Chapter 19
Bash
Blijf bij mij, he’d said to Adonis. Stay with me.
He hadn’t dared to say it in English. He wished he did.
He wished he had said it loudly in English, proclaiming to Adonis and the world that he wanted Adonis to stay with him, that he wanted Adonis to stay, not leave.
He wished he dared to figure out, even for himself, what he wanted.
Then he would be able to find the words to tell Adonis how he felt, how he wanted more than what they were.
How he was sure Adonis wanted more, too.
They’d said they wouldn’t be more than a hookup. They’d said that they wouldn’t let themselves come to mean more to each other than their bodies. But Adonis did mean more to him.
The more he talked to Adonis, the more time he spent in his presence, the more he wanted.
He was greedy with his time. He wanted it all.
Not just Adonis’s body, but his mind, his heart, his humor, his laughter, and his bad days.
He wanted to hold all of those things in gentle, open hands, to show Adonis how much he could cherish those things, how much he could cherish him.
Bash had never thought he would be a good boyfriend. With Adonis, though, it seemed easy. It felt like it would be the most natural thing. Just as he felt he was born to play hockey, he felt he was born to be with Adonis.
Like he was born to love Adonis.
Love wasn’t a word Bash said easily. He wasn’t afraid of love.
He just understood that it was serious. The love he had seen modeled in his family wasn’t bad, but it was practical.
The love his parents showed each other, and their children, was a pragmatic sort of love.
Love meant providing for each other; it meant establishing something stable.
Bash knew he could provide, knew that he could be stable, but that wasn’t the primary thing he wanted to offer Adonis.
He also knew that wasn’t what Adonis was looking for.
They’d barely talked about money. Sure, Adonis knew that Bash had family money, but he didn’t seem to care.
He had no interest in having everything paid for, and didn’t seem to want someone to “protect” him.
Bash didn’t feel the need to prove Adonis wrong.
In fact, he loved how Adonis was more than ready to stand up for himself and his boundaries.
He just wanted to share life with Adonis.
He wanted their texts and their emails to be in-person conversations.
When he wasn’t with Adonis, he found himself thinking of him.
When he saw something in Amsterdam that made him laugh, he wondered what Adonis would think of it.
When Lotte texted him something absurd about her developing romance with the Prince of the Netherlands, he instantly wanted Adonis’s take on it.
When a hockey game went poorly, he wanted to go to Adonis for words of encouragement.
That, he knew, was not how he usually felt about a hookup.
This, he also knew, could no longer be called just a hookup. It was something else. Whatever was between them wanted to grow into something even more solid, even more real, and Bash didn’t know if they’d given it the soil to have that growth.
He wanted it to grow like that, but he feared they wouldn’t be able to nurture it to its full potential.
In a few short months, they would graduate, and then he would move away.
They might have a few weeks at the start of the summer they could share, but then he’d be the stressed rookie of an NHL team, provided the Killer Whales still wanted him.
With his record this year after an injury, he wasn’t sure they would.
But if they did, he’d be in Seattle, and Adonis would be wherever law school took him.
Probably still Boston, because most of the schools he told Bash he’d applied to had been in New England.
He’d said he thought it would soften the blow if he at least told Anamária he’d be staying close to home for law school.
That would soften one blow, yes, but it would be all that much harder for Bash if Adonis ended up here, and he was on the other side of the country.
——
These thoughts were still knocking around his helmet during practice the next day, when he and Robbie led drills for the rest of the team. The Bellford hockey team had been doing well this year, and it was looking likely that they’d find themselves in the Frozen Four again.
“So, man, I need some advice,” Robbie said between hollering directions at the other players.
“Yeah? What’s up.”
“It’s about Clarisse.”
“Are things not going well?”
Robbie shook his head and smiled. “No, they actually are going well, and that’s what makes me nervous. They’re going really well, but we’re graduating in a few months. She’s going to Stanford after that for her PhD. We’ll be far away from each other.”
Was Robbie reading Bash’s thoughts?
“I like her,” Robbie continued, adjusting his helmet. “I might even…I don’t know…love her.”
Bash raised his eyebrows, surprised. Robbie had never been the romantic type.
“Are you serious?” he said.
Robbie laughed, embarrassed. “Yes.”
“I’m glad you’ve found someone who can tolerate you.”
Robbie gave him a shove. “C’mon, man. I really like her. I want to make something work, but I don’t know how. What am I supposed to do, move there with her?”
“Have you talked to her about it?” Sensible advice that Bash knew he should think about himself.
“No.”
“Well, then. Maybe you should.”
“What about you and Adonis?”
Bash almost tripped on the ice. “I thought we were talking about you and your problems.”
“You solved them, thank you for that, by the way, and now it’s time to talk about you.”
“I don’t want to talk about me,” Bash said.
“Well, let’s talk about you and Adonis.”
“That’s still talking about me.”
“But not exclusively. Are you going to date?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Do you want to?”
Bash didn’t answer and used a tricky pass of the puck as an excuse.
“You didn’t answer,” Robbie said helpfully.
“I didn’t want to. You’re so American,” Bash said. “Why does a physical relationship need to become romantic?” It was a pathetic defense, and he knew it. The problem was that he wanted the relationship to become romantic, and he feared that everyone saw it as much as he did.
Robbie skidded to a stop by Bash. “If you like him, say something. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”