Extra Innings, Chapter 16 · Rennie’s Answer
Rain ran down the motel’s outside corridor in sheets, and the light from the vending machine at the far end turned every drop orange before it hit the rail.
Rennie stepped out of 118 with his phone already ringing in his hand and pulled the door to behind him. The corridor was open to the car park on one side, roofed and nothing else, and the wind blew the wet in under the roof in gusts. He leaned on the cinder block between his window and the next one and answered.
“Rennie. It’s Ingrid Voss. Is this a bad time?”
“It’s a fine time.” It was a quarter past six, Friday, in Wichita, the game had been rained out an hour ago, and half the club was already at the steakhouse across the frontage road. “Is it a case?”
“It isn’t a case.” Voss had a voice like a scalpel laid down on a tray, cool and deliberate. Rennie had heard it tell grown men their seasons were over and heard it tell them they weren’t, and it never changed speed. “It’s you. I’m calling because the Rails’ medical director asked me to, and because I said I’d rather do it myself than have it come from a stranger.”
Rennie looked at the rain.
“All right,” he said.
“They’re rebuilding their training staff for next season. The head job in Denver. They’ve been watching the affiliate rooms all year, which you knew, and they’ve been reading your notes, which you might not have known. Every hold you filed. Teague’s programme, start to finish. The Pike call in June.” She paused, the length of a breath. “They want to interview you. In person, after your season. The medical director runs it. I sign your reviews, so they asked me for them, and I sent them. Nobody else was asked anything, and nobody else sent anything. I’m telling you that part on purpose.”
“I understand.”
“I thought you would. You’re the one who taught me to write it down.” Another pause. “There’ll be a letter. There may already be one.”
“There’s one,” Rennie said. “It came on the first. It’s still sealed.”
“Then that’s what it is. The formal invitation. Dates, the people in the room. The call is so you hear it from someone who knows your work before you read it on letterhead.” Somewhere behind her a door shut. “You don’t owe me an answer, Rennie. You owe them one, and not tonight. I’d like to know which way you’re leaning, but only if you’d care to say.”
For a while he said nothing. A truck passed on the frontage road and threw a long hiss of water up against the motel sign.
“I want to read it first,” he said. “And then I want to say yes. I’m fairly sure it’s yes.”
“Then read it first.” He could hear that she was smiling, and that she wasn’t going to let it into her voice. “Your season isn’t over. Don’t let this do your job for you on Sunday.”
“It won’t.”
“I know it won’t. Goodnight, Rennie.”
He stood out there a while after she’d gone. The rain came in under the roof and soaked his shirt front. Two doors down, Frye’s room had the curtains open and the television on, a weather map, a green blob sitting over Kansas.
The letter was in his bag’s side pocket, where it had been for eighteen days.
He sat at the foot of the bed in 118 lamp lit, curtains drawn, and the rain going on the window, and took it out, and turned it over. Rails letterhead. His name typed, the condo address typed, a Denver postmark from the twenty-eighth of August. He’d carried it to Round Rock and back and to here, and he hadn’t let himself look at the flap more than once a day.
He opened it with his thumb.
Two pages. The medical director’s signature, big and looping, running past the typed line. An invitation to interview for head athletic trainer, Denver, the week after the Triple-A season ended. A list of four names who’d be in the room, none of them Gil’s and none of them anybody Gil worked with. A paragraph that said, in the flat way of a lawyer who’d been asked to make it flat, that the process ran through the medical department alone and that no input on his candidacy had been sought from or offered by the club’s field staff.
That paragraph he read three times.
Then he read the rest, the dates, the parking instructions, the phone number. He put both pages back in the envelope and laid it on the bedspread beside him and sat with his palms on his knees.
Twelve years at the Big Ten programme. One season here. Every hold written down, every one of them in his own hand, Voss’s signature under his, never anybody else’s.
He picked up his phone and wrote to Voss: Read it. Yes. I’ll call them Monday.
The answer came back inside a minute: Then that’s settled. Well done.
He laughed, once, alone in the room, and dragged a hand down his face, and found it was wet, and that it wasn’t the rain.
Gil was in 124, last in the row, by the ice machine.
