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He's built like a Mack truck, the new roommate, dark/dark and 6'2" and about 200. Throws left and hits right, and there's a funny mark under his right eye, red and splotchy like he's been in a bar fight. Danny can see where he gets the bigness: his dad's got the massive shoulders of a guy who works for a living. RIght now he's stacking the kid's boxes in the corner easily, like they're a bunch of pillows. The kid himself is pretty quiet - the only thing he's said is "Hey." One good thing is he's not the flaky stoner Danny'd imagined when he'd heard his new roommate was a guy from Santa Barbara with a hippie name like Noah.
It’s Danny’s sophomore year. He’d agreed to take on this community-college rookie pitcher in exchange for a suite in The Towers, the upperclass dorm that’s the hardest to get into because the rooms have awesome views of the ocean. It’d seemed like a good deal at the time, but now Danny’s beginning to wonder. What if the kid’s a dork? A washout? Coach Sanchez admits he’s got no book on Noah Lowry. Nobody scouted him out of high school, cause no baseball players have come from Ojai in awhile.
As the kid’s parents are getting ready to leave, Noah’s mom’s looking weirdly sideways and it takes Danny a minute to realize she’s got tears in her eyes. He strolls over to the window at his end of the room to give them time. When the door closes, he walks back to where Noah’s standing between his formica desk and his naked blue-ticked mattress. There’s that awkward blot of silence while they’re both trying to think what to say.
“So how was the drive in from Santa Barbara?” asks Danny.
“Ojai,” says Noah in a burst. “Not Santa Barbara.”
Whatever.
Noah’s stretched himself up really tall, chest puffed like he’s an army guy in the movies, and he’s twisting a ratty Dodgers cap in his big hands. Danny, who’s been an Angels fan since he could walk, wishes they could go someplace and kick back and crack open a beer so this guy could relax a little. But Pepperdine Christian University is a dry campus. Not only are they not allowed to drink on campus - they’re not even allowed to come home drunk from somewhere else. It’s a guys-only dorm, there’s no girls allowed in the room after 1 a.m., and they have to go to chapel once a week. One of the juniors next door is a Spiritual Life Advisor. He's taped a banner that says “Jesus Is Just Alright With Me” above the twin sinks in the bathroom they share.
“You surf,” says Danny softly, tipping his head at the battered Rocketfish shortboard in the corner behind Noah’s boxes. “Swell’s good today. I checked.”
The kid’s face lights up, his brown eyes big. “You too?” he says. “I live for it. Whenever I get a chance.”
“Yep,” says Haren. “You got a car?”
The kid’s face settles. “Nope.”
“Well, we can’t get the boards down there on the bike, but whatya say we go down anyway, kick some sand?”
The bike is Haren’s prize possession, a ‘95 Honda F3 he got for a bag of nickels at a police auction in Rancho Cucamonga. It's fast and loud and has orange flames painted on it. Most Pepperdine kids raise their eyebrows when they see the bike. They think Danny’s slumming, their parents’d never let them ride, it’s too dangerous, whatever. So when he wants wipe off all the Christian goodness that oozes out like sweat from this place, Danny likes to gun the bike down the PCH, slaloming the double-yellow line around the curves, and let the engine rip into the wind off the sea.
//
Down at the parking lot, when Danny wheels the bike out and kick-starts it, the kid swings his leg easily over as though he could do it blind, and settles himself easily into the bitch seat, feet on the pegs. Danny notices that Noah keeps some space between them and his hands on his knees. Haren finds himself liking the way he leans naturally into the curves, soft and right, so that Danny can almost forget his weight.
After they’ve thrown the frisbee around on the deserted late-afternoon beach, Haren’s had a chance to see how Noah dodges and twists to snag his wildest throws. And how he frames his own throws against the wind coming off the surf. Haren’s starting to think he might like this kid, who’s all kinds of big and graceful. And quiet - he doesn’t talk unless he has something to say. When Noah takes off his shirt, Danny’s amazed at how cut the kid is, like a linebacker. But good hands, amazing hands. Soft and tough, and an arm like an Uzi.
