Extra Innings, Chapter 12 · Overnight

The aisle was lit from the floor, a row of small amber lights down each side where the bunks began, and past them the dark.

Rennie lay stretched out in the upper bunk on the right and watched the lights slide over the ceiling when the coach leaned into a curve. Rain hit the roof in sheets and then in handfuls and then in sheets again. Somewhere under him the diesel held one long note. Across the aisle, in the lower bunk on the left, Gil was breathing slow and careful through his nose, the breathing of a heavy man lying exactly flat because flat was the only thing that didn’t hurt.

It was a quarter to ten. They were somewhere in Illinois.

---

The charter had been cancelled at nine that morning. Curtis called Gil, and Gil called Turo, and by ten-thirty Turo had a bus for the players and a tour coach for the staff, a rock-band coach with a lounge at the back and eight bunks in the middle, rented out of Council Bluffs from a company that didn’t ask what it was for. “Seven hundred and forty miles,” Turo said in the lot, clipboard in hand. “Twelve hours if the road’s a Stockmen fan. Fourteen if it’s not.”

They left Packinghouse Field at twenty to twelve. The players’ bus went first. The coach followed, with Lonnie, Frye, Turo, the strength coach, the video man, Rennie, Gil, and a driver named Merle Haskins, sixty-four, who had driven gospel quartets for twenty years and said he’d driven all sorts but never a ballclub with so few guitars.

Gil sat in the front lounge chair for the first four hours, his right leg propped straight along the aisle floor, and talked Lonnie through the Nashville lefties. By Kansas City he’d stopped talking. By Columbia he was sitting forward, palms on his knees. Rennie watched him from three seats back and kept quiet. A man’s back was his own until he asked.

Somewhere past Columbia, Frye came back from the front lounge and sat down in the seat across from Rennie with his bag of seeds on his knee. He offered the bag. Rennie took three.

“Let me ask you something,” Frye said. “Straight.”

“You can ask.”

“Friday.” Frye cracked a seed and put the shell in his shirt pocket, which was where Frye put shells when there was no cup. “When he stood up in there. Did you know he was going to?”

“He told Curtis upstairs. I was in the room. So, about an hour before.”

“An hour.” Frye nodded, slow, like that settled a bet he’d had with himself. “My brother-in-law’s gay. Twenty years with the same guy, a dentist in Tulsa. Thanksgiving, my brother-in-law carves. I don’t know why I’m telling you that.”

“You’re telling me it’s ordinary.”

“I’m telling you it’s ordinary.” Frye looked toward the front, at the back of Gil’s head over the lounge chair. “And I’m telling you he’s been sitting like that since Kansas City, and you’ve been watching him since Kansas City, and nobody on this bus is going to say a word if you go up there.”

“Gil hasn’t asked.”

“He’s Gil. He’ll ask when he can’t stand up.” Frye stood, swaying with the coach, and tipped two more seeds into Rennie’s palm. “Mount Vernon’s in three and a half hours. I’d bet the seeds.”

Rennie didn’t take the bet.

---

At the rest stop east of Mount Vernon, at twenty to nine, the coach hissed and settled, and everybody stood up but Gil.

Lonnie waited in the aisle. “Bud.”

“Go on. I’ll be out.”

Lonnie went on. Frye went past with his seeds. Turo went past and looked back once. Then it was Rennie and Gil and Merle up front, the door folded back, and the smell of wet asphalt and diesel and cut grass coming in on the air.

Gil gripped both armrests and tried to get up. He got halfway. His face went the color of putty under the stubble and he sat back down very slowly.

“Skip,” Rennie said.

“Don’t.”

“I’m asking one question. Should I look at it.”

Gil looked straight ahead at the windshield wipers parked on the glass. “Yes,” he said. “Lord. Yes.”

