Extra Innings, Chapter 5 · Both of Us, Out Loud

“Bud, Pike’s back is not right.”

Lonnie Bright said it in the dugout runway at ten past four on Tuesday, with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a cup of coffee he hadn’t drunk going cold in his hand. He said it to Rennie, quietly, the way you’d tell somebody their fly is down. Then he looked up the runway toward the manager’s office and lowered his voice further.

“He threw his side session and he finished it, and then he bent over to pick up the ball bag and he didn’t come up straight. He came up in two pieces.”

Rennie had already seen it. He’d been standing at the bullpen rail at two-forty when Marlon Pike, thirty-four, bent for the bag and straightened slowly with one hand on his right hip, and laughed at himself, and walked to the clubhouse a little too carefully.

“I’ve got him on the table at four-thirty,” Rennie said.

“Gil wants him tonight. Wexler threw ninety pitches Sunday, and the pen’s got three arms that can lift them.”

“I know what Gil wants.”

Lonnie looked at him over the cold coffee for a long second.

“I know you know,” he said. “I’m telling you so you know I know. That’s all.” He tipped the cup at him. “Do your job, Doc.”

---

Pike lay face-down on the trainer’s table in his compression shorts and swore at the ceiling tile above the sink while Rennie worked down his right side. The spasm sat low, a ridge of muscle along the lumbar spine that jumped when Rennie’s thumb found it. Straight-leg raise was fine. Reflexes were fine. No numbness down the leg. When Rennie asked him to roll and draw his right knee to his chest, Pike did it and went grey around the mouth.

“It’s a muscle,” Pike said. “It’s a muscle, Doc. I can throw through a muscle.”

“You can throw through it once. Maybe twice. Then you’re throwing with the other side of your body trying to protect it, and that’s how a lefty reliever turns a back into a shoulder.”

“It’s one inning.”

“It’s one inning tonight.” Rennie stepped back from the table. “You’re not pitching. I’m holding you. Dr Voss sees you Friday when she’s in. Heat, the stim unit, and you walk. You don’t sit in the bullpen for four hours folded on a bench.”

Pike looked at him for a while. Then he let his head drop on his arms.

“Skip’s going to have my hide.”

“Skip’s going to have mine,” Rennie said. “You keep yours.”

He filed the hold form at five-fifteen in the training room. Section 4, player name, finding, plan, the review date, his own signature at the bottom. He scanned it and sent it to Voss and copied the clubhouse office, the way he did every hold, and then he took the paper copy down the corridor to the manager’s office and found it empty, and walked out the tunnel to the dugout.

Gil was on the top step with Lonnie and Desmond Frye, the three of them looking out at the field while the grounds crew raked the infield dirt. The light was long and gold. Somebody’s radio was playing in the stands.

Rennie stood one step down and held the form out.

“Pike’s held,” he said. “Lumbar strain. No throwing until Voss sees him Friday.”

Gil took the paper and read it. He read the whole thing, every line, like a scouting report, and Frye stopped chewing his sunflower seeds and Lonnie looked very hard at the infield. Gil’s jaw moved once.

He had three arms in the pen. Rennie knew the numbers as well as he did.

Gil folded the form in half and put it in his back pocket.

“Good,” he said.

That was all. He turned back to the field. Frye started chewing again. Lonnie’s mustache lifted on a long exhale like a tire going soft.

Rennie went back down the tunnel. His hands were steady. He noticed, the way he noticed things in his own body, that his heart wasn’t.

They lost that night, seven to six, when the third arm out of the pen gave up a two-run double in the ninth. Gil went into his office and shut the door and nobody knocked on it.

---

Friday Voss was in. She was fifty-five and tall and wore her reading glasses on a cord, and she put Pike through the same exam Rennie had and two more besides, and looked at his films from spring, and said, “Keep him. Re-check Tuesday. If he’s quiet, he throws Tuesday and I lift it.” She signed the bottom of Rennie’s form under his name. She looked up at Rennie once over her glasses and said, “Good catch,” and went to look at somebody’s hamstring.

Gil didn’t come by the training room. Rennie didn’t go by his office. They had agreed on that in April without saying it: in the building, the building was the building.

Saturday he didn’t see Gil except across the clubhouse, and on the bench, and once in the runway, where Gil stepped aside for him the way he’d step aside for anybody carrying a bucket of ice.

Sunday afternoon, after the last game of the homestand, a win, Rennie’s phone buzzed in his locker. A text, three words, Gil’s way.

Den. Eight. Eat?

He typed Yes and put the phone away and finished taping Reyes’s left wrist.

