JULY
Current record: 50–41
After he falls, Gene is convinced for one terrible minute that Luis has had a heart attack and died on his bedroom floor, decidedly, completely naked. If not for the circumstances and the deep pit of worry eating its way through him, he would find the whole scene a little funny. Once he realizes Luis only fainted—“only” being a relative term—he checks for bumps on Luis’s head and, when Luis comes to thirty seconds or so later, fetches him some clothes.
“What are these for?” Luis asks.
“I’m taking you to the hospital.” Not a question.
“No, I’m fine.”
But he puts the pants on when Gene hands them over and lets Gene usher him into the passenger-side door without any fight, so, Gene reasons, he must really feel like shit.
They take Luis’s truck—no one has money for an ambulance, particularly not a twenty-six-year-old and a twenty-eight-year-old whose jobs only pay them their shitty salaries six months of the year. Though, Gene notes while Luis ducks his head between his knees and continues arguing that he doesn’t need a doctor, Luis is about to get a pretty significant pay bump.
“This happens all the time,” Luis says.
“It absolutely does not. Do your seat belt.”
Gene has seen and heard about more than a handful of Luis’s panic attacks, and while hyperventilating and mild chest pains have made frequent appearances, fainting has not.
When they get to the hospital, Luis waits in one of the plastic chairs while Gene talks to the nurse behind the emergency room desk. Luis keeps the cool washcloth Gene got him pressed against the back of his neck, a lot less cool now. He has on a pair of Gene’s sweatpants, too short in the legs; the shirt he borrowed has damp armpits and a stripe of sweat down his back, as if he just finished a workout rather than a panic attack.
The doctors get to him alarmingly fast. Gene has been told many times that, while waiting is the pits, you want the doctors to make you wait, because that means you’re probably fine. When they call Luis’s name a mere ten minutes after they get there, Gene’s own pulse starts racing.
He can’t go back to see the doctor with Luis, so he paces. When he put his shoes on in a hurry, he neglected to grab socks, and now his Docs rub against his ankles in the most unpleasant way possible. On inspection, the friction has eaten through the top layer of skin, and his heels have begun to bleed. He sits, his laces loosened, and jiggles his leg hard enough to shake his seat until Dodger sets his chin on Gene’s knee to still him.
In the end, it takes three hours before Luis walks out, eye bags even heavier than usual, his usually perfect hair a hot mess.
“What’s the verdict?” Gene asks.
“I have anxiety. Shocker.”
“That’s it?”
“They said that I should, and I quote, ‘try to be less anxious.’ ”
“Awesome.”
Luis shrugs. “Apparently I was also dehydrated, so at least they fixed that. So glad my insurance makes me pay a hundred and fifty dollars for a doctor to tell me to drink water and get an easier job.”
Gene winces. “Sorry. I thought you were having a heart attack or something.”
“It’s okay. Thanks for driving me.”
Gene takes him back to his apartment, because there’s really no point in Luis’s going home. They throw yesterday’s warm-up clothes into the wash so they’ll be fresh when they get up, and Luis squeezes in a single hour of sleep while Gene lies, staring at the ceiling, next to him.
A call-up is better than a trade, he reminds himself until he grows tired of hearing the words in his head.
So why does he have this terrible, insistent feeling in his gut?
“He fainted?” Baker says.
Gene closes the door to her office. As far as he can tell, no one in the locker room heard her, but it’s possible they’re just being polite.
“A little,” Gene confirms.
“Is he okay?” Real concern laces her voice, and not just of the Can he still play? variety.
“The doctor who checked him out said he’s fine, yeah.”
“And you picked him up to take him to the hospital? Why didn’t you call him a fucking ambulance?”
Okay, so he fudged those particular details a bit. But he needed someone to tell him he’d done the right thing, and he couldn’t exactly admit to Baker that Luis had fainted naked on the floor of his bedroom. So he told her that he received a call from Luis shortly after she herself had hung up with him and that, halfway through said phone call, Luis had started to complain of chest pains, and Gene went to check on him.
