Extra Innings, Chapter 11 · Blind Item
The phones went off one by one and then all at once.
The first one buzzed on the bench by Pike’s locker at twenty past one. Then two more across the room, then one in a bag, then the one on the shelf over the coffee machine, then every pocket in the place, a whole clubhouse of phones going like a string of firecrackers somebody had lit at one end.
Rennie stood in the training room doorway with a roll of tape in his hand. He watched Frye pull his phone out, look at it, frown, and read it again with his lips moving.
“What,” Pike said.
Frye cleared his throat. He read it out flat, box-score flat.
“‘Blind item. Which Continental League skipper, a former big-league catcher, has been sharing more than a dugout with a member of his own medical staff? Our birds in the Heartland say those road trips have been very, very therapeutic.'”
He stopped. Nobody laughed. Somebody’s phone buzzed again and the man it belonged to shut it off without looking.
Rennie’s own phone was in his back pocket. He could feel it going against him, twice, three times. Rennie left it there. He tore a strip of tape off the roll, and the sound was very loud.
Frye set the phone down, screen to the wood. “Garbage site,” he said, to nobody.
Rask, who’d been lacing a shoe, went on lacing it.
Rennie put the tape down and walked to the manager’s office.
Gil was sitting behind the desk with his phone in front of him, the screen still lit. He didn’t look up.
“Shut the door.”
Rennie shut it.
“Lonnie sent it to me,” Gil said. “With no words. Just the link. Twenty years he’s known me, and he sent me the link with no words, which is the kindest thing he’s ever done.” Gil turned the phone over. “Who read it out there?”
“Frye. To the whole room.”
“He called it garbage after.”
“It’s not garbage. It’s a good guess with a wink on it.” Gil scrubbed both hands down his face. “Twenty-eight years, Doc. Fourteen in the bigs, fourteen down here. I never said one word in any room with a uniform in it. Not to Russ. Not to Reyes. I sat on a bus out of Toledo while a guy told jokes about it for three hours, and I laughed when everybody laughed.”
Rennie sat down in the chair across the desk.
“You don’t have to do anything today,” he said. “It’s a site with a wink on it. Nobody’s named.”
“Everybody’s named. There’s one catcher managing in this league.” Gil looked at the wall, at the schedule with its red X’s. “And one member of the medical staff who comes out of my office every afternoon at one.”
Somebody knocked.
It was Terrence Duffy, the beat man from the Omaha paper, forty-four, in a tie he’d loosened before he got to the door. He looked from Rennie to Gil.
“Off the record, Gil,” he said. “All of it. I’m not here.”
“Then come in and not be here,” Gil said.
Duffy came in and didn’t sit. “Somebody sent me that link at noon with three exclamation points. I’ve had two calls since. I’m telling you to your face that I’m not writing it. I don’t do blind items, I don’t do who’s sleeping with who, and if my editor asks, he’ll get the same answer.” He paused. “I came because the next guy might not walk in. Better you hear it from a man standing in front of you before you hear it from your phone.”
Gil held his eyes a long time.
“Thanks, Terry.”
“Don’t thank me. Win tonight. I need a story about baseball.” Duffy nodded at Rennie, once, the way he’d nod at any coach in the room, and went out.
“He’s decent,” Gil said. “I always thought so.”
Curtis Ashby already had it open on his desktop when they got upstairs. He turned the screen away from them, which Rennie liked him for.
“I read it,” Curtis said. “Sit down. Here’s where we are. HR has your form from July. The ruling’s on file. Voss signs everything about Rennie and you’re recused. Nothing in this item is a breach of anything, because there isn’t one.” He folded his hands. “So it’s not a policy problem. It’s a your-life problem. So what now?”
“Tell the room,” Gil said. “Myself. Before stretch.”
“Nobody’s making you.”
“I know.”
Curtis looked at Rennie. “And you?”
“I’ll be in there,” Rennie said. “I’ve got one thing to say, about my holds. Then I’ll shut up.”
“Do you want me in the room?”
“No,” Gil said. “It’s my room. You’ll be in your office.”
“With the door open,” Curtis said. “Anyone who wants to talk to somebody who isn’t you, I’m here till midnight.”