---

Gil’s house in Dundee was red brick on a street of red brick, with an elm in the front that had outlived the neighbourhood’s other elms and a screened porch on the side where Gil kept one chair. He had made a pot of something with sausage and peppers and white beans, and they ate it at the kitchen island standing up, and Gil drank a tall glass of iced tea and Rennie drank half of one, and they talked about Reyes’s wrist and the Memphis lefty and Gabby, who had called Gil twice this week to ask questions about Rennie that Gil had refused to answer on the grounds that she could ask him herself in July.

Then they went into the den, and Gil sat at one end of the couch, and Rennie did not sit down.

The den was small and brown. A couch the colour of a catcher’s mitt, worn pale on the arms. A television nobody had turned on. One shelf of books and one of baseballs and one framed photo of Gabby in navy scrubs on the day she passed her boards, grinning like she’d won something off him. A window unit rattled in the corner.

Rennie stood in front of the television with his fists shoved in his pockets.

“I need to say something before anything happens tonight,” he said. “And I need you to say something back. Out loud. Both of us.”

Gil looked up at him. He didn’t ask what. He just set his iced tea on the side table and put both hands on his knees and waited, the way he waited for a pitcher to decide whether to shake him off.

“Tuesday,” Rennie said. “I held Pike. You needed him. You said good, and you put the form in your pocket, and you didn’t say another word, and you didn’t come by my room. And I’ve been thinking all week about why I needed you to be the man who did that.” He took his hands out of his pockets. “So here it is, plain. If I tell you a man can’t play, he can’t play. Nothing you do in bed changes it, and nothing I do in bed buys you it.”

Gil held his eyes.

“I won’t ask,” Gil said. “If I ever do, say no and tell Curtis.”

The window unit clattered.

“One more thing,” Rennie said. “Tonight isn’t for Tuesday. It’s not a thank-you for how you took it, and it’s not because you said good on the step. I’d be standing here if you’d thrown the form on the dugout floor. I’d be standing here and telling you that you were wrong, and then I’d be standing here.”

“I know that.”

“I need you to know it out loud.”

“I know it out loud.” Gil’s voice was flat and steady. “And Pike’s Voss’s now. Till she lifts it. That’s all I’m going to say about Pike in this house tonight, and I’ve said it.”

Rennie exhaled. Something in his shoulders came down an inch.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay,” Gil said. Then, after a moment, lower: “Come here, Doc.”

---

Rennie crossed the rug and stood between Gil’s knees. Gil reached up and took him by both wrists, loosely, and looked up at him.

“What do you want tonight?”

Rennie had known since Memphis. He’d known lying on his back in Russ’s guest room with his own come cooling on his belly and Gil watching him the way a dugout watches the last out.

“I want to ride you,” he said. “Right here. On this couch. You sit back and you don’t move your knee and you don’t move your back, and I do the work. I’ve watched your face from underneath, and from the side, and from your back. I want to look down at it.”

Gil’s thumbs moved on the insides of his wrists.

“You want to be on top.”

“I want to be sitting on you with your face where I can see it. Yes.”

“All right.” Gil let go of one wrist and ran his knuckles slowly down the middle of Rennie’s stomach. Something in his grey eyes settled, the way a catcher looks when he’s seen the sign he wanted. “Yes. Get up here. I want you on me. Time stops it, either of us.”

“Time stops it. Yes.”

They undressed in the den with the lamp on. Gil stayed sitting and pulled his shirt off over his head and threw it on the floor, and Rennie unbuckled him and drew the trousers down his heavy thighs and off over his feet, and knelt for a second on the rug between Gil’s knees to do it, and while he was down there he put his mouth on the inside of Gil’s left thigh, high, where the hair went soft, and bit. Gil jerked under his mouth and hissed through his teeth.

“You do that,” Gil said, “and I’m going to finish before you get your shoes off.”

“You won’t.”

“I might. I’m a weak man.”

“You’re the least weak man I’ve ever met.” Rennie stood and pulled his own shirt off and stepped out of his jeans. He was hard already, had been hard since Gil said come here, and he stood there naked in front of the man on the couch and let himself be looked at.

Gil looked. He looked for a long time, sitting back with his legs spread and his own cock lying thick and hooked left against the fur of his belly, and he wrapped his hand round its base and held it, not stroking, just holding, like he had to keep it from going anywhere.

Rennie took a condom and the bottle of water-based lube from his bag by the door. He came back and knelt up on the couch cushions with one knee either side of Gil’s hips, and the couch sank under them both and complained.

“Is your knee all right like that?”

“My knee’s on the floor and bent at ninety. It’s the happiest it’s been all week.” Gil took the condom from him and opened it and rolled it down himself. “Your knees are the ones doing the work. Tell me if the cushion’s no good.”

“The cushion’s fine.”

Gil poured lube into his palm and warmed it a second and reached under him. His fingers found Rennie’s hole, slow and slick, and circled it, and pushed one in. Rennie went down onto it before Gil had decided to give it to him. He set both hands on Gil’s shoulders, on the thick slope of them, and rocked down on the finger.

