A Ring for Every Finger (but not that one), part 2

Max ducks out of the bathroom, and whatever hushed conversation took place there Rick would never know, but when he emerged the room was empty and the food and wine had been cleared away. He makes for the bed, too drunk and tired to even close the drapes, but Max caught him around the waist, all easy, and steered him to the tub. Max runs the tap lukewarm, and the smell of the shower gel isn’t Rick’s; it’s lemon and bergamot, citrusy and a little bit feminine and he breathes it in like a drowning man on shore as Max lays out a faded pair of cotton warmups and a fluffy towel for him. He almost wants to beg Max to come and wash his hair and shoulders for him, because his arms feel weighted down with lead. Maybe he’s a masochist after all.

The familiar blue and orange sweats are a little snugger on him than they used to be, or maybe these were Max’s, but it feels right, comforting rather than restrictive. In the bedroom Max has drawn all the drapes and turned on only the bedside lamp, the dim yellow-toned light glinting off the damp of Rick’s chest and shoulders like a firefly on a July evening. July is baseball season, he muses, as though the tonal shift from winter grey has brought him a feeling of homecoming.

“C’mere,” Max grumbles, budging rightwards on the bed as though the left side will somehow permanently belong to Rick. Sinking into it steadies the tilting of the planet. “I didn’t know you missed Detroit so much,” he continues, and his voice is carefully neutral.
“Christ, I didn’t think I did either.”
“You coulda called.” 

“So could you. Unless you wanna tell me I’m the only one missing what we used to have?”
“Shit, Rick. Just…shit.”
Rick knows Max-speak, knows that there are more emotions behind those words than he is sober enough to fathom right now, and contents himself with tipping his head into the crook of Max’s shoulder. Max’s fingers come to settle in his hair, and the last thing that he remembers being a coherent thought is that regardless of what they say to each other, they always come to nestle in each other’s orbits, like some gravitational force is bringing them home.

The first inkling Rick has that he’s dreaming is that he’s in the Trop, all empty cavernous space and weird echoes and catwalks trapping fly balls. The second is the uniform he’s wearing, all embellished gothic font and black piping on white. He’s turning a ball over and over on his knuckles, but he isn’t looking at the batters box; he’s staring into his team’s dugout, watching Max in his navy starter jacket, spitting sunflower seeds with the rookies in some sort of contest.
“Throw the ball!” comes the shout from behind home plate, the batter or the umpire or some disgruntled fan, “Throw the ball!”
But when he turns away from Max the batter at home plate is gone, as is the rest of his team, and there’s nothing but seawater seeping in through the infield dirt, rising higher and higher until there’s no air left to gasp for. He wakes, shivering through the dull headache of a mild hangover made easier by the fact that the light outside the windows left unobscured by the drapes is a glow produced by a thousand neon bulbs, a technicolor set to mute. Max is sitting by the window, doodling softly on some office notepad.

“Hey, Ricky,” Max exhales as he stumbles towards the table. “Or, what is it that they’re calling you in Boston nowadays? Fred Fred the Third?”
“Ricky Two-Freds, mostly,” he snorts, trying so hard not to take the bait.
“Ricky Two-Freds,” Max mumbles, the words slow and unevenly emphasized in his mouth.
“I think I prefer Pretty Ricky,” Rick continues, and it’s quiet but assured. Out in the open, now.
“Don’t make me do this now, Rick. Not when I just covered for your drunk ass and took care of you and put you to bed.” And Max is fumbling through his pockets for something, and Rick knows what it is before it surfaces. “Put it on with your other one,” Max grits out, and the metal alloy hasn’t even warmed against Rick’s skin before his one time fellow ace is out the door.

Rick knows what he should do, what he should have done a long time ago, but it doesn’t make his stomach turn any less when he reaches for his phone and sees all the messages left unanswered, a reminder that they couldn’t, didn’t, shut the outside world out entirely. Cora’s heartwarming message is at the top of the little list of banners, the kind that he knows can only come from a player’s manager, but he doesn’t need a manager right now, someone who thinks in terms of strategy and plans and ideas. He needs a friend.
The person on the other end of the line picks up somewhere in between the third and final ring—why do cellphones still ring?—and Rick asks before he has a chance to answer.
“Davey?”
“Ricky?” and the voice comes back, muddled with sleep but as fond as it always has been, and the relief hits his veins the way he feels after getting out of a bases-loaded jam.
“Yeah, it’s me. I—I needed to…shit, what time is it even there? I’m still holed up out in fucking Vegas.”
“It’s only just past midnight, I ain’t Cinderella. But if you wanna talk, you gotta talk, none of this pussyfooting around like you did five years ago.”
“No, I know—pussyfooting?”

“Kid walked in the room,” Price grumbles, and Rick laughs then, hot and dry like the Vegas air.
“No. I’m ready to talk,” he replies, hoping he sounds more assured than he thinks he does.
“And thank god for that. The two of you were giving me a case of emotional blue balls so bad I thought I was gonna have to make like A-Rod with his bat and fix it on national television.”

Rick laughs again, because he’s missed this camaraderie. In the offseason it can feel isolating, sometimes, as the champagne bubbles go flat and the weather goes dark and cold and he waits for the season to start again in the brightest and warmest parts of the country. “I take it there’s more to the story than a spontaneous Vegas proposal?”
“Something along the lines of: won tacky ring, dropped tacky ring, social media did its thing, and now Max is up my ass and not in the way I want him to be.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning apparently all that time we were screwing around in Detroit and doing a damn sight worse covering our tracks than I thought we were, that was all it was to him and he doesn’t even give a damn that I care about this.”
“Max is Max,” Price mutters. “But you and him…”
“Yeah?” Rick presses, hoping that he’s going to get somewhere at long last. 

“You and him are different. For two smart guys you were real damn bad at hiding it.”
“Davey, if we could speed up this thing and get to the wise old veteran advice part, I’d appreciate it. I kind of want to just forget this day ever fucking happened.”
“Watch who you’re calling old, wiseass. But shit, you didn’t think we knew? That Dombrowski didn’t know? You weren’t being half as careful as you should have been, and when you’re in the position you guys were in—it would take one hell of a reason not to be careful. Go deal with Max being Max, and let me get the fuck back to sleep.”
“I’ll keep you, ya know-“

“I know, Ricky. By the way, you don’t even wanna know how much goddamn cash Brock just lost to Benny on this bet.” If Rick were a meaner person, and if Brock weren’t so fucking nice, he would cackle here. “Man has the worst gaydar I’ve ever seen.”
“Hey, hey, you don’t remember Avila?”

“Ok, the second worst. Go find your prince, loverboy.”
“I think I just threw up. Scratch that, I did just fucking throw up.”
“Then you’ve got nothing but your hangover to blame.”
“Screw you, Price.”
“Up yours, Porcello,” he retorts, and makes a sound that bears an eerie similarity to a kiss being blown down the end of the line. Rick rolls his eyes, sorts through his clothes until he finds a dark shirt that will pair nicely with jeans and an oversized jacket that will do nicely at concealing his face, Lohan-style.
“All right, Vegas,” he whispers, staring out at the artificial neon glow. “I think it’s time you gave me back my ace.”