At three-thirty Gil nodded to Turo, and Turo reached up and turned the radio off.
The clubhouse was full. Players in shorts and shower shoes, coaches with their arms folded, Lonnie on the trainer’s stool by the door because his feet hurt. Rask sat on the floor against his locker. Pike stood. Gil didn’t get up on a chair this time. He stood out on the carpet with his hands at his sides.
“You’ve all read it,” he said. “Some of you read it twice. It’s about me.” He looked round the room, not hurrying, man by man. “I’m gay. I’ve been gay my whole life. I caught fourteen years in the big leagues and I never said that to one man in a uniform. I’m saying it to you because you’re the room I’ve got and I’d sooner you heard it from me.”
Nobody moved. Out in the corridor the ice machine rattled and went quiet.
“The member of the medical staff is Doc. We told Curtis in July. We filled in the form the Rails make everybody fill in. The people above us know, and they made a ruling, and I’m recused from his job, every part of it.” Gil laid his hand on the nearest locker. “Here’s what it changes about who plays. Nothing. Doc’s holds are Doc’s and Voss’s. They were in April and they are now. If any one of you ever thinks a medical call got bent for me, you don’t come to me. You go to Curtis or you go to Voss. That’s all. Stretch is at four-fifteen.”
He stepped back. Rennie came forward one step.
“One thing,” Rennie said. “If I hold you, it’s for your arm or your head or your back. That’s the only reason I’ve ever held anybody. Voss signs what I do. He doesn’t.”
The room was silent. Rennie could hear the big fridge in the corner, the one with the electrolyte drinks in it. Nobody said anything bad. Nobody said a thing.
Lonnie got up off the stool.
“Four-fifteen, bud,” he said, to the room, and the room started moving.
They filed out toward the tunnel in ones and twos. Pike went past Rennie without looking at him. Rask got to his feet and stood a second by his locker, then followed. Turo folded towels.
The radio stayed off.
At ten past four Gil’s phone buzzed on the desk in his office, and he looked at it and then turned it round so Rennie could read it.
It was from Reyes. Denver was an hour behind; Reyes would be in the Rails’ clubhouse, getting taped by somebody who wasn’t Rennie.
I’ve sat next to a lot of men for a lot of years. I know what I know. Sit down in the fifth.
Gil read it again over Rennie’s shoulder. He didn’t say anything. He picked up the pencil and wrote the lineup out in a clean hand, top to bottom, without crossing anything out.
The Stockmen lost by a run. Pike served up a two-run homer in the seventh on a slider that hung, and after it he stood on the mound with his head back.
In the fifth, with nobody on, Gil came down off the top step and sat on the bench.
Rennie saw it from down the bench. So did Lonnie.
After the game nobody turned the radio on. Turo had it on every night after a loss, low, the country station, so the room had something to be quiet under. Tonight it sat on the shelf over the laundry bins and the clubhouse was quiet with nothing under it at all. A few men said “Night, Skip,” at the office door, the same as any night. Rask said it. Pike didn’t, but he never did after a loss.
Rennie stayed to finish his notes, then drove to Dundee with the windows down.
The kitchen light was on and the rest of the house was dark.
Gil stood at the island, still in his game pants and a white undershirt, with the belt out, both hands spread on the butcher block, a glass of water between them. He looked up when Rennie came in through the back. Rennie put his bag down by the door. “I didn’t touch your knee today. Not once. I want that said before anything.”
“I know it.” Gil picked up the water and put it down without drinking. “You saw me sit down in the fifth.”
“I saw.”
Gil almost smiled. Then he didn’t. He looked at his hands on the wood.
“Nobody said a word, Doc. In the room. I stood there and said it, and they all just stood there.”
Rennie came round the island and stood beside him, close enough that their arms touched.
“Lonnie said four-fifteen. Rask said good night.”
“Rask says good night to the bat rack.” Gil rolled his shoulders. “I keep waiting for it to hit me, like a foul tip. It hasn’t.”
Rennie put his hand on Gil’s back, low, over the place that locked after bus rides. It wasn’t locked. He could feel Gil breathing under it.
“I want you,” Rennie said.
Gil turned his head.