When they stop to drink some water, Haren asks to see Noah's pitching hand, because something about it's strange. It's like the middle knuckle's missing from the pinky, oddly boneless.
"What's with that?"
"I broke it in my first game at Ventura," says Noah. "Sliding into first."
""Didn't they rehab you?"
"Eventually," says Noah, "but I finished the game, six and a third, without telling Coach it was broken. It hurt like hell but it was worth it. I wanted to find out," he says, "how much I could take. And I did."
They don’t quit till it’s dark and when they stop they get cold fast. When the kid slides his arm around Danny’s waist on the way back, as they round one of the hairpins on the campus road, Haren’s surprised by how it feels, like it belongs there. Just as Danny kills the engine, Noah vaults off the back like they’ve done this together before.
*
Danny’s only three weeks older than Noah, but for the first few weeks of school, he treats Noah like a younger brother, making him take the first shower and go get late-night groceries and turn off the overhead lights when they’re both practically asleep. Noah hates Danny calling him “the kid,” so he starts calling Danny “Chewbacca” cause his hair’s always all over the place.
Eventually, though, they don’t have to call each other anything, because they they're never not together.
*
They both have baseball dads, but different.
Danny’s father dogged him relentlessly, throwing him extra BP before games, icing his arm, yanking him out of football when Danny made the secondary, hiring a coach for Danny’s senior year. From freshman year on, it was all baseball all the time, no breaks. When he thinks about it, Danny wonders what Dan Senior’ll do with himself now. A couple weeks into freshman-year fall practice, Coach Sanchez banned his dad from practice for screaming at Danny from the stands, trying to send in sign.
Noah’s dad brought up him and his brother to be tough, to deal with the world he’d faced as a kid. Noah and Shaun’d had worked summers digging ditches for his construction company. Steve Lowry liked to stand over the kids, sweating and dirt-stained and and miserable, shouting “You want to dig ditches the rest of your life? No? Then work hard.”
And it turns out they’re both too big for their beds, even the extra-long dorm-room beds that’re supposed to fit everybody. Noah gets used to seeing Haren’s pale, hairy feet poking out from the covers. In the morning, he likes to walk by and slide his fingernail up the inside of Haren’s foot, which makes Danny scream you fuckin asshole, Noah, so help me I’m gonna kill you so loud that Evan Muldoon, the Spiritual Life Advisor who lives in the adjoining suite, has filed a formal complaint against them on the grounds of "ungodly language."
//
Noah’s first game pitching for the Pepperdine Waves at Eddie Field Stadium gives him his first-ever eyeless, cold-sweat slog back to the dugout. His community-college stuff doesn’t fool the Trojans, and on a full count, Bill Peavey homers off a belt-high fastball and the ball basically lands in the ocean. USC 8, Pepperdine 1.
After that game Noah gets sent to the bullpen, penciled in as a long reliever. Or maybe, Coach Sanchez says, if he gets lucky and improves drastically - a closer. Maybe.
The word “relief” now strikes Noah with a new meaning. As he watches Haren's starts from the ‘pen, he wonders when he’ll be able to stroll out to the mound that quietly and calmly, take a big pause in the middle of his motion like he’s stopped to think about something. And then WHAM.
*
By their junior year that game is the blur of a bad dream.
Danny works with Noah, hallway relays and hand jams and long-toss out on the beach after practice, stuff they shouldn’t be doing to their arms, but they tell themselves it’s just till my next start and that story suffices. Noah studies up and gets himself two new pitches, a slider and a slurve. If he sometimes wakes up shouting because his shoulder burns and his forearm aches, so what? Noah sometimes forgets to eat, and Danny accidentally shows up for math class in pajama bottoms one afternoon. But ultimately what counts is decided on the field.
