Extra Innings, Chapter 7 · Protocol

The foul tip sounded like a bat breaking, except it was bone and plastic.

Tomás Reyes, thirty-eight, dropped to one knee behind the plate with his left hand on the dirt and his mask cocked sideways. The Louisville crowd made the noise crowds make when they don’t know if a man is hurt or only winded. The ball rolled to the backstop. The batter took first on the missed third strike and then stopped, looking back.

Rennie was out of the dugout before the umpire waved him. He got to Reyes in eight strides and went to a knee.

“Follow my finger.”

Reyes followed. His eyes tracked. Both pupils equal. He said, “I’m fine, Doc,” in a voice held too steady, and tried to stand, and sat back down on his heels.

“Stay.”

Reyes stayed. The Louisville trainer was halfway out of his dugout; Rennie waved him off with two fingers. The umpire stood over them and asked if they needed time. Rennie said yes. The crowd noise dropped a register and then climbed again when Reyes lifted his head.

Gil arrived a second later, mask in his hand, the old catcher’s walk. No touch on Reyes. Eyes on Rennie.

“Coming out,” Rennie said.

“I can finish the inning,” Reyes said.

“You’re not finishing the inning.” Rennie had the card in his head already: SCAT, Maddocks, the stepwise return. “You took it on the mask. You’re in protocol until Dr Voss says otherwise.”

Gil’s mouth tightened once. Nineteen years Reyes had been catching. Gil had caught fourteen himself. Rennie watched him swallow it.

“Voss,” Gil said.

“I’ll call her from the tunnel. She owns the lift. Not you. Not me.”

Gil nodded and laid a hand on Reyes’s shoulder and said, “Come on, Tomás. Walk with me.”

Reyes walked. The crowd clapped because it was all they had. In the tunnel the concrete smelled of old beer and wet chalk. Rennie sat Reyes on the padded bench and ran the Maddocks questions while the assistant trainer held a penlight. Venue. Which half. Who scored last. What team they played last week. Reyes got all of them. He stumbled on the months-backward list, went from September to July, stopped, started again, and cursed in Spanish. Rennie wrote it down without looking up. The assistant trainer clicked off the penlight and didn’t say anything, which was the right thing to say.

“I know what comes after September,” Reyes said.

“I know you do. Tonight your head doesn’t.”

“Then let me finish the inning. One more batter, Doc. I’m fine.”

“That’s enough,” Rennie said. “You’re done for the night.”

He stepped into the alcove by the dugout phone and got Voss. She was in Denver, in clinic clothes by the sound of her voice. She listened for forty seconds and said, “Hold him. Overnight observation. Three a.m. check. I lift it, or I don’t. Tell Gil I said that. And Doc, write the time of the tip on the form before you forget.”

“Already did.”

He told Gil at the top step. Gil said, “Fine,” once, not looking at him, looking at the field, where Dalton Rask was buckling his shin guards with hands that shook. Rask hadn’t started a game since May. Gil went back to managing with him.

Between innings Lonnie asked if Reyes could pinch-hit in the ninth if they needed a bat. Rennie said no. Lonnie said, “Just asking, bud,” and chewed his mustache. Frye’s hitters went quiet. Pike threw a clean eighth. In the ninth Wexler gave up the tying single. In the tenth Louisville’s lefty dropped a changeup on the outer half and the Stockmen’s rally died at second.

They lost three to two in ten. Gil took the loss without throwing a helmet. In the clubhouse Reyes sat on a folding chair with an ice towel on his neck and answered every question Rennie asked him twice.

Lonnie said, “I’ve seen him take worse.”

“You’ve seen him take worse and play,” Rennie said. “Tonight he’s not playing. Voss’s call.”

Pike brought Reyes a Gatorade and didn’t make a joke. Turo put a dry towel on the chair back and said nothing. Rask sat two chairs over with his shin guards still on and asked if he’d done all right. Gil said, “You threw out a runner. You also called the pitch Wexler hung in the ninth. Both true. We’ll talk tomorrow.” Rask nodded. Weather report, nothing more.