“Tonight. Upstairs. Not on the edge of anything.” Rennie said it level, in the tone he kept for telling a pitcher he was done for the night. “Middle of your bed. Both of us lying down, on our sides, facing. You on your left, so that knee’s on top and carrying nothing. Me on my right. My leg over your hip.”
Gil didn’t answer for a while.
“You’ve thought about this.”
“Since June. Every time you climbed onto that bed like it was a mound in Toledo.” Rennie kept his hand where it was, low on Gil’s back. “You don’t stand. You don’t kneel. Nobody’s holding anybody up. Your face is a foot from mine the whole time, and tonight I watch it.”
Gil said nothing for a moment. Then: “Say the rest of it.”
“Here’s the rest. Condom. The lube’s in my bag. You do what’s on this list and nothing that isn’t, unless you ask me first and I say yes.” Rennie held his eyes. “Read it back to me.”
Gil’s mouth moved at the corner.
“Both of us on our sides,” he said. “Middle of the bed. Me on my left. Your leg over me. A rubber, and the stuff in your bag. Anything else, I ask first, and I wait for a yes.”
“That’s the list.”
“Then yes,” Gil said. “I want you. I’ve wanted you from the minute you stood next to me in that room and said your one thing.”
“Yes,” Rennie said.
The bedroom was dark except for the yard light striping in through the blinds.
Gil peeled the undershirt off and threw it over the chair, then shoved the game pants and his shorts down and shed them. The grey fur lay thick over his chest and ran in a line down his belly, and the pale surgical line showed on the outside of the right knee in the striped light. Rennie put a condom by the glass Gil had carried up, the water-based lube beside it, then stripped where he stood, shirt, jeans, shorts, and left them on the rug.
He was already hard. Gil groaned, low, looking at it.
Gil sat on the high side of the mattress and swung his legs up the slow careful way, good leg first, and settled onto his left side mid-mattress, cheek on his own pillow. Rennie climbed in after him and settled on his right side, facing him. A foot of sheet between them. Then less.
Rennie lifted his left leg and laid it over Gil’s hip, his calf against the back of Gil’s thigh, and pulled himself in by it until their cocks touched and Gil’s breath went short.
“You’ll be the death of me, Doc.” Gil laid a palm on the thigh over him, big and warm, and slid it up toward his ass and stopped. “Can I touch your cock?”
“Yes.”
Gil closed his hand round it between them and stroked it once, slow, base to tip, watching Rennie’s face while he did it. Rennie’s eyes wanted to close. He kept them open. He’d said face, and he meant it.
“You’re leaking on my sheets,” Gil said.
“It’s your fault.”
“Tell me why.”
“I’m leaking on your sheets because I’ve been thinking about your cock since the fifth inning. Since you sat down. I was at the wrong end of the bench half hard, watching you do it.”
Gil let him go and reached behind himself for the nightstand. “Can I open you up?”
“Yes. Use a lot.”
The cap clicked. Gil warmed it in his palm first, as Rennie had taught him without ever teaching him, and reached between them, under the leg Rennie had over him, and then two slick fingers were pressing at him, circling, patient. Rennie opened the leg over Gil’s hip to give him the angle.
“Breathe,” Gil said.
“I’m breathing. Put one in.”
One went in. Gil’s finger was thick and sure, and he pushed it slowly to the last knuckle and held it, and Rennie felt himself grip it and let go, grip and let go.
“Two?”
“Two.”
Two stretched him, the good burn. Gil worked them, unhurried, turning his wrist, and then crooked them up toward the front, hunting, and found it. Rennie’s hips jumped against him.
“Fuck. Yes. That. Do that again.”
Gil found it again, and again.
“The noise you make in my bed,” Gil said, down in the rough part of his chest. “All summer I stood in that kitchen and made eggs and you sat on that stool reading your phone and I thought about carrying the plates up here and never eating them. Every morning. Two eggs, over easy, and you on this pillow.”
“Every morning you stayed over,” Gil went on, and pressed up hard inside him and kept the pressure there, and the sound Rennie made went up the walls. “That’s why I burned the toast in July.”
“I thought it was the toaster.”
“It was your ass.”
Rennie’s answer broke off in a groan, because Gil had started moving his fingers again, faster now, stroking that place every time.
