Work Text:
June 20, 2007
5:30 a.m.
When the midsummer sun angles through a crack in the curtains and takes a shot directly at his eyes, Tim wakes. His morning wood's tenting the sheets, and one of his arms is thrust out, palm up, over the edge of the bed. He pulls his arm right back.
It takes him a second to realize that this hotel bed is not his hotel bed, and when he rolls over toward the middle of the bed he sees the slope of Zito’s shoulder and remembers. Zito’s asleep on his side, facing the other way, his arms crossed under his chest, one hand cupping his shoulder. On the edge of his neck, where Zito’s hair curls a little around his earlobe, Tim sees his heartbeat pulse under his skin, only a little faster than the slow heave of his breath.
Tim sits up and pushes his hair out of his eyes, knits his fingers and stretches his arms. He slides quietly off the edge of the bed and goes in search of the bathroom. His ass aches a little, and his lips are swollen and bruised, and he’s got some road rash from Zito’s stubble. But as he flips up the toilet seat he catches sight of himself in the three-way mirror. For the first time in a month, he doesn’t compose his face into a mask of seriousness. He doesn’t exactly smile, but the corners of his eyes and mouth curve up.
Tim splashes warm water on his face, towels himself dry, and heads back toward the bed. On the way he spots the copies of USA Today and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the hotel’s thrust under the door. Great - two different accounts of yesterday's disastrous game. He grabs both newspapers, opens the door and hurls them down the hall.
As the door whooshes closed behind him, shutting the world out, Tim is untroubled by the fact that he’s just poked his head out of another guy’s hotel room at five-thirty in the morning, buck-naked. In his view, anyone crazy enough to be up at this hour can fucking well deal with whatever they’re unfortunate enough to see.
And Zito, come to think of it - Zito needs to be awake. So Tim cannonballs back into the bed, diving under the down comforter, settling himself up against Zito’s back and snaking one arm over the left-hander’s side.
Zito’s whole body starts. He shakes himself awake, letting loose a sigh that has some voice in it. He rolls over sleepily to face Tim.
As Zito’s eyes flicker open and meet his, and Zito smiles a little, Tim kisses the corner of his mouth. Then he leans forward and slides his wet tongue all over Zito’s ear in a way that makes the left-hander moan and his mouth gape. Tim wraps it up with a slow, maddening suck of his earlobe that makes Zito arch his back, imagining.
It’s not long before their mouths collide and they’re tasting each other, and Tim’s doing something with his hands that makes Zito throw his head back in pleasure.
The bed smells like sweat and soap and last night’s sex. Zito’s warm and fragrant in the way only a newly awakened person can be, just back from the foreign country of sleep.
The bedclothes wrench and tangle around them, and in a few moments it’s like there was never any sleep at all.
This, of course, could be a problem. Zito’s due at Miller Stadium at eight-thirty. There, by this afternoon, he’s expected be five days rested and sharp enough to halt the Giants’ seven-game losing streak.
//
7:45 a.m.
Zito’s been at this awhile. He can generally do wakeup-to-ballpark in about forty minutes, assuming he knows which streets are one-way and there aren’t too many red lights.
When his cellphone alarm blasts him awake at zero hour, he shakes the sleep out of his head as if it’s water. He sits up and runs his hands over his face. Needs a shave, but he can do that later at the yard.
He pulls his knees up, sighs, looks around the room. The only traces of Tim are an empty lowball glass on the nightstand and a few straight dark hairs on the other side of the bed.
Where Lincecum’s pillow should be there’s a hotel comment card propped against the headboard.
Attractiveness of hotel/grounds: YES
Check-in process: weird
Cleanliness of hotel room: no complaints
Quality of breakfast: what breakfast?
In-room services: improving
Your overall experience:
In the space below Your Suggestions Help Us Improve Our Service, Lincecum’s written San Francisco.
//
The starters often hang out together in the dugout with whatever relievers aren’t in the bullpen; they talk about batters, rag on each other, call pitches. But this game is the last of the series against the Brewers, and today they’re scattered around, dispirited. In the first four, nobody wants to talk about what’s happening to Zito - the car crash they’re all watching in slow motion. He gives up four runs in the first, and two more in the third, and it’s pretty obvious he isn’t even going to make it to five today.