Junior year they’re the perfect one-two punch, Danny and Noah - Coach says he doesn’t want to rank them as ace and deuce cause he says he can play them any time, anywhere. And he does.
Plus Danny can hit. When he’s not pitching, Danny’s the DH, batting .310, and you can tell when he comes up to the plate that he scares the shit out of everybody who pitches him. It's how he shuffles out to the plate, no banging the bat around on his feet or twisting the closures on his gloves or anything. He just hangs there, silent. He’s as still as a hawk, waiting for his pitch the way a big bird scouts a smaller one, and then in a crack it’s gone.
Haren’s such a double threat in the PCC that when somebody on one of the other teams makes up a little rhyme about him, it sticks: on the mound or at the plate, Danny Haren’s the hand of fate.
When A.J. repeats this to Haren while they’re in the showers one day, he pretends not to listen. When A.J. singsongs it again, louder and more annoying, Danny just grins slowly, hot water seaweeding the hair on his chest, and says in the direction of Noah, well shit it’s better than Chewbacca.
*
C.J. Wilson, the guy they're facing today, he’s that asshole starter from Loyola Marymount. He's girl-pretty and a straight-edger who's got a blue glove with three black Xes on it to signify his purity of mind and body. There's something about Wilson that makes Danny feel poisonous, demonic, a danger to himself and others.
But maybe Danny’s just in that mood today because the team bus’d left without him - his linear-algebra test had taken two class periods - and he’d had to ride the bike over here to Westchester. The sun smacking white off the surf, the wind peeling his eyes dry and ratting his hair had made him feel like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, parading without a permit.
Now that he's here, though, and on the mound at the last minute, the bad mood's back. So it’s pretty gratifying when Wilson gives up eight walks. Haren, in contrast, has never felt stronger. He winds up striking out eight, and though the Loyola Marymount hitters are pretty good and they light him up for some runs, they can’t seem to get ahead of the Waves.
Still, it’s annoying that Wilson’s stats show that he’s an even better hitter than Danny is. This game’s no exception. Danny hits a two-RBI homer in the fourth - sweet. But in the fifth, Wilson matches him and raise him. Going into the seventh, he's 4-for-5 with a triple, homer and three RBIs.
At that point, with the game tied at 5, Haren’s starting to smell his own sweat and feel his gut running down a little. The wind’s come up from the ocean, he can feel it, and his shoulder’s beginning to throb. He feels like he’s underwater as he puts on jacket in the dugout. Who’s gonna close it? Their scheduled guy’s down with the flu. Haren’s been so busy getting guys out that he hasn’t had time to glance over to see who’s getting greased up in the ‘pen.
When he saw how tired Haren was, Coach Sanchez'd yanked him after the sixth. But Danny’s happy to settle back in the dugout, arms over the lip, and enjoy watching Wilson unravel. C.J. walks the bases loaded, and then he gives up RBI singles to Tony Garcia and Jared Pitney and a sac fly to Danny Garcia.
To Danny’s amazement - he actually looks twice, thinking his eyes aren’t working - it’s Noah who’s called in to close, even though it’s Thursday and Lowry’s scheduled to start Saturday. Noah closes it fiercely but carefully, like he’s playing chess, adding and subtracting, pushing things aside and moving the ball in ways only he understands. When Wilson comes up to bat, Noah gets him to chase outside and Wilson hits into a game-ending double-play.
*
It takes Danny about eleven seconds to talk Noah into riding back to Malibu with him on the bike.
By the time they slink their way in and out of the rubberbanding rush-hour traffic, though, they’ve only made it to Woodland Hills, and it’s getting late. Danny’s thinking they should just stop and get something. By the time they get back to Pepperdine, the dining hall’ll be shut down for everything except cereal and milk and girl-yogurt, and he can’t face that. Not tonight.
