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Spring training for the Lake Monsters happens in Viera, Florida, and Tyler shows up there the first week of June, fresh off his college season. The facility is new and clean and belongs to the Nationals, who are themselves only two years old, still figuring out what they are and what they want, and the whole operation feels as if it's being assembled as it goes. Tyler is twenty years old and was drafted six weeks ago and is trying very hard to not look like he is trying very hard.
He spends the first morning watching one of the shortstops field grounders while he pretends to stretch his hamstrings.
The guy is Marek Brave. Tyler has the roster sheet memorized. Aside from that, Tyler remembers him from high school, at least in an abstract sense. Can't remember exactly which school he went to, but he has a face that is hard to forget. Pale skin, pouty lips, and long black hair tied back in a ponytail that hangs down between his shoulder blades. Marek's been at it for a half hour already. Coach cracks the ball left of the bag, Marek catches it in his glove, throws to first, resets. Each rep is slightly different, like he's slowly working something out, finding his groove. Tyler studies him long enough that his left hamstring genuinely loosens from the stretch, which was not his intention.
Marek throws too wide to first on his next rep and has to jog after the ball himself through the wet grass.
“You're from the QC, aren't you?” Tyler says on the second day, when Marek crosses his path to fill his water bottle. Marek's eyes narrow, scan Tyler's face as if searching for a hint of recognition.
“Bettendorf, yeah. You too?”
“Davenport. Well, Buffalo, actually.” Tyler says. “I went to high school in Davenport.”
Two kids from the same bank of the same dirty river standing together in Florida, heading to Vermont in two weeks. Something changes in Marek's expression, a small settling, a compass needle finding north, and Tyler will spend the next several months trying to name it precisely and never quite getting there.
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
There's a shift in the infrastructure, a shared foundation now that neither of them has to build. They know the same heat off the Mississippi in summer, the same flat stretch of I-80 going west. Surrounded by guys from everywhere else, in Florida, and then in Vermont, it works like a private language. Neither of them has to explain what they mean when they say ‘back home’.
They arrive in Burlington in the third week of June, which is also when Tyler sees real mountains for the first time.
He doesn't say this out loud. He stares at them from the window of the bus—the Green Mountains going dark blue in the distance, something that has always been there and will be there after everything else is gone—and he says nothing and swallows the lump in his throat that forms when he thinks about being so far from home. He’d been lucky to stay in Iowa for college. At least he’d thought that at the time but now he almost hates that and the fact that it makes him feel so much smaller, being here.
Centennial Field is on the university campus, with crumbling grandstands and a wall of trees just outside the perimeter of the outfield fence. The structure was built in 1922 and it shows, the concrete worn smooth and the roof over the grandstand patched in several places. Tyler loves it immediately, despite its flaws. He does not say this either.
What makes a good keystone combination is hard to explain to someone who doesn't play. The stats can't accurately capture it. It isn't about range or arm strength or reaction time, though those matter. It's more like a sixth sense for another person's movement. It's about knowing where he'll be before he gets there, trusting him to be there, and being right often enough that you no longer have to track him in your periphery. It takes most of a season to build that with someone new.
It takes Tyler and Marek three weeks. Two in training and one after they’ve settled in Vermont.
The first double play they manage in a real game—bottom of the fourth, man on first—happens before Tyler consciously registers it. Marek ducks right, scoops the ball out of the dirt, and the flip to second is gentle, just enough on it that Tyler can redirect without stopping his momentum. He's pivoting, already throwing to first, before the ball has fully nestled in his glove.
In the dugout afterward, Marek drops onto the bench beside him.
“Nice work.”
“You too.”
Tyler is already running it back in his mind. Marek reading exactly where Tyler's weight was and making the throw to match, a fraction of a second to make that read, made correctly. The ball had moved between them the way a river moves, sluicing through a path that was already carved, has existed for eons.
