The Elephants play a three-game set in Houston in the horror of Houston’s roofed park. It’s loud in a way few stadiums are, a combination of enclosure and a rabid fan base. Houston always seems to have their number: at the Elephants Coliseum, but more so here, hitting like someone’s telling them what signs Zach is putting down. It’s exhausting, especially when they lose by three runs.
Zach mostly wants to go, recover, shower, collapse. But Eugenio finds him after the game, after reporters elicited the usual quotes about getting ’em again tomorrow, even if Eugenio is starting the next game and the one after that. “There’s a Spanish place nearby, if you wanted to go get dinner. And, uh, game-plan.”
The caterers laid a team spread in the kitchen. But it was an afternoon game and Zach could use a drink not prepared at a hotel bar. “Let me go get changed.”
When he gets back to his stall to pull on his street clothes—there’s Eugenio. And Gordon. And Giordano. And Braxton. And Hayek.
“I updated the reservation,” Eugenio says.
They grab a couple of rideshares, and in the ten minutes it takes to drive from the ballpark to the restaurant, Zach runs through every possible outcome from bad to catastrophic that could happen during this. The waitstaff hitting on Eugenio, which happens, but is easier to brush off when it’s just him and Zach. Zach running into someone he met the last time he was in Houston and the two of them spending a solid minute trying to place each other before coming to the realization it was through Grindr. Zach somehow forgetting their teammates are there and that the rest of the restaurant is there and that the rest of the planet is there and reaching across the table to run his fingertips over the calluses on Eugenio’s palm.
But nothing prepares him for the slow torture of being crammed next to Eugenio in a booth in the noise of the restaurant, Eugenio explaining various menu items as his shoulder brushes Zach’s.
It’s a nice restaurant. Not a baseball-player-nice restaurant, which tend toward steak-and-bourbon kinds of places, but a nice one, located in an old house that their waiter informs them is from the 1920s, light walls and dark wood trim, all straight, masculine edges.
They’re in a back room, quarantined off from the rest of the dining area, which is probably for the best when Giordano asks, “Why is the food small?” and then their waiter explains the concept of tapas while Eugenio looks like he wants to slither onto the floor.
“What are you going to get?” Zach says.
Eugenio has his phone out, his notes app open, and is editing a list on it, one he probably started when he made the reservation. “I was thinking about the eel.”
“Huh, I don’t think I’ve ever had eel.” Which leads to a discussion of if eel is kosher, which Google tells Zach it is not, and then a story about his mother’s horror when one of their cousins made catfish fritters for Pesach.
“You guys decided?” someone says, and it occurs to Zach that they’ve mostly been talking to each other, not that Zach can really hear much beyond Eugenio’s warm breath in his ear. His thigh has gotten increasingly closer to Zach’s, even if his hands are resting innocently above the table.
“I haven’t looked yet,” Zach admits. “Uh, Morales, get me whatever.”
Their waiter collects their orders—Eugenio requesting a duck entrée and a variety of tapas—along with Gordon’s credit card and assurances that they’ll keep ordering and won’t break anything.
Eugenio hasn’t moved any farther away, even though they’re no longer studying the menu together. He looks down at where Zach’s hand is resting on his own leg. “How come you painted your nails for this game?”
The nails on Zach’s throwing hand are painted white, the kind of lumpy uneven painting he did with his nondominant hand so that Hayek could see what signs he put down. “The first couple times we played here, the stickers kept peeling off in the humidity. I had to reapply ’em between innings.”
“I should probably do that.”
“I brought the nail polish along, if you want to borrow it later.”
“Sure, I can swing by your room.” And Eugenio smiles like he’s getting away with something.
Their food comes. Eugenio ordered what looks like six things for himself, the unkosher eel, a fava bean salad, potatoes with spicy oil, a couple more things that Zach can’t identify. And Zach sticks his fork into one of them, unthinking, not having asked. Eugenio scoots the plate toward him, Zach eating from it and, when he glances up, Gordon is looking at them.
