Extra Innings, Chapter 3 · Room 412

The bus window showed Rennie a bus. Out past the glass there was Interstate 80 in the dark and Iowa and nothing else, so the window did what a window does after midnight and handed back the aisle in dim yellow, the rows of sleeping men, and one big shape in the front seat sitting sideways with a leg stretched into the aisle.

They had rolled out of Packinghouse Field at a quarter past eleven, after the Sunday night game and after Turo Salcedo had counted every bag into the bay twice with his lips moving. The Stockmen had won six to five in ten innings. Now it was ten to one, and the only sounds were the tires and Tomás Reyes snoring somewhere in the back, which had been going since Council Bluffs.

Josiah Teague had stayed in Omaha with the assistant trainer, a stationary bike and a three-page list.

Across the aisle Lonnie Bright slept sitting up with his reading glasses on his chest and his white mustache lifting with each breath. He opened one eye.

“What are you looking at, Doc?”

“Iowa.”

“Nobody looks at Iowa.” The eye closed. “Wake me for the hotel.”

Two rows back Marlon Pike, thirty-four, the lefty who had started opening day on a day’s notice, leaned into the aisle with a bag of ice balanced on his elbow.

“Doc. It’s tired. Not sore. Tired.”

“Tired how?”

“Like I carried a couch up a flight of stairs.”

“Then it’s tired,” Rennie said. “Ice on twenty minutes. If tired turns into anything else by morning, you tell me before you tell Lonnie.”

“Before Lonnie. Got it.” Pike settled back and was asleep in a minute.

In the glass the shape at the front shifted, tried to cross its legs, and stopped halfway with a hand on the lower back. Rennie knew that hand. In four weeks he had learned that Gil Marchetti could sit through a nine-run inning without blinking, and that two and a half hours on a bus seat made the same man grind his jaw. Rennie could have fixed it in ten minutes on a table. Gil had said, flat, on the way out of the park, that he would walk it off.

They had managed three weeks. Two more late nights at Rennie’s, after games that ended early, with Gil’s truck left at the river lot and their mouths on each other and nothing more. And at Rennie’s door, both nights, Gil had said one word on his way out, the way a conductor reads a stop off a ticket. Des Moines.

The first night, in the hallway, Rennie had answered his question at last. “Yes. And I’d have told you to sit down first.” Gil had laughed so hard a dog started up in the next apartment.

---

The hotel was one of the chain places out by the airport, the kind with a plastic key card and a pool nobody used, where the driver could park the coach in the back lot. They checked in at twenty to two. Lonnie got 408 and a look of deep grievance. Gil got a corner on the fourth floor, and Rennie got 214 at the end of the other hall beside the ice machine.

At the elevator Gil stood with a hand braced on the wall and his face grey around the mouth. Rennie stopped beside him, a trainer beside a manager, with Desmond Frye three feet away cracking seeds and not listening.

“Ten minutes in the morning,” Rennie said. “Whenever you want it.”

“Monday night I’m not a patient.” Gil said it low, without looking over. “Monday night you don’t touch the back. If it needs fixing, fix it Tuesday at the park, with the door open.”

“With the door open,” Rennie agreed.

He already had the room number. Gil had given it to him on Friday in the equipment hall, with his back turned and his voice pitched for the shelves. “Four-twelve. Monday, nine o’clock. Take the stairs. The cameras don’t cover the stairs.”

Rennie slept until nine, ate eggs in the empty breakfast room, and found Reyes in the fitness room at eleven with the left shoulder wrapped in ice and the face of a man about to ask a question.

“Am I catching Tuesday?”

“You’re catching five innings.” Rennie loosened the wrap and pressed under the collarbone, and Reyes hissed. “Then Dalton Rask goes in, and you sit in the dugout and heckle him.” Rask was thirty-six and had backed up three catchers in three organizations without once complaining about it.

“Five. He’ll hate it.”

“He’ll ask me at two tomorrow, and I’ll say five, and he’ll say, ‘Five, then,’ and write it on the card.”

“Nineteen years I’ve been catching.” But Reyes grinned and put his head back against the wall. “You’re good at that. Saying no like you’re doing him a favor.”

“I am doing him a favor.”

Gil came through the lobby at half past two with Frye at his shoulder, limping slightly, and slowed when he saw Rennie by the elevators.

“Reyes?”

“Five innings tomorrow, then I want him out. I’ll tell you again Tuesday at two, but it won’t change.”

“Five.” Gil nodded once. “Frye, tell the card.” He went on toward the restaurant, and nobody in that lobby saw anything but a manager and a trainer talking about a catcher.