There’s no way Baker believes him, but he hopes she doesn’t mention it.
“Because ambulances are expensive,” Gene answers, which, at least, isn’t a lie.
“The team would have paid for it.”
“I don’t think he wanted the team to know. He didn’t want to get benched.” At least, that’s how Gene would have felt had he been in Luis’s position.
“He’s still playing?” Baker asks, incredulous. She reaches for her phone, and Gene realizes he’s made a serious error in telling her anything, no matter how many details he fudged.
He jolts forward to stop her. “You can’t call them!”
“Like hell I can’t.”
“Baker, come on, you know he can’t just—”
“He will get another chance,” she says, tapping in a number she has long since memorized.
“Not necessarily.”
“Guys like Estrada get second chances. He will be fine.”
Gene doesn’t agree. Luis has caught a lot of flak in the last few years, flak that might have landed a little softer were he white; for guys who are straight, and white, and cis, it takes longer for fans’ and coaches’ and executives’ goodwill to wear off. Gene has seen the things people say every time Luis falters; this opportunity was hard-won, and Baker knows that as well as Gene.
“Baker,” he says.
She sets her jaw. “We have to keep our players safe. He can’t play if he went to the hospital last night. What kind of coach would I be if I didn’t say something?”
“What kind of coach would you be if you held your players back?”
Baker puts her phone down.
“Do I trust you to do your job?” she asks, voice frighteningly level.
Gene bites his tongue, quite literally, until he trusts himself to answer truthfully. “Yes.”
“Even though you’re screwing your teammate?”
Gene blinks at her, the fact of his and Luis’s relationship—whatever that relationship is—thrown in his face like it could be a bad thing, something to be used against him. It stings, in his throat and behind his eyes.
“But that’s none of my business,” she says. “Just like this decision is none of yours.”
She points at her door. A dismissal. Gene slams it on his way out.
“Check the fucking attitude, or I’m scratching you,” she yells through the glass.
His warm-ups—stairs, laps, push-ups, the parts he can do without Luis—go by much faster today. He did this pared-down version of their routine for years on his own, but it doesn’t sit right with him anymore. He feels unprepared for the day. The energy he usually burns off running down grounders bubbles in him, speeding his breath and urging him to do another set of bleachers. He resists it, but when he sits on the bench in the dugout, he can’t stop himself from jiggling his leg so hard it might register as an earthquake on some scales.
It’s an unseasonably cold day in Beaverton. One of those odd summer days that make you check the calendar.
He knows the following: he probably fucked Luis’s chances of playing today; Luis has probably found out by now that Gene fucked his chances of playing today; Luis fainted in his room less than twelve hours ago, and Gene isn’t completely convinced that Luis should be playing anyway; and, loudest and most selfish of all, he misses Luis for more than just their warm-ups, like someone took a sharp knife to the most important part of his life and sliced it out.
He texts Luis—Where do they have you batting?—desperate to hear that he hasn’t ruined this opportunity for Luis by opening his fat mouth. He stares at his phone and wills it to light up with an answer.
Instead, the bench creaks to his left, and when Gene looks, it’s Vince, his beard grown out over the past months in a way that makes him look less polished, more intimidating.
“Baker’s pissed at you,” he says. It’s the first thing he’s said to Gene since Sacramento that wasn’t directly baseball-related.
Gene swallows around the feeling of relief, just at Vince talking to him, even if he’s said nothing good or even surprising yet. “Did she tell you why?” he asks.
“No. You want to?”
Vince isn’t pitching today, but he has an ice pack strapped to his shoulder anyway, has shown up hours early for this game. Captain, through and through.
“Everyone’s pissed at me,” Gene says.
“I’m not.”
Gene laughs, horrified that it comes out wet. Vince has never been a fan of crying, certainly not turned in his direction. Gene tries to pretend it didn’t happen, wills the tears away.
