Extra Innings, Chapter 14 · The Offer

Gil’s office door was shut.

It had been propped open with a rubber wedge every day since April, through the hold and the scans and the call-ups and the night the whole clubhouse found out about the two of them. Turo had once tried to take the wedge for the laundry room and Gil had gone and got it back. Now it was Saturday afternoon, September fifth, a quarter past four, three hours to first pitch, and the door was closed, the wedge lay on the carpet beside it.

Rennie came up the corridor with an ice bag for Pike’s shoulder, which didn’t need ice, and slowed down without meaning to.

Through the door he could hear Gil’s voice and nobody else’s. A phone call. No words carried. The pauses did, long ones, and the size of them.

He kept walking.

---

Pike lay on the table, cap over his face.

“Is he yelling at somebody?” Pike said, from under the cap. “I heard he’s got the door shut. Wexler says he’s never seen it shut.”

“Wexler’s been here since April.”

“Wexler says nobody’s seen it shut.” Pike lifted the cap. He was thirty-four and had been told by four organizations that his shoulder was fine, and he believed none of them, and Rennie liked him for it. “You’d know. You’d know if he was getting fired.”

“I’d know if your rotator cuff was getting fired.” Rennie strapped the bag on. “Twenty minutes. Don’t move it.”

“That’s not an answer, Doc.”

“It’s the only one I’ve got that’s mine.”

Pike put the cap back over his face and said that was the most trainer thing he’d heard all year, and Rennie went and restocked the tape cart, a row at a time, white and then brown and then the pre-wrap, until he heard the office door open down the corridor and close again, quieter.

Lonnie came through ten minutes later with his windbreaker over his arm and stood by the cart. He looked at the tape for a while, as if he were counting it too.

“Bud,” he said.

“Lonnie.”

“Phone call was Denver. I don’t know what about, and I’m not asking him and I’m not asking you.” He picked up a roll of brown tape, turned it in his fingers, and put it back in the wrong row. “Only he came out of there and walked past me to the field and forgot to say anything about the lineup. Twenty years I’ve known him. He’s never forgotten the lineup.”

Rennie moved the brown roll back where it went.

“He’ll tell me if he wants to,” he said.

“That’s right.” Lonnie nodded. “That’s the right answer. I wanted to hear somebody give it.”

---

Omaha lost, five-two. Gil managed the game as he always did, a foot on the dugout step, arms folded over the rail, and if anybody in the stands could have told that something was wrong, it would have been only because he made no mistakes at all. He took Wexler out at the right time and put the right man in, and the right man allowed a double with two on anyway, and Gil said “That’s baseball” to the reporter from the paper and meant it.

Afterward Gil didn’t come to the training room. He went to his office and propped the door with the wedge, and sat at his desk with the lamp on, writing something by hand on a yellow pad. Rennie saw him through the gap, heading out to the lot. Gil didn’t look up. Rennie didn’t stop.

At eleven-forty his phone buzzed in the car.

Tomorrow night. Your place, if that suits. I have to tell you something and I want to tell you sitting down. Nothing’s wrong with anybody.

Rennie read it twice in the dark of the lot.

It’s all right, he wrote. Seven. I’ll cook.

You don’t have to cook.

I know. I’m cooking.

---

Sunday morning there was a day game, a one-ten start, and Rennie was in at eight. At nine he came out of the training room for a towel cart and saw Gil going up the stairs at the end of the corridor, toward the front offices, in a collared shirt and khakis instead of his uniform, carrying a manila envelope flat against his leg.

Curtis’s office was up there. So was the fax machine nobody else used.

Turo was in the corridor with his clipboard. He watched Gil go up, and then he watched Rennie watching, and then he looked at his clipboard.

“Doc,” Turo said.

“Turo.”

“Towels are short. Somebody took twelve to the bullpen and left them in the rain.” He made a mark. “Man went up those stairs with a letter. I don’t know what’s in it. What I do know is this. He wrote it at his desk last night by hand and then he typed it this morning on the old computer in the video room, which takes him forty minutes for a page because he types with two fingers, and he printed it and read it and signed it and put it in that envelope, and he did not ask a single person to read it over.” Turo tucked the pen behind his ear. “That’s all I know. Twelve towels.”

“I’ll find them.”

“I know you will.”

They won the day game seven to three. Gil was himself again, or nearly. He argued a check-swing call and lost it and laughed about it in the dugout, and in the eighth he sent Frye out to the mound instead of going himself, and Frye came back with a line that got another laugh out of him. Rennie kept an eye on the right knee at the step and noticed nothing new. He wrote that down in his head and nowhere else.