The Wild’s the most notorious dive in Woodland Hills, a dark beer-smelling little cave the size of a rich guy’s living room. There's a pool table and peg darts and dim murals that you can’t really see. The juke’s loaded up with metal and punk, The Dead Boys and the Dropkick Murphys and NOFX. If somebody makes the mistake of trying to cue up Led Zeppelin or Johnny Cash, the bartender walks over and unplugs the juke and then plugs it back in so it resets to The Snap-On Tools.
The Wild's got no actual door, just a piece of smeared heavy-duty plastic that waves in the early-evening breeze. Noah’s apprehensive. They’re only twenty, and they both know that if they get busted for this, Coach’ll bench both of them. Even if they’re bound for State.
But when Noah points out the the sign in the entryway that says NO MINORS, Danny just grins and says, “Yeah, buddy, remember it - it’s what you’ll say when the manager says he’s sending you back to Triple A.”
Danny orders them a half-pitcher of margaritas like he’s been doing it all his life. He’s so big and soft-spoken and he smiles so sweetly at the waitress that she doesn’t look too hard at his laminated fake ID. She brings them two cold glasses and the pitcher of antifreeze-green drink. It’s so sweet and salty that after Noah knocks the first one back, the next one just seems like an afterthought. Thenhis mouth’s dry from the jalapeno poppers they’ve been scarfing, so he has another one to put out the fire. And that’s the last he knows for a while.
//
Danny ordered that pitcher of margaritas with the honest intention of getting roaring drunk, but as he watches Noah’s dark eyes lighten and his quads straining against his jeans as he stretches his legs out into the aisle, Haren rethinks it. He’s no straight-edger, but he knows that if they pull back into the Towers parking lot tonight visibly fucked up, their suffering will be violent and public. So he watches the ice chips melt into a layer of clear below the green of his margarita, and he asks the waitress for a Coke.
It's strange, but tonight the booze seems beside the point. He's never seen his roommate this loose or this happy. They sit there, not having to say much, both pairs of legs poking out the side of the banquette, cracking open peanuts and tossing the shells on the floor. Soaking up the sweetness of it - of what they all just did.
When it’s time to pay the tab, Danny slides himself out into the aisle a little stiffly, fingers scrambling in his back pocket for his wallet.
“You always like this?” asks Noah suddenly.
“Like what?” says Danny. Something in Lowry’s face gets his attention and he sits back down.
“Like - I dunno. I feel like I’m on a date or something.”
When Haren looks at him funny, Noah twists his mouth closed. “Look, just forget I said it, OK?” says Lowry.
And then he gives Haren the smallest but most definite smile, and for a moment Haren wonders if Noah’s drunk at all, or just pretending.
*
Danny decides to take them back to Malibu the slightly-longer way, through the twisting two-lane roads that stretch through the canyons, Topanga and Mulholland and Cold Canyon. Some instinct of self-preservation tells him the 101's too exposed. And besides.
Besides. Noah’s got his chin on Danny’s shoulder, singing into his left ear - life in the fast lane surely make you lose your mind. Lowry’s so tanked that he has to hang onto Haren to keep from falling off. He’s got both his arms around Danny’s waist and his thighs are pressing into the backs of Danny’s legs in a way that’s making it hard to drive. Not because they’re off-balance. Not because it’s awkward, Noah riding bitch.
No. It’s getting hard to keep the bike on the road because Danny’s getting hot about the feel of Lowry’s hard thighs against his, and just when Haren thinks he’s getting over that, Lowry tucks his hands into the pockets of Danny’s leather jacket, and Danny can feel Noah’s fingers on his belly, strong and flexible, holding him against the blaze of oncoming headlights.
They fit together like hand and glove, Haren thinks to himself, and for a while he’s utterly calm. The night air’s drenched with the cough-drop smell of eucalyptus, and he’s got his best buddy with him on the bike, and they’re both still stunned by the memory of that game.