So Rennie treated him in the aisle. Merle found a moving blanket in the luggage bay and Rennie folded it twice on the carpet between the seats. He got Gil down onto it one stage at a time: knees, hands, then onto his side, then flat. He worked with Gil face-down first, thumbs pressed in beside the spine low down, finding the knot on the right where the muscle had grabbed and wouldn’t let go. Then face-up, knees bent, rocking them gently side to side. It took twenty-five minutes. Lonnie came back on with three coffees, saw them, set the coffees down on the front console and went back out again to stand in the rain.

When Gil could roll onto his side and push himself up to sitting without his face changing color, Rennie eased back from him.

“That’s what I can do tonight,” he said. “It’s going to stay stiff. Lie flat in the bunk. Not on your side. Flat. Get up every couple of hours and walk the aisle if you can.”

“Yes, Doc.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. You always are.” Gil hooked a hand on the seat edge above him. “It’s your worst quality.”

They got back on the road at a quarter past nine. Rennie helped him into the lower bunk and pulled the curtain halfway, and climbed into the upper one opposite, and lay there with the amber lights going past on the ceiling, and slept before he meant to.

---

He woke when the coach stopped moving.

It was black outside the little window by his head, and loud. Water was hitting the coach from more than one side. A flashlight beam went by. Somebody up front was talking to Merle, his voice worn thin from being awake too long.

Rennie climbed down. Gil was on the lower bunk’s edge, bent forward from the hips like a folding chair, a hand braced on each thigh.

“Nashville,” Gil said. “Two-twenty. And I think we’re parked in a lake.”

They weren’t quite. They were parked in the hotel’s back lot, on the high side, the one corner that wasn’t under water. Lonnie went in to find out. Rennie’s phone buzzed while he was gone. Curtis, at twenty past two, from his kitchen in Omaha: Hotel says lobby flooded, no check-in till morning. Ballroom w/ cots. I’m on with the Nashville club re: tomorrow. Nobody drives anywhere tonight. Rennie showed it to Gil. Gil read it and handed it back.

“He’s up,” Gil said. “Curtis is always up. One of these years I’m going to call him at four and he’s going to answer on the first ring and tell me the weather in Denver.”

Lonnie came back soaked to the waist, with a hotel night manager behind him under an umbrella that was doing nothing.

The river had come up at midnight. The hotel’s garage had six feet of brown water in it. The lobby had a foot, and no power on the ground floor, and nobody could be checked in or out of anything until the morning. The manager had opened a ballroom on the second floor with cots and blankets, for the players and anybody else. “We’ll have coffee by six,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. We’ll have coffee by six.”

The players came off their bus and splashed across to the side entrance with their bags on their heads. Turo counted them in. Frye went with them, and the strength coach and the video man, and Merle went off to the drivers’ room the hotel kept behind the kitchen.

Lonnie planted himself below the coach steps, looking up at Gil.

“Cots, bud.”

“I’m not lying on a cot.” Gil was holding the overhead rail. “I’ll be fine in the bunk. Doc’s staying on.”

Lonnie looked at Rennie. Rennie held his look.

The whole clubhouse knew since Friday. Lonnie had known longer than that, and had said “Pass the salt” in May and “four-fifteen” on Friday and never anything else.

“Six-thirty,” Lonnie said. “Coffee. If she’s telling the truth.” He turned and waded off toward the side door with his bag held up over the water.

Rennie shut the coach door and locked it, and pulled the curtain across the windshield, and came back along the aisle. Gil had got himself down flat in the bunk again, eyes on the bottom of the bunk above him.

“Sleep,” Rennie said.

“You too.”

They slept.

---

When Rennie woke the second time the rain had dropped to a steady drum and the little window had gone from black to the darkest blue. His watch said five past five.

He stayed put and listened. Across the aisle Gil was awake. Rennie could tell from the breathing, which wasn’t sleep breathing. Gil had been lying there an hour thinking about something; it was in the breathing.

