Chapter Nineteen
Marcos – ‘I’ll try’
“So, both of us kept our socks on.” Marcos’ voice was rough as he pulled his shirt over his head. “Which means this doesn’t count, right?”
“You’re so funny,” Sebastian called from down the hall, and a grin slipped onto Marcos’ face.
He was standing in Sebastian’s room, hand running through his damp hair now that he was fully dressed. His body still was too loose from the shower and everything before it, muscles heavy in a way that had nothing to do with training.
His eyes swept the room, fully taking it in now that Sebastian’s lips weren’t waiting for his.
It was clean and controlled, almost too put-together, but not empty.
A few clothes sat folded over the back of a chair.
A watch rested on the bedside table beside a phone charger.
The bed was ruined now, the sheets pulled loose and twisted.
Then the pictures on the shelf caught his attention.
A younger Sebastian stood with an older man and woman in one of them. His grandparents, Marcos assumed. Sebastian looked small between them, hair neat and his face serious in a way that didn’t fully match the age of him. Another photo showed a girl standing beside him, looking a little older.
Marcos stepped closer.
The frame he picked up held only Sebastian and the girl. Sebastian couldn’t have been older than nine, maybe younger, grinning at the camera with a few teeth missing. The smile was big, but something about it didn’t reach his eyes properly.
Marcos turned the frame over and saw writing on the back.
Qu?nh.
Marcos furrowed his brow, trying to sound it out under his breath, and almost dropped the photo when he heard movement in the doorway behind him.
“It still counts if you put your face into my sock,” Sebastian said.
Marcos spun, and blood rushed to his cheeks, and his eyes flicked to the floor. “Fuck off.”
“It’s cool. I’m pretty open.” Sebastian smiled, his gaze dropping to the photo. “Are you snooping?”
“I’m nosey.”
“I gathered.” Sebastian stepped forward, taking the frame from Marcos, his eyes running over it. “That’s Loren, my sister.”
“What’s the word on the back?”
Sebastian raised his brow and checked. “Oh, that’s her Vietnamese name.”
“K-why-n?” Marcos tried, and Sebastian’s mouth tightened as he stifled a laugh.
“Kinda close. Kw-in.”
Marcos hummed and watched as Sebastian placed the photo back on the shelf before looking out the window and into the night.
The game tomorrow pushed itself back into Marcos’ head then, badly timed and impossible to keep out.
Marcos knew he would have to go home. Sleep. Prepare for the game the following night. But for the first time since Sebastian had kissed him, he didn’t want to leave. Something in his gut stirred, but it wasn’t anything he was afraid of.
“So, do you also have a Vietnamese name?” Marcos asked, and Sebastian turned to face him.
“Yeah.”
“Sebastian is a fake name?”
“What? No.” Sebastian chuckled. “No, no. Sebastian is my legal name. But I also have a Viet name.”
“Which is?” Marcos pressed.
Sebastian pursed his lips, tilting his head from side to side, crossing the room to stand in front of Marcos. “A secret.”
“Really? You’re not going to tell me?”
Sebastian brought his lips to Marcos, quick and gentle, before pulling away again. “Nope.”
Marcos gaped as Sebastian walked out of the room. He followed, keeping a few steps behind him. “Why not?”
“I think it’s funny.”
“Oh, okay. Sure.” Marcos nodded, resting his hands on the kitchen counter once they reached it. “Well, you know what I think is funny?”
Sebastian raised his brow.
“You’ve never said my name right before.”
“Marcos?”
“Yep.”
“Marcos,” Sebastian said firmer.
“Wrong.”
“Marcos.”
“No.” Marcos laughed. “You need to roll the ‘R’.”
“What? Roll the—what does that mean?”
“Like, flutter your tongue behind your teeth.”
Sebastian scrunched his nose before trying, producing a wet humming sound.
“What was that?” Marcos asked, his face recoiling.
“I fluttered it.”
“You sounded like a baby trying to breathe for the first time.”
Sebastian tried again with the same amount of luck.
“You’re gonna hurt yourself.” Marcos chuckled, and Sebastian rolled his eyes.
“Whatever.”