Zach swallows his bite of fingerling potatoes, which he didn’t really chew all that well, a lump down his throat that he washes down with a too-big sip of wine. He’s pinned into a corner of the booth, Eugenio on one side, Hayek—who is telling an incredibly loud, incredibly filthy, and almost certainly fabricated story—on his other. And he taps Eugenio’s thigh with his hand, then nudges him with his elbow. “Bathroom,” he adds, unnecessarily, when Eugenio slides out.
He exits their dining area, escaping into the safety of the underlit restaurant hallway. The bathrooms are both single occupancies, both occupied, so he waits. The restaurant, like everything else in Houston, is over-air-conditioned, ceiling fans stirring the already too-cold air.
And maybe Gordon looked at him for no particular reason. He’s a nice guy, Eugenio’s landlord even though he refused offers of rent. He hasn’t shown up unannounced with the pack of folks he always rolls with, instead calling and telling Eugenio to clean the place up—not that it was ever really messy—but giving them enough time for Zach to shower and throw clothes on and sit on Eugenio’s couch, pretending to be engrossed in a movie with his hair still wet. A nice guy, but Zach doesn’t want to test the limits of his niceness, especially not in front of their teammates, the restaurant waitstaff. Not with Eugenio there, laughing expansively and pressing his thigh against Zach’s.
One of the bathrooms opens. Zach goes in and splashes water on his face, trying to cycle his breathing back to normal. He thinks about texting someone—Morgan, maybe, though he doesn’t know what to say. His sister, who would tell him that he picks food off everyone’s plates and always has. Eugenio, to tell him to sit farther away from him and to stop making jokes and having a lower lip Zach has to watch in order to hear them.
When Zach gets to the table, he slides into his seat, eats his duck mechanically, and keeps his thigh a few inches from Eugenio’s.
“Your food okay?” Eugenio asks, when he sees Zach sawing a microscopic piece of duck down even further.
“It’s perfect.” But he doesn’t finish it and declines the waiter’s offer of a box.
When they get back to the hotel, Zach stops for a small bottle of nail polish remover at the little vending area in the lobby, one selling single-serve pints of ice cream, half bottles of wine, and various toiletries. He should take the nail polish off, especially since they have Eugenio starting the next two games. Especially since the cashier glances at his hands and then up at him in question.
The light is on in his room when he opens the door, Eugenio on one of the beds watching something on TV. And right, Zach slid his extra key into Eugenio’s stall under his mitt. He tried to be clandestine about putting it there until he realized it was an unmarked black room key for a hotel they were all staying at.
Eugenio clicks off the television. “I didn’t want to rummage through your stuff.” He wiggles his unpainted fingers.
It takes Zach a minute to find the nail polish, which is in his travel toiletry kit, sitting under a spare tube of toothpaste. “Here you go.” He tosses the bottle to Eugenio.
It’s a matte white; he tried a different brand that turned out to be too shiny and hard to see. This kind only takes one coat to be visible but a while to set because, according to his sister, the quick-drying kind is garbage that peels off.
“It might be easier if you did it,” Eugenio says. “My coordination isn’t great with my left hand.”
“Uh, get comfortable, I guess. This shit takes forever to dry.”
They end up sitting cross-legged on one of the beds. Eugenio takes off his shirt when Zach tells him he doesn’t want to wreck it by accident and holds out his hand like Zach’s a manicurist at a nail salon. He has big palms, squared-off fingers, nails filed neatly the way pitchers do to get a good grip on the ball.
“Sorry,” Zach says, before he starts, “this is probably gonna look like shit.”
“I’m sure the pitching staff will notice and complain.”
Zach twists the top off the nail polish, setting the bottle onto the nightstand and holding the brush. It’s different from this angle, Zach pushing a blob of nail polish on the plane of one of Eugenio’s nails, down, and then tracing upward like in a YouTube tutorial he watched on how to do this. He thought about having his nails done at a salon, but he really only needed the one hand, and only occasionally, and didn’t want to deal with guys thinking this was something he went out of his way to do.