Rennie climbed down and squatted beside the lower bunk. The curtain was open. Gil lay flat, on his back, in shorts and a faded grey T-shirt with the blanket kicked down to his shins, hands folded on his belly, eyes open.

“You been awake long?”

“Since half past four,” Gil said. “My back asked at half past four and I told it to wait.”

Rennie didn’t answer straight away. He thought about the knot on the right side, about the twenty-five minutes on the moving blanket, about Lonnie out in the rain. He thought about all of it and then he put it down.

“Before you say anything,” he said, “the treatment’s over. It was over at the rest stop. I’m not your trainer on this coach until we’re off it. If that back needs looking at again, you tell me so, and I put this down and go back to being Doc. I’m not doing both.”

Gil turned to look at him.

“I don’t need you looking at my back,” he said.

“All right.”

“I want you.” That went to the bunk above him first. Then his eyes came to Rennie and he said it again, to his face. “I want you, Rennie. I’ve wanted you since Omaha. I’ve lain here for half an hour with a hard-on like a fence post and a back that won’t let me so much as roll over, and I’m asking anyway. You can tell me that’s stupid.”

Rennie laid two fingers on Gil’s forearm.

“It isn’t stupid,” he said. “It might be possible.”

“Possible how.”

“You lie flat. You don’t lift your hips. You don’t twist. You don’t help.” Rennie used his rehab-plan voice; the rest of him wasn’t ready to come out yet. “I do all of it. I get on you and I go as slow as I want and you don’t move anything but your mouth.”

Gil watched him a moment.

“You want that,” Gil said. “Not for the back. For you.”

“I want it for me. I’d want it if your back was twenty-five.”

“My back was never twenty-five.” Gil almost smiled. “Yes. Hell, yes. Where.”

“Not in there. You’d brain yourself on the bunk above.”

---

The lounge at the back of the coach was a U of padded bench round a strip of carpet, with a window across the rear and the blinds down. Rennie dragged the mattress off the empty bunk under his and laid it out on the carpet between the benches. It just fit, with a foot to spare at each side for his knees. He folded the moving blanket on top.

Then he went back and walked Gil down the aisle, Gil gripping his shoulder, short steps, cursing every one.

Gil went down in the order Rennie had shown him at the rest stop, knee, hands, side, back, and stretched out flat on the mattress, head to the rear window. A long breath left him. His color came back a little.

“Flat,” he said. “Flat’s all right.”

Rennie went and got his kit bag from the overhead and dug out the condoms and a bottle of water-based lube, and laid them out on the bench at Gil’s shoulder. Gil’s eyes followed him.

“You packed for this.”

“I pack for everything.”

Rennie knelt beside him. He worked the T-shirt up past the big belly and the grey fur and Gil’s chest, and Gil raised his arms an inch and no further, and Rennie eased it free without making him sit. He eased the shorts down. Gil’s cock came free and fell against his thigh, thick, already half hard and filling under Rennie’s eyes.

Rennie stripped his own shirt. He stood, stooped under the low ceiling, kicked off his sweats and shorts and stood over Gil naked, and Gil looked him over, head to foot, and groaned.

“Come here. Come down here.”

Rennie came down. He knelt astride Gil’s hips, one knee on the mattress at either side, and didn’t sit. He leaned down on his hands, one on the bench edge at each side, and kissed Gil, slow and deep, Gil’s mouth opening under his, Gil’s hands coming up to his thighs and staying there. Rennie hadn’t been above him for a kiss before.

“You don’t move,” Rennie said against his mouth.

“I’m not moving.”

“Your hands can move.”

“Then I’m moving my hands.”

Gil ran them up Rennie’s thighs from behind to his ass and took a cheek in each palm and squeezed, hard, the big bent fingers digging in, and Rennie’s groan went into the kiss. He sat back a little, just enough that his balls dragged across Gil’s belly, and Gil’s cock came up between his legs and nudged in between his cheeks, hot and stiffening.

“Fuck. Doc,” Gil said. “Know what that is, back there?”