Rennie filled the concussion form in block letters at the trainer’s table while the clubhouse TV replayed the tip on a loop nobody asked for. He wrote the exact time from the scoreboard clock, the pitch type from the chart, and the name of the umpire who waved him out. Voss would want all of it. He signed the bottom and put a carbon in Reyes’s locker under the ice packs.

At the hotel Curtis texted Gil two lines about the protocol paperwork, and Gil sent them on to Rennie. Lonnie rode up in the same elevator and asked, quiet, if Rennie needed a second set of eyes at three. Rennie said no. Lonnie said, “All right,” and got off on seven.

---

The club was in a downtown boutique hotel with a brick lobby and a piano nobody played. Gil had a corner suite on the ninth floor: a sitting room with a green couch and a desk under a bad print of Churchill Downs, a bedroom with a king bed and a padded headboard, a bathroom with a tub that took forever to fill. Rennie’s room was two doors down, a single with a view of the parking garage.

Before anything else he wrote the overnight note for the assistant trainer: hourly visual through six, wake for confusion or vomiting, call Rennie first and Voss second. He taped a copy to Reyes’s door and another inside the training bag. He checked Reyes once more at ten-forty. Name. City. Score of the game. Marisol’s middle name. Reyes said, “Doc, go sleep,” and Rennie said, “I will at six.”

In the elevator mirror he looked tired and certain. At eleven he knocked on Gil’s door with a paper cup of ice and his phone alarm set for five to three.

“Reyes is asleep,” Rennie said. “Assistant trainer’s on the chair in his room. I’ll do three myself. You don’t need to stay up.”

“I’m up.” Gil stood aside. He was in a team T-shirt and shorts. The suite smelled of hotel soap and the rain that had started after the game. “You eat?”

“In the clubhouse.”

“Sit down a minute.”

Rennie sat on the green couch. Gil took the far cushion. They didn’t touch. Outside, Louisville traffic hissed on wet streets.

“I wanted to leave him in,” Gil said. “Old habit. You saw it.”

“I saw it. You didn’t leave him in.”

“Because you said protocol.”

“Because Voss said protocol. I only carried the phone.”

Gil looked at him. “You pulled him against both of us. That’s the job.”

“That’s the job.”

They sat with that. Gil scrubbed a hand down his face and left it over his mouth a second.

“Gabby texted,” he said. “Asked if the catcher was all right. She saw the clip. I told her protocol. She said good.”

“She said good to protocol?”

“She said good to me listening to the trainer. She’s an ER nurse. She likes rules that keep people alive.”

Rennie smiled once. “Tell her I said thank you.”

“She’ll make you say it again at the airport.”

Gil got up and poured two glasses of water from the bathroom tap because the minibar was soda and something with a cork neither of them was touching. He set one in front of Rennie and took the other back to his end of the couch.

“Rask looked green,” Gil said.

“He’ll look greener tomorrow with the lefty in his head. You’ll get him through it.”

“You’ll get Reyes through the night. That’s the heavier job.”

“I know the form. I’ve done the form.”

Gil drank half the glass. “I hate the form.”

“Everybody hates the form. The form keeps men from walking into pitches they can’t track.”

“Knew that too.” Gil put the glass on the carpet by his foot. “Doesn’t mean I like watching him miss the months backward.”

Rennie nodded. He had nothing soft to put on that. He said, “I have four hours before I walk down the hall. I’d like to use one of them with you, if you want that. Sober, both of us. And if I say Time, it’s Time.”

Gil’s mouth tipped. “I want that. Come here.”

---

They used the bedroom. Gil locked the suite door and the bedroom door and set his phone screen-down on the nightstand next to Rennie’s, both alarms showing.

“Knee,” Rennie said.

“Flew in. It’s quiet. Back’s fine. Your call where.”

“Not on my back. I had my back on Sunday.” Rennie looked at the headboard, then at the pillows. “You sit up against that with your legs out straight. I sit in front of you, facing you, legs over yours. Your knee stays flat on the mattress the whole time and nothing bends that doesn’t want to. I want your face, and I want it where I can talk into it.”

