Extra Innings, Chapter 8 · Gabby

The arrivals curb at Eppley smelled of jet fuel and cut grass, and the heat came up off the concrete in sheets.

Gil had parked the truck in the cell lot and walked over anyway, because forty minutes in a cab with the engine running was not something his back forgave. He stood under the overhang with his cap pulled low. Rennie stood a yard to his left in a plain grey polo with no club logo on it, which had taken him twenty minutes to choose that morning.

“Flight’s down,” Gil said, reading his phone. “Eleven minutes ago.”

“She’ll be at the carousel.”

“She doesn’t check bags. She says checked bags are for people who trust airlines.”

“Does she trust anything?”

“Triage. Her mother. Me, mostly.” Gil pocketed the phone. “She’s going to study you for about four seconds before she says a word. Don’t fill the four seconds.”

“I don’t fill silences.”

“I know. That’s why I’m not worried.”

He was worried. Rennie could see it in Gil’s weight shifting off the right knee and back onto it, as it did in the eighth inning of a one-run game. It was the All-Star break, Friday, and for once nobody in the world needed anything from either of them.

The doors slid open and she came out with a backpack over one shoulder and a paper cup of iced coffee in her hand. She was tall, dark-haired, with Gil’s heavy brows and a nurse’s quick eyes that went over the whole curb once and came back to them. She hugged her father hard, one-armed because of the coffee, and said into his shoulder, “You look tired.”

“I’m fifty-three.”

“You looked fifty-three at Christmas. Now you look tired.” She let go and turned.

Four seconds. Rennie counted them without meaning to. She looked at his face, his hands, his shoes, and his face again.

“You’re the trainer,” she said.

“Rennie Okafor.”

“Gabby. He told you what I said about the catcher?”

“He did.”

“Then say it. He promised me you’d say it.”

“Thank you,” Rennie said. “For telling him it was good that he listened.”

She held his eyes another second and then smiled, fast and wide and entirely her father’s. “He never tells anybody anything. He told you that. So.” She handed Gil her coffee to hold so she could shake Rennie’s hand properly. Her grip was dry and firm. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Dad, the truck’s in the cell lot, isn’t it.”

“It’s a short walk.”

“It’s ninety-four degrees.”

“It’s a short walk,” Gil said, and carried her coffee the whole way.

---

The day before, Thursday, Gil had walked into Curtis Ashby’s office at ten in the morning with Rennie beside him and shut the door.

Rennie had asked to be there, and Gil had said yes before he’d finished asking.

Curtis had a salad on his desk. He looked at the two men and closed the laptop.

“Sit down,” he said. “This is either very good or very bad, and you both look like it’s the form.”

“It’s the form,” Gil said. He didn’t sit. “Rennie and I are together. Since April. The Rails want the disclosure by the fifteenth. I’m not waiting for the fifteenth.”

Curtis looked at Rennie.

“It’s accurate,” Rennie said. “I’d like it filed with both our names. Dr Voss signs my reviews. Gil has never been on one and won’t be. If HR wants anything else, I’ll answer it myself.”

Curtis lifted his fork and set it back down.

“The policy needs mid-year notice where one of you supervises the other,” he said. “He doesn’t. I made sure of that in January because Voss made me make sure. So nobody owes anybody an apology.” He pulled a notepad over. “I’ll send it to Denver this afternoon, before I go home. HR will want it in writing from each of you. They’ll come back with something by Tuesday. My guess is it says what’s already true and adds that Gil stays out of anything about your career, your pay, your contract. Can you live with that?”

“I asked for that,” Gil said.

“I know you did. You just did it in front of me.” Curtis wrote two lines and looked up. “Thank you for walking in here before somebody walked in here for you. That happens. It’s uglier.”

In the corridor afterwards Gil had drunk two paper cups of water at the cooler, one after the other.

“That’s thirty-five years,” Gil had said, low. “Out of the drawer.”

“One office. One man.”

“One more than ever.” He’d crushed the cup. “Let’s go to work.”

---

Gabby slept late Saturday, which Gil reported to Rennie at nine-thirty by text as if it were a box score: Still down. Eleven hours. ER brain.