“I know what it is.”

“That’s been lying in that bunk since half past four waiting for you to wake up.”

Rennie reached behind him and gripped it. It was hot in his palm, and heavy, and he stroked it just once, long, and it jumped in his hand.

He kept hold. His other hand found the lube and flicked the cap, poured some into his palm, then went behind him and slicked his own hole, two fingers, and Gil’s gaze never left his face.

“Let me,” Gil said.

“You’ll twist.”

“I won’t twist. I’ll reach. Reaching’s allowed.”

Rennie leaned forward on one hand and gave him the bottle. Gil slicked his fingers without lifting his head and reached under, between Rennie’s spread thighs. Rennie felt a thick fingertip circle the rim, slow, slick, and then press.

“There,” Gil said. “Let me in.”

The finger went in. Rennie’s head hung forward. Gil sank it deep and crooked it, and Rennie was rocking back onto it before he knew it.

“Two,” Rennie said.

“Ask me nice.”

“Two fingers, Skip. Now. Please.”

Two. It stretched and burned and then it didn’t. Gil fucked them into him, knuckle-deep, his wrist resting on the mattress, his elbow tucked to his side, nothing moving above the elbow. When he hooked into the spot at the front, Rennie’s hips jumped and the bench creaked under his hand.

“You’re dripping on my belly,” Gil said.

He was. His cock was hanging hard over Gil’s stomach and a string of precome had run down onto the grey fur. Gil eyed it and pushed his fingers deep and left them.

“I want inside you,” Gil said. “That’s all I want this morning. I’ll lie here like a plank. Get on me.”

Rennie tore a condom open. He reached back and rolled it onto Gil’s cock, slowly, both hands, and slicked it, and Gil cursed the ceiling. Then Rennie set one hand on the bench edge and with the other he held Gil upright, and lowered himself until he felt the head of it against him.

He stopped there.

“Watch me,” he said. “Don’t lift.”

“I’m not lifting. Go on, Rennie. Sit on it.”

Rennie sat.

Slow. The head pushed against him and he breathed and bore down and it went in, the thick blunt head stretching him open, and a sound escaped Rennie that he hadn’t meant to make. Gil hauled his cheeks wide and kept him spread open. Rennie held there on the head of it, and he shook, once, all over.

“More,” Gil said, teeth shut. “Doc. More.”

“I decide more.”

“Then decide it.”

Rennie sank another inch, and another. He could feel each one, the bend in Gil’s cock pulling in him toward the left, pressing somewhere it had never pressed when Gil was behind him or over him. He went down until there was no more to take and his weight was on Gil’s hips, and sat there full, thighs shaking, studying Gil’s face below him.

Gil’s eyes were shut. His mouth was open.

“Open your eyes,” Rennie said.

Gil opened them.

“I’m sitting on your cock in a tour bus in a flooded parking lot in Nashville,” Rennie said. “And you’re not allowed to do anything about it.”

Then he moved. Not up and down. He rocked, forward and back, a short slow grind with Gil deep in him, and every rock dragged the head across that spot at the front, and after a few of them Rennie had to stop and breathe.

“Fuck. Gil.”

“Yeah.” Gil’s words came out rough. “Grind on it. Grind that hole on me. Make it yours. Do what you want with it. I’m just the thing you’re sitting on.”

“You’re not just anything.”

“This morning I’m a plank of wood with a dick on it. Use it. Wear it right out. I want this coach creaking each time you drop on me.”

Rennie lifted, an inch, two, and sank back down, and the slide of it going in again made him shout. He kept at it until it was a rhythm, slow lifts and easy drops, his thighs doing the work, and Gil lay under him and took it and didn’t move his hips at all. Rennie could see what that took. The cords stood out in his neck. His knuckles had blanched.

“You’re so fucking tight round me,” Gil said. “You go up and you drag me with you. You’ve got me wet all down my balls. Again.”