Rennie went the long route to get there, down the stairs and across the lot under the overhang of the office, because he wanted a minute with nobody in it and the walkway was full of Frye’s television. He didn’t get the minute. Lonnie was standing under the office awning with a golf umbrella furled at his side, smoking the one cigarette he allowed himself a month, looking out at the rain on the cars.
“Bud.”
“Lonnie. I thought you were at the steakhouse.”
“Came back for my wallet. Frye’s paying, but Frye always forgets he said so.” Lonnie tipped ash into the wet. “Skip didn’t come. He’s got his knee up and a box of saltines and the Rails scoreboard on that laptop of his. Says he’s had all the steak a man can eat in one season.”
“He’s had a lot of steak.”
“He has.” Lonnie looked at him sideways. Then he looked at him longer, the white mustache moving as if he were chewing on something he hadn’t decided to say. “You look like a fellow who got a phone call.”
Rennie didn’t answer.
“That’s all right,” Lonnie said. “I don’t need to know what kind. I’ve stood under a lot of awnings in my life, bud, and I’ve seen men come out of a lot of doors, and the ones with good news always look like that. Like they swallowed a lit bulb and it’s still on.”
“I didn’t swallow anything.”
“No. You got something, though.” Lonnie dropped the cigarette in the coffee can by the door that the motel kept for the purpose, and opened the umbrella with a whump. “Whatever it is, it’s yours. Don’t you let anybody tell you different. Not me. Not him. Not the fellows in Denver.”
“Nobody’s going to.”
“Then go knock, and tell him, and let me go eat Frye’s steak.” Lonnie stepped out into the rain. Over his shoulder, not turning round: “And tell him to ice that knee.”
At a quarter past eight he knocked. He had the envelope in his jacket.
Gil answered in an old Stockmen T-shirt and sweats, his readers parked in his hair. His knee had a sleeve on it. He looked at Rennie’s face and stepped back without a word and let him in, and closed out the rain.
“Sit,” Gil said.
Rennie didn’t sit. He stood between the two beds with his jacket dripping onto the carpet.
“Voss called me,” he said. “At six. Out on the walkway.”
Gil pulled the readers down, folded them, set them by the lamp. He didn’t sit either.
“All right.”
“The Rails want to interview me. The head job. Their medical director’s running it. Voss sent them my reviews because she signs them. That’s all anybody sent.” He took the envelope out, not offering it. “I opened the letter after. On my own. It says the same. It says the field staff weren’t asked and didn’t offer anything. In writing.”
“I know they weren’t. I didn’t.”
“I know. You should hear it’s on their paper too, not just yours.” Rennie put the envelope back in his jacket. “I said yes. To Voss. I’m calling them Monday. I decided that on my own, before I came down here, and you’re the second person to know.”
Gil stood very still. Then his face changed, slowly, from the eyes down, and Rennie watched it change.
“I’m proud of you,” Gil said, unsteady. “I’m allowed to say that. I looked it up. It’s not an opinion on your candidacy, it’s a man saying a thing in a motel room.”
“You looked it up.”
“I read the whole recusal policy twice on the plane.” Gil’s mouth twitched. “Section on personal remarks. They’re permitted. Provided they’re not made to anybody who decides anything.”
“I don’t decide anything.”
“Then I’m proud of you, Doc. You did that. You did it with your own pen.”
Rennie took his wet jacket off and dropped it over the window chair, envelope and all, and went to him.
That was the end of the subject. Rennie had said what he came to say and Gil had answered it, and after that the jacket stayed on the chair and the envelope stayed in the jacket, and neither of them looked over at it.
Gil kissed him standing by the bed, his hands on Rennie’s face, and then let go and sat down on the mattress, minding the knee, and looked up.
“How’s the knee,” Rennie said.
“Rain knee. Stiff, not sore. I iced it at seven.”
“Back?”
“Back’s fine. I didn’t sit on a bus today. Sat on a dugout bench for two hours watching it rain, then got told to go home.”
Rennie stood over him and looked at the sleeve on the knee, and at the leg Gil kept out straight, and thought about it as he would on a table.
“I’ve had nothing tonight,” he said. “Water and a vending-machine coffee at five. You?”
“Crackers. A can of club soda. That’s my whole night.”
