Evan didn’t look up. “Yep.”
Rizzo hummed. “Do you know you have this tone you get when you’re lying?”
Evan sighed and finally glanced over. “Are you always this annoying?”
“Only when I care.” Rizzo leaned back into the stall, eyes flicking briefly across the room before returning to Evan. “It’s funny. CJ asked me the same thing.” When Evan didn’t reply, Rizzo sighed. “You and CJ have been…weird lately.”
Evan stiffened despite himself. “We’re fine.”
Rizzo raised an eyebrow. “Okay, bud. But your shoulders go tight every time he walks into a room, so you might want to work on that.”
Evan opened his mouth to argue, then stopped when Rizzo continued, undeterred, “And CJ laughs differently when you’re around. He catches himself halfway through, like he isn’t sure it’s okay. It’s actually painful watching you two.”
Evan clenched his jaw and stared at the floor. “You’ve been watching us.”
Rizzo shrugged. “I notice stuff.”
He scrubbed a hand over his face, hating that Rizzo had just put words to something Evan hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. “It’s nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.” Rizzo tilted his head as the silence stretched uncomfortably between them. “You don’t have to tell me,” Rizzo said finally, voice softer. “I just wanted you to know that you’re not really hiding anything. At least not from me. The rest of the team is clueless.”
Evan released a humorless breath. “Great.”
Rizzo nudged his knee lightly with his own. “Hey. I’m not judging. You can tell me anything, and I would never judge.”
“I’m fine.”
Rizzo studied him for another beat, then patted him on the shoulder and stood. “If ‘fine’ stops working, you know where to find me.”
The problemwith Rizzo was that almost everyone underestimated him. On the surface, he was noise and jokes, filling every room with chatter and running commentary, as if silence personally offended him. He distracted the world with his volume and charm, until everyone dismissed him as unserious and shallow. But inside the room, Rizzo was listened to, though he wasn’t always taken seriously the way some of the veterans were. His jokes softened the edges of his observations and his laid-back nature made people forget how closely he was paying attention.
Evan knew better now. He saw how Rizzo noticed things, the way he watched people like other guys watched film. Rizzo tracked patterns while pretending not to care, and he let people believe he was easy to fool because it made them careless around him. But Evan had also learned that nothing Rizzo did or said was unintentional, and that left Evan stuck on their conversation long after it ended.
“You’re not really hiding anything.”
Rizzo’s words followed him, lodged under his skin in a way that was irritating and persistent. Evan had built a career on being unreadable when it mattered, and the thought that someone else could see straight through him unsettled him more than he was willing to admit. He’d tried to shake it off, tried to be calm and unbothered while he played the part he was expected to play. Rizzo hadn’t said it to corner him or to pry into his private life. Evan knew that. Rizzo had just been annoyingly perceptive and had offered up those words as a fact, without judgment. Evan didn’t know what to do with that, so he buried it under routine and games and all of the things he could control.
The next few weeks blurred together as early-season weeks always do. Homestands folded into road trips, which folded into longer homestands. There were early days, late nights, and video sessions that ran longer than they should have. The rhythm of the season took hold, demanding Evan’s attention whether or not he was ready for it. The team played well.Heplayed well, and winning always helped. So did the familiar comfort that came with being in control behind the plate, knowing his pitchers trusted him to steer them through a game. He usually loved this part, loved how baseball cut his world down to manageable pieces. This year, though, something else tugged at the edges of his focus.
Without meaning to, Evan started paying attention to how often CJ and Rizzo were together. It wasn’t anything newsworthy, and Evan doubted anyone else noticed anything more than two teammates having fun. Rizzo drifted toward CJ in the clubhouse like it was instinct. He claimed the chair next to CJ’s locker more often than not, spinning it around backward and straddling the seat so he could talk while CJ taped his wrists or scrolled through his phone. They shared headphones sometimes, Rizzo playing a song he thought CJ would like, or CJ sharing a video that made Rizzo laugh until he snorted. Their heads bent close enough together that Evan had to look away before someone caught him staring. Even on the field during warm-ups, when Rizzo should have been with the rest of the infielders, he always seemed to end up in CJ’s orbit.