Rennie squeezed.

“Doc. You’ll have me coming without moving a muscle.”

“Not yet.”

“Then quit doing that.”

Rennie squeezed again. Gil’s laugh came out strangled, and his hips rose to meet the drop.

His whole face changed. The noise he made had no pleasure in it.

Rennie stopped dead. He lifted clear off him, Gil’s cock sliding out of him wet, and he knelt up over him with his hands off the benches and both palms off Gil’s body, and waited.

Gil lay there, eyes shut, and breathed. In, slow. Out, slow.

“Hang on,” he said.

“I’m here. I’ve stopped.”

“I moved.”

“You moved.”

“I forgot.” Gil kept breathing. After a while his face loosened. “It grabbed. It let go. It’s letting go.”

Rennie didn’t budge. He didn’t touch the back. If Gil wanted the trainer he’d have to say so.

“Your call,” Rennie said. “Either way’s fine. We can lie on this mattress and listen to it rain.”

Gil opened his eyes.

“Back on me,” he said. “Sit down on me and finish what you started, and I’m going to keep my ass flat on this mattress if I have to think about the Nashville lefties the whole time. Please. Get back on.”

“Hips flat.”

“Hips flat. You’ve got my word.”

Rennie lowered himself again. It went easier this time, a single long slide from the head down, and Gil groaned and so did he. Rennie sat flush on him and stayed still. Gil’s hands came back to his knees.

“Lefties,” Gil said, voice shaking. “Their Tuesday guy. Throws a cutter in on the hands. Their Wednesday guy. Sinker, sinker, changeup.”

The laugh went right through Rennie and clenched him tight, and Gil swore.

He started again, slower. Long lifts now, nearly off the head, then down until Gil was deep again, and with each drop he let his weight settle and held it, and ground once, and lifted. Rain drummed on the roof. Rennie’s thighs burned. He didn’t care.

“Talk,” Rennie said.

“You want talk.”

“I want filth. You’ve had an hour to think of it.”

“I’ve had all summer.” Gil’s eyes were on him, dark. “I’m lying here with my cock up your ass as deep as it goes and yours bobbing over me like it’s asking for something, and I can’t give it anything without my back going.”

“Then nobody gives it anything,” Rennie said. “I’m keeping my hands on these benches. I want to come off you with nothing on it.”

Gil’s mouth opened. “Off my cock. Nothing else.”

“Nothing else.”

“Can you?”

“Watch and find out.”

Gil huffed, close to laughing. “Then I’ll talk you there. Keep your hands on that bench, Doc. Not one finger off it.”

Rennie forgot to breathe.

He tipped his hips forward an inch, so that each drop put Gil’s cock square against the place at the front, and the next drop made his hole clench down on Gil and both of them cursed. His own cock swung free over Gil’s belly, an inch clear of the fur, wet at the tip, touching nothing.

“Damn,” Gil said, low. “Hanging there leaking on me and nobody’s laid a hand on it. Every time you sit down it jerks. I’ve got the best seat on the coach.”

Rennie kept on, gripping the bench edges hard, and shut his eyes.

“Open them,” Gil said. “Your rule. Open them.”

Rennie opened them.

“That’s my trainer,” Gil said, softly. “Riding the manager in the back of a bus before the sun’s up. Dick out over me, dripping, and too proud to touch it. Go on. Faster. I’m stuck here anyhow.”

Rennie went faster. The drops got shorter, quicker, Gil’s cock driving into that place with each one, and Rennie could hear himself now, a noise going out of him each time, open and loud and nothing like Doc.

Rennie’s cock slapped up against his own stomach and swung back out over Gil, and he kept his hands where they were.

“That noise,” Gil said. “I’ve lain here an age for that noise. Keep making it.”

“Gil. It’s coming. I’ve got nothing on it and it’s coming.”

“Come on me. On my belly. I want it.”

“Gil.”

“Hands on the bench. Let me see it.”