“Fuck me tonight,” Rennie told him. “Here. I’d like to lie on my front on that bed with a pillow under my hips, and have you come down on top of me, on your forearms, so the knee’s straight and nothing’s on it. And before that I’d like to sit propped on the headboard and have your mouth on me, with you lying flat, because it’s easier on your back than anything else I can think of.” He stopped. “That’s what I want. What do you want?”
For a moment Gil said nothing. He watched Rennie with both palms on his knees.
“That,” he said. “All of that. In that order.” He blew a breath through his teeth. “I’ve got the things in my kit. Condoms. The lube, water-based, same bottle. If the knee’s wrong on my forearms I’ll roll off and we’ll find something else, and I’ll say so before I do.”
“Then say so.”
“I will.” Gil reached up and put two fingers in the waistband of Rennie’s slacks and pulled him a half step closer. “You came down here with that envelope in your coat and a speech ready.”
“I had two speeches. That was the second.”
“I liked the second better.”
Rennie undressed by the bed while Gil watched him from the mattress, and then undressed Gil, the T-shirt over his head, the track pants down and off over the knee sleeve, the sleeve last, peeled down slow off the scar. In the lamplight Gil was all bulk and grey fur, a soft belly over the band of muscle under it, his cock half hard already and lying heavy to one side.
He climbed onto the bed and settled against the headboard on a pair of pillows and his knees apart. Gil stretched out face down between Rennie’s knees, slow, settling his weight, his feet hanging past the mattress, the bad knee straight out behind him, and propped himself on his elbows, and gazed up at him.
“Comfortable?” Rennie said.
“I’m lying on motel sheets with my face between your legs, about to suck you till you shout. I’ve never been more comfortable in my life.”
He started low. He kissed the inside of Rennie’s knee and worked up, slow, along the soft skin, his beard scratching, his breath hot, and Rennie’s cock jumped against his belly and Gil watched it jump and took his time. His tongue found the crease of Rennie’s hip. Then he nosed into his balls and breathed there, and drew one into his mouth, softly, and released it, and Rennie’s cry bounced off the cinder-block wall.
“Skip.”
“I heard you.”
Gil took the crown of him into his mouth and kept it there, wet, his tongue moving under it, and Rennie’s hips jerked before he could stop them. Gil let him. He took more, slow, his lips tight, and slid down, and came up, and slid down again, and set up a rhythm, unhurried, his whole head moving, his eyes open and on Rennie’s face.
Rennie’s hands went into the sheet either side. He didn’t touch Gil’s head. He wanted to watch Gil do it, his mouth stretched wide and his cheeks hollow, his beard wet and grey, and he watched, and talked, because Gil liked it when he talked.
“You look like you were made for it,” he said. “Lying there. Doing that.”
Gil made a low sound around him. It went into his back teeth.
“Like that,” Rennie said. “Do that again. Growl on me.”
Gil did, a rough rumble in his chest, and Rennie heard himself whimper, a thin, high noise he’d have died of in any room that wasn’t this one. The mattress springs complained. Gil’s spit ran down him, hot, then cooling, and Gil chased it with his tongue, and came back up wet and grinning, and sank down again.
“Slower,” Rennie said. “I want this to last. I’ve waited all day.”
Gil slowed. He eased back until only the tip stayed on his tongue, and sucked, and let go, and licked down him and back up, a long wet stroke, and took him again. He worked one hand under Rennie’s hip, under his ass, and lifted him a little, angled him, and sank lower, and Rennie hit the soft back of Gil’s mouth and his skull knocked the headboard.
“There,” he said. “There. Stay.”
Gil stayed. He swallowed around him, once, and Rennie’s whole body went taut, and a long groan scraped up out of him, so loud it startled them both.
“That mouth,” Rennie panted, and then, because Gil liked it, “Filthy old man. See the mess you’re making of me.”
Gil’s answer was a wet, greedy sound, and more of it.
“Nearly there,” he said, low. “If you want it in your mouth, tell me. If you don’t, come off and I’ll finish on my belly.”
Gil came off long enough to answer. His mouth was red and wet and his voice was rough.
“Mouth. I want the taste of you finishing. Don’t hold any of it back.”
He went back down. Rennie gripped the sheet. He rocked up, small, and Gil took it and pressed his tongue flat and sucked, steady, relentless, his eyes still open, still on Rennie, and Rennie looked down into them and felt it come on him all at once, from somewhere under his ribs.
