Chapter 10 Luca
LUCA
Wes Chen courted me with carbohydrates.
I don't think he knew he was doing it. I don't think the word "courting" existed in his vocabulary, and if it did, it would have been filed under "unnecessary social constructs" alongside small talk and team-building exercises.
But that is what was happening. Wes Chen, who communicated primarily through silence and controlled violence and the strategic deployment of baked goods, was courting me, and the courtship was conducted entirely in flour and butter and the particular language of a man who didn't know how to say "I'm thinking about you" but could say it in sourdough.
The first loaf arrived on a Thursday, wrapped in a clean dish towel, left in my equipment room stall with no note.
No explanation. Just bread. I knew it was from him because nobody else on the team baked, and because the bread was perfect, the same golden-crusted, open-crumbed sourdough that I'd eaten in his kitchen, and because when I looked across the locker room and caught his eye, he looked away approximately one-tenth of a second too fast, which was the Wes Chen equivalent of a love letter.
The second loaf arrived on Monday. This one came with butter. Homemade. In a small glass jar with a lid.
The third arrived on Wednesday. Bread, butter, and a jar of what turned out to be homemade strawberry jam that was so good I ate it with a spoon standing in the equipment room at 7 AM and briefly considered proposing to the jar.
He never mentioned the deliveries. I never mentioned them either.
We had developed a system of communication that existed entirely outside of language, a parallel channel that operated on baked goods and glances and the specific electricity of two people who had touched each other on a couch in Midtown and were now navigating the aftermath in a workplace where touching was not an option.
The workplace part was difficult. At the facility, Wes was exactly who he had always been. Quiet. Contained. The only visible change was that he no longer flinched when I handed him his tea in the morning. A small adjustment. Invisible to anyone who wasn't looking.
I was always looking.
The evenings were ours. We spent most of them at his apartment because his apartment had the kitchen, and the kitchen was where Wes was most himself.
He cooked for me. Not bread. Actual meals.
Chicken and rice that was better than it had any right to be.
A stir-fry that he made with the precision of a man following a chemical formula.
One night, an attempt at pasta from scratch that was terrible in a way that endeared him to me more than if it had been good, because watching Wes Chen fail at something and not storm out of the room was evidence of trust.
"This is bad," he said, staring at the pasta, which had the texture of damp cardboard.
"It's not bad. It's ambitious."
"It's bad. Don't patronize the pasta."
"The pasta doesn't have feelings."
"The pasta has feelings and I've hurt them."
I laughed. He looked at me the way he always looked at me when I laughed, which was with an expression of startled wonder, as if the sound was a natural phenomenon he hadn't expected to witness up close.
And then the corner of his mouth moved, the tectonic shift that I had learned to read as the Wes Chen version of joy, and we abandoned the pasta and ordered Thai food and ate it on his couch with our legs tangled together, which was a position that two weeks ago would have sent his nervous system into full retreat and now produced only a slight elevation in his breathing rate.
Progress. Slow, incremental, measured in the millimeters of distance between his body and mine on a couch.
He texted me now. This was a development. Wes Chen, who had previously used his phone exclusively for the alarm clock and the weather app, had begun sending me text messages. They were not romantic. They were not chatty. They were Wes.
6:47 AM: The bread is proofing. It will be ready at 4.
11:23 AM: Your left skate blade has a burr. I noticed during practice. Don't use it until I fix it.
9:14 PM: I made soup. There is extra.
Each text was a complete sentence. Proper punctuation. No emojis, ever. The texts of a man who treated language as a precision tool and refused to dilute it with cartoon faces. They were the most romantic messages I had ever received, and they were about bread and skate blades and soup.
I saved every one of them.
The physical relationship was developing at Wes's pace, which was the pace of a man walking across a frozen lake and testing every step before committing his weight.