“I’m really not,” Vince says. “I’m fucking jealous, because you’re twenty-six, and you have your whole career ahead of you.”
“It doesn’t really feel like it. You’re leaving. Nada got called up this morning—”
“I saw that. Should have been you.”
Gene shakes his head. “He deserves it.”
“You can still be jealous, Nes.”
“I don’t want to be.” And it’s such a small part of the problem, really. That Luis has gotten something Gene can’t have. The problem is that Gene wants to be there, at his side, while he does it. He wants to hold Luis’s hand and play a little to his left; he wants Luis Estrada, Baseball Player, to bat him home, and then he wants Luis Estrada, the person, to take him home.
He can’t say all of that, can’t admit to Vince this aching want he has let into his heart, the tender bruises it has given him on its way in. But Vince pulls him in, gives him a side-hug like the dad he will be someday, and drops a kiss into the middle of Gene’s curls. His ice pack leaves a cold spot against Gene’s T-shirt.
“I know,” Vince says. “But sometimes we’re jealous. Sometimes our bodies won’t let us fucking win, and it sucks, and you’re allowed to hate it.”
“I missed you, dude.”
“I’m sorry I threw a fit.”
Gene nods. “I’m sorry I didn’t want to let you be upset. I wanted to fix it.”
“Because that’s the kind of person you are.”
Gene clicks his tongue. “I know it can be annoying.”
“It’s the absolute worst,” Vince says, but Gene can hear the humor in his voice, and it’s the kind of ribbing they used to do, so familiar it hurts.
“What am I gonna do when you leave?” Gene asks. He says it like a joke, but he means it, utterly and entirely.
“Not replace me with Luis Estrada, I hope.”
“You have got to get over that. I can have two friends,” Gene says.
“Friends,” Vince says, like there should be air quotes around the word. “Not ready to get into that yet?”
“Absolutely not.”
Vince lifts his hands, palms out in front of him, and tilts his head like Fair enough. “I can respect that.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I’m going to have to tease you for this eventually.”
Gene tips his head against the back wall of the dugout. “Please wait until I’m less fragile.”
“Deal. One question.”
“No thank you,” Gene says, the same as Luis did all those months ago, because he’s thinking of Luis, because he always is.
“Were you two an item in college? Is that why you’ve always been so obsessed with him?”
Gene wrinkles his nose. “I’m not obsessed.” He is. “And no, we weren’t.”
“And now?”
“So why haven’t they called you up yet?” Gene asks, desperate to move the topic away from himself. “You’ve been tearing it up.”
Vince shrugs. “Oh, who the hell knows? What’re you gonna do.”
“Did you ask?”
“About a million times, yeah.”
“Nothing?”
“Crickets.” He shrugs again, but this time it seems a little more genuine. “As long as we can get Beaverton to the playoffs, I can retire happy.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, that’s what I told my therapist, at least.”
Gene laughs. “We’ll get you that postseason start, Altzy. Who cares if you do it in front of forty thousand people or eight thousand?”
“Eight thousand is a little generous for our crowds.”
Gene stands up, walks to the ledge of the dugout and leans over its railing, marveling at the empty plastic-and-metal stands around them.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Beaverton might be turning into a baseball town.”
“Fucking brutal,” Gene says as the Beavers make their way down the dugout tunnel after an excruciating, double-digit loss.
“Absolute dogshit,” Ross agrees. He struck out, almost mercifully, to finally end the game.
“We’ll get ’em next time,” Gene says. “Yeah?”
Ernie gives Gene a shoulder nudge as he walks past, smile just as bright after a tough loss as it is after the most electric of wins.
Ross gives a halfhearted nod of agreement. “Let’s just hope Nada fared better than we did, right?”