“Condom,” Rennie said. “Now. Before I come on your fingers and you have to start the list over.”
Gil pulled out slowly. He tore the packet with his teeth, reached down and rolled it on, and Rennie looked down between them, the thick curved cock going shiny under the latex, Gil’s hand slicking more lube down it and then over Rennie’s hole, cool and then not.
Gil set the head against him from below and stopped there and looked at him.
“Going in,” he said. “Yes?”
“Yes. Slow at the start.”
Gil pushed. Rennie felt the blunt pressure and then the give, the head popping past the ring, and his lips came apart and he made himself keep his eyes on Gil’s face, a foot away, less. Gil’s jaw was set. A vein beat at his temple.
“Fuck,” Gil said. “Doc. Fuck.”
“Keep coming. Slow.”
Gil came in slow. Lying like that, his cock went in at a low angle, and he had nothing to do but lie on his side and draw Rennie’s hips onto him with the hand on his thigh, and keep drawing, until he was flush against Rennie’s ass and couldn’t go any deeper. His right knee lay on top of Rennie’s calf, carrying nothing.
They stayed like that. Rennie’s leg was shaking over Gil’s hip.
“Say something,” Gil said.
“You’re so thick. You’re stretching me open in your bed. You’re up in my belly now.” Rennie’s voice cracked. “Move. You can move.”
Gil drew back halfway and came in again, and Rennie’s eyes nearly went shut, and he held them open.
“Your face,” Rennie said. “Let me see it. Don’t hide it.”
“I’m not hiding.”
“You hid all day.”
Gil stopped, deep in him. For a moment Gil’s face did something no field or room had ever got out of it. Then he closed the last inch and Rennie kissed him, hard, one arm over Gil’s shoulders.
“I’m not hiding now,” Gil said into his mouth.
“No.”
Gil started to fuck him properly.
It was long and even at first, short strokes from the hips because that was all lying on his side would give him, sliding nearly out and rocking back in, deep, the old bed keeping a slow count under them. Rennie used the leg over Gil’s hip to haul him in each stroke, met him, took it. Every stroke dragged the fat head over the spot Gil had been hunting.
“There,” Rennie said. “Stay right on it. Fuck me there.”
“You’re letting me in.” Gil hauled on the thigh, and what followed went deeper, and Rennie’s whole body jerked. “Twenty-eight years,” Gil said, jaw tight. “Twenty-eight years I kept my mouth shut. I’m done keeping it shut. Now you get every filthy thing in my head.”
“Tell me.”
“You’ve got the tightest hole in Nebraska and I’m in it. It’s sucking me in. Listen to that. Wet, and every sound of it mine. I back out and it hauls me home.” He rocked in. “I want you on every surface in this house. I want you in the dugout with the lights off. I want to stand in that room and say your name.”
Rennie was gasping now. “You said it. You said Doc.”
“I’ll say Rennie next time.”
“Now.”
“Rennie,” Gil said, and pulled him on so deep Rennie shouted.
“Can I put my hand on your back?” Gil said. “Off the list. Low down.”
“Yes.”
Gil’s hand left his thigh and went round him and spread low across his back, broad and hot, fingers wide just above his ass, and pulled. It held Rennie’s hips tipped onto him and Gil didn’t let it slide.
“There,” Gil said. “That’s where I want you.”
“You put me there.”
“I did that.” Gil’s rhythm shortened, picked up. “Can I go deeper? Pull me in.”
“Yes. Yes.”
Rennie hooked his heel behind Gil’s thigh and pulled, and Gil’s hand on his back tipped him the last bit, and the angle opened him wider and Gil sank in further and held, and Rennie said oh, long and low.
“I’m going to come,” Rennie said. “Gil. If you keep that up I’m going to come, and I don’t want it on the sheet.”
Gil stopped, deep. His breath was loud through his nose. Sweat ran off his temple into the pillow.
“Then I’m asking,” he said. “Off the list. I want you in my mouth till you go off in it. Now, before I finish. Can I?”
Something turned over in Rennie.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. Please.”
Gil came out of him slowly, keeping the condom on with one hand. He stayed where he was, on his side, cheek on the pillow, the knee resting.
