Chapter 9 Wes
WES
The last morning of the rehab arrangement fell on a Tuesday.
I knew it was the last because Dr. Okafor had cleared me for full contact the day before, which meant tomorrow I would dress myself and lace my own skates and the fifteen-minute ritual of Luca Moretti's hands on my body would end, and the ending of it was sitting in my chest like a stone that I could not swallow and could not spit out.
He reached for my compression shirt. The same motion he'd performed twenty times.
Left arm first, guiding it through the sleeve with the careful attention of a man handling something valuable.
Then the right. Then lifting the fabric over my head, his knuckles grazing my stomach on the way up, the contact so familiar now that my body no longer flinched at it.
My body had, in fact, been doing the opposite of flinching.
My body had been leaning into the contact with a hunger that my brain was still trying to regulate.
"Ribs feel good?" he asked, adjusting the hem.
"Yeah."
"Full range of motion?"
"Yeah."
"So this is the last time."
The sentence hung in the air between us.
A factual statement. An observation about the conclusion of a medical necessity.
There was no reason for it to carry weight.
No reason for the six words to land in my chest the way they did, heavy and final, like the last note of a song you didn't realize you'd been listening to until it stopped.
"Yeah," I said. "I guess it is."
His hands were on my shoulder pads. Adjusting the straps.
His face was close to mine, closer than it needed to be, the proximity a byproduct of the mechanics of the task.
I could see the gold flecks in his brown eyes.
I could count them if I wanted to, the way Mik Volkov had counted Cole Briggs's freckles, the way people count the details of someone they are trying not to love and failing.
Seven. There were seven gold flecks in his left eye. I'd counted them on the third morning, through my peripheral vision, while pretending to look at the wall.
"Luca."
He stopped. His hands on the straps. His eyes on mine. The use of his first name did what it always did between us, which was to shift the register from professional to personal in the space of two syllables.
"Yeah?"
"I don't know what I'm doing."
"About what?"
"About you."
The locker room was empty. 6:50 in the morning, the fluorescent lights buzzing, the ice plant humming its distant drone. Just us. Just his hands on my shoulder pads and my heart doing something that defied the resting rate it was supposed to maintain.
"You don't have to know," he said. His voice was careful. Gentle in the specific way of a man approaching a wild animal. "You don't have to have it figured out. You can just be here."
"I'm not good at just being here."
"I know. You're good at fighting and baking and intimidating rookies. Being here is a different skill set."
"You're making fun of me."
"I'm making fun of the situation. You, I take very seriously."
His hands had stopped adjusting. They were just resting on my shoulders now, warm through the padding, and the weight of them was the most grounding sensation I had experienced since the last time he'd done this, which was yesterday, which was twenty-four hours ago, which was too long.
I kissed him.
I did not plan it. I did not run it through the analytical framework or the risk-assessment protocol or any of the systems I used to evaluate decisions before committing to them. My brain was the last one to the party, as Cole had said, and the body had already made the call.
I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to his and the world went quiet.
The kiss was clumsy. I want to be honest about that.
It was not smooth or practiced or any of the things that first kisses are supposed to be in the stories people tell about them.
My nose bumped his. My hands, which had been at my sides, came up and gripped the front of his polo with the desperation of a man who had decided to jump and needed something to hold onto during the fall.
The angle was wrong because I was sitting and he was standing and the height differential created a geometry that neither of us had solved.
But his mouth was warm. And soft. And for three seconds, before either of us adjusted or calibrated or made any conscious decision about what was happening, his mouth was on mine and my hands were on his shirt and the silence in the locker room was total and I was not shaking.
He pulled back first. Not far. An inch. His forehead rested against mine. His breathing was uneven and his eyes were closed and his hands were still on my shoulders, gripping now instead of resting.
"Wes." My name in his voice. Low and rough. "Are you sure?"
"No."
"That's honest."
"I'm not sure about anything. I have never been less sure about anything in my life. But I just kissed you, which means my body has apparently decided to bypass my brain entirely, and my body seems very sure, so I'm going to trust it and hope the brain catches up."