“Who does the work?”

“Both of us. Small. You pull, I rock. Nobody bounces.”

Gil stripped the T-shirt and let it fall. His chest hair was damp at the edges from the shower he’d taken after the game. He shoved the shorts down and kicked them aside. Heavy thighs. Soft gut. The white scar up the right knee. He was already hard, thick, curved left, and made no move to cover it.

Rennie undressed slower. Belt. Shirt. Trousers. He left his watch on the nightstand. Gil stacked two pillows behind his own lower back against the headboard and sat into them with his legs out long and a little apart. Rennie folded a third pillow in half and set it down between Gil’s thighs, close in, then sat down on it facing him and laid his legs over Gil’s thighs, heels by Gil’s hips. He leaned back on his hands. It put his ass level with Gil’s cock and tipped his hips up toward it, and it put their faces two feet apart.

“Condom,” Gil said, before Rennie could. His redraw from Tuesday wasn’t back yet.

“Drawer.” Rennie had put one there earlier with a bottle of water-based lube, one plain line, no joke. He leaned forward, rolled it on Gil, slicked him, then reached back under himself and pushed two slick fingers into himself while Gil watched his face.

“Yes?” Gil said.

“Yes. Time stops it.”

“Time stops it.”

Gil held himself at the base. Rennie came forward on his hands, slid his hips the last few inches along the pillow, and took the head. He sank onto it under his own weight. When he was halfway, he took his right hand off the sheet and set the palm on Gil’s hip to stop him.

“Don’t move. I’m finding it.”

Gil didn’t move. His hands stayed where they were on Rennie’s thighs. He watched Rennie’s face while Rennie rolled his pelvis a degree, breathed, rolled it another, until the angle opened.

“There. Now.”

Gil eased him in by the thighs, slow, a half inch and a wait, a half inch and a wait, until Rennie’s ass sat snug against the base of him on the folded pillow. Both of them let out a breath. Rennie put his hand back on the sheet behind him and stayed there, full, his legs loose over Gil’s, his cock up off his belly between them, touching nobody.

“Damn, you’re tight after a week of road beds,” Gil said, low. “Hold still a second. Let me have this.”

Rennie let him have it. He could feel the stretch settle and ease. He could feel Gil’s heartbeat, or thought he could, a slow thud where they were joined. Gil’s thumbs moved once along Rennie’s inner thighs, an inch either way, and that was all.

Rennie held still. Then he rocked, small, a roll of the hips toward Gil and away, and Gil pulled with his hands under Rennie’s thighs on the forward half so they met in the middle. It was short and deep and unhurried, and the bed didn’t make a sound.

“Like that,” Rennie said.

“Like that. Tell me if it’s wrong.”

“It’s not wrong.”

“Then narrate it. I want words.”

“Thick. The curve drags left going in, and it lights up my whole back. Slow, because you know what slow does to me.” Rennie rocked forward and held it a second, eyes on Gil’s. “Like you’ve got all night and I’m the only thing on the schedule.”

“You are the only thing on the schedule.”

“Till five to three.”

“Till five to three,” Gil agreed, and pulled him in again.

Rain hit the window. The bedside lamp threw Gil’s shadow up the headboard behind him. He talked low, the way he never talked in the dugout: how Rennie had gone out on the grass in eight strides and owned it, how ten thousand people had watched him say no to a manager and nobody in those seats knew where he’d be at eleven. How tight he was. How he could feel him squeeze through the rubber on every backward roll.

“Keep going,” Rennie said. “I like you dirty and quiet.”

“Then hear this. I’ve been stiff since you told me to stay on the top step.”

“I didn’t tell you to stay on the step.”

“Your face did.”

Rennie laughed. Gil felt it from the inside and swore through his teeth, and Rennie laughed again on purpose.

“You do that in the training room,” Gil said, “I’ll need a Section 4 of my own.”

“You’ll get nothing in the training room. You get it here.”

“I’ll take here.”