---

Gil came at five to seven with a paper bag of tomatoes from the farm stand on Dodge Street, as if he had needed a reason to knock.

He’d been to the condo often enough now that he no longer planted himself mid-room waiting for permission to touch anything. He put the tomatoes on the counter and left his shoes by the door and stood by the river window for a minute, as he did every time, the water going brown and slow under what light was left. After that he sat down at the little table by the kitchen and watched Rennie cut tomatoes.

The kitchen was a step up from the living room, one broad oak step the whole width of the condo, so that the counter and the table stood on a kind of stage over the sofa and the green chair and the brick wall. The building had been a seed warehouse once, and the step was where the loading floor had been raised. Gil had tripped on it the first time and complained about it every time since.

Rennie made rice and black-eyed peas with peppers and the tomatoes, his mother’s way, and set two plates on the table and two glasses of water, and sat down across from him.

Gil was halfway through his plate before he spoke. Then he put his fork down.

“The Rails called me yesterday,” he said. “Baseball ops. A man named Haldane, forties, I met him once at the winter meetings. They want me in Denver next season. Bench coach for the big club.”

Rennie set his own fork down very carefully.

“That’s,” he said.

“Yes. I know. Fifteen years I’ve been waiting for somebody to say that on a phone.” Gil gave his water glass a quarter turn on the table. “That’s not what I came to tell you. That’s the good part. Let me get to the rest while I’ve still got the nerve.”

“Go on.”

“He talked for a while. The money, the staff, who’s staying. Then he said, and he said it easy, as if it was the next thing on a list, he said, ‘And while I have you on the line, Gil, the trainer you’ve got down there. Okafor. Is he any good?'”

Rennie didn’t move.

“I said I wouldn’t answer that.” Gil looked straight at him. “He laughed. He thought I was being modest for you. So I told him why. I said I’m in a relationship with Rennie Okafor, and it’s been on file with Rails HR since July, and I’m recused from anything to do with his evaluation or his career, and I’d be grateful if he never asked me that again, and if he needed to know anything about the medical staff he could ask your medical director, because that’s his call.” Gil stopped. “His. Not mine.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, for a bit. After that he said, ‘Understood,’ and he said it like he meant it, and then he asked me about our bullpen.” Gil let a breath go. “And I hung up and sat there for two hours, Doc, and then I wrote it down. All of it. What he asked and what I said. And this morning I sent a recusal to Curtis and to HR, with a copy to the medical director. Written. Signed. It says I’ve been asked, I didn’t answer, and I won’t answer, about you, to anybody, for any job, ever. Nobody gets a word out of me about you. Not a reference. Not an opinion. Not a conversation in a hallway.”

The river had gone dark in the window. A barge light moved down it, slow.

“You did that this morning,” Rennie said.

“Before the day game. I typed it with two fingers. Turo’ll have told you.”

“Turo told me about the fingers. He didn’t tell me what was in it.”

“Good man.” Gil lifted the fork and laid it back. “Here’s the other part, and then I’m done. I don’t know if they’re looking at you. For anything. I don’t know if that question meant something or if he was just a man going down a list. And I’m not asking you. If they are, I don’t want to know from you before it’s done. That’s on purpose.”

Rennie sat with that. There were things he could have said. There was a letter in a drawer at work that he had not opened yet, from an address in Denver, and there was a voicemail from a number he didn’t know that he had saved without listening to it. None of it was getting said at this table, and Gil had just made sure he didn’t have to.

“My file stays mine,” he said. “Not tonight. Not until there’s something to tell, and maybe not then.”

“That’s right.”

“And the bench job?”

“I haven’t said yes.” Gil laid both palms on the tabletop. “I haven’t said anything. I told Haldane I’d answer in writing once the season’s over, and that’s what I’ll do. I wanted to say it to you first, sitting down, before it was anything. So it came from me, not a hallway.”

Rennie got up and took the plates to the sink and ran water over them and didn’t wash them. For a minute he leaned on the sink. Then he dried his hands on the towel and turned round.

Gil was watching him from the table. Big and grey and tired in a collared shirt, top button undone, his right leg stretched out under the table where Rennie always knew it would be.

“Bench coach,” Rennie said.

“Bench coach.”

“Gil. That’s the big club.”

“I know.” Gil’s mouth moved, not quite a smile. “I’ve had a day and a half to know it. I still can’t say it without my voice going up.”

---

Rennie crossed the kitchen and stood next to his chair, and Gil tipped his face up.