“You’re greedy,” Gil said. Gil worked a second finger in beside the first, the bent one, and Rennie gasped. “That’s what I’ll say. Polo shirt, clipboard, calmest man in Nebraska, and up here on my lap you’re trying to sit on my hand like it’s the last seat on the bus.”

“It’s been four days.”

“Four days.” Gil crooked his fingers, found the place, held it. “You held a man on Tuesday and walked off the dugout step like you were going for a sandwich, and the whole time you wanted this.”

“Not the whole time.”

“How much of the time?”

“Most of it.”

Gil laughed, low in his chest, and pulled his fingers out, and wiped them on his own thigh, and took hold of himself.

“Come down, then. Slow as you want. You’re running it.”

Rennie reached down and took Gil’s cock out of Gil’s hand. He held it steady at the base and lifted himself on his knees until the head was against him, and he looked down. Gil was looking up at him. He’d flushed deep red under the white stubble and his mouth was a little open.

Rennie sank.

It was slow because he made it slow. The head of Gil pressed and pressed and then opened him and slid in, and he stopped there, an inch down, and let his body get used to it, counting breaths. Gil’s hands came up and settled on his hips and didn’t pull. They just sat there, big and warm, his thumbs on the front of the hip bones.

“No clock on it,” Gil said. “Take all night.”

Rennie sank more. The curve of Gil bent him from inside, pushing on the left side, and it was too much and then it was exactly enough and then his ass was resting on Gil’s thighs and Gil was as deep in him as he went and Rennie’s whole body was shaking.

“Fuck,” Gil said, very quietly, staring up at him. “Doc, you’re—” and lost the rest of it.

Rennie couldn’t say anything. He held on to Gil’s shoulders.

“Talk to me,” Gil said. “You okay up there?”

“Yes.” It came out rough as gravel. “Yes. Give me a second. You’re big this way. You go deeper this way.”

“Take the second. Take ten.”

Rennie took the second. Then he lifted, a few inches, and came back down, and they both groaned at the same time and the noise they made in the little brown den was ridiculous and neither of them laughed.

He found the way to do it. Not bouncing. His knees were on cushions that gave, and Gil’s knee couldn’t take it anyway, so instead he rolled. He sat deep on Gil and rocked his hips forward and back, grinding down, and every time he rocked forward his cock dragged along the soft fur of Gil’s belly, and every time he rocked back Gil’s cock pushed up into him at the angle that made his eyes lose focus. Forward, back. Forward, back. The couch creaked under them in time.

“Now you’ve got it,” Gil said. “Now you’ve got the rhythm. You know exactly what you’re doing up there.”

“I’ve thought about it.”

“How long?”

“Since opening day. Since you lay on my table and told me your back was fine.” Rennie rolled forward, and his cock slid up the slope of Gil’s gut, leaving a wet line. “It wasn’t fine.”

“It wasn’t fine,” Gil agreed hoarsely. “Nothing’s been fine since you told me I couldn’t have my ace.”

Rennie leaned his weight into Gil’s shoulders until his face was close to Gil’s, close enough to feel his breath, and kept rolling his hips. He kissed Gil’s mouth, then the corner of it, then his cheekbone where the stubble stopped. Gil turned his face up into it.

“Tell me how I look from down there,” Rennie said, grinding slow on him.

“I see the best-looking man in the Continental League sitting on my cock in my den with his eyes half shut.” Gil’s thumbs pressed into his hip bones. “I see your belly shaking every time you come down. I see you leaking all over my gut. You’re making a mess of me, Doc. I’ve got a wet patch on me the size of a home plate and you haven’t even come yet.”

Rennie made a sound and rolled faster.

“And I feel you,” Gil said. “I feel you squeezing me every time you go back. You’re doing it on purpose.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t quit on that.”

Rennie did it again, sitting down hard and squeezing, and Gil’s head dropped back against the cushion and he swore, long and filthy, at the ceiling.

They went on. Rennie lost the sense of how long. The window unit ground away. Sweat ran down his back and gathered in the small of it, and Gil’s hands slid on his hips with it and gripped tighter. His thighs began to burn. He didn’t stop. His cock was trapped in the slick between his belly and Gil’s, sliding through the grey fur with every roll forward, and the friction built and built until he was making noise on every stroke, loud, uncontrolled, the kind of noise he kept out of his own apartment because the walls were thin.

“Turn it up,” Gil said, both big hands tightening on his hips. “The Hendersons next door are eighty-one and they’ve both got hearing aids and they take them out at nine.”

Rennie laughed and then groaned because laughing moved Gil inside him.

Then his left thigh, the one that had cramped in Des Moines, gave a warning flicker. Not a cramp yet. The start of one, a tight thread pulled through the long muscle above his knee.

“Wait,” he said. “Stop.”

