Chapter 7 #2
We peel off down the hall. The noise dulls to a manageable thump.
The first door is a bathroom (occupied, laughter behind it), second on the left is a bedroom where two guys and a very determined dog are wrestling over a slice of pizza, third is a laundry room that smells like detergent and damp cotton. He keeps going.
At the end of the hall, there’s a back door.
He pushes it open, and cold air breathes us in.
The tiny yard is a slab of concrete and a dead grill, a cracked Adirondack chair, and a fence with a loose board that taps against itself in the wind.
The Christmas lights out here don’t work at all. It’s blessedly dark.
We step out. The door clicks shut behind us, and the party becomes a heartbeat through the wall.
“It’s not much,” he says, like he owes me an apology for his yard.
“It’s perfect,” I say, and mean it.
Our breath ghosts in front of us. Somewhere two houses over, a dog barks twice.
I lean on the railing that isn’t a railing, just a wobbly two-by-four someone nailed to the concrete at some point.
He stands beside me, hands in his pockets, then out, then in again.
Without the indoor glow, his edges look softer.
He’s still immaculate, somehow, even with hair dried into a not-quite-curl at the ends and a sweat-darkened collar.
We don’t talk at first. The quiet isn’t awkward. It’s… deliberate. He looks up—the smear of city sky is a darker shade of nothing, one plane blinking a slow red dot. I look at him. It’s reflex at this point.
“You leave tomorrow?” he asks.
“Stupid early,” I say. “Cheapest flight, death o’clock. My mother will still be up, because she’s a witch who never sleeps.”
He huffs—a smile without teeth. “How long?”
“Week.” I nudge him with my elbow, gentle. “You?”
“Home after practice Monday,” he says. “A few days. Back before New Year’s.”
“Can’t miss drills. Coach would weep.”
“He doesn’t weep,” he says, deadpan, and we both laugh quietly at the same time.
A breeze sharp enough to be almost a warning slips through the yard. He shivers. It’s small, but I catch it. I offer my jacket before I can overthink it. He stares at it, then at me, then shakes his head.
“I’m fine,” he says. But he steps closer anyway, heat settling between our shoulders like an idea that doesn’t want to leave.
“Your guys are nice,” I say. “Louder than my amp, but nice.”
“Yours are louder,” he counters.
“True,” I allow. “We come with ear protection.”
He looks at me then, directly, like he’s clicking something into place. In the dim, his eyes look darker; I can’t tell if that’s the light or the fact that we’re outside of everyone else’s story.
“Thanks for coming,” he says.
“Wouldn’t miss the last game before break,” I say. “I’m practically a fan now. I understand at least three rules.”
He smiles, slow. “Yeah? Which three?”
“Traveling, fouls, and that whatever you did in the last minute was rude to the other team and you should apologize.”
The laugh that comes out of him is quiet and unguarded and gone too quickly. His shoulder bumps mine—light, accidental. I don’t move.
We fall silent again. The house thumps. The fence clicks. The night feels like it might look away if we do.
“Rafe,” he says, then stops like the word tripped him.
“Yeah?”
“I’ve never….” He swallows. I feel it like a tug in the center of my chest. “I shouldn’t—”
I step in just a fingertip. Not crowding or even trapping, but enough to make the answer easy if he wants it, easier to refuse if he doesn’t.
“It’s just us,” I say, voice low. “No audience.”
His breath ghosts my cheek now. He’s close enough that I can count the freckles that only show up when he’s not under arena lights. Close enough to smell laundry soap and whatever clean thing he wears that isn’t cologne. His hand comes up and then lowers again, like it forgot what hands do.
“I’ve never,” he says again, and he’s not panicking. He’s telling the truth like he’s putting a puzzle piece on the table and asking me not to throw it away.
“Okay,” I say. “We don’t have to.” I lift a shoulder. “We can stand here and make fun of your whiskey selection.”
He huffs—half a laugh, half a breath. “We don’t have whiskey.”
“Even worse.”
Silence loosens its grip an inch. He looks at my mouth. It’s fast. If I blinked, I’d miss it. But I don’t blink; I was made for this kind of detail. His jaw tightens, then relaxes. His shoulders drop a millimeter, like he decided something he doesn’t have a playbook for.
“Show me,” he says, so quiet I feel the words more than hear them.
“Sure?” I ask, because surety is important.
He nods. It’s small, but it’s enough.
I move slowly, so there are no surprises.
One step. My hand lifts, palm up, so he can see it, so he can choose.
He looks at it, then at me, then sets his own hand there.
It’s warm and steady despite the tremor in his fingers.
He has to angle down to do it—he’s got inches on me, and the bend brings him closer, makes him seem even larger in the narrow strip of space between wall and fence.
I settle my other hand lightly at his waist, above his pocket, not pulling, just a point of contact so he knows where I am.
Even under layers of denim and cotton, he’s solid.
Broad. Built like the captain he is. His breathing goes higher, not faster.
I can hear the house’s bassline through the wall and the quicker one under my palm.
“Okay?” I check.
“Yeah,” he whispers.
I lean in, closing the last inches until I’m tilting up into him. He lowers, bracing against the wall like he’s folding himself down to meet me. And then I press my mouth to his. Not hard, not asking for anything he hasn’t already given me. Just a kiss. The shape of one. The possibility.