This is what Tyler came here for. The particular satisfaction of a difficult thing done correctly, the proof that he belongs on this ladder at all. He's been playing baseball since before he could read and is still, daily, figuring out what that means at this level. Most days he doesn't need anything else. But when he collapses into bed that night, it's only Marek's face on his mind.
The frustrating thing about Marek is that Tyler cannot determine what he means.
Marek has a habit of standing too close. Not aggressively, nothing legible as a thing, just a few inches inside the range Tyler would call normal for a teammate. He's ever-present at the water cooler, in the dugout, in the clubhouse where he'll hover right beside Tyler while he tapes his wrists and stay there far longer than the task requires. Tyler notices every time and isn’t sure whether Marek is aware of it. He also has a way of looking at Tyler directly after a good play that Tyler has taken note of maybe fifteen times since they showed up in Burlington. He has yet to arrive at an interpretation that satisfies him.
The Vermont summer doesn't help. It's so unlike the heat back home, so much softer and relentlessly green, the air carrying the smell of the lake on most evenings. The Adirondacks are tucked just on the other side of Champlain, just out of Tyler's line of sight and he stands at second base sometimes before a game and thinks about them there, invisible, and feels absurdly like he's somewhere he was never supposed to be.
Marek in his uniform is another problem Tyler hadn't specifically anticipated. The pants are stark white at the start of every game, dusty red-brown by the end, and they fit the way they fit on someone built the way Marek is built, which is well. Tyler does his level best to stop noticing the long line of Marek's legs, the curve of his ass. During fielding drills he has developed an intimate familiarity with the middle distance.
In the third week of July, walking to their cars after a night game, Marek says without any setup: “Y'know you're pretty fucking good at this, right?”
“At what?”
He chuckles, flips his long hair over his shoulder as he slides into his car. “At baseball, Tyler.”
Tyler has been wrong about this kind of thing before, has misread warmth for intention and paid for it. He is not doing that again.
The holes appear in early August, when the summer is already thinking about ending. The evenings cool fast and the light goes golden earlier and earlier and Tyler's ability to maintain his working theory decays in direct proportion to how beautiful the sunsets get.
It’s Abercrombie, their catcher, who suggests Church Street, after a Friday home win. It’s the main drag in downtown, with bars and restaurants along the pedestrian stretch. It’s a short walk, and an even shorter drive. Even Tyler, who is not a bar person in any sense, understands why half the roster ends up there without much deliberation.
Tyler drives. He likes to drive. Some combination of control issues and the genuine preference for sobriety over the helplessness of being drunk in a public place. Marek rides shotgun. This has become an inevitability over the course of the season, established without either of them meaning to establish it, a path worn into grass over time.
The bars are busy without being too overwhelming, people moving between them with music pumping through open doors. Half of the group disappears into a place with a pool table within twenty minutes. Tyler gets a beer only because the bar isn’t carding anyone and it gives him something to hold on to. He nurses it while the remaining guys scatter.
Marek gravitates toward everyone. He’s a moth drawn to every dull glimmer of a human being. His eyes are bright, hazy once he finishes his second drink, and his face flushes a little more with each sip of his whiskey.
This is the part Tyler has not fully accounted for in his working theory. In any given social situation, Marek expands. He excels. He is easygoing and fun, laughing at things that are funny and flitting from table to table, gabbing to strangers and friends alike. Tyler envies this about him. He observes from his position at the far end of the bar, perched on a stool and tells himself that he is simply the kind of person who watches. This is true. It has always been true.
By midnight, the group has dwindled to Tyler and Marek and Abercrombie, who is deep in conversation with a few college girls and shows no signs of surfacing. Marek sidles up to Tyler at the bar, too close, like always, and they’ve been here for three hours and Tyler’s still only halfway through his beer and the attention that’s been spread through the room, doled out to everyone else all night has narrowed, fixed itself gradually and then all at once onto Tyler.