Gene usually leaves his phone in his locker during games, to force his full, fickle attention onto the game. Tonight, he brought it to the dugout with him, checked it about a million times, until the battery finally died on him. Last he saw, Portland was in the third inning. The walk from the dugout to the locker room has never felt so long, and Gene itches to check the score more than he has in years.
When they pour back into the clubhouse, Ernie sees him first.
“Nada!” he yells. The team, as if drawn up by the same string, stands straighter, trying to crane their necks around to see.
Sure enough, Luis sits in front of his locker, in the same sweats he borrowed from Gene that morning, his T-shirt swapped out for one of his usual—plain, black, a little on the tight side. He has a Beaverton cap on, the one he thinks draws attention away from his ears, tipped back in the way he prefers. He has shoved his hands into the pockets of his jacket, and he looks far more relaxed and infinitely happier than he did that morning.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Vince asks.
Luis shrugs. “Guess I’m finishing up the season with you losers,” he says, to which a chorus of cheers arises from the team. Gene, for his part, can’t quite bite back the smile that insists at the edges of his lips. It’s laced with confusion, but there it is: he wants Luis here. Or rather, selfishly, horribly, he wants Luis next to him, wherever that may be.
Almost as badly, he wants Luis for the team. He wants never to have another game like this one, and Luis can help them toward that goal. He’ll ask Luis later what happened, but for now, he’s happy. Completely, face-split-in-two happy.
“Shit game tonight,” Luis says, dropping the side of his fist onto Gene’s shoulder.
Gene should worry, maybe, about how obvious and ridiculous his smile must look at that insult. But he beams, unashamed. “Thanks. Try and beat that next game.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I will.”
What had seemed five minutes ago a lost-cause night has transformed into something better, unexpected, and Gene figures he should probably assume that it won’t last. But Gene is an optimist, and he wants to give himself this.
Baker has other ideas.
Usually, after a game this sloppy, she bangs into the locker room and brings with her a bone-deep unpleasantness, her jaw set and her face red. She has never needed to give them the post-game, you-all-suck speech, because the disappointment that surrounds her says all that she needs to say.
So, tonight, they watch her progress across the room in complete silence, expecting her to walk straight out. Instead, she stops outside her office, arms folded, face surprisingly neutral.
“All right,” she says. “Not the outcome we wanted. New series this week, though. We’ll give it our best.”
A tentative feeling of relief starts to nudge its way in at the corners of the room. They wait while Baker considers her words, all of them exhausted in the way only a four-hour blowout loss can make you.
“I’ll let you go in a minute,” she says. “Off day tomorrow, and I’m keeping practice optional, so if you want to take the chance to rest up, do. We’ll fly out to Albuquerque tomorrow night. If anyone’s interested, we’ve set aside a bank of seats for the Portland game. It’s a day game, so whoever wants to can catch a few innings before we head to the airport.”
Her offer is met with a smattering of confusion. They’ve all been to their fair share of Lumberjacks games, and there’s nothing particularly special about tomorrow’s matchup, a sleepy Sunday matinee against another bottom-dwelling team.
“Are they that desperate to fill seats?” Cooper asks.
“Can it, Coop,” Vince says, and Gene notices, belatedly, that he’s filming the room on his oversized iPhone.
Baker holds her hands up, and finally lets her neutral façade break just enough to smile. “Hey, if you want to miss your teammate’s major league debut, be my guest.”
Everyone turns to look, confused, at Luis. Or, at least, Gene does, and he thinks he can feel everyone else doing the same.
But then:
“He’s played here for almost two years, and we will miss him like shit, but goddamn if we aren’t proud.”
Luis hasn’t played for Beaverton for two years. Before Gene can put the pieces together—
“Ionescu, I’m sorry to say you won’t have tomorrow off. They need you in Portland at noon.”
So everyone isn’t looking at Luis. They’re looking at—
“You’re getting called up, Nes,” Luis says, at which point the locker room erupts into the sort of cheering you only muster for a person you really love, and will really miss.