He tries to keep his hand steady, holding Eugenio’s fingers with his left hand and anchoring the pinky of his right on the bedspread to make it easier to paint. Eugenio isn’t watching him—or rather, he’s watching the slow spread of nail polish on his fingernail, Zach re-dipping the brush and beginning the next one. “Have you done this before?” Eugenio asks.
“Hold still. And no, not for someone else. Why, have you?”
“A couple times with my ex.”
Zach finishes the coat on Eugenio’s index and middle fingers. “Quit moving your hand. It’s gonna look jacked up.”
He takes Eugenio’s ring finger, rotating it to one side, and then the other, applying polish. “Put your hand down on the comforter.” And it only takes two strokes to do Eugenio’s pinky nail. “Do you want me to get your thumb?”
“Yeah, might as well.”
Zach does, blowing over it when he’s done. “There, I can set a timer. I usually wait about ten minutes.”
Eugenio is looking down at his nails. The paint is white, a contrast to his skin, tanned from playing outside. It’s more visible than it is on Zach.
“Thanks,” Eugenio says. He wets his bottom lip with his tongue, and Zach is about to lean in and kiss him, when he says, “Um, do you think you could do the other hand too?”
“Guys’ll notice that. Someone’ll probably say something.”
“You can take it off right after. I just want to see how it looks.” Eugenio is flushed, and his face must actually be burning, looking everywhere but Zach, at the forest-green bedspread, over Zach’s shoulder at the TV on the dresser behind them. “It’s okay. Forget I said anything.”
“No, um, here.” Zach shifts Eugenio’s right hand—his throwing hand, the one he actually uses to signal specific pitches with—on the comforter, thumb and forefinger circling his wrist without applying pressure. “Don’t move this one, okay?”
He takes Eugenio’s left hand, the hand he conceals in his mitt when he’s catching, and in batting gloves otherwise, though he usually strips those off and stuffs them in his back pocket when he’s on base. The fingernails he has no practical reason, no justifiable baseball reason, to paint.
Objectively, it’s no more difficult to do this hand than it was the other. Except for the way Eugenio sucks a breath as Zach starts on his first finger. Except for the way that he’s watching the slow spread of polish on his nail, biting his lip. Except for that he’s moving his wrist, a small motion but one Zach stills, his thumb pressing the tendons in Eugenio’s forearm.
“Thank you,” Eugenio says, softly, when he’s done and Zach places his hand on the comforter, fingers splayed out from one another.
“They look good.”
“Yeah?”
“You look good.”
“Fuck,” Eugenio says, and Zach kisses him, Eugenio’s bottom lip between Zach’s teeth, his tongue in Eugenio’s mouth, and Eugenio sucks on it, unsubtle, an invitation. “Zach, fuck, c’mon.”
Zach doesn’t move, though, not for a second, leaning to kiss him, just giving him the tip of his tongue, pulling back when Eugenio tries to deepen it. Not until Eugenio says, “You gonna make me ask to suck you?”
Zach’s belt is loud in the quiet of the room. He pushes down his pants, his shorts, kicking them off, tossing his shirt somewhere, and knee walks as Eugenio repositions himself with his back against the padded headboard. His hands are still on the bedspread at his sides, unmoving, pressing divots into the quilting and shaking minutely.
Zach runs his fingers down his arm, tracing from shoulder to bicep to elbow to forearm to wrist before skiing off his knuckle. “Keep those there.” He works himself a few times, but Eugenio is already leaning down.
“I want to feel you get hard.”
Zach holds himself, guiding his cock into Eugenio’s mouth. “If you want me to pull off, uh, hit me on the thigh or something.”
Eugenio nods, eyes closed, eyelashes on his cheeks, tongue rubbing the underside of Zach’s cock. It’s easier at this angle, for Zach to put his hands against the wall, to roll his hips, expecting Eugenio to slap him on his leg when Zach gets fully hard, when he pushes deeper into his mouth. He doesn’t.
