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The flight back to New York was long and unremarkable. No turbulence of note, no strikingly good-looking flight attendants, no dramatics with the baggage. Nobody got drunk enough to make a scene. They were all too tired for that, even Swisher, who could make a proper scene when he put his mind to it.
It was around five in the morning when they landed, 5:30 by the time the travel guys had sorted everyone's bags, separated out the equipment that could go direct to the Stadium from the stuff people were going to want back in their own hands. The white walls, white floors, massive white pillars of JFK practically vibrated with artificial airport light; the air conditioning was roaring through invisible vents. Pretty much exactly what Derek could not handle after flying in overnight from the west coast.
Alex bumped into him just before they reached the private car stand, something that probably looked accidental. Derek felt like shit and suspected his appearance reflected that all too well-- he was at the age where things like overnight flights left visible traces under his eyes and at the corners of his mouth-- but Alex, damn him, looked perfect, his skin miraculously grease-free, lips somehow unchapped by the airplane air. Derek bumped him back.
"Minka stayed out west?"
"Mmm. They're filming out there." Derek had spent one morning on-set with her before a night game, one of those games where he didn't have to be at the park until after lunch, and of course he was used to being deliberately filmed, he knew the kind of support structure it required, how to behave around producers and directors and extras and all that, but it had just been so goddamn boring that he had wanted to scream. They went through the same four lines seven or eight or maybe twenty times, and on top of that it was a windy day: they had to stop in between every take so Minka and her castmates could get their hair fixed. It had been a relief to come back to the ballpark, where the biggest concern about hair was that it didn't extend beyond the Yankee-mandated collar length, and the only person who really gave a shit about styling what he had was Alex.
"Your place or mine?" Alex asked, like it was a foregone conclusion that they were hanging out. Or not even hanging out: sleeping in each others' guest rooms, more likely, because naps on an airplane were fine so far as they went, but everyone needed real sleep at some point, and for Derek that point was rapidly approaching.
"Mine," he muttered. "Or... Cameron's not around?" Cameron being whatever passed for Alex's latest girlfriend, unless that had changed just before the road trip and Alex had failed to make mention.
Alex shrugged. So far as Derek knew he hadn't had any of his girlfriends move in, not since The Breakup.
"Is she even in town?"
"I don't know, maybe. If she is, she'll call me sometime." Alex was already striding towards the automatic doors, eager to get the hell out of JFK, to get to a place that was not airport-related. Well, they were all pretty eager for that.
"Some boyfriend you are," Derek said, catching up, maybe throwing a little bit of a friendly elbow. Alex shrugged again, twisting his ribs deftly away in one smooth athletic motion, and caught the eye of a driver, sweating in a too-heavy dark suit, hands already extending for the straps of their bags.
---
He slept for six hours. It wasn't nearly enough. Although he kept meaning to, he hadn't gotten around to buying blackout curtains yet, and the sun creeping in as midday marched up on New York was getting too brightly intrusive to ignore.
When he went out to the living room, he found Alex fast asleep on the couch, curled up on his side against the fine-grained white leather. Probably creasing and staining it, the fucker. There was that twang of annoyance, but it was all residual, because if Alex fucked up the leather, well, Derek could afford to get it remade ten times over and then some. The days when that hadn't been possible, or so easy, were long since past.
He sat down on the end of the couch, near Alex's feet. "There's a perfectly good guest room, you know."
"Mmmmmhm." Alex rubbed a hand over his eyes, rolled over in a rumpled tangle of limbs. He stretched his legs out into Derek's lap.
"Real guest room, with a real bed. Probably better for your back than a couch. You come up crampy, I'm telling the trainers it's all your own fault."
Alex yawned, huge and dismissive. The inside of his mouth was bright pink, like a puppy's. "Time's it?"
"Almost noon."
"I could eat."
Derek snorted. Alex could always eat. It was amazing that he hadn't gotten fat yet. But maybe that was in his future. It was different once you retired, that's what everyone told him. The hair fell out and the gut moved in; your back and knees went, or maybe the hip. Pitchers had their arms go, but he probably didn't have to worry about that.
"We could go get lunch somewhere?"
"We could go stand around and wait for people to crowd up and gawk at us," Alex said. "Pretty much the same thing."
"Bitch, bitch, bitch" Derek muttered, although of course Alex was absolutely right. New York City was big enough to not give a shit, but the Yankees were big enough in NYC to sort of cancel that out.
He flicked one of Alex's big toes, making it curl. The temptation to start rubbing his feet was weirdly strong, but Alex hadn't showered yet, not since before the airport, and toying with that was not a good idea. "So, fine, we can order in? I don't think there's anything in the fridge. Maybe, like, some ketchup. You want we can order pizza or whatever."