Tim’s squatting like a bird of prey on the dugout ledge between the sunflower seeds and the gum bucket. He’s got sunglasses on even though it’s shady up there. He keeps his expression blank when the left-hander returns to the dugout after the fourth, towels his face, and reaches for his jacket.
It’s a beautiful eighty-degree day, and most of the guys are hanging on the dugout lip. Zito plunks down just below and to the side of where Tim’s perched. For a long time they’re both silent.
The Giants rally after Zito’s taken out - hard to know how to take that - and for awhile it looks like they might sprint past the Brewers and get at least one win out of this series. But in the sixth, Dave Roberts hits a grounder and beats it to first base, and then gets robbed on a bad call. Bochy stomps out to confront the ump.
Zito rests his head against the ledge and glances up at Tim, who keeps his eyes straight ahead, but tips his head down a bit. Under the rims of Tim’s sunglasses, their eyes meet. It's like a blaze of electricity, this look, and Tim feels it all over.
- I know what you're thinking, and it's not that, says Zito, looking up at him. - So don’t even go there.
He shifts his gaze forward.
- That sucking noise I heard, says Tim, spitting out some seed hulls. - I figured it out. It was a commentary on our pitching.
- Makes sense that even the fuckin' ghosts'd be Brewers fans, says Zito.
He smiles, and something in Tim relaxes.
Roberts is still standing at first, his hands in the air, miming amazement at Brian Knight’s boneheaded call. Bochy’s screaming at Knight, and he probably just called him a cocksucker, because the umpire's thumb is in the air and Bochy’s ripping off his size-eight cap and hurling it to the ground.
- This game, says Zito.
//
June 21, 2007
4:30 p.m.
- No, Zito says into his cell phone, some heat in his voice.
The last half-hour of every trip is always the longest, Tim realizes as the team bus eases into the backed-up northbound traffic on 101. It’s raining, so everything’s blurred, but there’s a blaze of flashing emergency lights, blue and yellow and red, ahead on the median. Most of the cars in the left lanes have their right blinkers on.
The entire day’s been like this. There was a lot of turbulence on the flight from Milwaukee, thunderstorms, lightning glancing off the wings of the plane. Even the flight attendants had been ordered to sit for most of the trip.
It didn’t make much difference. The eight-game losing streak hadn’t given anyone much to talk about, let alone celebrate.
Everybody just wants to get home to the comfort of whatever’s not baseball.
Zito’s a couple of rows ahead of him on the bus. Tim listens to his phone conversation with one ear, curious, hating himself a little for doing it.
- Yeah, I know, I haven’t, says Zito. - What about the other one? Tuesday?
There’s a long pause, and Zito shifts the phone to the other ear.
- I get it. How many times have we been through this? Tim can hear him smiling.
- You’re a pluperfect asshole, Danny.
- OK. Tilden. Laurel - the second left. There’s steep parts. But it’ll take me at least an hour to get there if there’s traffic on the bridge. I know - I saw, sunny. Kay. Yeah. I’ll call you when.
And then there’s another long pause.
- Me too, Zito says quietly.
//
9:45 p.m.
Getting back to San Francisco, where it’s so cool and rainy, so different from summer everywhere else and so like Seattle, made Tim homesick. So he stopped off in the Mission for a rice plate at Irma’s.
It was past seven-thirty so they were already closed, but he’d tapped on the window and they’d let him in anyway. And not because he’s a Giants player; he’s pretty sure that no one there recognizes him. To them, he's just another skinny Pinoy boy.
When he got home, he made his weekly call to his dad. The usual, complaints about the idiots he works with at the plant, stuff Tim’s heard a hundred times before. His dad never has much to say beyond baseball.
Now Tim’s pitching his dirty laundry into the corner behind the chair and uploading a new DVD, the fourth season of the X-Files, onto his MacBook. After the long week on the road, it was the only good thing in his mailbox.
There’s a reason, he knows, for that old saying that what happens on the road should stay on the road.
Something’s gotten ahold of him. He wonders if people can see it, smell it, coming off him. He’s always been able to keep that stuff where it belongs, out of the way. He wonders what’s happened to his self-discipline.
So when he hears the knock on the door, Tim forces himself to sit there, to wait for the second knock. When he finally opens the door, Zito’s standing several feet back, formal, as though they’re just meeting for the first time.
If he had a hat, it’d be in his hands.