Still, he pulls back, fucking his mouth in small thrusts, then pulling back even further, running the tip of his cock over his bottom lip, smearing it, and then his cheek, a wet mark right where his stubble ends. “You look so good like this. I wish you could see.”
“Zach.” It sounds a little whiny. When he looks down, Eugenio is hard in his dress pants, hips straining.
“Stay still.” He nudges at Eugenio’s mouth again, holding himself shallowly without moving his hips, and counting down silently from thirty.
By the end of it, Eugenio’s trembling, fine shivers Zach can feel, muscles in his biceps and forearms tensing, his breath in short little pants through his nose. There’s sweat at his hairline, and Zach runs his fingers over it, and his temple, and the side of his face where he can feel himself through the wall of Eugenio’s cheek. Presses in with the pad of his thumb until it forces Eugenio’s mouth open wider, jaw going slack, spit running down his chin.
Eugenio has short hair, cropped close by the clubhouse barber before they got on the plane for this road trip. Zach tugs a few of the hairs between his thumb and index finger, and Eugenio hisses a breath.
“I’m gonna move, okay?” he says. Eugenio nods.
He braces against the wall, and works his hips, watching his cock disappear into his mouth, and his hands, which haven’t moved from where Zach set them on the bedspread, bright and intentionally visible.
He’s about to come and he pulls back, reaching to jack himself, when Eugenio says, “Um, on me?” His voice is rough.
And Zach spills over onto Eugenio’s chest, a little on his chin and lip. He leans forward, thumbing over one of the white streaks, smearing it into his tattoo. Then up, catching the droplet on Eugenio’s mouth, rubbing it in. “What do you want?” He reaches for Eugenio’s belt, the button to undo his fly.
“It’s not going to take much.”
And Zach cups him through his shorts, the fabric of his boxers already stained dark over the head of his cock, sticky when Zach brushes it with the flat of his palm.
Eugenio is breathing hard, chest working. “Though maybe more than that.”
Zach doesn’t curl his hand or grip him, continuing to trace Eugenio’s cock with no more than light pressure. Adding a loose unsatisfying circle of fingers but withdrawing his hand when Eugenio starts to move his hips. “Stop,” Zach says, and Eugenio stills.
He runs his hand up Eugenio’s chest, rolling a nipple between his fingers, scratching lines in one of Eugenio’s tattoos where it won’t show a mark, a dark abstract shape interrupted with a few edges of color. He’s shaking all over with the effort of holding himself in place.
“That first time,” Zach says, “when you came over to my place at spring training, we went swimming. I couldn’t stop looking at these. Couldn’t stop looking at you.”
He reaches, shoving his hand under the waistband of Eugenio’s boxers. His palm is probably too dry, but it doesn’t matter, not with the way Eugenio’s leaking, not when Zach says, “You can move,” and gives him the channel of his fist to fuck into, Eugenio coming almost instantly.
“Kiss me,” he says, after, and Zach does, hands on Eugenio’s sides, up his forearms, on the thick muscles of his back. “That was... Jesus, Zach.” He still hasn’t moved his hands.
“Your nails are probably dry,” Zach says. “Let me go get the remover. Unless you want to do it in the morning.”
“No, I might forget.” As if he could just walk into the stadium with both his hands painted, casually, unremarkedly.
Zach gets the nail polish remover, a box of Kleenex from the bathroom, a wastebasket. He’s about to tip the remover onto a wad of tissues, but stops himself, seeing the way Eugenio is looking at his own hands, admiring and a little regretful, teeth on his swollen lower lip. “I could take a picture of them,” Zach says, “if you wanted me to.”
Eugenio reaches for his phone where it’s face down on the nightstand. He types in his passcode and then hands it to Zach. “Um, just against the bedspread, I guess?”
“Maybe lie back?”
Eugenio is shirtless, pants still opened, though his boxers are a mess. He lies down, and Zach picks his hand up, positioning it against his chest, fingernails bright white on the dark field of his tattoo. The other in the line of hair down his stomach.