"Santenello's," Alex said immediately. Santenello's was nearby and ridiculously cheap for the neighborhood, but the pizza was good and they reacted to big tips with discretion, not gossip, which Derek knew had somewhat endeared them to Alex in the past.
"Fine," He shoved at Alex's ankles until Alex curled his legs back up, grumbling tiredly. Derek went to find his cell phone. He could ask what Alex wanted, but it would just be a formality; he knew the order already.
He should probably spend the offday with his personal trainer. There were always exercises to do, an ever-increasing list of stretches to keep his joints in order. The most recent being: he desperately had to get better going to his left. He was still OK, nobody had noticed it when he went right, towards Alex, but when he had to go left, towards Robbie, well, he was maybe a couple steps slower. The media guys noticed. More importantly, other teams were starting to notice, which meant more balls played in that direction. He was not going to be a liability to this team. He was not.
But it had been a long road trip. The flight back had seemed even longer. They had one single day to themselves, and it was at home, even, which was a rarity. He was going to eat pizza and sit around his apartment, goddammit, and everything else, for one day at least, could go get fucked.
---
"You get it," he yelled, trying to make himself heard over the clinking of bottles as he rummaged through his bar. Rum, rum, tequila-- he couldn't drink this stuff in the middle of the day, middle of the season. The doorbell rang again. Champagne? They could do mimosas, maybe? But that wouldn't really go with pizza.
He could hear Alex get up, grumbling, "I'm always the one who pays for it, God, gonna go broke if you keep this up," and other things in a similar vein as he went to the door. It was just Alex's usual complaining, though, because if either one of them was ever going to go broke, it wasn't going to be local pizza that did it, and sure enough Alex gave the kid a fifty, told him to keep the change, grabbed the pizza and shut the door before the kid could even sputter out a coherent thank you.
"One day," Derek said, weighing a bottle of vodka in one hand, "you're gonna start carrying twenties, or even, God forbid, a ten dollar bill, and we'll think the world is ending."
Alex shrugged. "Fifties and ones, man, that's all I need." Derek knew him well enough to know the reasoning behind this: singles for vending machines in road trip hotels, fifties for everything else. Living in New York City, they rarely needed anything less than a fifty anyways.
He took the pizza away and set it down on the kitchen table, flipping the lid so he could pick off all the pineapple, transferring it to Alex's half. Alex disappeared behind the door of the fridge for a minute before reemerging with a bottle of cranberry juice.
"Didn't even know that was in there," Derek said, eying it dubiously. "You want vodka with that?"
"Nah. Straight cranberry today. Hey, let's live a little."
Sober on an offday, that was something different. But what the hell; there was probably enough grease and fat in the pizza to count as an intoxicating substance, and truth be told, something different was welcome. Offdays spent with Alex were as familiar as Alex himself. Alex used to make at least a token effort to spend the extra time with his family, but that wasn't happening so much anymore, and Minka was still out west. Which was fine with Derek. She had her own stuff going on, it was a good thing, really.
Turned out the cranberry juice didn't really go with the pizza any better than mimosas would have, but whatever.
---
"What's she like? Minka, I mean," Alex said, as if he could have been talking about anybody else. He was back on the couch, sprawled to take up as much space as possible. Derek didn't feel up to fighting him for it, so he was standing at the living room windows, big floor-to-ceiling numbers that sounded great on property write-ups, looking out over the city and thinking deep, sensitive thoughts. Or brooding, if you were going to be uncharitable.
"She's like, I don't know. She's nice. Why?"
"Well, I never even met her yet, and it's all over that you're engaged. Which, by the way... what's up with that?"
Derek shrugged, eloquently he hoped. His apartment-- if it could be called that, as he had bought it and now owned it outright, and he secretly liked to think of it as a flat, although he would never, ever tell anyone that-- was high enough up to give him a pigeon's-eye-view of the city. It was a hell of a thing to look at, all those people the size of ants down on the street. There was some kind of haze creeping over the tops of buildings from the west.
"I mean, what's so special about her?" Alex asked, pressing on with his usual dogged obliviousness. "Of all the girls you've been with, or could be with, she's the one makes you want to, to settle down? And I haven't even met her..."
"So I need your approval? You'll meet her eventually. And it's... I don't know. I'm over 35, I'm still running around doing the bachelor thing? Maybe it's time not to? But also who says it's settling down? Not like I'm retiring, you know what I mean?"