Since the couch, we had progressed to kissing that lasted longer than three seconds, to hands that explored without urgency, to a specific evening where Wes had taken my shirt off with the focused concentration of a man performing surgery and had spent fifteen minutes mapping my back with his hands, tracing the compass rose tattoo with his fingers, learning the geography of my body with the same methodical intensity he brought to hockey film.
We had not gone further. I had not pushed. Pushing Wes was like pushing a wall. The wall didn't move and you bruised your shoulder. The wall had to decide, on its own timeline, to become a door. My job was to be there when the door opened.
But the secrecy was starting to wear on me.
I had not expected this. I had agreed to the discretion without hesitation because I understood why it was necessary.
Wes was not out. Wes was not even sure what he would be coming out as.
The team didn't know. His family didn't know.
His understanding of himself was still being assembled, and asking a man to go public with an identity he hadn't finished constructing was unreasonable and unkind.
I knew all of this. I believed all of this. And still.
Still, there were moments when the secrecy scraped against something raw in me.
When Jonah made a joke about setting Wes up with someone and Wes said nothing and I said nothing and the nothing sat between us like a stone.
When a reporter asked me if any of the players were particularly easy to work with and I said "they're all great" instead of "one of them bakes me bread and touches my back like I'm made of something precious and I am falling in love with him. "
When I walked past Wes in the hallway and treated him like any other player and felt the specific, familiar ache of being someone's secret.
Ryan had kept me a secret. For a year and a half, I had been the thing he did in private and denied in public, and the hiding had eroded something in me that I had spent three years rebuilding.
I had promised myself, after Ryan, that I would never again be the person someone hid.
That my love was not a thing to be ashamed of.
That any man who wanted me would have to want me in the light.
And here I was. In the dark again. By choice. By compassion. By the understanding that Wes's journey was not Ryan's performance and that patience was not the same as complicity.
But understanding something intellectually and feeling it in your body are different experiences, and my body was starting to register the secrecy as a familiar pain.
Wes noticed. Of course he noticed. The man who read hockey plays three steps ahead and cataloged the weight distribution of my skating stride was not going to miss the shadow that crossed my face when Jonah made the joke.
We were in his kitchen. He was making bread.
I was sitting on the counter swinging my legs and watching him knead, which had become my favorite spectator sport because watching Wes's hands work dough was hypnotic and beautiful and doing things to my cardiovascular system that I was choosing not to measure.
"You're quiet," he said.
"I'm always quiet when you bake. It's like watching a meditation."
"You're a different kind of quiet. This is the quiet from the alley. The one that means something is wrong and you're deciding whether to tell me."
I looked at him. He was looking at the dough, not at me, which I understood was intentional.
Wes offered space for difficult conversations by not making eye contact, because eye contact added pressure, and pressure was the enemy of honesty.
He had learned this somewhere. Maybe from himself.
Maybe from the penalty box, where you sat alone and stared at the ice and processed things without anyone watching.
"The secrecy is hard for me," I said.
His hands slowed on the dough but did not stop. "I know."
"I don't need you to come out. I don't need you to tell the team or your parents or anyone. I need you to know that it's hard for me, and that the hardness isn't about you. It's about history."
"Ryan."
"Ryan. And the way hiding feels, regardless of the reason. The way it makes you smaller. The way every public interaction becomes a performance and every private moment becomes the only real thing, and you start to feel like the real thing is the one that has to be hidden."
He stopped kneading. Turned to face me. His hands were covered in flour and his expression was open in the way it only was in this kitchen, the guard down, the fortress unmanned.
"I am not hiding you because I'm ashamed," he said. "I need you to know that."
"I do know that."
"I'm hiding because I'm still..." He searched for the word.
Wes did this when the vocabulary of emotion exceeded his practiced range, pausing while his brain located the right term in a lexicon he was still building.
"Assembling. I'm still assembling the picture of who I am.
And until the picture is complete, or at least recognizable, I don't know how to show it to people. "
"You're showing it to me."
"You're different."
"Why?"