“I’ve been sitting down with this for a day and a half,” Gil said. “I’d like to lie down with you a while. Here. Not the bed. Down on that rug of yours, you on your back, me on my knees, looking right at your face. I want to have you and keep my eyes on yours from start to finish. Will you let me?”

Rennie laid his palm on the shoulder nearest him.

“Ask me the rest,” he said.

“The rest is a condom and the lube in your bathroom and no beer, which you already know, since all I’ve had is your water.” Gil didn’t look away. “And a towel under the knee, because you’ll make me, and if the knee says no we get up on the sofa and nobody’s lost anything. Yes or no, Doc.”

“Yes.” Rennie kept looking at him. “On the rug. On my back. Yes.”

Gil stood. He did it as he’d learned to that summer, a palm on the table, his weight going up through the left side and the right following, and then he was on his feet and close. Gil had three inches on him and never let him forget it. He took Rennie’s face between his hands and kissed him.

There was no hurry in it tonight, and Rennie could taste the day and a half: the pauses through the office door, the yellow pad, two fingers on a keyboard. Gil’s mouth was soft and his stubble scraped. Rennie opened for him and dragged the collared shirt up out of the khakis, and Gil growled against his mouth, let go of his face, and went for his belt.

“Bathroom,” Rennie said against his lips.

“Go on. I’ll be down there.”

In the bathroom cabinet he found condoms, then a bottle of water-based lube, and caught his own face in the mirror, flushed, eyes too bright. He took a folded bath towel off the rail as well. He went back out before he could think about anything that was in a drawer at work.

Gil had got down the step with a hand on the counter and his shirt off. He stood on the rug in khakis and bare feet, chest heavy and grey-furred, belly soft over the waistband, studying the green chair as if it had spoken to him.

“Not tonight,” Rennie said.

“No. I know.” Gil reached behind him, and Rennie passed him the bottle. “Tonight I want your face.”

Rennie dropped the condoms and the towel on the rug and stripped off his T-shirt. Gil watched. Rennie unbuttoned his jeans and shoved them off with his briefs and kicked them clear, and stood naked in his own living room with the window black behind him and his cock already up, and Gil took him in and said “Well, now” very quietly, as if a neighbor might hear.

“Your turn,” Rennie said.

Gil unbuckled and let the khakis drop and stepped free on his good side. Thick-thighed, his cock jutting dark from the grey hair and curving left, the old surgical scar pale down the front of the right knee. He came close again and pulled Rennie in, and the two of them pressed close, cocks hot between their bellies, and Gil groaned and pushed his face into Rennie’s neck.

“Turn me loose for one minute,” Gil said against his throat, “and I’ll come on your stomach, twenty-five years old again.”

“Then don’t turn me loose.”

Gil laughed into his skin. He dipped to a nipple, sucked, then caught it with his teeth until Rennie gasped and grabbed his shoulders, and moved across to the other. His hands slid down and filled themselves with Rennie’s ass, and one blunt finger dragged dry and slow down the crease and pressed his hole, not in, only pressed, and Rennie swayed.

“Floor,” Gil said.

Rennie shook the towel out double and laid it where Gil’s right knee would go, and pulled a cushion off the sofa for under his own hips. Then he stretched on his back across the rug, the wool rough against his shoulders, the oak step a dark line above his head with the kitchen light spilling over it. Gil got down the coach way, left knee first onto the rug, then the right onto the towel, slow, a hand on the sofa arm until both were under him. He settled upright between Rennie’s spread knees and let his breath go.

“Knee?” Rennie said.

“Knee’s on a towel, like you wanted. Lift.”

Rennie lifted, and Gil slid the cushion under him, and then his hips were tipped up toward Gil and his feet were planted flat on the wool, one each side of Gil’s knees, and Gil was looking down the length of him, slack-jawed.

“There,” Gil said. “That’s what I wanted. I get the whole of you from here.”

The cap snapped open, loud over the fridge. He slicked two fingers. Rennie opened his knees wider and dug his heels into the wool, and Gil reached down between his legs and found him.

One finger, slow. Rennie’s mouth fell open, and Gil watched it and pressed deeper, and Rennie tightened round him and then eased.

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me while I do it.” Gil had gone rough. “Everything. I’ve been listening to a man in Denver for a day and a half. I’d rather listen to you.”

“It’s thick.” Rennie swallowed. “Your fingers are thick. It’s slow. I want two.”