Rennie drove over at noon. Gil’s house in Dundee looked the same as it had in June, red brick and the old elm and the screened porch, except that the porch had two chairs now and the second one had the store tag on its leg. Rennie pulled the tag off before anyone saw it.

Gabby was at the kitchen island in a T-shirt from a 10K in Tempe, eating cereal out of a mixing bowl.

“He doesn’t own normal bowls,” she said. “Sit. I have questions.”

“I assumed.”

“Are you going to answer them?”

“The ones I can.”

“That’s a trainer answer.” She pointed her spoon at him. “One. How bad is the knee, really. Not what he tells me.”

Rennie looked at Gil, who was at the stove pretending to read the side of a coffee can.

“He can answer that,” Rennie said. “I don’t talk about anybody’s knee unless he’s in the room and says I can. That goes for him too. He’s also my partner, which is a second reason.”

Gabby held his eyes for longer than four seconds this time.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. That’s the right answer and I hate it. Dad?”

“It clicks at sixty degrees,” Gil said to the coffee can. “It’s held all year. It’ll need doing again in five years. I’m not doing it in-season.”

“Thank you.” She tipped the bowl and drank the milk out of it. “Two is for later.”

The afternoon was ordinary. They walked to the little park at the end of the street, Gil between them with his cap on, and nobody looked twice. Gabby told a story about a fishhook through an eyebrow. Gil laughed and told none.

At six Gil lit the grill on the back step, burned the first two burgers and got the next four right. They ate on the screened porch with a jug of iced tea sweating on the table. Nobody drank anything else. Gabby was going onto nights on Tuesday and didn’t drink the week before; Gil said that was a good rule and poured himself more tea.

When the light went orange behind the elm, Gabby set down her glass.

“Two,” she said.

Rennie waited.

“Are you good to him?”

It was asked plain. Gil started to say something and she lifted one hand off the table without looking at him, and he stopped.

“I try to be exact with him,” Rennie said. “I tell him what I see. I don’t tell him what he wants to hear unless it’s also what I see. When he’s wrong, I say so. When he’s right, I say that too, which he takes worse.” He looked at Gil, then back at her. “And when he asks me for something, I tell him yes or no and I mean it. That’s what I’ve got. I think it’s good. You’d have to ask him.”

Gabby turned her head.

“He’s good to me,” Gil said. His voice came out rougher than he meant. “Nobody better has walked into that clubhouse. I’m not saying that in front of anybody else.”

“You just said it in front of me,” Gabby said. “That counts.” She stood up and dropped a kiss on her father’s cap. “I’m going to bed. I start nights Tuesday, so I’m banking sleep like a grandmother. The guest room has a fan, right?”

“Box fan. In the closet.”

“Goodnight, Rennie.”

“Goodnight.”

She went in. They heard her on the stairs, then the guest room door at the end of the upstairs hall, then nothing.

Gil exhaled long, covered his face with both hands and kept them there.

“Well,” Rennie said.

“Don’t.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were going to say well again.”

“I was going to say she asked the right question.”

Gil took his hands down. “She asks the right question for a living.” He looked at the dark yard. “You’re staying.”

“If you want.”

“I want.” He stood, and the knee clicked, and he didn’t look at it. “Come up when you’re ready. I’ll be the one awake.”

---

Gil’s bedroom was at the front of the house, over the porch. Gabby’s room was at the back, past the hall bathroom, forty feet of old floorboards away. Rennie walked the hall in his socks and noticed which boards spoke. Two by the bathroom door. One at the top of the stairs.

Gil was sitting on the side of the bed in his shorts and an undershirt, the lamp on low. The bed was an oak frame, heavy and old, with a headboard that sat close to the wall. He’d opened both windows. The night came in warm and full of cicadas.

Rennie shut the door and turned the lock. He leaned his back on it for a second.

“You all right?” Gil asked.

“I’m all right. I need to ask you something first.”

“Say it.”