He opened his eyes. The gold flecks were brighter from this close, or maybe I was imagining it, or maybe proximity changed the way light worked when it hit the eyes of someone you were falling for.
"If we do this," he said, "I need you to know something. I don't do casual. I don't do experiments. I don't do 'let's see where this goes' with someone who might decide next week that this was a phase and go back to pretending I'm just the equipment guy."
"That's what your ex did."
"That's what my ex did. And I survived it. But surviving something twice is harder than surviving it once, and I'm not interested in being someone's trial run."
"I can't promise you I have it figured out. I don't. I don't have a label for what I am or what this is. But I can promise you that this is not casual and it is not an experiment and the way I feel when you touch me is not a phase."
"How do you feel when I touch you?"
"Like the shaking stops."
Something broke open on his face. Not tears. Something underneath tears. The specific expression of a man hearing something he needed to hear and hadn't dared to hope he would.
He kissed me. Different from mine. His kiss was not clumsy. His kiss had the confidence of a man who knew what he was doing and who he was and what he wanted, and what he wanted was me, and the certainty of that was so foreign and so overwhelming that my whole body responded.
He cupped my face in both hands and tilted my head and kissed me properly, deep and slow, his tongue touching my lower lip and then my tongue, and the sensation traveled from my mouth through my chest to the base of my spine and I made a sound that was involuntary and raw and came from the same place the bread came from.
Somewhere below the surface. Somewhere real.
"We should stop," he murmured against my mouth. "We're in the locker room."
"I know."
"Anyone could walk in."
"I know."
"I'm not stopping."
"I noticed."
His hands moved from my face to my neck, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw, and I pulled him closer by the front of his polo until he was standing between my knees.
The position was charged with an intimacy that I felt in every part of my body.
His hips were at my chest height and his hands were in my hair and he was kissing me with a thoroughness that suggested he had been thinking about this for longer than three weeks and had a backlog of wanting to work through.
"Not here," he said, pulling back. His lips were red. His eyes were dark. The polo was stretched from where my fists had been gripping it. "My apartment. After practice. If you want."
"I want."
"Wes."
"I want. I don't know what I'm doing and I don't have a label for it and my brain is currently staging a full-scale revolt against my nervous system. But I want you. That's the one thing I'm sure about."
He pressed his forehead to mine one more time. Breathed. Then he stepped back and smoothed his polo and picked up his coffee and said, in a voice that was almost steady, "Your left shoulder pad is crooked."
"You're the one who knocked it crooked."
"Details." He grinned. The real one. The one that made rooms warmer and hearts do things they weren't supposed to do at 6:55 in the morning. "Fix your gear, Chen. You've got practice in thirty-five minutes."
He left. I sat at my stall and fixed my shoulder pad and drank my tea and tried to remember how to be a hockey player when every cell in my body was busy being a man who had just kissed Luca Moretti and was going to his apartment after practice and was terrified and alive in equal measure.
Practice was a blur. I played well. I played clean.
I did not fight anyone, which was notable because Carolina's enforcer spent the entire scrimmage running his mouth and ordinarily I would have shut it for him.
Instead I skated. I defended. I moved the puck.
Coach Callahan looked at me with an expression I couldn't read, which might have been approval or confusion or the early stages of a migraine.
After practice. Shower. Change. The drive to Midtown, to Luca's apartment, to the half-unpacked chaos of a man who had been in Atlanta for six weeks and had organized everyone's life except his own.
He opened the door. Changed out of his work polo into a soft grey T-shirt and jeans.
Barefoot. Hair still damp from his own shower.
The tattoo on his shoulder blade visible through the thin fabric.
I could see the shape of it now. A compass rose.
The kind sailors used. Pointing in four directions at once.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
"You want to come in, or are you going to stand in the hallway like a beautiful refrigerator?"
"A what?"
"Inside joke. Never mind. Come in."