He freezes. Not a flinch, not a shove—just locked, like his body hasn’t figured out the next command. For a second, I wonder if I misread it, if I should back off, but then I catch the sound of his breath leaving him, rough and shaky, like he’s been holding it since the world began.
His hand comes up to my shoulder. It doesn’t grip, doesn’t drag me closer. It just lands there, fingers stiff, uncertain. Testing. Like he’s never done this before, not this way, not with another man. Hell, maybe never with anyone.
I angle a fraction more, slow enough to give him space. His jaw works like he’s swallowing something too big, but then—hesitant—he leans in the last half inch. Our mouths meet again, and the spark we’ve been pretending not to carry flares to life.
It’s not fireworks. It’s a match in a dark room.
But that little flame feels like everything.
I pull back just a fraction. Not enough to break the spell.
His eyes are wide, pupils blown, blinking like he’s trying to memorize every second.
His lips are fuller, pinker, and he runs his tongue over the bottom one too fast, like the impulse startled him as much as me.
His shoulders are rigid, his hand trembling where it still rests on me, as if he’s not sure whether to let go or hold tighter.
“I—” He starts, stops, swallows again. His voice is uneven, a rough scrape in his throat. “I shouldn’t.”
“Because?” I ask. Not as a dare, more like an invitation to set the fear down somewhere outside himself.
“Because I’m… me.” He winces at the words, like he knows they don’t explain half of it. “Because people expect things. Because once something exists, you can’t pretend it doesn’t. Because—” His breath shudders out, softer now. “Because I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Those are good reasons,” I say honestly. “Also terrible ones.” I angle my head, making sure he can see my grin in the dark. “We don’t have to name it. We don’t have to label it. We can just… not be miserable for five minutes.”
He huffs another tiny laugh that ghosts my mouth. “You make it sound easy.”
“It isn’t,” I say. “But it doesn’t have to be impossible.”
He looks at the closed back door, at the dark yard, at me. That small war plays over his face again—duty versus want—and want wins by the slimmest of margins. He leans in first this time, like he’s testing whether gravity works the same way twice. It does.
We kiss again, longer, the pause between us collapsing until there’s nothing but heat and the slow press of his mouth against mine. It’s not practiced—hell, it’s clumsy in a way that makes my chest ache—but it’s real.
His hand tightens on my shoulder like he’s steadying himself, then slides up, fingers grazing the back of my neck.
The touch sends a shock straight down my spine, electric and raw.
My own hand fists in the fabric at his waist, tugging him that fraction closer, and I feel it—the tremor that runs through him.
My pulse hammers everywhere at once: in my throat, in my fingertips, in the hollow just beneath my ribs.
The world shrinks down to this—his breath mingling with mine, the scrape of stubble against my lip, the way his chest rises and falls unevenly, trying to find a rhythm.
When we finally break apart, it’s only because oxygen insists on being part of the equation. We’re both breathing hard, foreheads almost touching, and my body is lit up like I just stepped offstage after a set that left me wrung out and alive all at once.
He doesn’t freak. He doesn’t run. He just stands close, breathing like he just finished a sprint.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” I say, because facts help, because if I don’t say something real, I might say something stupid. And I’m also fully aware we’ve already had this conversation, but I’m grasping here. “Stupid o’clock. Back in a week.”
He nods against my breath. “Practice Monday. Home after.”
“Text me,” I say.
“I will.”
Noise swells behind the door—someone opening it down the hall, laughter spilling out, a voice calling his name with a smile in it. We step apart an inch, then two. The air feels colder, which is rude, honestly. I squeeze his hand once before I let it go.
“You okay?” I ask.
He thinks about it like it’s a test, then nods. “Yeah.” A beat, then his voice drops, rough and embarrassed. “But… I can’t tell anyone about this. I just… can’t.” His eyes flick away like the words burned coming out.
It twists in my gut, sharp and sour, like hitting a wrong note in front of a packed bar.
But I get it. Hell, I get it in ways he doesn’t even know.
I’m bi, Mexican, living in a country that only likes its immigrants if we’re convenient and palatable.
I’ve spent years code-switching, slipping into skins people expected me to wear, learning what to hide and when. So yeah, I get it.
Doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting.
And damn if the word doesn’t stick in my head like a chorus: can’t, can’t, can’t.
Three notes, sharp and final. The kind of word you want to bend, break, turn into something else until it stops cutting.
My pen hand itches like I should be writing this down, scribbling lines about how his can’t feels more like a won’t—how it rubs against the way he kissed me like he’d been starving.
“Okay,” I say, steady as I can, because what else do you say when someone’s still figuring out how to breathe?
We go back in together, the bass swallowing the yard’s hush, the party folding around us like we never left.
Someone thrusts a cup into my hand; someone else tells Ollie to come settle a debate about whether Jason’s dunk was better than it looked.
He slides back into captain mode, easy as a jersey.
I slide back into band guy, easy as a smirk.
But his shoulder finds mine once in the press of bodies, a bump that doesn’t have to happen. He looks at me just long enough to make the room tilt. No one notices. Or maybe they do and decide to be kind.
I take a sip of something that still tastes like headaches and sugar and grin into it, because beneath the noise, something quiet exists now.
And once something exists, you can’t pretend it doesn’t.
Not when your chest is already writing songs about it.
Not when every strum of a bass string is threatening to turn can’t into something louder, something true.