After lunch Rennie took a cab downtown to walk the visitors’ training room, because he never walked into a strange one on game day. One whirlpool that ran cold, a taping table patched with tape, and a home trainer who called the place the closet. He timed the walk from the dugout twice, and the second time he caught himself counting the hours to nine and made himself count the steps instead.

At four Voss called from Omaha. She read road cases by phone and she never wasted a greeting.

“Teague’s numbers are good. Range is where I want it, the swelling’s gone, and I’m moving the bike days up in the next block because I like being the one who says so. Send Gil the dates for the block. Not the weights.” A page turned on her end. “Your ninety-day went into the file Friday, and Curtis countersigned it. Gil’s name isn’t anywhere on it, and I’d like that page to stay that way.”

“So would I.”

“Good. Go and eat.”

At a quarter past six Rennie phoned his mother. She told him it was eighty-one in Houston and she was already tired of it, and asked if he was eating. Then she asked, in the voice she used for asking about a tax form, whether there was anybody.

“There might be,” Rennie said.

There was a long silence on the line. “Good,” Ngozi Okafor said. “Eat something green. Tell your sister I’m waiting for her call.”

At twenty to nine he stood in the hallway outside 214 with a clean shirt on and his heart going hard, and took the stairs.

---

Room 412 was a corner with two windows and a king bed. Out past the glass the runway lights blinked green and white, and the red tail-light of a plane climbed into the dark. Gil opened the door in socks and grey sweats and a grey T-shirt. He hadn’t shaved. It was an off day, and the white stubble stood out along his jaw like frost.

“You took the stairs.”

“Two flights. Nobody saw me. A housekeeper’s cart on three, and nobody with it.”

“Good.” Gil shut the door, turned the deadbolt and slid the chain across, and stood with his back against the wood. “I want to say what I want before we do anything. I’m better at it when it’s said.”

“Go ahead.”

“I want you on that bed where I can see your face. I’ve wanted to see your face with me inside you since the table. I want to take a long time. And I want you to tell me the second anything’s wrong.”

“I want that too,” Rennie said. “I want you inside me, and I want to say what I like out loud and have you do it. And Skip, I should say this part. Tomorrow at two when you ask about Reyes, I’ll answer the way I would have yesterday. Nothing tonight changes it.”

“I’d think less of you if it did. And I won’t ask you for anything tomorrow I’d have to ask for here. Same as the table.”

“Same as the table. And the word’s the same.”

“The word’s the same. Condom tonight, and every night till we’ve both been tested. June, after the homestand. We talk about it then and not before.”

“Agreed.” Rennie looked at the way Gil was standing, all his weight on the left leg and one hand pressed flat to the small of his back. “And one more thing. I’m not treating you. I’m not touching the back. But I’m picking how we do this, because I want you to last, and you can’t kneel and you can’t hold your own weight up tonight, and I’m not pretending I didn’t see you get off the bus.”

Gil’s eyebrows went up. “You’re picking.”

“I’m picking. You’ll like it. You’ll be lying down the whole time.”

“Doc,” Gil said, “that’s the best offer I’ve had since 2011,” and crossed the carpet, set one hand flat on Rennie’s chest, and kissed him.

It was slow and it went on. Gil kissed like he caught, Rennie thought, patient, all of him behind it, reading the pitch before it came. When they broke apart Gil’s breathing had gone uneven and his hand was still spread over Rennie’s heart.

“Four weeks,” Gil said. “Four weeks of that table and your kitchen and a parking lot. I’ve been good.”

“You’ve been very good.”

“I’m done being good.”

Rennie pushed the grey T-shirt up over the belly and the chest hair, and Gil lifted his arms and let it go. Gil unbuttoned Rennie’s shirt one button at a time with a care that seemed to cost him, pushed it off his shoulders, and spread both palms on Rennie’s chest and belly and left them there.

“Every time I’ve seen you in that polo,” he said, “I’ve wanted my hands right here.”

“They’re there.”

“I’m going to put my mouth there too.” He bent, slow, minding the back, and sucked one nipple and then the other until Rennie’s breath came short and his hands were clutching the thick shoulders. Then he straightened up with a grunt. “That’s as far as I bend tonight. Show me this bed.”

They got the rest of it off. Gil was hard and heavy, curved to the left, all thigh and belly and shoulder with grey hair over the lot of him, and the breath stuck in Rennie’s chest looking at him.