But it’s a problem, this feeling. There’s also that memory, from the bar, of that perfect smile Noah’s never quite given him before. The calm starts to come and go, and then it vanishes to make room for something else. Danny’s having trouble driving because he’s as hot as he’s ever gotten about a girl. He's hard and crazy with ideas he’s never had before, thoughts he shouldn’t be thinking, about his roommate.
*
Cool night air turns cold pretty quickly when you’re riding a motorcycle, so by the time they pull into the Towers parking lot, they’re both shivering. At the door, Danny’s fingers are stiff, fumbling the key into the lock.
“Hey, there,” says a voice from down the hall - it’s Evan Muldoon, holy Jesus on crutches - “I hear you guys walked all over LMU this afternoon. Way to go!” As he walks by, Evan high-fives Danny, who pushes Noah ahead of him through the door.
“Yeah,” says Danny to the back of Evan's head, “it was one of the better days of my short and miserable life as a Irretrievable Sinner.”
“The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” says Evan, continuing down the hall and letting the words float out behind him, “even in baseball. Did you know Cal Ripken Junior’s accepted Jesus as his personal savior?”
Danny just manages to shut the door behind him before they both burst into laughter that Haren hopes won’t be audible down the hall.
“Cal Ripken Jr. probably is Jesus, says Noah solemnly, “so he kinda got upgraded to the express line on that one.”
Haren’s easing his arms out of the threadbare satin-lined sleeves of his leather jacket, sparing his shoulder, which is already heavy with ache from today’s outing. As he slips the collar over the hook on the back of the door he becomes aware that Noah's standing behind him, just waiting. When Danny turns around, Noah’s face is scrunched up in anguish, maybe puzzlement, as though he’s just realized he’s left something behind that he has to go back for. Back out into the dark.
In the split second that he sees Noah’s hand swinging up towards him, Haren realizes he must have crossed the line, and now Lowry’s gonna knock him into the wall to prove I ain’t that way.
“You motherfucker,” says Noah, his throat tight with what sounds like tears, “you sonofabitch, it wasn’t - ”
At the moment Noah grabs him by the hair and yanks him forward, Danny sees that Lowry's temples are glistening with sweat even though he’s still shivering, and when their mouths meet, Noah’s teeth cut into Danny’s lip and for a minute neither of them can breathe, it's so strange and hot.
The coppery taste of Danny's own blood is nothing - an old memory of busted lips from bar fights - compared to the softness of Noah’s mouth and his tongue. As Haren slides one hand around Noah’s waist and uses the other to hold his mouth right where it is, he feels like he's gonna come in his shorts just from the way Noah tastes, like salt and tequila and the end of a long day.
*
The fact that neither of them fits on his bed makes what they’re doing more absurd or more graceful, depending on how you look at it, because now that they're jammed together on Danny's bed, there’s no part of them here that’s not touching. Taking off each other’s clothes seems something like kids’d do on a sleepover. Except that when Haren sees Lowry’s nearly hairless chest, his pecs outlined by the moonlight streaming in the seaward window, he kinda stops breathing for a minute.
When he remembers to breathe again, Danny has the good sense to start using his tongue to explore all the places on Noah's body he knows he’d want to feel something warm and wet and full of the want that’s flooding through his gut right now, and the noises that Noah's making - the way his back arches up like a bow when Danny hits a sweet spot - are making his breath come hot and fast.
Even though he’s never done this before - Noah’s hard muscles, his scent, his crazy messed-up hair are so different from any girl’s - it kinda reminds him of pitching. Danny knows he can stop any time now, even right in the middle of his windup, to take the time to feel what Noah’s tongue is doing in his mouth, the heat of his wet cock on Danny’s belly as they writhe together in the dark.
It’s a dance they’ve been doing every day, just closer and dirtier and way more mind-blowing this time, and when Noah takes them both in hand, Danny suddenly realizes what it means that putting your fingers just so on the seam creates movement nobody’d ever expect, movement that’ll blow by 'em at the plate as they try to swing at something only he and Noah can see.