Gil gave him two. That stretched and stung, and Rennie hissed through his teeth, and Gil kept still, his free hand spread on Rennie’s knee, and waited for him. When Rennie nodded he began to move them, a slow twist going in, and when he curled them forward Rennie’s head went back on the rug and the noise out of him would have shamed him anywhere else.

“That one,” Gil said. “That’s mine.”

“Again.”

Gil kept giving it to him till Rennie was dripping a thin line onto his own belly and rocking down on the fingers without deciding to. Gil worked in a third. Rennie took it with his eyes closed and opened them again because Gil had asked for his face, and Gil was watching him, lips parted, breath short.

“Now,” Rennie said. “Now, Gil.”

Gil drew his fingers out. He tore a condom open and got it on, and Rennie watched those thick fingers go careful, and then Gil slicked himself and shuffled in on his knees, the left taking his weight, and Rennie felt the slick crown of him nudge in below his balls and settle against his hole.

“Tip up for me,” Gil said. “Just your hips.”

Rennie tipped them on the cushion. Gil gripped Rennie’s thigh with one hand and himself with the other, and the crown pushed and pushed and was in, and a long shout tore out of Rennie, up the step into the dark kitchen.

Gil stopped. He stayed upright on his knees, joined to him, and looked down into his face.

“Easy,” Gil said, barely. “Easy, Doc.”

Rennie laughed, which made him clench, which made Gil groan, which made him laugh again.

“More,” he said. “Slow. Some more, slow.”

Gil gave him more. An inch, a breath, another inch, his hips rolling forward, until he was in to his balls and Rennie could feel the left-hand curve of him pressed deep against the place he knew. They held there. Rennie’s thighs trembled against Gil’s flanks. Neither said a word.

“How’s the towel?” Rennie said.

“Doing its job. How’s the rug?”

“Scratchy. Leave it.”

“My left knee’s doing everything and liking it.” Gil eased back, slow, nearly to the crown, and slid home again, slow. “Tell me if that’s right.”

“That’s right.”

Gil kept on, finding it, rocking into Rennie in short strokes and then longer, and Rennie reached up and caught Gil’s forearm with one hand and kept the other on the rug, and watched his face. It was red. His eyes stayed fixed on Rennie’s, and each push in parted his mouth a little, and each draw back pulled his brow together.

This was what he’d asked for, and Rennie could see why: the sweat coming up along Gil’s hairline, the pulse jumping in his throat, his jaw setting each time he went deep.

“You see me,” Rennie said.

“I see you.”

“I see you too. You look ready to fall over.”

“I’m fifty-three and kneeling on a bath towel with my heart banging.” Gil shoved into him, a grunt in it. “I’m not falling over for anybody. Not halfway through fucking you.”

He got a rhythm going. He hooked both forearms under Rennie’s legs and held them open and worked into him with long strokes, his hips smacking flat on Rennie’s ass, his belly heaving. Rennie had both hands on Gil’s forearms now. His cock rode heavy and wet on his belly, jumping on each stroke, and neither of them touched it.

“I could go till sunup,” Gil said. “Tight and wet as you are, I could go all night in you.”

“You couldn’t.”

“I could stay down here till the knee told me to quit.” He sank in and stayed and worked his hips there, and a noise broke from Rennie with no words to it. “And then a bit longer out of plain meanness.”

“You leave that knee out of it.”

Gil laughed and leaned down on one hand beside Rennie’s head and kissed him, messy, off-center, open-mouthed, then pushed himself upright again and kept fucking him, short hard strokes that slapped wet between them, until Rennie’s heels skidded in the wool. The room was full of them. The window had fogged at the corners. The lamp by the green chair was the only light down there, and their shadow lay across the brick, one shape, moving.

“Rennie.”

“Yes.”

“I’m getting there.” Gil’s voice had come apart. “In you, like this, on the floor. Can I, Doc?”

“Yes.” Rennie kept his gaze on him. “In me. Let me watch you.”

Gil drove in and kept his eyes open. Rennie watched them go wide and then go somewhere else. Gil’s grip bit at his thighs, the whole heavy body went rigid over him, and he pushed in once more, deep, and stayed, groaning low and long. Rennie felt the throb of him in the rubber, then another, and felt Gil’s thighs shake against him. Gil bent and rested his forehead on Rennie’s breastbone, panting.

“Oh,” Gil said. “Oh, my.”

They stayed like that. Rennie held his head. Gil’s breathing slowed by degrees. Rennie was still hard against his own belly, hard enough to ache.

“Don’t move yet,” Gil said.

“I’m not moving.”