“I want you tonight.” Rennie kept it to a murmur, because the house was quiet. “I don’t want you inside me. That isn’t about you. I want my ears free. I need to hear that hall and want you in the same breath, and I can’t do both with you in me. So everything else. You can have my thighs. I’d like to be on top of you while you do it. If you want that too.”

Gil didn’t answer right away. Then he nodded, slowly.

“I want that,” he said. “Nothing you don’t. Time stops it.”

“For you too.”

“For me too.” Gil held out a hand, palm up, and waited. Rennie crossed the room and took it.

Gil drew him down beside him and kissed him, slow, mouth only, the rest of him not moving. This was Rennie’s first kiss in this room. Gil tasted of iced tea and charcoal smoke, and he kissed the way he’d held the burgers off the flame, patient for a long time and then not.

“Also,” Gil said, an inch from his lips. “When I ask, you give me one word. That’s all I need.”

“What kind of word?”

“Whatever’s true. Slower. More. Yes. Time, if it’s time.”

“And if I don’t have one?”

“Then that’s the word.”

Rennie smiled in the dark. “All right.”

“Word, Doc.”

“Yes.”

They undressed each other without hurry. Gil’s undershirt went over his head; the polo Rennie had chosen so carefully that morning dropped on the chair. Gil got Rennie’s belt open and stopped with his hands on the waistband and looked up, and Rennie nodded, and Gil pushed everything down and let it fall. Then Rennie did the same for him. Gil was half hard already, thick and curving left, and didn’t bother hiding it.

“On your back,” Rennie said. “Right in the middle.”

Gil lay back with a pillow under his head and his legs a little apart, the bad knee straight. He looked enormous in the lamplight, grey fur from his collarbones to his groin, the old surgical line pale on the knee. Rennie climbed on and lay down along him, chest to chest, his knees together on the mattress between Gil’s thighs, propped on his elbows by Gil’s shoulders.

“Is this all right on the back?”

“Quit checking me over.” Gil’s palms found Rennie’s back, one between the shoulder blades and one low, over the swell of his ass. “You weigh what you weigh. I’ve worn catcher’s gear heavier than you for nine innings.”

“That’s not flattering.”

“Accurate, though.”

Rennie kissed him again, deeper, and Gil’s whole body answered from underneath, the big chest rising, his fingers spreading on Rennie’s back. The old oak frame took it without a word.

“Come up here,” Gil said. “Higher. Give me your chest.”

Rennie walked his forearms up the pillow until his chest was over Gil’s face. Gil craned up and took a nipple into his mouth, warm and wet, and sucked, and Rennie had to press his mouth into the pillow to keep the sound in. Gil worked it with his tongue, slow, then grazed it with his teeth, then went to the other one, his beard rough on the soft skin around it.

“You make that noise at the park,” Gil murmured against his chest, “and I’m finished.”

“I don’t make it at the park.”

“Make it here, then. Into the pillow. I can hear it through the feathers.”

Rennie made it into the pillow, his cock throbbing hard against the grey fur under him. Gil laughed against his skin, very low, and bit the side of his chest where it met the ribs, and Rennie’s hips jerked forward on their own.

“Fair’s fair,” Rennie said.

He slid back down. He kissed the base of Gil’s throat, the hollow under the collarbone, the place over the sternum where the hair grew thickest and smelled of soap and charcoal. He took Gil’s nipple between his lips and sucked until Gil’s breath came uneven, and Gil’s cock stood up hard against Rennie’s hip and stayed there.

“Doc,” Gil said, a warning and a plea at once.

“Bag’s on the chair,” Rennie said. “Lube. Side pocket.”

Gil reached without letting go of him, found the bag by feel and brought back the bottle of water-based lube. He thumbed the cap and put it in Rennie’s hand.

“Your thighs,” he said. “Your call how.”

Rennie sat up for a moment, clear of the right knee, poured some out and rubbed his hands together till it was warm. He slicked Gil first, one long slick pull that made Gil’s stomach jump, then reached under himself and slicked the insides of his thighs high up, under his balls, where the skin was softest. Then he lay down along Gil again, a hand lower than before, and reached down between them and set Gil’s cock where he wanted it, angled up into the crease at the top of his thighs. He pressed his knees together.