Rennie’s shout came and he cut it short. His hips lifted and Gil went with them, kept him in, drank him down with a hungry noise in his throat, and Rennie shook against the headboard and spilled and spilled into him until he had nothing left, and Gil let him go slow, licking him clean, and laid his head on Rennie’s hip and breathed.
Rennie found Gil’s shoulder with his hand. It was all he could manage.
“Hell,” he said, when he could.
“That’s one word for it.”
A good while passed like that, Gil’s cheek on his hip, Rennie’s fingers moving on Gil’s shoulder. The rain came on harder against the window and eased off and came on again. Out on the walkway somebody ran past with a bag over their head, swearing, and a door slammed.
“Still want the rest?” Gil said.
“I want the rest. Give me a minute. I want it while I’m like this, loose.”
“You’re sure. You’ve just come.”
“I’m sure.” Rennie looked down at him. “Get the kit.”
Gil eased off the bed knee first and fetched the kit and came back, and Rennie turned over onto his front and pulled a pillow under his hips, and put his face down on his folded arms. He heard Gil set the bottle and the condom on the nightstand. He heard the cap. Then the bed dipped and Gil’s knees came down astride Rennie’s legs, outside them, both of his legs together under Gil, Gil’s weight on his own shins for just a moment while he got the lube on his fingers.
“Knee?” Rennie said, into his arms.
“For now. I’ll be down flat in a second.”
Gil’s fingers came cold and slick between his cheeks and pressed. Rennie was soft and open and loose from coming and the first finger went into him easy, and the second not much harder, and Gil worked them slow and deep, and pressed up inside him, and Rennie’s spent cock twitched under him against the pillow and he groaned into his own arms.
“You’re tender,” Gil said.
“I’m tender. Don’t stop.”
“Slow is what you’re getting.”
Slow was what he got. Two fingers, then three, Rennie’s hips rocking down into the pillow and back up onto Gil’s hand, his breath ragged against his own wrist. It was sore and it was sweet, raw, every nerve still lit from Gil’s mouth, and he wanted more of it, and said so, and heard Gil laugh behind him, low.
“Listen to you,” Gil said. “Begging into a motel pillow.”
“I’m not begging.”
Gil crooked his fingers and stroked, slow, right on the spot, and Rennie’s breath broke into a moan that shook and wouldn’t stop, and he pushed back hard on the hand and heard how wet it sounded and didn’t care.
“Begging,” Gil said, satisfied.
Then the fingers were gone, and the wrapper tore, and Gil lowered himself down onto him.
He came down on his forearms, one either side of Rennie’s shoulders, his chest against Rennie’s back, his belly against the small of it, his legs straight out along Rennie’s legs with the rebuilt knee straight and resting, nothing bent. His weight settled. Not all of it. Enough. Rennie felt covered, held down by nothing but warmth and bulk, Gil’s breath in his hair, Gil’s forearms framing his head on the pillow.
“There,” Gil murmured by his ear. “That’s my knee straight. That’s my back flat. That’s you under me.”
Reaching between them, he set himself in place and pushed.
With Rennie’s legs together under him it was tight, very tight, the pillow tipping Rennie’s ass up into it, and Gil went in slow, a little then further, and Rennie bit the inside of his arm and breathed through his nose, letting him in. Gil stopped halfway and let him breathe. Then went on. And then he was seated deep, his hips pressed to Rennie’s ass, his chest laid down on Rennie’s back, and he stayed there, and neither of them moved, and the rain went on outside.
“Tell me,” Gil said.
“Move.”
Gil moved. He didn’t draw out far. Lying flat, his hips could only rock, short and deep, and every rock pressed Rennie down into the pillow and dragged against the raw place inside him, and it was nearly past bearing, and it went on, slow, steady, Gil’s mouth by his ear, Gil’s breath hot and getting quicker.
“You’re so tight like this,” Gil said. “Legs together. There’s nothing of you I can’t feel. I can feel you every time you breathe.”
“Then don’t let me breathe.”
Gil’s laugh buzzed in his neck and drove harder, and Rennie grunted, and Gil did it again. Short, hard rocks now, his forearms braced, his weight landing on each, and Rennie’s whole body jolting into the mattress, and the headboard knocking against the cinder block, and Rennie past caring who was in 123.