Gil stopped. His hands went still on Rennie’s hips and his whole body went still under him, and he didn’t thrust up, didn’t move, didn’t say anything. He just looked up and waited.

Rennie stayed sitting on him, seated deep, and put a hand behind him and pressed his thumb hard into the muscle above his own knee, where the thread was pulling. He held it. He breathed. He let the leg straighten a little along the cushion, then bent it back.

“Quad,” he said. “Same leg as Des Moines. It’s not a cramp. It was thinking about it.”

“You want to get off?”

“No.” He worked the muscle with his thumb another few seconds. Gil didn’t move under him, not an inch, even though Rennie could feel him throbbing inside, thick and hard and waiting. “No. I want to keep going. But hold me up a little. Take some of my weight with your hands so the thigh doesn’t have to.”

“I can do that.”

Gil shifted his grip. He slid his hands under Rennie’s ass, one under each cheek, his fingers spread wide, and lifted, not much, just enough that Rennie’s thighs weren’t carrying everything. Two hundred pounds of trainer on a catcher’s palms.

“Like that?”

“Like that.” Rennie tested the leg. It held. “Okay. Now.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Then go.”

He went. With Gil’s hands under him he could move differently, lighter, and Gil started to help, lifting him an inch and letting him down, lifting and letting him down, not thrusting with his hips, just using his arms, his catcher’s shoulders, and his face set the way it set behind the plate when a pitcher was working a full count.

“Fuck me with your hands,” Rennie said. “That’s what you’re doing. You’re fucking me with your hands and your cock’s just there.”

“My cock’s not just there.”

“It’s there. It’s very there.”

Gil laughed and lifted him and dropped him, and Rennie came down onto him and rolled forward, and his cock dragged up Gil’s slick belly, and the thing that had been building low in his body for half an hour came up through him all at once.

“Gil,” he said. He never said Gil in bed. “Gil. I’m going to. Don’t move your hands.”

“I’m not moving anything. Go on. All over me, Doc. I’m holding you up.”

Rennie rolled forward one more time, ground down, and came. He didn’t touch himself. His fingers were dug into Gil’s shoulders and Gil’s were under his ass, and he came from the drag of his own cock up the hair of Gil’s belly and the push of Gil’s cock inside him, pumping out over Gil’s gut and up onto the grey hair below his chest, his whole body clenching, his voice going up into something he would deny later. Gil held him up through all of it and said his name, Rennie, not Doc, Rennie, over and over.

When it was done he slumped forward until his forehead was on the back of the couch beside Gil’s ear. He was still full of Gil, and still shaking.

“Your turn,” he said into the couch.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to. I want to feel it. Don’t stop holding me.”

Gil held him. Then, with Rennie loose and heavy on him, he began to move his hips for the first time, short careful pushes up, mindful of his back and his knee, and it didn’t take long. Six, eight, ten strokes. Rennie squeezed down on him on purpose, and Gil said “Oh, fuck,” flat and surprised, and pushed up and held there and came, pulsing inside the condom, his fingers sunk deep in the meat of Rennie’s ass.

---

Later Rennie lay on the couch with his head at the far arm and his legs across Gil’s lap, and Gil sat at the other end with his hand around Rennie’s ankle, absently, the way he’d hold a ball between pitches. The lamp was still on. The window unit had cycled off, and the den had gone so still Rennie could hear the elm moving outside.

“Your quad,” Gil said.

“It’s fine. I’ll stretch it in the morning.”

“I’ll stand over you while you do.”

“You won’t make me do anything. That’s a trainer’s call.”

“You’re the trainer at work.” Gil’s thumb moved on the bone of his ankle. “Here you’re a man who came all over my stomach and I’ll make you stretch.”

Rennie smiled at the ceiling.

After a while he said, “I meant it. What I said before.”

“I heard you.”

“I mean, I want there to be a rule. A real one. Not a feeling about it. Something we’d both recognise if it ever started to go wrong.”

Gil was quiet. His thumb stopped.

“Okay,” he said. “Lay it out.”

Rennie thought. He’d been thinking, he realised, since the dugout step.

“If either of us ever catches himself bargaining,” he said, “even once, even small, even a joke that isn’t a joke, we stop. Not forever. A month. We stop for a month and we sit with it and we figure out what happened, and we don’t start again until we both know.”

---

At the door, near midnight, Gil stood barefoot on the step with the porch light on him, his shirt back on and buttoned a hole off.

“A month,” he said.

“A month,” Rennie said. “Either of us. We call it, we don’t argue.”

“We don’t argue.” Gil looked out at the dark street, at the elm. Then he looked back at Rennie and nodded once, slow, the same nod he gave an umpire he’d decided was right.

“Agreed,” he said. “Out loud. Both of us.”

“Both of us,” Rennie said, and went down the steps to his car.