There was a squeaking sound as Alex shifted on the couch. He didn't have to turn around to know that Alex was hanging an arm over the back, looking at him. He could picture the smooth brown of Alex's forearm, the perfectly turned forms of his fingers, the heavy expensive glint of his wristwatch all just dripping down the white couch-back. "So she was, what, the one who happened to be in the right place at the right time?"
"I don't know, maybe, but it's not... that makes it sound so simple and. Cheap? Something it's not. I don't know." He sighed, a little more heavily than he'd meant to. "Can we not...?"
"Sorry," Alex said. More squeaking, a leather-relieved sound from the couch cushions as he picked his big ass up, and then there was an arm sliding around Derek's waist from slightly behind. Friendly. "It just weirds me out. That I haven't even met her and she's, like, this big deal to you. Apparently."
There were lots of things that Derek could say, but he wasn't sure where exactly he wanted to take this, or even really if he wanted to take it at all, so instead of saying anything he pressed his lips together and shook his head a little and stared out at the city some more. Alex leaned into him briefly, but didn't press it.
They watched the weekday traffic crawl along beneath them for a while. Derek's back was a little sore, most likely from the flight, and he found himself thinking about his trainer. Then he was mad at himself for thinking about his trainer again on an offday.
"Looks like a hell of a fog coming off the Hudson," Alex said.
"Yeah, I know," Derek said. "You wanna go for a walk? We could head down to the Stadium."
That-- the idea of them walking from Manhattan down to the Bronx-- was so funny that Alex kind of gasped silently for a minute before he could start laughing properly. He wheezed and bumped the side of Derek's head lightly with a fist. "Wow, great idea, asshole. That's totally do-able."
"Pessimist."
"I live in the real world, that's not pessimism, that's smarts. And look at that fog. It's probably humid out, I'm not doing that to my hair."
"Oh, of course." Derek rolled his eyes, knowing Alex wouldn't see it, but just as sure that Alex would know he was doing it. Alex pinched his side, right where the muscle would probably start to liquefy into love-handles the day after he hung up his batting gloves for good.
"Let's not do anything today," Alex said. "Let's just stay in and loaf around. Watch TV or whatever. Enjoy your AC."
"Gaze down upon the world."
"From on high, right."
"My lofty perch," Derek muttered, leaning in close to the glass. His breath steamed it up, fogging on top of the fog outside, which was white-gray and quite thick by now, a visible cloud settled into the rifts between high-rises. Alex reached in and drew an interlocking NY in the condensation, dragging his fingertip 'til it squeaked. Buildings made tiny by distance were visible through the letters.
"Thanks a bunch," Derek said. "That shit never comes off, now every time it gets humid everyone's gonna know which window is mine."
Alex shook his head, grinning. "Please. Nobody can see this high up anyways."
"Helicopters," Derek started, but Alex was laughing again. "Window washers across the way. Excuse me, the Goodyear blimp doing a low flyover, OK. Spiderman." He started slapping at Alex, not hard, just enough to make Alex twist and duck and laugh even harder.
"I don't think," Alex managed, gasping between bouts of laughter, "I don't think Torii Hunter is creeping on your building."
"You'd be surprised," Derek said. "Always scaling walls, he gets around."
"You're killin' me," Alex hooted, sprinting away down the hall. Derek shook his head and picked up the hem of his shirt to wipe off the window. He could still see the NY there, fuzzing at the edges as the water from his breath beaded up along the lines Alex had drawn.
On second thought, fuck it. Nobody was gonna see that from up here. And even if they did, well, there were plenty of Yankee fans in the city. Let Peter Parker get an eyeful.
"You better not be touching my stuff!" he yelled, heading down the hall after Alex.
"I'm going through your closet!" Alex shouted back. There was a rattle of hangers, like he thought it made for added authenticity.
"Motherfucker!" Derek shouted, charging forward. But there was a stupid fond smile on his face all the same, the kind of dumb facial expression he couldn't ever quite manage to wipe away, no matter how sincerely he tried.
Down on the street, cars were flicking on their headlights even though it was the middle of the afternoon, trying to maintain some semblance of visibility in the fog. Way high above that, he hit Alex in the face with a pillow, the swing batters-box-perfect, the two of them laughing so loudly that the neighbors would have been infuriated if he didn't own the entire floor. But he was a professional ballplayer, and he did. That was one of the perks.
As was the midseason offday at home. It was just a series of perks, really, there for him to take full advantage of, and he saw no reason to not do so. He didn't have to be anywhere today, there was no one they could disturb, there was no reason why they couldn't bum around his very expensive apartment if they wanted, eating crap, maybe ruining a very expensive shirt or two in the service of dragging out Alex's incredibly bright toothpaste-ad smile. No reason at all.