Work Text:
Rachel texts the first Saturday in October, the sound of Mike’s phone loud in the quiet house. Dinner tonight? she asks, no preamble. The good margarita place?
Mike stares at the message for a full minute, then sets the phone back down on the granite and opens the fridge for a beer. They haven’t talked since that morning in her hotel room last month, her red hair splayed out on the pillows and I don’t know if that’s a good idea. She texted after the game to see how Baker was doing, asking if he knew anything about her prognosis. Mike, who—among other, dicier feelings—didn’t like the idea of being her source, never texted back.
Baker is fine, for what it’s worth, spending her off-season rehabbing at a state of the art sports medicine facility in Arizona. Mike is spending his in San Diego, getting fat.
He drinks his beer and then another one, even though it’s barely eleven. Here for work? he finally asks.
Rachel texts back after less than a minute: nope.
Okay then. Mike finishes his beer before replying, channel surfing through his entire sports package. It occurs to him to be embarrassed he’s engaging in some bullshit texting powerplay with his ex-wife. Sure, he taps out. See you at 7?
Yep , Rachel replies, plus the eyes emoji. Mike smiles in spite of himself, rubbing a hand through his beard.
He stops drinking after that, considers working out or taking a shower. He realizes with a jolt that he's fully expecting to have sex tonight. He hasn't had any in—well. A while, honestly. Not since Rachel herself, and before that Amelia. It usually doesn't take him this long to get through a box of condoms. He purposefully hasn't been letting himself think about why.
In the end he runs a couple lazy miles on the treadmill and makes himself a sandwich, eating it standing up at the island and watching the same college football coverage he didn’t care about an hour ago. It’s still only quarter past noon. Mike hates the off-season for this exact reason, the endless solitary boredom of it, how he’s built to do a very specific set of things and none of them need doing in any meaningful way for five months. He’d play all year round if he could. When he was married—or newly divorced, even—it was one thing, but now—
He’s putting his plate in the dishwasher when Baker calls.
Mike’s heart flips over inside his chest like somebody’s virginal fucking prom date. He shuts the dishwasher with enough of a jerk that the silverware rattles inside, fumbling the phone off the counter with slippery hands.
“Hey, Baker,” he says, breathing in. For one demented second, he thinks she’s calling about Rachel. “How's it going?”
“Terrible,” she announces, in this sulky voice he’s only ever heard out of her when it's past midnight on getaway day. Mike once handed over an entire burrito because she sounded like that. “Rehab fucking sucks.”
Mike laughs. She's in Arizona, he reminds himself. The pitcher-catcher bond doesn't actually amount to ESP. “So what, thought you’d give me a call? Have me turn that frown upside-down?”
“Yep.” She pops the p, and Mike pictures her mouth. “Entertain me. Tell me about how the odds of recovery on your knee are longer than the ones on my elbow.”
“Fuck you,” Mike says, although that's actually something he said to her in the days following her surgery, when she was small and vulnerable in her hospital bed. It feels like a long time ago.
The other thing he said to her, of course, was that he wasn't getting back together with Rachel.
“Fuck you," she says cheerfully. “Come on, old man, hearing how decrepit you are will be the most fun I’ve had all day. I’m so bored here.” She sighs. “And lonely.”
Mike swallows. “Yeah,” he says quietly, sitting down on the edge of the couch and scrubbing a restless hand through his beard. They’ve talked on the phone a few times since she left San Diego, though nothing like they did back before that night at Boardner’s. Their conversations always wind up full of pauses like this. “I hear that.”
Ginny sighs again, bratty teenager grounded on the weekend. “So what are you up to?” she asks. “Anything exciting?”
“Nah.” The lie slips out easily, like he subconsciously decided on it as soon as he picked up the phone. “Beer and college football.”
Ginny hums. “Which game?”
Mike tells her and they make fun of Duke together for a while, Ginny whooping in his ear like a frat boy. Mike shifts on the couch, remembering her chirping at him during BP. He gets up and grabs another beer, switching her over to speakerphone. It feels safer, somehow, that extra layer of removal.