“Lie down on your left side,” Rennie said. “Across the middle of the bed. Good knee down, bad one on top, bend it if you want. Pillow under your head.”

Gil did it, carefully, with a long groan that turned into a laugh when he got there. “Oh. Oh, that’s the back letting go. Don’t tell anybody.”

Rennie got on the bed and lay down on his back across from him at a right angle, so his hips were up against Gil’s belly and his head was out toward the edge of the mattress. He lifted his legs and laid them over Gil’s hip, knees bent, calves hanging down over Gil’s back. Gil’s bottom leg slid in under Rennie’s thighs. They lay like that, a capital T on the bedspread, and Gil propped himself up on his elbow and looked down the length of Rennie’s body at his face.

“Huh.” Gil’s eyebrows went up. “I can see everything.”

“That’s the point. You can see me, and your back doesn’t have to hold anything up, and your knee’s not on the mattress. And I can feel all of you.”

“Where’d you learn this?”

“A book. Years ago. I never had a reason to try it till tonight.” Rennie reached for the nightstand. “Lube’s here. Condom’s here.”

Gil squeezed a cold line onto two fingers. His other hand, from the elbow he was propped on, spread over Rennie’s belly, warm and heavy. “Tell me when.”

“Now.”

The first finger went in slowly, and Rennie’s breath hitched. It was thick and rough-knuckled, one of the fingers that had been broken too many times to straighten. Gil worked it in long patient strokes and watched Rennie’s face the entire time, and talked to him.

“Easy. You feel tight and then you don’t. That’s it, letting me in. I’m going to give you two.”

He gave him two, and Rennie groaned out loud and pushed down on them. Gil spread them, slow, and curled them, and found the place inside on the first try, and Rennie’s whole body jumped against his belly.

“Fuck. Gil. That.”

“That?” Gil pressed it again, slow, his eyes on Rennie’s face. “That’s what I was after. Keep sounding like that and I’ll keep at it.”

Rennie made it again. He couldn’t help it. Gil worked a third finger in beside the others and fucked him with them, steady, while Rennie’s hands twisted in the bedspread and his cock lay hard and wet on his own stomach where Gil could see it twitch every time his fingers curled.

“Would you see that,” Gil said. “Your cock jumps every time I touch it in there. I’m not even touching it and it’s leaking for me.”

“I’m ready. Skip, I’m ready. Put it in.”

“You sure.”

“I’ll tell you when I’m not. I want your cock in me, Gil. Now. Before I lose my nerve and start talking about Reyes.”

Gil laughed, low, and slid his fingers out, and Rennie felt the empty space they left. The wrapper tore. Gil rolled the condom down and slicked himself, one long pull of his fist that made his cock jump, and then he took hold of Rennie’s top thigh and shifted his own hips in close underneath, and the blunt head of him pressed against Rennie’s hole from below.

“Slow,” Rennie said. “Just the head first.”

“Just the head.” Gil pushed. The thick tip pressed and popped through, and a deep stretching burn opened in Rennie and spread up into his belly, and he grabbed Gil’s forearm on his stomach and held it.

“Stay. Stay there a second.”

Gil stayed. He didn’t move at all. He watched Rennie’s face, and his thumb moved in a small slow circle on Rennie’s belly, and he waited.

“Okay,” Rennie said. “Okay. More.”

Gil gave him more. In this position he didn’t have to push down, only forward, a little at a time, his hips rolling in slow and Rennie’s legs heavy across them, and each slow push pulled a long, low sound up out of the bottom of Rennie’s chest. Then Gil’s belly was pressed up hard against the backs of Rennie’s thighs and Gil let out a long shaking breath.

“That’s me. That’s all of me. Hell, Rennie.”

For a few seconds neither of them moved. Rennie could feel his own pulse beating around the thickness of him. He was so full there was no room left to think. A plane went over and the window glass buzzed.

“Tell me,” Gil said. “What’s it like?”

“Big.” Rennie laughed, shaky. “Bigger than your fingers said. Like you’re halfway up through me. Like if you breathe I’ll feel it.”

Gil breathed, deliberately, a long slow one that pushed his belly against the backs of Rennie’s thighs, and Rennie felt it inside and groaned.

“I could live right here till the bus comes,” Gil said.

“Move. Please. Slow first.”

Gil moved. He pulled back a few inches and rolled in again, slow, and the angle of it dragged the head of his cock right across the place his fingers had found. Rennie’s back came up off the bed.

“Oh. Oh, fuck. That’s it, that’s where. Leave it right where it is.”

