The Rookie's Rival

*"Bennett. You planning to pitch today, or just stand there staring at your phone?"* Noah has read the first three words of his sister's message and that is enough to lodge a stone behind his ribs. *Dialysis moved up.* He shoves the phone into his duffel without finishing it. The locker room smells like pine tar and old sweat. Dale Hargrove is holding court at the far end with a plug of tobacco in his cheek and eight years in the organisation behind him, explaining that the curveball is dead and he will be calling fastballs until somebody proves him wrong. Noah keeps his head down, finds locker forty-seven, and lets his fingers find the seam of a baseball on the shelf. He rubs it once, then twice. Then his phone goes again. *Dr. Patel says there's a possible match. Not sure yet. Don't get excited.* At McCormick Field the sun is still low across the outfield and the Blue Ridge Mountains sit hazy in the distance, and Noah stopped noticing them about three weeks into his first season. The man leaning on a bat in the infield is new. *"Javi Reyes. Traded over from the Cardinals organization. You're Bennett, right? The lefty with the fastball that's supposed to be something special."* Javi watches one slider and tells him he is dropping his shoulder on the release, which is both correct and extremely annoying, and then invites him to cards. He is a shortstop who has seen a lot of pitchers miss their spots. He is also, by any honest reading of the depth chart, the last person Noah should be spending time with. Because the general manager is Evelyn Torres, who does not call pitchers to her office with good news, and who says things into her phone like *if he can't stay healthy through June, he's not worth the roster spot.* And then a hospital rings during a game, and Lily's kidney function has dropped again, and the number is seventeen percent. A baseball romance between two men on a minor-league roster where everybody is competing for the same handful of jobs: a pitcher trying to hold a mechanical flaw and a family emergency in the same set of hands, an infielder who keeps showing up and staying, a veteran catcher who calls everyone kid, and a front office doing arithmetic on people. The romance is closed-door.