo
Which, okay, Lumberjax-underscore-Brandon—whatever. Not the meanest tweet Gene’s ever seen about himself. What he wants, what he opened the tweet for, is the video linked beneath. As soon as he clicks on it, the audio comes through the speakers. Gene considers turning the volume off entirely, but the Bluetooth has already snitched on him.
“No,” Vince says, though they both know Gene will ignore him. “Turn that off.”
The video is shaky, taken on a cell phone, but it does the trick. Giving up on subtlety, Gene holds the screen as close to his face as he can, to watch his failed attempt to steal second base. Vince calls it self-flagellation, Gene calls it learning from his mistakes.
The thing is, the pitcher was a head-nodder.
People think that stealing bases is about raw speed, but it’s about knowing your moment. In college, Gene memorized a video where the reigning MLB stolen base champion explained that you have to learn a pitcher’s giveaways. You wait for him to give that infinitesimal nod of his head, or squint just so—that little thing he always does before he throws the pitch. And then, before the ball even leaves his hand, before his windup is even done, you go.
By the time anyone notices, you’re already safe.
Gene took off the instant the pitcher’s head declined, pulse hammering, his helmet falling off somewhere between first and second. He hasn’t been able to stop reliving the pressure of the second baseman’s glove on his back, the tag applied an instant before Gene’s outstretched hand hit the base. In the video, the second base umpire squeezes his hands into fists to call Gene out.
“You’re obsessing,” Vince says.
Which, yes. Gene’s ADHD fixates on things, plays them on a loop until they become so ingrained that he can’t ever forget them. It’s why he tries not to read Twitter, why he hates conflict. It is, Gene really does try to tell himself, why he can’t stop thinking about the way Luis reacted to their elbows bumping in the dugout, why Gene hates the idea of being anyone’s least favorite teammate so much.
For all that he loves to see the good, it has always been a conscious choice, a skill honed over many years. One born out of necessity. If he let himself do anything else, if he let himself think about the things people said and thought about him, he would never stop. He would start to believe them.
But he’s human. Sometimes he fixates. “A little,” he says to Vince.
“It’s fine,” Vince says. “It’s not like one stolen base was going to fix that game.”
“I know.”
“Didn’t you tell me you were going to stop going on Twitter?”
“I lied,” Gene says, turning back to the video. He did delete Twitter from his phone, but he’s noticed that he can find rude comments on Vince’s version of the app just as easily as he could on his own.
“At least you weren’t as bad as Estrada.”
“Not a high bar.” Gene presses play on the video again. This time, he sees it, a half-second before video-Gene takes off: a slight turn of his head toward their home dugout along the third base line, a barely-there delay before he runs. He scrubs backward, tries to recall what it was that pulled his focus away from the task at hand, but all he can remember is Luis staring back at him from the dugout.
Then, a notification pops up at the top of Vince’s phone.
“You have a text from Jack,” Gene says.
“Open it?”
Vince’s text stream with Jack looks more or less exactly how one might expect two married, thirty-eight-year-old queer men to text each other. Heart emojis from Jack, a picture of their dogs, a text from Vince that reads, I’m getting too old to be away from you and the kids this much. The “kids” here meaning the dogs. He’d paired it with the breaking heart.
Jack’s message is a link, captioned, Price dropped!!
Gene’s thumb presses on the link before he asks if he should—he recognizes the Zillow logo when he sees it. Looking at the ridiculous, expensive real estate Vince and Jack always consider but never buy has become something of a pastime for Gene.
This particular house is the exact kind of place where a once-great baseball player should retire. Not too ostentatious, but gorgeous. The windows span most of the outside walls, and it sits in front of a backyard so big it might actually be measured in acres. There are five bedrooms—five times as many as Gene has ever had, and three more than he can possibly imagine having—but Vince and Jack do want to adopt, eventually, and they love having guests.
The house is perfect, except that, according to the ZIP code, it’s in Bend.
“Is it the yellow one?” Vince asks.
“Yeah.” Something about the way Vince perks up when he says it makes Gene ask, “Wait. How real is this?” He tries to sound casual about it, but his heart pounds, surprise making it hard to swallow.
“We’re just talking about it,” Vince says.
“When would you move?” he asks.
“In a year or two. When I retire.”
Gene clings to the “or two” part of that answer, and says, “Bend is nice.”
“Well, you know we want kids.”
“You and me? I don’t remember that conversation.”
Vince rolls his eyes. “Jack doesn’t want to adopt when I’m traveling so much.” If the set of his shoulders is any indication, this involved a fight, which Vince and Jack have only rarely.
“Bend’s probably a good place to raise kids. I mean, I know literally nothing about that, but it seems…pretty?” Gene guesses.
“It is. And it’s only about three hours from here.”
A road trip, to be sure, but a lifetime spent on buses packed with twentysomething-year-old men has somewhat numbed Gene to the idea of road trips. What’s three hours? Vince is from a small town, Jack from a smaller one. It makes sense for them to move somewhere quieter.
“It’s a good house,” Gene says. He adds, half-joking, “You pick a bedroom for me? The beige one?”
Vince says, “The beige one is the guest room. Yours is picture twenty-four.”
Picture twenty-four shows a room that opens up, via glass-paned French doors, onto a weathered back porch. The light through the windows makes it look sunny. Spacious. Gene says, “Not too shabby.”
“We’re thinking about putting in an offer,” Vince says, eyes firmly on the road ahead of them. “But obviously we wouldn’t move until after the season.”
Gene always knew the ice packs and physical therapy wouldn’t be enough to keep Vince pitching forever. He shouldn’t be surprised that he’s considering retirement, but The Yellow House and the mention of an offer have made Vince’s inevitable departure feel real in a way he can’t bring himself to face just yet.
Gene doesn’t know what he would have done when people started paying attention to him if Vince hadn’t been there to remind him that no one else’s opinion mattered. He doesn’t care to imagine playing without most of his teammates, but he can’t imagine playing without Vince. A small part of him digs its bitten nails into the idea that they will always play together, but an athlete’s career ends when it ends.
If this is his last season with Vince, he sure as shit doesn’t want to spend it trying to convince Luis Estrada not to hate him. The sooner they can get Luis traded or called up, the sooner Gene can enjoy this year for what it is: his last chance to help get Vince to the playoffs, to share a team with the guy who made this place feel like home.