“It’s staying put.” He did it again, and a third time, and on the fourth Rennie put a hand flat on his forearm.

“Wait. Hold on.”

Gil went still at once, halfway in, his hand gone quiet on Rennie’s belly. “Talk to me.”

“Nothing’s wrong. My hips are sliding off you.” Rennie reached up behind his head, got the spare pillow, and worked it in under the small of his own back, so his hips tipped up and settled tighter over Gil’s. He hooked his top knee higher on Gil’s side. “There. Now you’re not chasing me. Now go.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure. Go.”

Gil went. With Rennie’s hips tipped up on the pillow the angle changed, and the next stroke slid straight in along the place instead of glancing across it, and they both made a sound.

“Oh, that’s better,” Gil said hoarsely. “Oh, that’s a lot better. You fixed it.”

“Occupational hazard.”

“Quit making me laugh with my cock in you.” But he was laughing, and Rennie felt that too, and it was ridiculous and wonderful. Gil kept it there, long slow strokes, his whole body rocking on its side behind them, and he didn’t have to lift or hold or brace a single thing. His face was red and slack and he was grinning down at Rennie as if he’d found money in an old coat. “You’re right. You’re right, Doc. My back doesn’t know I’m here. It’s all just you.”

“Quicker.”

“Say how.”

“Faster, and quit being careful with me now,” Rennie said, and heard himself and laughed. “I won’t break. Give it to me.”

“Like what?”

“Give it to me, Skip. Fast.”

Gil took hold of Rennie’s hip with his free hand and pulled him onto his cock as he drove in, and the next stroke was fast and deep, and the one after that, and the bed started to knock against the wall. “That’s what you want? Like that?”

“Like that. Yes, yes. Like that.”

Gil fucked him like that. The slap of his belly against the backs of Rennie’s thighs went off like applause in the quiet room. Rennie’s calves bounced against Gil’s back. Gil was swearing in a low continuous stream, and then talking, and Rennie couldn’t have said where one stopped.

“Damn. The hold you’ve got on me. Your hole’s gripping me every time I pull out like it doesn’t want to let go. You know what you look like with my cock in you? Like nothing that’s ever happened in a Des Moines hotel. I’ve been sitting on that bench three weeks thinking about this exact face.”

“More. Keep it coming, all of it.”

“Every off day this club gives us, you’re in my bed. I’m going to learn every sound you make, and which one means slower, and which one means not now, not ever.” He drove in and held there and ground, a slow circle, right on the place, and Rennie made a high thin noise and clawed the bedspread. “That one. I’m learning that one first.”

He did it again to be sure, and Rennie made it again, louder, and Gil made a low pleased sound, the one he made in the dugout when a hitter swung through the same pitch twice.

“Give me the play-by-play,” Gil said. “All of it. I can see your face. I want the words too.”

“You. Thick. Every time you pull back I feel the head drag over it and I think I’m going to go, and then you push in and I don’t, and it builds.” Rennie’s voice was coming apart. “My legs are shaking on your back. Can you feel them?”

“I feel them. Your calves are drumming on me.” Gil rolled in deep and held, and ground, and Rennie’s heels dug into him. “You know what I’m thinking about? The bus. Two and a half hours of watching you in that window with your eyes shut, pretending to sleep. I knew you weren’t.”

“I was thinking about this.”

“I know you were. You had your hand over your lap the whole way to Des Moines.”

Rennie gave a cracked laugh that turned into a moan halfway, because Gil had drawn nearly out and pushed back in slow, the full thick length of him, and the pillow under Rennie’s back made every stroke of it land in the same place.

“Yes. Do that. Do that again. Long like that.”

Gil did it long like that. He did it until Rennie was gasping and red to the chest and his fingers were tearing at the bedspread, and the bed’s headboard was tapping the wall in a slow beat, and somewhere down the hall an ice machine dropped a load and neither of them heard it.

Rennie’s cock was standing straight up off his belly now, dark and dripping, jerking with every grind, and neither of them had touched it once. Gil looked down at it.

“You’re going to come from this. Aren’t you. Just from me.”

“Yes. Don’t touch it. I want to go off with you inside me, Gil. Like this. Nothing else.”

“Then do it. Go when it comes. I’ll keep it just like this.” Gil drew nearly out and slid back in slow, and kept on, long and steady, eyes locked on Rennie’s face. “Come on. I want your face when it happens.”

The heat came up from the base of Rennie’s spine all at once, tight and enormous. “Skip. Skip, I’m coming. Oh, fuck, I’m coming.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Go on.”