“I’m not done with you.” Gil lifted his head. His eyes had come back, and they went to Rennie’s cock and then to his face. “Your cock. My mouth. On that sofa, me flat on my back, off my knees, before you say a word about them. You up on the cushion beside me. Will you let me have that too?”

“Yes.”

Gil eased out with his fingers round the rim of the condom, and Rennie grunted at the loss of him. Gil tied it off and left it on the towel to deal with later. Then he got up off the towel as he’d got down, a hand on the sofa arm, left leg first, and got onto the sofa the coach way, as Rennie had drilled it into him, side and then back, and lay full length along it, head propped on the arm cushion and the right leg straight. Two and a half weeks after the coach, his back let him do it without a hitch, and Rennie, who had watched each stage of it, let himself believe it.

“Come here.”

Rennie rose off the rug and climbed onto the sofa seat and knelt upright beside Gil’s chest, side-on to him. Gil’s head came round on the cushion. He put a palm behind Rennie’s thigh and drew him the last inch, glanced up once, and opened his mouth over him.

Wet heat, slow. Gil took him deep and drew back and took him again, his cheeks drawn in, tongue busy along the underside, and Rennie held the sofa back with both hands so they would go nowhere else.

“Gil.”

Gil made a low yes in his throat. His hand slid round and took hold of Rennie’s ass and drew him on, deeper, and Rennie’s hips bucked once and he caught himself on the sofa back.

“Sorry.”

Gil let him slip free. “Don’t be. Too much, and I’ll tap you. You know the sign.” He tapped the back of Rennie’s thigh twice, light, the sign he’d set himself back in April. “Two on the leg. Otherwise my mouth’s yours to use.”

He took him in again. Rennie let himself move, shallow, then deeper, rocking slow into Gil’s mouth, and Gil groaned with him in his mouth, and the sound shot through Rennie. It wouldn’t take long. It was already gathering, the last half hour of it, the rug and the towel and Gil’s eyes on him, all of it drawing down into one pressure behind his balls.

“I’m going to come,” he said. “Gil. In your mouth, yes or no?”

Gil freed his mouth long enough to say, “In my mouth. Yes. Every drop you’ve got,” and took him back.

Rennie came three strokes later, knuckles pale on the sofa back, head thrown back, letting the shout go. It pulsed out of him long and hard into Gil’s mouth, and Gil kept him there and swallowed, and swallowed, throat working, until it slowed. Then the hand left Rennie’s ass and tapped twice on his thigh.

Rennie pulled back at once.

Gil lay with his eyes shut, lips apart, breathing, his chin wet. He wiped it with his wrist.

“Too much,” he said, hoarse. “Right at the end. Give an old man a minute.”

Rennie gave him the minute. He knelt there with a hand on the sofa back and his legs shaking until Gil looked up and laughed at the state of them both.

---

They stayed on the sofa afterward, which groaned under the two of them as it groaned under Gil alone, because Gil said he wasn’t getting up off it again tonight for any bed. It was too short for both of them. Gil lay along it with his right leg up on the arm and Rennie lay half on him with his ear on his chest and a blanket over them from the back of the green chair. The barge light had gone. The river was black.

“Bench coach,” Rennie said after a while.

“You keep saying it.”

“I keep thinking about it.” He felt Gil’s chest rise and fall under his ear. “You’d be good at it. You know that.”

“I’d be good at it.” Gil said it slowly, as if he were writing it on the yellow pad. “I’d be good at it in Denver. I’d be at the ballpark at noon every day and home at midnight, and I’d learn which way the wind blows in a park with an upper deck, and I’d stand next to a man who’s never heard of me and tell him when his pitcher’s done.” He stopped. “I didn’t say yes.”

“I know. You told me.”

“I’m telling you again because it’s the truth. I didn’t say yes, and I didn’t say it because of.” Gil stopped again. “No. That sentence stays unfinished. I filed a paper this morning that says I won’t finish that sentence.”

Rennie lifted his head.

“Then don’t,” he said. “Tell me about the wind instead.”

“What about the wind?”

“In Denver. With the upper deck. Which way does it blow?”

Gil studied him. Then he laughed, low, and put a hand on Rennie’s head, light, and took it away again.

“Out to right in the afternoon,” he said. “I looked it up last night when I couldn’t sleep. Out to right, and then about the seventh inning it turns round and comes in off the mountains, and every pitcher in the league knows it, and every hitter, and I’d have to stand there and act like I didn’t know it was coming, so the young ones learn to feel it themselves. And there’s a thing they do with the baseballs out there, they keep them in a humidor, so the ball doesn’t…”