Evan had to constantly remind himself that Rizzo had always been like this. The younger man was loud, tactile, and thought personal space was optional. He told himself he was reading more into their interactions than was there, and most of the time, that worked. But then he would notice the ease they had with each other, the way CJ didn’t overthink his words or pull back when Rizzo laughed too loudly. He touched Rizzo casually,guiding him out of someone’s way with a hand on the small of his back when Rizzo wasn’t paying attention, or bumping his shoulder when they sat together in the film room. But what Evan really found interesting was that CJ didn’t flinch or shift away, like he’d always done with Evan, when Rizzo did the same to him.
It didn’t have to mean anything. People changed, and CJ was allowed to be easy and relaxed with someone who wasn’t Evan. He told himself that often enough that he almost believed it, but the thought continued snagging on the same sharp mental edge every day. CJ hadn’t just figured out how to be physically close to a teammate without fear. He’d decided someone other than Evan was worth figuring it out for.
Once that thought took hold, it didn’t need encouragement to fester. It lived quietly in the background of his days, surfacing whenever the noise fell away. It showed up during the pauses between innings, or the drive home from the park, or in the rare stretches of time when there was nothing he had to focus on except his own thoughts. Evan had built his life around motion for a reason. Movement kept him from asking questions he didn’t really want the answers to.
A rare scheduling quirk gave the team an early-afternoon game, followed by almost two full days off. Normally, Evan loved the days when it felt like the league had accidentally forgotten about them. He got to sleep in, workout when he felt like it, and cook an actual meal instead of heating up one of the prepared ones he got from a meal plan. For a little while, he could feel like an ordinary human being. Right now, as the last of the adrenaline from that day’s game drained out of his system, the thought of the empty hours in front of him only made him restless. So he focused on the familiar rituals he could control: stretching, recovery work, anything that didn’t require him to examine what was going on in his head.
Out on his balcony, Evan rolled his shoulder once, slow and deliberate, easing into the stretch the way the trainers had drilled into him over the years. The resistance band pulled back against his grip, and the familiar tension grounded him in the moment. He counted under his breath, holding the stretch before returning to the starting position. The rhythm was supposed to be meditative as well as restorative, helping him anchor his thoughts in muscles and breath rather than letting them drift. It wasn’t working.
The late-afternoon air was warm, but a breeze off the bay cut through it, carrying the tang of salt and the smell of fried food from somewhere down the street. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, still somehow amazed that scent and sound from the neighborhood could reach him on the fourteenth floor. Below him, Little Italy moved at an unhurried pace, and couples strolled past with shopping bags and cold drinks. Someone laughed, loud and unselfconscious, and it was familiar enough that his attention snagged on it before he could stop it. The band snapped back against his palm as he released it a beat too soon, and the sting was sharp enough to pull a quiet curse from him. Irritation flared as he rubbed his hand, and he found himself leaning over the railing despite himself.
It didn’t take long for Evan to find Rizzo, perched on the low wall in front of the entrance, loose and unguarded. CJ stood in front of him, talking with his hands the way he used to, before he laughed, head tipped back and shoulders loose. Evan’s stomach dropped like he’d missed a step.
CJ could be friends with whoever he wanted, and Evan could lie to himself that it didn’t matter that CJ hadn’t chosen him. But this had all been easier when they were on separate teams, when CJ hadn’t wanted Evan in his life at all. Evan had learned how to live with that.
He turned away from the railing abruptly and faced the sliding glass door instead, breathing through the tightness in his chest. He knew with sudden, weary clarity that if he stayed out on the balcony, he would keep watching them, and he would let his thoughts jump to places they didn’t need to go. Evan shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts and pulled out his phone, the screen lighting up in his palm.