“Come up here,” he said. “On your knees. Bring it to me.”
Rennie came up onto his knees on the mattress in front of Gil’s face, one hand on the headboard. Gil’s palms settled on his hip and behind his thigh, and nowhere else.
“Easy, Doc,” he said, and took him.
His mouth closed hot over him, and he didn’t tease. He took Rennie deep straight away and sucked, slow and hard, his cheeks hollowing, his tongue pressing up the underside. Rennie’s hand tightened on the headboard and stayed there. Gil held his hip and kept him where he was.
“Gil. Fuck. Gil.”
Gil groaned round him; Rennie felt that groan travel up his back.
He was nearly there already from the fucking, his hole still open and slick and twitching on nothing, and Gil’s mouth on him was nearly too much. Gil pulled up to the head and sucked it, and pushed back down, and Rennie watched the grey stubble on his cheeks move, watched his own cock disappear into that mouth, the mouth that had said I’m gay to thirty men at three-thirty that afternoon.
“I’m coming,” he said. “Gil. Your mouth. Now.”
Gil’s eyes came up to his, and he didn’t stop.
Rennie came. He shouted and his hips jerked forward, and Gil held his hip and kept his mouth where it was, swallowing round him while Rennie emptied, until Rennie was shaking, making small sounds, and Gil let him slide out, slowly, mouth shining, and left it that way.
“Come back in me,” Rennie said. “Finish in me.”
“You sure?” Gil said from the pillow. “You just went off.”
“I’m sure. Slow, because I’m tender. Then however you want.”
Rennie lay back down on his right side, face to face, and put his leg back over Gil’s hip without being asked. Gil slicked the condom again and set himself and looked at him.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
He went in slow and slick. Rennie hissed at it and then let it, and Gil gave him a long minute of almost nothing, just rocking, his palm low on Rennie’s back again. Then Rennie said “Now,” and Gil fucked him short and quick and deep, his cock working slick in the tender stretch, the bed creaking hard, red climbing Gil’s neck and his eyes on Rennie’s the whole time.
“Rennie,” he said. “Rennie. I’m nearly there.”
“In me. I want to watch your face when you do.”
Gil’s hips stuttered. He drove in three more times, hard and uneven, and with the last he went still, deep, and his whole face came open, mouth wide and eyes on Rennie’s and a sound rising out of him that started as Rennie’s name and ended as nothing. Rennie felt him throb deep in him behind the rubber, once and again and again, Gil’s palm spread low on his back the whole time as if he were holding them both in place.
For a while nobody spoke.
Afterwards Gil binned the condom and lay back down on his side, and Rennie dragged the sheet over them both, because the room had gone cold the second they stopped. Gil reached past him for the glass on the nightstand and drank the water at last, the whole glass.
“The knee?” Rennie said.
“I lay on it for half an hour and it didn’t say a word.”
“Nobody said a word today.”
Gil put the glass down. “No.”
“Tomorrow they’ll say something or they won’t,” Rennie said. “Either way you’ll make eggs.”
“I’ll make eggs.” Gil worked his thumb over his own knuckles. “You want two?”
“I want three.”
“You’ve never eaten three eggs in your life.”
“I never had a manager stand up in front of thirty men and say it either,” Rennie said, and Gil laughed, a real laugh, the first Rennie had heard out of him since twenty past one.
On Saturday Rennie got to the park at a quarter to one.
The clubhouse was half full already. Nobody looked up when he came in, or everybody did, briefly, and then went back to what they were doing. Pike was on the floor stretching his back the way Rennie had given him in June. Rask was taping his own wrists and doing it badly. Frye was eating sunflower seeds over the trash can.
The radio sat on the shelf over the laundry bins, off. Turo was folding towels under it.
Rennie went toward the training room. He had his hand on the door when he heard Pike get up off the floor behind him, the pop of his knees, and walk across the carpet.
He heard the click.
The country station came on, loud, a steel guitar and a man singing about a truck, too loud for a quarter to one on a Saturday. Somebody groaned. Somebody else said “Leave it.” Rask said “Turn it up,” and Pike turned it up.
Fiction by the Woolnight editorial team. AI-assisted drafting; reviewed and edited by humans before publication.