“Why don’t you drink?” Marek says. “You should celebrate.”
“I’m drinking right now.” Tyler takes a sip of his now lukewarm Bud.
“Half a beer in three hours.” Marek scoffs and pries the glass from Tyler’s hands, swirls the beer around, and downs the rest of it. His nose scrunches. “You’re always just, like…watching.”
“Someone has to drive.”
Marek looks at Tyler like he does after a good play, that brief confirmation, except they’re not on the diamond and there’s no play and there’s nothing about baseball to attribute it to. No straightforward explanation. He opens his mouth to speak.
”Hey.” Abercrombie materializes between them, jacket in hand. “We’re gonna check out this other place.” He jerks his head toward the college girls and they giggle, whisper amongst themselves. “You guys in?”
Another look, exchanged between teammates. Between friends?
”Nah, I’m gonna head back soon.” Tyler says.
”I’ll catch a ride with you,” Marek says, and Tyler assumes he’s talking to Abercrombie since he’s looking right at him, but then his attention turns back to Tyler. His eyebrows raise. “If that’s okay.”
“Oh,” Tyler says. “Yeah, sure.”
Abercrombie is gone. Marek closes his tab and they walk back to the car and Tyler drives them north out of Burlington, the lake visible to the left when the road bends, black water and the Adirondacks on the far shore nothing more than a dark smudge against the horizon.
Marek has his elbow on the window frame and he’s looking out at all the nothing while his other hand finds Tyler’s thigh, his fingers merely a suggestion against the thin fabric of Tyler’s shorts.
Tyler keeps his grip steady on the wheel. He is aware of this as a choice, a conscious decision not to engage in whatever Marek is offering, and he makes it anyway and lets the quiet engulf them as Marek’s fingers retreat.
In the driveway of an old house on a street of old houses, Marek gets out of the car and leans down through Tyler’s open window. The tang of Jack Daniels is on his breath.
“You were gonna say something,” Tyler says. “At the bar, I mean. Before Josh interrupted.”
Marek huffs, chuckles. “I was.”
“Well, what was it?”
The engine idles.
”You know what it was, Tyler.”
He straightens up and sways along the sidewalk. Fiddles with the front door briefly before stepping inside.
Tyler sits in the driveway. He knows what it was, yes, and he will continue to sit here and do nothing about it. The reason is legitimate. Everything still feels so new, they’re in an unfamiliar place, the season has thirty games left and he cannot afford to be wrong about this, cannot afford to ruin what they’ve built so far and turn the next thirty games into something neither of them can play through. It’s a good reason. He drives back home in the pitch black with the windows all down and the early morning air coming in and it is a good reason, damn it, and he knows it.
After Church Street, Tyler’s working theory is reduced to bullshit. Tyler knew what it was before Marek said it and knows it even more plainly now, and what’s left is simply the practical argument.
Marek doesn’t bring it up. He is exactly the same as always—too close, too attentive—except the directness of it has lost any remaining deniability. He is patient the way the mountains are patient, the way the corn fields back home are patient, and Tyler has been steadily taken apart by that patience since June and hates it and has nowhere else to put the hatred but Marek himself.
Their double plays keep getting cleaner.
Marek isn't doing anything. That's what Tyler keeps coming back to. He exists in the same space as Tyler, the same as he ever was, and Tyler is the one ripping apart at the seams over it. In the clubhouse, Marek will reach past him for something off the hook above his head and Tyler will feel the heat of his arm for the rest of the game. On the bus rides to Lowell and Staten Island and Troy, Marek falls asleep against the window and his hair comes loose from his ponytail and Tyler keeps his eyes trained on the highway. He really does hate him, a little, for how easy he makes it all seem.
It’s mid-August, pre-game infield. Tyler is at second, throwing balls on autopilot and Marek is at short, and at some point their arms fall into the same rhythm without either of them adjusting for it. Throw and reset, throw and reset.