Gil let go of a breath in one rough piece.

“Doc,” he whispered. “Oh, Doc.”

Rennie rocked. Gil’s cock slid through the wet channel of his thighs, the thick head pushing up under his balls on the forward pass and dragging back along the tender skin on the return. It wasn’t being fucked. It was close enough to it that Rennie’s whole body knew the shape of the thing and wanted it, and far enough from it that he could hear the cicadas over his own breath. He squeezed his thighs and Gil made a sound deep in his chest that was new to Rennie, and his hips lifted off the sheet to chase the squeeze. He kept squeezing just to hear it. Gil’s hands left his hips, found the outsides of his thighs and stopped there, open, asking.

“Go on,” Rennie said. “Hold them shut for me.”

Gil’s big palms closed over the outsides of his thighs and pressed them together, and the slide got tighter and slower, and Gil swore quietly, a long string of it, all of it about him.

“That’s it,” Gil breathed. “Hold it like that. Doc. Like that.”

“Your hands,” Rennie said. “My hips. You set the pace.”

Gil’s palms moved down to Rennie’s hips and took hold, and he began to push up between his thighs, short and slow, as his body wanted, and Rennie met it. The bed held. Rennie’s own cock lay hard against the soft fur low on Gil’s belly, and he kept his weight up off it on his forearms.

“Tell me things,” Rennie said. “Quiet.”

“Quiet.” Gil wet his lips. “You’ve been hard since the porch. I watched you answer her with your hands folded on the table and I knew. I could see it in your shoulders.”

“You couldn’t.”

“I watched you pull my catcher in front of ten thousand people. I can read your shoulders.” Gil pushed up slow between his thighs and held there. “You’re hot as a stove in there. You’re squeezing me on purpose.”

“I am.”

“I know. I feel every one.”

“And?”

“Like you’ve got me in a hand made of you.” Gil’s grin went crooked. “Soft on the inside and hard as a catcher’s thigh on the outside. Every time you squeeze I lose count. I’m on about ninety pitches and I’m not coming out of the game.”

“Nobody’s walking out to get you.”

“Damn right nobody is.”

Rennie laughed, and the laugh shook down into Gil, and Gil groaned at it and thrust up farther than he meant, and the headboard touched the wall. One dull knock in the dark.

“Wait,” Rennie said.

Gil froze under him. Not a breath. His hands on Rennie’s hips stopped dead.

They listened. The cicadas. A car two streets over. Nothing from the hall, no door, no board.

“The headboard,” Rennie whispered.

“I heard it.” Gil kept his voice to almost nothing. “What do you want to do?”

“Pillow behind it.”

Gil reached up over his head, slid the spare pillow off the stack and wedged it down between the oak and the wall without lifting his shoulders. Then he lay back and waited, his cock trapped hot between Rennie’s thighs, not moving it at all.

“Again?” he asked. “Or done? Either.”

“Again. Yes.”

“Word.”

“More.”

Gil smiled up at him and gave it to him, slow at first, testing the bed and the wall with every push, and when nothing knocked he let himself have more. Rennie took his weight on his elbows and arched his back so the angle steepened, and the next push dragged Gil’s cock hard along the seam behind his balls and wrung a sound from him that he only half caught in the pillow.

“Again,” he said. “That one. Again.”

Gil gave him that one exactly and kept giving it, and Rennie stopped trying to catch the sounds and just kept them low.

The pillow took the next knock and turned it into nothing. Rennie found a rhythm he liked, a long squeeze-and-slide, his thighs locked, Gil driving up into the slick channel of them and pulling back, the slippery rhythm of it low and steady under the cicadas. Sweat ran down Rennie’s sides and dripped off his ribs onto Gil’s chest. Gil’s fur was soaked under him, and every time Rennie slid forward it dragged against his nipples and made him gasp into Gil’s beard. Every few strokes the fat head pushed up hard behind his balls and pressed there, and something deep in Rennie answered it as if Gil were inside him after all, and he had to bite his lip.

