Chapter 5 Wes #2
"His name was Ryan. He played defense. We were together for a year and a half, which in college is basically a lifetime.
I thought it was the real thing." He paused.
His leg started swinging again, a self-soothing rhythm.
"He cheated on me with a teammate. Another defenseman.
I found out because someone at a party thought I already knew and made a joke about it.
A joke. That's how I learned that the person I loved was sleeping with someone else. Through a punchline."
"He was an idiot," I said.
Luca blinked. The words had come out of me with a conviction that surprised us both, because I did not typically offer unsolicited opinions about other people's romantic histories, and because the conviction behind the statement was fueled by something that I was not ready to name.
He reached across the space between us and put his hand on my forearm. A comfort gesture. Instinctive. The kind of touch that warm people offered without thinking, the physical vocabulary of a man who had grown up in a family where contact was language.
I pulled my arm back. Not slowly. Not gently. A flinch. The hard, involuntary recoil of a body that had not been touched in kindness by another man in longer than I could calculate.
Luca's hand hovered in the empty air where my arm had been. His face did something complicated. Not hurt, exactly. Recalibration. The expression of a man who had reached for a door he thought was open and found it locked.
"Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to..."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. I overstepped. I do that sometimes. I assume people want the same kind of comfort I want, and that's not always true, and I should have asked instead of just..." He pulled his hand back to his lap. "I'm sorry, Chen."
The training room was very quiet. The fluorescent lights hummed. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers on my forearm, the warmth of them, the specific pressure of a touch that had meant I'm here and that my body had interpreted as danger.
"It's not you," I said. The words came out rougher than I intended. "I don't... people don't touch me. Not like that. I'm not used to it."
"Okay." His voice was careful now. Recalibrated. The warmth was still there but it had pulled back a step, creating a distance that he hadn't wanted to create and that I hadn't wanted either but that my body had demanded. "I won't do it again. Not without asking."
"You don't have to ask."
"I think I do. And that's okay. People have different languages, Chen. I'll learn yours."
He hopped off the counter and busied himself with equipment, and the moment passed.
But something had shifted. Not between us.
Inside him. I had watched Luca Moretti be wrong about something for the first time, and the way he handled being wrong, the immediate accountability, the zero defensiveness, the willingness to adjust without making the adjustment into a performance, told me more about him than six weeks of biscotti and tea and daily kindness had.
He was not a man who was never wrong. He was a man who was wrong sometimes and owned it immediately. That was rarer and more valuable.
"Was that a compliment?" he said from the equipment cage, his voice carefully light, testing whether the room could hold normal again.
"It was a fact."
"Wes Chen. A laugh and a compliment in the same day. I should get you injured more often."
"Please don't."
"I'm kidding." His smile softened. "But thank you. That's... yeah. Thank you."
The training room was quiet. The overhead lights hummed.
My ribs ached with every breath and my hands were resting on my thighs, still for once, and across the room a man who had told me about his broken shoulder and his broken heart was sitting on a counter looking at me like I was someone worth looking at.
I had spent my entire career being looked at by crowds.
Eighteen thousand people in an arena, watching me fight, watching me bleed.
None of those looks had ever made me feel seen.
Visible, yes. Evaluated, assessed, judged.
But seen, in the way that seeing implies being known, being understood, being recognized as more than the function you perform? Never.
Luca Moretti was seeing me. Through the silence and the murder face and the bruised ribs and the bread I baked at midnight and the hands that shook after fights. He was seeing all of it, and the terrifying thing was not that he was looking but that he wasn't looking away.
"Moretti."
"Yeah?"
"The ex. Ryan. The one who cheated."
"What about him?"
"He was an idiot. And I don't say things I don't mean."
The gold flecks in his eyes caught the fluorescent light and I held his gaze for three seconds longer than I should have and then looked away, because three seconds was the limit of what my nervous system could sustain, and beyond that limit lay territory I was not equipped to navigate.
He hopped off the counter. "Same time tomorrow?"
"Same time tomorrow."
He walked out. The training room settled back into its functional silence, all chrome and rubber and the faint smell of antiseptic. I sat on the table and looked at my hands.
They were steady. No tremor. No shaking.
I had laughed. I had called a man an idiot as a form of emotional defense of another man's honor. I had held eye contact for three seconds with someone whose eyes had gold in them.
Small things. Individually meaningless. Together, a pattern.
I did not bake that night. I went home and I ate dinner at the table instead of the counter, which was a change I did not examine, and I went to bed at a reasonable hour, which was another change I did not examine, and I slept without the midnight detour to the kitchen.
The bread starter sat in the refrigerator, unfed, and I felt a small pang of guilt about this, as if the starter's feelings could be hurt.
Then I realized I was projecting emotions onto a jar of fermented flour, and I turned off the light.
The sticky note was on my nightstand now. I had transferred it from my pocket without making a conscious decision to do so. "For Grumpy." Blue ink. Smiley face. The handwriting of a man who believed that sugar and butter and small acts of kindness could solve structural problems.
Maybe he was right.
Maybe the structure was the problem.
-e