Chapter 13 Derek
We beat Detroit in Detroit.
I came home drained but still buzzing from the excitement of a win. The apartment was dark except for the blue flicker of the TV.
Théo was asleep on the couch.
He had pulled the throw blanket from the back of the cushions and draped it over himself, his skate bag and backpack still by the front door where he’d dropped them.
Aspen was curled at his feet like he’d been there all evening, which knowing Aspen, he had.
The TV was playing some reality baking competition at low volume, the judges speaking in hushed tones that had apparently not been enough to keep Théo awake.
I stood in the doorway for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
He looked different asleep. Peaceful. The walls he kept up during waking hours were gone, and without them he looked younger. Softer. Hand pillowed under his cheek, lashes dark against his skin. His mouth still curved slightly downward—even unconscious, apparently, he had opinions.
There was something almost unbearably young about him. Something that made me want to—
Aspen lifted his head. Assessed the situation. Decided it required a full body shake that rattled his tags loud enough to wake the dead.
Théo startled upright, blinking, the blanket sliding off his shoulder. His hair was pushed to one side and his eyes were unfocused and his voice, when he spoke, was even raspier with sleep than usual.
“Shit. What time is it?” He looked around the room. “Did you just get back?”
“It’s one in the morning. Go back to sleep.” I set my bag down quietly. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
He sat up further, rubbing his face with the back of his hand, the throw blanket falling away entirely. Long sleeved t-shirt despite the late summer humidity. Pajama pants. He had his sleeves pulled over his hands again in that habitual way, fingers curled into the fabric.
He looked smaller like this. Unguarded. Sleep soft. Without the silences and deflections, something almost fragile. I wondered if he was cold. If the AC had been running too high.
And then, unbidden, with absolutely no input from the rational part of my brain: you should go keep him warm.
I cleared my throat.
“I’m going to crash,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay. But if you want to head home, let me call you an Uber first. I don’t like the idea of you on the train at this hour.”
He was still mostly asleep, processing on a slight delay.
He looked at me for a moment with those dark, unfocused eyes, and then nodded and settled back against the cushions.
Aspen, who had apparently fulfilled his duty by waking everyone up, resettled himself at Théo’s feet with elaborate ceremony and put his chin back down.
I turned off the TV. The apartment went darker.
“Good night, Théo.”
No response. Already gone.
I turned and went to my bedroom.
I did not think about how it had felt, coming through that door. The apartment lit by the blue flicker of the TV, Aspen in his spot, someone asleep on the couch. The specific domestic warmth of coming home to something other than silence.
When Samantha watched Aspen, the routine was different. I’d drop him off before road trips and pick him up the next day. Practical. Efficient. It also meant I always came home to an empty apartment and I’d filed that under totally fine without actually examining what was underneath it.
I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and thought about Mackenzie.
The way it had felt to come home to her, early in Chicago when everything was new and hard and she was the one constant that made sense of it.
I had loved her since I was 16 years old.
I didn’t know how to want someone who wasn’t her, hadn’t needed to learn, and then she had made the decision for me in the most brutal way possible and left me with a blown knee and a concussion and a gaping hole in my chest.
I hadn’t dated since. Hadn’t wanted to. Hadn’t had the bandwidth, or the trust, or whatever it was that made a person willing to hand someone else that kind of access again.
That was the explanation. That was the whole and complete explanation for the weird pang in my chest when I’d seen Théo on the couch.
I was lonely. That was all. A lonely person coming home to find the apartment occupied and feeling the ghost of what that used to mean.
That was ridiculous. He was my teammate’s younger brother. He was 21 years old and he had fallen asleep watching a baking competition and I happened to have a comfortable couch and a dog who had apparently adopted him.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling.
The keep him warm thing was a fluke. A misfiring.
My brain producing random output the way brains did when they were tired and travel lagged and had consumed an airport sandwich that was not sitting well.
I had spent the better part of the last year largely alone, by choice, because the alternative required something I didn’t currently have.
That kind of isolation did things to a person’s wiring.
Made the brain reach for warmth where it found it, regardless of—
Regardless of what, exactly.
I turned that question over in the dark for a moment and then set it down carefully, the way you set down something fragile that you’re not sure about yet.
Théo was not the same person as the one I watched on those YouTube videos. That much was certain. Broken in ways I didn’t fully understand yet and wasn’t sure he’d let me understand.
I should go keep him warm.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum like I could physically locate whatever had generated that sentence and have a word with it.
I was not going to examine this right now.
I was tired and slightly confused by my own brain and the airport sandwich had definitely been a mistake.
I was going to go to sleep and in the morning Théo would be gone and Aspen would need walking and I would go to practice and everything would be straightforward and uncomplicated and fine.
I closed my eyes.
Dreamed of dark hair and pale skin and a downturned mouth that was, undeniably, lush enough to be its own problem.