“You see what this is,” Gil said, hoarse. “Three months of you going past my office door with that board under your arm. Tonight I’m fucking your thighs in my own bed and you’re telling me how. Doc, I’d let you tell me how till the season ends.”

“The season’s not long enough.”

“Then after.” Gil’s fingers bit into his hips. “Word.”

“More.”

Gil obliged, hips working up under him. He worked up into him faster, heels dug in, the big chest heaving, and Rennie rode the push of it with his thighs shut tight and his mouth open against Gil’s cheek, saying his name into his beard, Gil, Gil, low enough that only the man under him heard it. He could feel himself getting close from nothing but the heat and the pressure behind his balls and the sound Gil made every time he squeezed, his own cock aching and leaking on Gil’s belly, and he knew exactly where it would go if he let it.

He stopped his hips. He let Gil keep moving under him and held his own body still.

“Word, Doc,” Gil said, already hearing it.

“Keep.”

Gil’s eyes opened. “Keep?”

“Mine. I’m keeping it.” Rennie put his forehead against Gil’s temple and breathed. “Sunday. After the airport. I want it with nobody down the hall. You finish. I want to feel you finish.”

Gil searched his face, sweat on his brow, the question plain in it.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure. I’m asking for it.”

“Then it’s kept.” Gil’s grip firmed on his hips. “Squeeze for me.”

Rennie squeezed, hard, thighs locked around him. Gil drove up into his thighs three more times, long and hard and slick, and on the fourth his whole body bowed off the mattress under Rennie’s weight and he came, with his teeth shut and the sound jammed down in his chest, pulsing hot between Rennie’s thighs and out over the sheet and the backs of his legs. Rennie held him there with everything he had and felt every one, and his own cock jumped against Gil’s belly and he let it ache and kept it.

They lay as they were.

The cicadas went on outside. Somewhere down the block a sprinkler started up, hissed a while, then stopped. Rennie lay on him, sticky from the thighs down, his heart going like he’d run the bases, hard and not minding it.

“All right?” Gil whispered.

“All right. You?”

“I’m fifty-three and I just came between a man’s legs in my own bed with my daughter down the hall.” Gil’s ribs lifted under him. “I’ve had worse nights.” His hand moved on Rennie’s back, once, and settled. “You’re hard.”

“I know. It’s kept.”

“Sunday.”

“Sunday.”

Rennie lifted his hips. They were glued together. When he peeled up off Gil the noise was obscene in the quiet room and they both froze and then started to laugh without any noise at all, shoulders shaking, Gil with an arm over his own eyes.

There was a towel on the chair under the bag. Rennie got it and cleaned Gil first, then himself, then threw the towel over the chair back. He lay down on the side Gil wasn’t on.

“Hall’s quiet,” he said.

“She sleeps like I do. Nothing wakes her but a phone.” Gil rolled his head toward him. “You wanted your ears free. Did you get it?”

“I got it. I heard the house the whole time. And I wanted you the whole time. Both.”

“That’s the deal we made.”

Gil reached over and found his hand on the sheet and took it, loosely. “She asked me which side of the bed you’d sleep on,” he said. “This morning. While you were driving over.”

Rennie turned his head.

“I told her I didn’t know yet,” Gil said. “She said find out.”

“This side.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Don’t tell her.”

“She’ll know anyway. She’ll study you for four seconds over the coffee and know.” Gil’s eyes closed. “Sleep, Doc.”

Rennie didn’t, not for a while. He lay and heard the house breathe around them and the man beside him start to snore, low, like a train a long way off.

---

Gil made pancakes in the morning. Gabby came down at eight in the 10K shirt and stopped in the kitchen doorway and stared at the griddle.

“Those are pancakes,” she said.

“They’re pancakes.”

“You’ve never made me a pancake in my life.”

“You never stayed over on an off day,” Gil said, and flipped one, badly.

She sat down at the island across from Rennie, who’d been awake since six-thirty and was on his second cup. She took the pot from him, poured her own and studied him over the rim of the mug. He counted. One. Two. Three. Four.

She set the mug down.

“If he ever stops listening to you,” Gabby said, “call me. I outrank him.”