He leaned off the headboard, slowly, testing his back, and Rennie came up off one hand to meet him. The kiss was awkward for a second, the angle all wrong, Gil’s belly against Rennie’s shins, and then it wasn’t. Gil kissed like he managed a close game, without hurry, a little rough at the end. When Rennie sank back onto his hands his cock stood up stiff and flushed and Gil’s breath was coming short, his cock twitching deep inside him, thick and hot.

Back to it: he rocked, Gil pulled. Every forward roll dragged the left curve of Gil’s cock over the place that caught Rennie’s breath, and he said so, plain, and Gil kept the pull exactly there. Sweat came up low on Rennie’s back and on his wrists where they took his weight. Gil’s hands on his thighs went slick. His own cock bobbed between them, wet at the tip. Gil’s eyes went to it and his hands stayed on the thighs.

“Your arms?” Gil asked.

“Starting to burn.”

“Give me one.”

Rennie gave him his right hand. Gil took it, laced their fingers, and held Rennie’s weight on that side by the hand, so Rennie could hang back off it with his weight on Gil’s arm, and the angle went a degree steeper. The noise Rennie let out would have cleared a clubhouse.

“Keep that one.”

“Don’t let go of that hand.”

“I won’t.”

They kept it slow for a long time. Rennie found that if he tightened as he came forward and let go as he rocked back, Gil’s whole body answered, his belly jumping, his fingers closing hard on Rennie’s. He did it until Gil said his name through his teeth, then stopped doing it and made him wait.

“Mean,” Gil said.

“Patient.”

“Same thing from where I’m sitting.”

“Work for it.”

“Rennie. Please.” Gil’s voice had gone rough. “Don’t make me wait on it.”

Rennie gave it to him. Then once more. Gil’s skull knocked back on the padded headboard and stayed there, and he watched Rennie down both their bodies through slitted eyes. The rain thickened on the glass. Gil’s breath deepened, then roughened, and the pull got shorter. Rennie saw every stage of it arrive: the line cutting in between the eyebrows, the breath going short, the lower lip dropping. He’d seen that face on Gil arguing a strike call. He’d never seen it this close.

“Talk,” Rennie said. “Give me your side of it.”

“Hot. The rubber’s hot. You go tight every time you come forward, then you let me go. I can feel your pulse where I’m in you.” Gil’s voice dropped. “And your cock’s leaking on your belly and you haven’t put a hand near it, and that’s going to finish me.”

“Then finish. Do you want to come in me?”

“Yes. Can I?”

“Yes. Come. And after, I’d like your mouth on me.”

“You’ll get it. Ask me again after.”

Rennie rocked forward hard on the next one and stayed forward, and Gil hauled him close by the thighs and kept him there, hand and thigh. Gil’s eyes shut. He groaned and didn’t bother holding it, pulsing in the condom, his fingers locked in Rennie’s. Rennie held through it, full and hard and not done, and watched every second of his face.

When Gil’s breath came back he let Rennie down off the hand. He kept a hand on the rubber at the base while Rennie eased back off him on the pillow, then tied it off and binned it in the nightstand trash.

“Your at-bat,” Gil said. “Tell me how.”

“Your mouth. If you want it. I ask first every time.”

“I want it. Lie back.”

Rennie lay back along the bed with his head on the pillows Gil had been leaning on. Gil turned over onto his belly between Rennie’s legs, a folded pillow under his chest, the bad leg flat on the mattress behind him.

“Knee?”

“Flat. Nothing on it. Stop doctoring me.”

He kissed Rennie’s knee first, then the soft skin above it, taking his time about the second one, his beard dragging. Rennie lifted his hips an inch without meaning to and Gil pressed them back down with his palm, gentle, and raised his eyes and waited.

“Go on,” Rennie said.

Then he sucked Rennie in. He was blunt about it: wet heat, lips over his teeth, one hand spread along Rennie’s inner thigh and the other on the sheet. He went slow at first, the head and then more, then eased, then more again. Rennie put a hand on Gil’s shoulder and kept it there. The bathroom light Rennie had left on for the three a.m. walk caught the grey in Gil’s beard. The sound Gil made around him was low and pleased.

“Fuck,” Rennie said. “Don’t stop.”