“Thought you would’ve liked Duke,” he interrupts.
Ginny laughs. “No way. UNC all the way, baby.”
It's an expression, Mike reminds himself. He takes a long pull of his beer.
During the commercials they chat about stupid shit, like the best way to eat an Oreo and what their favorite kind of Halloween candy is. “Were you a ballplayer literally every year too?” Mike asks. “I always just wore my little league uniform.”
Ginny hums a negative. “I was a Power Ranger for like four years running, actually. Will was the Black Ranger and I was the Yellow Ranger.”
“Oh yeah?” Mike grins at the thought of it, a tiny version of Baker running around the suburbs in full superhero regalia, pillowcase full of sugar swung over one shoulder. “You guys used to beat the shit out of each other, make it authentic?”
“I mean, I’d beat the shit out of Will,” Ginny concedes. “My pop was always too worried about my arm to ever let him get much of a shot in, though.”
Mike nods even though she can't see him. She doesn’t talk about her family a ton, though obviously he knows the gist of things. It occurs to him he wouldn’t mind hearing the whole story there. “I mean, you were also a girl,” he points out.
“Sexist,” Ginny says immediately.
“Harpy,” Mike shoots back.
“Whatever.” She blows a raspberry on the other end of the phone. “You love it.”
“That’s what you think, rookie.” Mike clears his throat, rubbing the back of his neck a little. “So what, they gonna let you trick or treat around your nursing home, you think?”
“Yep,” Ginny says. “And I'm gonna go as you in a Cubs uniform. World Series ring included.”
“Fuck you,” Mike tells her, but he's laughing too hard for it to land with any heat. Ginny’s laughing too and he pictures her dimples, the soft dip of skin and her wide beautiful mouth. The thing he wanted most that night outside Boardners, beside actually kissing her, was to put his hands on her face. “The Cubs aren't gonna win it.”
“The Cubs are gonna win it, and then you're gonna have all kinds of regrets.”
“Well,” Mike says, only then he can't follow it up with anything meaningful and it lands between them like a ground pitch, artless and thudding.
“Yeah, yeah.” Ginny laughs again, seemingly unembarrassed. He wouldn't have guessed that between the two of them, he'd wind up being the one who feels shy. “Okay, I gotta go anyway. I’ve got a PT appointment at four.”
“It's not—” Mike starts, but when he glances across the room at the clock on the microwave he sees it is, or near enough to it. Holy shit, they've been on the phone since just past noon. The Duke game is long over, replaced by Baylor against some other school he doesn't know the name of. Mike feels, for no reason at all, like he just got caught jerking off in public. “Better get to it then,” he manages finally. “Do an extra set of reps on behalf of my knees, will you?”
“I always do,” Ginny assures him. “Bye, Lawson.”
“Be good,” Mike says. It comes out less captain-advising-rookie and more creepy-uncle. Before he can correct Ginny laughs, warm and knowing, and hangs up the phone. Mike sits there for another moment, rubbing at an ear and staring unseeingly at the TV.
He should shower. He’s been sitting in his gym shorts for over three hours. He should shower, and then he should—
Get ready to see Rachel. Shit.
For half a second, he thinks about cancelling. It would be easy. He could just call and say, listen Rach, it isn't a good idea, and that would be that. There are all sorts of plausible reasons why he wouldn't want to see his ex wife, and none of them have anything to do with he's really feeling, some strange, nameless anxiety related to Ginny’s laugh and her eyes and a promise he may or may not have made to her a month ago.
In the end it's that last thought that has him showing up at La Puerta at seven sharp with a clean shirt and combed beard: the idea that he might cancel a date with Rachel, who he has loved for nine years, because of something he said to a rookie call-up while she was doped on pain meds.
“Hi, stranger,” Rachel says when he arrives, already posted up at the bar with her purse slung over a chair. She's wearing the earrings he bought for their first anniversary. She’s everything he’s wanted since he was twenty-six years old.
“Hi,” Mike says, brushing his mouth across her cheek. “Long time no see.”