“I won’t get your face in it.” Though it could be an issue if the pictures get leaked, Eugenio identifiable by his tattoos. He clicks the camera, taking a handful of pictures, then shows them to Eugenio for his approval. “Send me that one.” A photo Zach will need to bury, somewhere, behind three different passwords. One he shouldn’t keep but will anyway.
“I should get cleaned up.” And Eugenio’s voice sounds like his throat is sore.
Zach motions for him to stay put. “Do you want some ice? Let me go get you some.”
“Maybe in a second. I can probably take the nail polish off.”
“It’ll take off the stuff on your other hand too. I’ve got it.” Zach dispenses some of the remover onto the Kleenex, then starts with Eugenio’s pinky.
“It’s cold,” Eugenio says. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
Zach works the wad of tissues, polish coming off, though it smears Eugenio’s fingers white at the tips. He gets a fresh sheet of Kleenex and tries to extract the stuff off Eugenio’s cuticles, until it’s finally mostly gone, like it wasn’t ever there.
“The rest’ll come off in the shower,” Zach says. “But you might want to go and wash your hands.”
Eugenio does and comes back, holding his pants and boxers, naked except for his still-painted right hand.
“You gonna sleep here?” Zach asks. He probably shouldn’t, though it would also be a problem if someone sees him coming out of Zach’s room looking wrecked. There are scratch marks on his side, ones Zach thought would be confined to his tattoo but aren’t. “I think I got some Neosporin or something for those if you want.”
Eugenio looks at the marks. “I’m good. You didn’t break the skin.”
“You might get shit for those tomorrow.”
Eugenio shrugs. “So what? Guys talk all the time. Most’ll assume I just snuck a girl up here. Maybe I should download Tinder or something as cover.”
“Don’t,” Zach says, and Eugenio laughs.
He sets his clothes on the desk, then pulls two water bottles out of the mini fridge, handing one to Zach. “I was gonna crash for a while.”
“Which bed do you want to sleep in?” Because Eugenio has preferences about the distance from the bed to the window, even if they’re high up, sealed off against the Houston streets. From the bed to the door, the rooms lining the hallway where their teammates are sleeping, unaware.
“Either is fine,” Eugenio says, though he amends it to “the one by the window” when Zach looks at him skeptically.
Up close, he smells like his cologne and a little like nail polish remover. He settles with his back to Zach’s chest. Different from how Zach’s slept next to people in the past, from the sudden drop of postcoital sleep or the hustled-out morning after. Especially when Eugenio says, “That was... I’ve never... Fuck. It was never like that.” Zach waits for him to elaborate. But his breathing evens as he slides toward sleep.
“I’ve never...” Zach says, a few minutes later, into the safety of Eugenio’s neck. Softly so as not to wake him. “It’s never been like this for me either.”
Light wakes him up in the morning, spilling in from the curtains they didn’t bother to close. Next to him, Eugenio’s sleeping, sheets kicked up around his legs. He has a bite mark on his shoulder Zach doesn’t remember leaving, scratches on his sides, a slight bruise around one of his wrists, not a full bracelet, just the impression of Zach’s thumb and forefinger.
And Zach should have insisted on ice, on Neosporin, on a shower, on Eugenio going back to his room, because there’s no way he can walk out of Zach’s room and not get noticed by their nosy-ass early-bird teammates.
“Morning,” Eugenio says, rolling up to kiss him, a lazy sort of kiss that deepens when Zach’s cock starts showing interest.
“You gotta go back to your room. Just, uh, maybe try to do it quietly. Someone might see.”
“You should go get me coffee.” Eugenio stretches out, arms out at his sides, though he leaves them there when he sees Zach looking at the weight of his shoulders, the movement of muscles in his chest. He examines the nails of his right hand. “These look good.”
“For real.” Zach attempts to slide out of bed but stops when Eugenio hooks one of his legs around him. “Get up.”