Rennie came. It started at the place Gil was pressing and came up through him with nothing touching it, a long hard pulse that landed on Gil’s belly, and another, and another, striping the fur, and his whole ass seized down on Gil’s cock and held it, and he said Gil’s name up at the roof of the coach, twice, his voice breaking on it. It kept coming, slower, in spills, his hips jerking with each one, until he was empty and shaking.

Gil’s hands were clenched at his sides. He hadn’t moved his hips. His whole face had flushed.

“Hell, Rennie,” Gil said. “No hands. See what you did to me.”

Rennie held himself up on the bench edges, Gil still deep in him, trembling.

“You didn’t move,” he said.

“I didn’t move. Somebody give me a medal.” Gil’s breath was ragged. “Rennie. Can I come in you? I’m on the edge. I’m asking.”

“Yes. In me. Let me do it.”

“Do it.”

Rennie rocked again, small, careful, every drag almost too much now, short grinds down onto him. “Give it to me. Go on, spill in me.” Gil’s eyes stayed open. His mouth worked.

“Like that,” Gil said. “Just like that. Doc, you’re so soft in there now. You’re hanging on to me as if you’d keep me. Don’t let go.”

“I won’t.”

“Rennie. Now. Now.”

Gil came with his hips flat on the mattress. It shook through him too: Gil’s thighs went rigid under his ass, his fingers sank into Rennie’s waist, his head pressed back into the folded blanket and the sound out of him went on and on with no word in it. Rennie felt the kick inside him, and another, in the rubber, and he settled all his weight, didn’t move, and let Gil spend himself in him, and never looked away from his face.

Gil lay there after, eyes closed, chest heaving, Rennie’s come going cold in the fur on his belly.

“Don’t get off,” he said. “Not yet.”

Rennie didn’t get off.

---

Afterwards, a long time afterwards, Rennie lifted off him slowly and peeled the condom off him, knotted it, and balled it into a wad of paper towel off the lounge counter. He wiped Gil’s belly with a damp cloth and then his own thighs. Then he stretched out next to him, face-up too, shoulder to shoulder, the two of them filling the strip of carpet between the benches from side to side.

“How’s the back,” Rennie said.

“Are you asking as my trainer?”

“No. I’m asking as the man who was just sitting on it.”

“It’s fine.” Gil’s head rolled toward him. “It’s stiff and it’s sore and if I get up off this floor without your help I’ll be the first man in history. It’s fine.”

“At six-thirty I’m your trainer again. Only if you say so.”

“I say so.” Gil didn’t speak for a while. “Lonnie knew you were staying on.”

“Lonnie knows a lot of things.”

“Lonnie said six-thirty, coffee. That’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to me. That and the link.” Gil reached over without lifting his shoulder and found Rennie’s hand where it lay on the mattress and took it. “I’m a lucky man, Doc.”

“You’re a stiff man.”

“That too.”

They lay and heard the rain ease off. It went from a drum to a patter to a drip off the roof edge, one drop and then a gap and then another. Rennie felt Gil’s hand go slack in his. Gil was asleep, on his back on a bunk mattress on the floor of a rented tour coach, his mouth open.

Rennie didn’t sleep. In time he got up, carefully, and pulled the sheet from the bunk over Gil, and dressed, and went up the aisle past the amber lights to the front.

He didn’t open the door. He pulled an inch of curtain back off the windshield and looked out.

The light was coming. It came up grey behind the hotel, behind the dead red sign over the lobby doors, and it laid itself flat across the water in the lot, a sheet of brown water with the tops of the parking meters standing up out of it and a shopping cart on its side and the white lines of the spaces wavering under the surface. The players’ bus stood empty with its doors folded shut. Past it the street was a river with a traffic light still changing over it, red, green, red, for nobody. A heron was standing in the middle of the lot on one leg.

The coach door stayed shut, and behind him the man asleep on the floor at the back didn’t stir.