When coach calls them in, Marek falls into step beside him. The knees of his pants are already streaked with dirt.
”Hey.”
”Hey.”
“After the game.”
”What about it?”
Marek glances over. Same look as always except there is nothing left to parse from it. A question with a specific answer it’s looking for.
”Nothing,” Marek says. “Just…after the game. Okay?”
Tyler picks at a frayed thread on his glove. He thinks about all the games they have left. He thinks about the locker room and the bus and the uncomfortable geometry of spending every day in close quarters with someone you’ve gotten wrong.
”Okay,” Tyler says.
In the seventh, with Tyler on-deck, Marek gets hold of a fastball that he drives hard down the left field line. It clears the fence and disappears into the trees beyond and Marek flips his bat, unhurried, and starts around the bases with a spring in his step as the crowd gets to their feet. When Marek comes around third, he passes close enough that his hand finds Tyler's shoulder for a second and then he's rounding home and the guys are whooping in the dugout and Tyler steps into the box.
He strikes out.
When the clubhouse clears, Marek is in the parking lot, leaning against Tyler's car with his hands in his pockets.
”I wasn’t exactly being subtle,” Marek says.
”I know.”
”Good. I wasn’t sure you did.”
”We have a lot of games left,” Tyler says. He stares anywhere but Marek’s face. Can’t risk catching the glow of the setting sun in his eyes.
“Yep.”
”We have to play together.”
“I know that. Obviously.”
”Well, if it goes wrong—“
”Whatever,” Marek says. He waves a hand, dismisses the thought like he’s already weighed the options, factored in all possible outcomes and decided that it’s worth the risk. “You weren’t really that tight, were you? The first morning in Florida. Your hamstring.”
Tyler blinks.
“You were watching me back then. I know what it was.”
Tyler has been carefully managing what he wants since June and he is done managing it. The want is a simple thing. He has been making it complicated for months.
”You started this,” Tyler says.
”I know that too,” Marek says, and slips his hand down the front of Tyler’s jeans.
Tyler grabs the collar of Marek's shirt and kisses him right there in the parking lot, and it turns out that not doing it was the hard part because kissing Marek is remarkably easy. Marek's lips are so soft and he laughs a little against Tyler's mouth, which Tyler hadn’t expected. Then they’re moving down, into the cab of Tyler’s Corsica, and Tyler has the vertiginous sense of all that careful distance he constructed collapsing at once, every instance of not-noticing Marek reversing itself.
The lump that formed in Tyler's throat on the bus looking at the mountains is gone. In another life, he did this back in June and saved himself the summer.
Marek has him reclined in the passenger seat and Tyler has both hands in his hair and the car is much too small for this, obviously, the gearshift a constant nuisance, but there’s nothing to be done about that.
What Tyler is mostly aware of is Marek’s weight on him, Marek’s teeth at his throat, and the specific, humiliating reality of how hard he is, which has been approximately three months in the making.
The seatbelt latch digs into Tyler’s back. The windows go fully opaque with condensation.
Marek pulls back enough to look at him. He seems, Tyler thinks, extremely pleased with himself.
“Hi, baby,” Marek says.
”Hi,” Tyler says. His ears are hot.
Outside, a car pulls into the lot and its headlights sweep across the windshield, diffused through the fog, and they both go stock still for a second and then it passes and parks somewhere else and they stay still anyway, breathing.
“We should probably…” Tyler starts.
”Yeah.” Marek reaches over and wipes a small clear patch in the passenger window with the heel of his hand. Through it, Tyler can see the grandstand, the edge of the field. A strip of light cuts in and shines in the sweat on Marek’s chest.
The last home game of the season is the first week of September, and while Marek runs drills, Tyler pretends to stretch his hamstrings. Even now, Marek's still making calculations, still working something out. His ponytail swings with the motion of his throws.
Tyler watches him with butterflies in his stomach and doesn't pretend he isn't.