“Counteroffer,” Eugenio says. “I do something about that—” he glances down at where Zach is hard “—and then you go get me coffee and we tell Giordano to mind his own fucking business and stop snooping at peepholes.”
“It’s not Giordano I’m worried about. Gordon—he kept looking at us at the restaurant yesterday.”
“So what? He knows we’re friends.”
“You know it’s not like that.”
“I gotta spend today getting abuse from Houston fans. The least you could do is let me rub off on you.” He reaches for Zach’s shoulders, and Zach should absolutely tell him to get up, get his clothes and get out, get to his own room, to stop rolling his hips like that, and twisting his own nipple with his painted fingernails and pressing the scratch marks on his ribs.
Zach should and he doesn’t, instead lowering himself by increments until his chest is against Eugenio’s, mouth on his neck, the wet easy slide of their cocks together. “You should go back to your room.”
But he gasps when Eugenio spits in his hand, reaching between them, thumb against the head of his cock.
“I could stop,” Eugenio says, pausing, “you know, if that’s what you want.” And he whines when Zach pinches him, up the thin skin of his ribs, using his index and middle fingers, a few times, leaving a ladder of red marks. They move together like that, long enough that it starts to build.
“Don’t come yet,” Eugenio says.
“I wasn’t.”
“Sure, you weren’t. Hold still.”
Zach does, holding himself up, arms on either side of Eugenio’s shoulders. Long enough that he starts to feel it, tense with the effort of holding himself in one position. “Can I move?”
Eugenio shakes his head.
“Now?” It feels like an eternity later, tension mounting in his lower back, in his balls, like he’ll shoot off if Eugenio so much as breathes on him.
Eugenio waves a hand. “Get off me.”
Zach does, reluctantly, hissing when his cock rubs Eugenio’s stomach as he brushes by him. He walks across the room, like he’s making for the desk where he set his clothing in a neat pile. “I was just gonna go back to my room. Since you’re so insistent that I leave.”
“If that’s what you want to do, I guess I’m just gonna take care of this, then.” Zach reaches for his own cock, giving it a deliberate tug.
“What I want to do—” Eugenio walks back toward him “—is to not have to look over my shoulder every ten minutes about everything.”
“You know it’s not that simple.”
“Feels pretty simple to me.” He reaches down, bypassing Zach’s cock in favor of holding his balls, not gripping, but enough pressure that Zach can feel it.
“Yeah, okay, c’mon.”
And Eugenio straddles him, weight pinning him down. It doesn’t take much, just their bodies, moving together, Eugenio’s hand possessive at his jaw. The span of his shoulders blocks out the rest of the room, the light from the hallway and the inevitability of having to deal with the world for a few more minutes. And he kisses Zach through it as they both shake apart.
“I was gonna shower.” Eugenio rolls off of him. “I meant it about getting coffee.”
Zach cleans himself up, contemplating the relative dangers of going to the lobby and getting two cups of coffee versus ordering room service, and decides the former is less of one than the latter.
He doesn’t run into Giordano or Gordon in the hallway. Instead, he finds Braxton, looking un-showered, hair unbrushed, the stubble around his beard not yet shaved. He doesn’t say anything to Zach as they ride the elevator down to the lobby, just scrolls through his phone.
Zach doesn’t say anything to him either as they wait at the Starbucks. The line progresses slowly enough that he probably should, even just a “good morning” or something about the game later. But he doesn’t trust himself not to overexplain why he’s getting two cups of coffee—an early game-planning meeting, a bet he lost to Eugenio, whatever. He wonders if Braxton will say something or ask about who was up in his room. If Zach should go out when they get back to Oakland, be seen with someone he has no intention of sleeping with, just for plausibility. If Eugenio should do the same. And he pictures Eugenio sitting at a restaurant he picked out, having flirtatious dinner conversation with someone who won’t flinch their hand away if he reaches out to hold it, and feels an unadorned dread about a showy date turning into something real.
Ahead of him, Braxton orders three cups of coffee, not bothering to explain them. He grunts as he passes Zach on the way back to the elevator, drinks secured in a cardboard carrier.