Gil talked. He always talked, and he talked filthy and slow in Rennie’s ear, about how Rennie had walked in out of the rain with that face and that letter and Gil had wanted to put him on the bed in his wet coat. About how good he was, how he was the finest thing a Wichita motel had ever seen, how Gil was going to remember this on every road trip for the rest of his life. Rennie answered when he had breath. Every thrust shoved a noise from him, a grunt, a gasp, a ragged “yes” ground into the pillow, and the wet slap of Gil’s hips against his ass filled up the room under the rain. Sweat ran off Gil’s chest onto his back and slid. Gil’s beard scraped his nape and his teeth found the muscle of his shoulder, not biting, just there, and Rennie moaned so hard the pillow muffled none of it.
“Fuck, Doc,” Gil gasped. “The noises you make.”
“Then earn more of them.” He told Gil to go harder. He told Gil he wanted to feel it tomorrow on the bus, and Gil laughed again.
His cock had come back, sooner than he’d have thought, half hard against the pillow. It wasn’t going anywhere tonight, and he didn’t need it to. All he wanted now was the fullness behind him.
Gil’s rhythm broke.
He didn’t ask. He didn’t need to. Rennie felt it in the shake of his forearms and in his breath, ragged and high, and Rennie lifted his head off his arms and turned it so Gil could hear him.
“Now,” Rennie said. “Come. Now, Skip. Let go.”
Gil made a sound Rennie didn’t know he had, raw, almost a sob, and drove in deep, three, four times, and stopped, as deep as Rennie went, his whole weight on Rennie’s back, and came, and Rennie felt him jerk inside the condom, again and again, Gil’s face shoved into his neck, Gil’s breath gone, his forearms locked rigid either side of Rennie’s head.
Then he went loose all over, all at once, and lay on Rennie and breathed.
After a while Gil slid off him, holding the condom, and rolled flat on the other half of the bed. The wastebasket rustled. Then a long exhale, close to a groan.
“Knee?” Rennie said, into the pillow.
“Knee’s never been happier. Back’s another story. Ask me in the morning.”
Rennie rolled his face sideways on the pillow. Gil lay with a forearm across his eyes, chest still going, his cock soft, the sweat drying on him.
“Your back,” Rennie said. “Tomorrow, before the bus. Ten minutes on the table in my room. That’s an order from medical.”
Gil lifted his arm off his eyes.
“You’re going to work on me after that?”
“After breakfast. Not tonight. Tonight I’m off.” Rennie felt himself go hot. “It’s going in my notes, though.”
Gil laughed, a real one, the whole bed shaking with it, and rolled toward him, slow, and tugged the damp pillow free and let it slide to the carpet.
“You’re going to take notes on me in Denver?”
“I’m not in Denver.”
“Not yet.”
“Not yet,” Rennie agreed.
Later Gil rose, creaking, and got the shower running hot, and the two of them crowded into the little tiled stall with the plastic curtain sticking to Rennie’s back, not doing anything, Gil’s forehead against Rennie’s temple. The water pressure was terrible. Gil said so twice. Rennie told him that every motel in the Texas League had the same plumber, and Gil said that wasn’t a joke, it was probably true, he’d met the man in 2009 in El Paso.
They dried off with the thin towels. Gil put the sleeve back on his knee without being told and Rennie watched him do it and said nothing, and Gil caught him watching and said, “I know. I know. Twenty minutes in the morning,” and Rennie said, “Before the bus,” and Gil said, “Before the bus, Doc,” and turned the lamp off.
They lay in the dark later with the lamp off and the rain easing to a drizzle, Rennie on his back now, Gil turned toward him on his side. Neither of them was asleep.
Rennie thought about the envelope in the jacket over the chair. He thought about Monday. He thought about his mother in Houston, who would ask whether Denver had a good church and whether the man he worked for was kind, and how he would tell her he didn’t work for the man he loved, he worked for himself, and he’d written it down.
And Gil, lying next to him, hadn’t said yes to Denver and wouldn’t say it for another week, in writing, about his own job and nothing else.
Sunday, after the last game, he was going to tell his mother. Both things. The interview, and Gil. Everything, one call.
He decided it there in the dark, and didn’t say it, and lay listening to the rain stop.
Fiction by the Woolnight editorial team. AI-assisted drafting; reviewed and edited by humans before publication.