Gil didn’t stop. He settled into a rhythm and kept it, slow down and slower up, his cheeks hollowing on the pull, and every few strokes he let Rennie slip out to the tip and held him there on his tongue until Rennie swore at him. Then he took him deep again. His hand on Rennie’s thigh slid up to the crease of his hip and pressed there, pressing him into the mattress, easy.

“You’re going to have me begging,” Rennie said.

Gil made a yes sound without letting go. Wet ran into his beard. Rennie’s thighs started to shake on either side of his shoulders. Rain filled the gaps between his breaths. Heat gathered low in his back, slow, then all at once.

“Gil. I’m almost there. You can come off.”

Gil came up just far enough to say, “Do you want to come in my mouth?”

“Yes.”

“Then do it.”

He took him back in and went deeper, slow, and Rennie’s hand tightened on his shoulder. Gil’s tongue worked the underside. Rennie said his name once, low, the dugout voice gone, and came in Gil’s mouth. Gil swallowed, coughed once, gave a short laugh, and dragged a forearm across his beard.

“All right?” Gil asked.

“All right. Your neck?”

“Pillow did the work.”

Rennie slid down and lay along him, careful of the knee, palm on Gil’s shoulder. They listened to the rain. Somewhere below, a siren went past and faded. Rennie drank from the water glass Gil had brought in and passed it over.

“You didn’t waste any of that,” Rennie said.

“I wanted all of it. You asked. I said yes. That’s the whole play.”

“Next time you can come off if you want.”

“Next time I’ll say if I want. Tonight I wanted that.”

Gil’s hand found his shoulder for a second and left again, just a check. Rennie counted breaths the way he counted a pulse on a sideline.

“Voss lifts him or she doesn’t,” Gil said. “I won’t ask you to lean.”

“I wouldn’t lean.”

“I know.”

Rennie traced the old scar on Gil’s knee with one finger, lightly. “This held tonight.”

“It held.”

“You stayed on the top step anyway.”

“Somebody had to watch you pull my catcher.” Gil caught Rennie’s finger and squeezed once. “I’d do the same if it was Pike. Or Rask. Don’t make it about us.”

“I’m not. I’m saying I saw you choose the rule.”

“I chose the rule.” Gil stared at the ceiling. “Twenty years ago I’d have argued. Tonight I handed you the phone.”

“That’s growth.”

“That’s fear of Gabby.”

Rennie laughed into his shoulder. Gil ran a washcloth over them both, hung it on the tub, and lay back down. At five to three Rennie’s phone lit up on the nightstand before Gil could touch his shoulder.

---

By three Rennie had his clothes on. Gil walked him to the suite door in his shorts.

“Reyes,” Gil said.

“Three a.m. check. If he’s wrong, I call Voss. If he’s right, he sleeps till six and we do it again.”

Gil nodded. He touched two fingers to Rennie’s shoulder in the doorway, then let go.

Rennie walked two doors down, knocked softly, and went in. The assistant trainer was upright in the armchair with a paperback face-down on his knee, and he lifted a hand. Reyes was awake on the second knock. Rennie turned on the desk lamp, not the overhead, and crouched by the bed. Pupils equal. Name, date, city. The score. Marisol’s middle name again, because it was the one question Reyes couldn’t have rehearsed. Time: 3:02. Oriented.

“Headache?”

“Some. Less.”

“Sick to your stomach?”

“No.” Reyes looked at the ceiling. “September, August, July, June. I lay here and did it till I got it.”

“I’d rather you’d slept.”

“I’d rather I’d caught the ball.” Reyes closed his eyes. “Gil all right?”

“Gil’s fine. He handed me the phone.”

Reyes huffed, close to a laugh. “Then he’s not fine. He’s learning.”

“You’re done until Voss says. Sleep. I’ll be back at six.”

In the hall Gil stood barefoot in his T-shirt, watching. He raised two fingers, a catcher’s sign, and went back into the suite.

Rennie set the next alarm for six, sat in the chair by Reyes’s door until his hands were steady again, and marked the three a.m. box.