When Zach gets back to his room, Eugenio is there, dressed in his dress pants, in one of Zach’s shirts, oversized and sufficient to contain his shoulders, one of the dozens of team-branded ones they all get without Zach’s name anywhere on it. His hair is already drying in the air conditioning, the ends going fluffy.
They drink coffee, and Zach goes, shaves, showers, dresses. When he looks out the window, the team bus is parked outside on the street below, ready to ferry the first wave of players and staff to the park.
“Bus is here if you want to head out,” Zach says.
“I might get the next one. Or walk. It’s not like it’s that far.”
“The heat here is kind of sneaky. I didn’t think it’d bother me until my legs cramped up the first few times we played.”
“Look—” Eugenio gets up, coming to sit on the bed opposite from where Zach is sitting. “I don’t have to sleep here if it makes you uncomfortable. I guess I wasn’t being that fair to you.”
“We shouldn’t be doing this on road trips. I got the sense at the restaurant last night that Gordon might have figured it out.”
“If he has,” Eugenio says, “he hasn’t said anything to me about it.”
“He could be waiting. For a confirmation or to tell the front office. And if the team finds out, you know it wouldn’t end well for either of us.”
“He wouldn’t do that.” And Eugenio sounds confident in that, like Gordon’s friendship will be some barrier against his disapproval.
“You don’t know that until you know. He’s old school. He might be cool with one of us in the abstract. But together? No.”
“Do you want to stop?” Eugenio looks past him, out the window, into the big open blue of the Texas sky. “We can if you want to.”
“No.” And Zach wishes he got breakfast along with the coffees, for the hot glare of the morning to stop pouring in through the uncurtained window. For the simplicity of falling asleep against Eugenio and waking up with him still there. “No, I don’t want to stop. But we need some boundaries. Ground rules. Something.”
“How have you handled it before?”
“This is my first time—” he searches for a word for what they’re doing together “—with a teammate. With a ballplayer at all.”
“I meant, if you met someone on the road or something.”
“They weren’t exactly sleeping over. Or at the team hotel at all. This is new to me. I don’t know what I’m doing either.” It’s too much to admit. That he’s nearly thirty and his longest previous relationship was measured in weeks.
“I was with my ex for a long time,” Eugenio says. “We were in high school when we got together. It felt like it wasn’t really a choice, just something everyone expected.” He pauses for a second. “And I’ve never really dated anyone other than her or slept with anyone besides her. No one else serious. Before you.”
“Oh.” Because Zach stopped tallying his hookups once it felt juvenile to do so. And Eugenio said before that he hadn’t dated anyone seriously since his ex, but the implications of what serious meant slosh around in Zach’s stomach like cold coffee. “Is it, like, a religious thing?”
Eugenio shakes his head. “I think I’m just built that way. I thought she and I were going to get married, and that would be that. And then we didn’t.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
“If it helps, I’m not actually that sorry.”
Eugenio laughs. He comes over to Zach, legs interweaving between his, kissing him, hands on either side of Zach’s face. “I can sleep in my room tonight.”
It’s both pragmatic and fundamentally disappointing, enough that Zach wants to say fuck it. But his courage will likely evaporate when their teammates give Eugenio hell for getting laid spectacularly enough to leave marks. Something he’ll have to deny, which will only incite them more. A ritual that Zach is on the outside of, even if Eugenio’s wrist still carries the impression of his fingers. “Does it matter that I don’t want you to?” Zach says.
Eugenio smiles at that. “It does.”
He smells like coffee and the shower. Something about it makes Zach’s chest hurt, different from the rising panic he felt while waiting in line behind Braxton.
“Depending on how things go today,” Eugenio continues, “I might need to actually game-plan tonight.”
“You’d miss me from the other room?” Zach asks.
“I might.” And he winds a hand into Zach’s hair, lifting the curls above his ear, kissing him on his jaw and his temple, on the bridge of his nose, a place Zach can’t remember anyone kissing him before.