He came with a cry that broke in the middle. His cock jerked untouched and shot up his chest in thick hot streaks, onto his belly and his collarbone, and his body gripped Gil in hard waves. Gil swore and drove into it, once, twice, three times, hard enough to shove Rennie an inch across the bed, and then his whole body locked up along Rennie’s legs and he came with a long, broken groan, his forehead dropping onto Rennie’s hip.

“Rennie,” he said into his skin, and then nothing for a while.

Rennie felt every pulse of it through the thin skin of the condom, deep in him. Gil shook all through it and kept his hand flat on Rennie’s belly, in the mess, holding on.

Then Rennie’s left calf seized.

“Ah. Ah. Skip, don’t move. Cramp.”

“Where?” Gil was up on his elbow at once. “Tell me where.”

“Left calf. The back. It’s the leg on your back. Let me get it straight.”

“Here. Hold on.” Gil eased out of him, carefully, and lifted the leg off his own hip and straightened it along the bed, and took the calf in both big hands and dug in with his thumbs. “Flex your foot. Toward you. Breathe. That it?”

“Higher. There.”

The knot let go. Rennie lay back and started to laugh weakly at the ceiling. “I’m sorry. That’s the least dignified thing that’s ever happened to me in bed.”

“Head trainer with a charley horse.” Gil kept kneading, laughing too, hoarse and breathless. “I’m going to think about this in the dugout.”

“You are not.”

“I’m going to think about it very quietly.” He let the calf go, peeled off the condom and knotted it and dropped it in the wastebasket, and lay down along Rennie properly this time, on his side, his chest against Rennie’s arm. “And I’m not letting you near my back tonight. Don’t ask.”

“I’m not working. I’m lying here.”

“Good.”

After a while Gil’s hand found Rennie’s belly again, where the mess was starting to dry, and rested there, warm and unmoving.

Rennie turned his head. “Did you get it? My face?”

“I got it. I’m keeping it. Front of my head, top shelf, right next to the 2006 All-Star game, and it’s winning.”

They cleaned up with a hotel washcloth and its mean little bar of soap, and slept with the curtains open a hand’s width and the planes going up red against the black. Gil was asleep in five minutes, on his back for the first time in two days without groaning, mouth open, snoring like a semi on a grade.

---

At twenty past five Rennie slid out from under a heavy arm. He found his clothes by feel, buttoned the shirt wrong and fixed it, and bent over the bed with his shoes in his hand.

“Skip. I’m going down the stairs. At breakfast I’m the trainer and you’re the skipper.”

“Breakfast,” Gil said into the pillow. “Eggs. Eat yours.”

“I’ll look at my eggs.”

“That’s my trainer.” One big hand patted the sheet where Rennie had been. “Go on. It’s cold.”

The stairwell smelled of bleach and old carpet. Nobody saw him. He stood under the shower in 214 for ten minutes with his forehead on the tile.

By eight the breakfast room smelled of syrup and coffee and men who had slept badly in a strange bed. Reyes sat with an ice pack strapped to his shoulder, eating eggs with his off hand. Pike and Wexler had a table by the window. Pike lifted his left arm over his head as Rennie went by and wiggled his fingers.

“Tired,” Pike said. “Still just tired. I’m telling you before Lonnie.”

“Noted,” Rennie said. “Tell me again after you throw your bullpen.”

“He’s going to make me fill out a form about my feelings,” Pike said to Wexler.

“I’m going to make you fill out a form about your arm,” Rennie said. “Your feelings are your own business.” Rennie carried his plate to the coaches’ table, where Frye was cracking seeds into a napkin and Gil sat with his back to the wall, shaved, in a team polo, reading the lineup card. He was sitting up straight. Rennie noticed it, and noticed Gil noticing him notice.

“Morning, Doc.”

“Skip.”

“Reyes good?”

“Five innings.”

“Five.” Gil’s eyes came up for half a second and went down again, and that was all of it.

Lonnie Bright put his tray down in the chair beside Gil. He took off his reading glasses, folded them, and set them next to his orange juice. He looked at Gil’s face for a long moment, then at Rennie’s, then at the lineup card, as if it could tell him something.

“Bud,” he said. “I came up to four at ten last night with Tuesday’s card, and you didn’t answer, so I stood there a minute. And I could have sworn I heard.”

He stopped. He looked at Gil, who was sitting up straight for the first time since the bus, and at Rennie, who was looking at his eggs. Lonnie picked up his glasses again and unfolded them and put them on.

“Pass the salt, bud,” he said.