They stayed in silence briefly, both watching each other, Marcos swinging his arms slightly at his side. The room was brighter here, cooler, with the counter between his hands and the bedroom out of sight. He could breathe without having to look at the tangled sheets.
Then the pressure of the game the next night crept in properly.
“I should probably go,” Marcos finally said. “Game tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Sebastian said quietly. “Geelong.”
Marcos caught the word before it settled. Geelong.
Sebastian had played there for two years, and Marcos knew enough to understand the game tomorrow wouldn’t sit like any other fixture.
The Rams had been his team before Melbourne, before the Mustangs had offered him more money, before ruck-rover became something he had to pretend didn’t still scrape at him.
“That’s exciting for you.” Marcos kept his voice light, but he noticed Sebastian shrug.
“Yeah.” Sebastian paused, then shook his head “Anyway, uh, I guess I’ll walk you to the door.”
Sebastian threw his arm toward the hall, and Marcos smiled, falling in step beside him as they shuffled toward it. Marcos pulled his shoes on slowly, taking his time to make sure they were on properly and tied. When he straightened, he brought his hand to Sebastian’s cheek.
“I…had a really good time,” he murmured, his thumb brushing across Sebastian’s cheek.
“Me, too.” Sebastian’s lips met his again. “Thanks for staying.”
Marcos leaned back and gave a small smile. “You made it easier.”
“True. I could’ve made you finish asking if you needed to take it in the ass.”
Marcos’ ears burned as he stared at Sebastian, who was smirking. “You’re an ass.”
“I’m fucking hilarious.”
Before Marcos could say anything else, Sebastian kissed him again, harder this time, pushing him against the wall.
Marcos went with it too easily. His back hit the wall near the door, and his hands found Sebastian’s waist before he’d properly decided to touch him. The kiss turned heated quickly. Everything in Marcos leaned forward. His chest, his hips, his hands gripping tighter at Sebastian’s sides.
They broke apart before it got too heated, both of them breathing harder than the kiss deserved.
“One day,” Sebastian muttered.
“What?” Marcos questioned, lifting his eyebrow, as his heart thumped at the idea.
“What? Nothing.” Sebastian winked, then opened the door.
Marcos watched him, his mind racing, placing images of Sebastian on top of him in the centre of his thoughts. His pants tightened, and he had to fight to shake it off.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Sebastian said, before another smirk slipped onto his face. “You good boy.”
“I fucking hate you,” Marcos said, voice low, before stepping over the threshold. Despite his words, though, a stupid smile was plastered on his face as the door closed behind him.
The smile stayed with him in the car, stubbornly sitting on his face.
He drove home with one hand resting loosely at the bottom of the steering wheel and the other against his thigh.
The streets slipped past him in quiet strips of light and shadow, headlights sliding over the windscreen, traffic lights changing for no one at empty intersections.
He didn’t put music on. He wouldn’t have been able to listen to it anyway. His mind was somewhere else and was barely paying attention to anything happening around him, other than the bare minimum required to drive.
The silence in the car didn’t press against him the way the walk home had last time.
It didn’t make everything feel heavier or every streetlight seem too bright.
There was no sweat cooling badly on his back, no shoes half-crushed under his feet because he had shoved them on wrong, no need to keep moving because stopping would let his head catch up.
His head had already caught up. When he pulled up outside the house, the front windows still held light behind the curtains, which told him his family were still awake.
They often stayed up later the night before one of Marcos’ games.
He wondered if they felt the same sort of nerves he did, but he never asked.
He sat in the car for a minute with both hands on the wheel, watching the house glow to his side.
The front fence was uneven near the gate where he’d opted to jump over it instead of using the gate.
The porch light threw a pale circle over the entrance as though it was waiting for Marcos to approach.
Marcos got out, locked the car, and walked up the path, turning the key in the door and pushing through.
“What were you doing out?” Greg’s voice met Marcos as soon as he walked in the door. “You have a game tomorrow. You need to be rested and ready.”
Marcos paused with one foot still on the welcome mat outside, his eyes squinting at the sound of his father’s voice.
His dad stood near the entrance to the hall, arms folded, wearing sweatpants and an old shirt, his face already set in the expression he used when he thought Marcos had made an obvious mistake.
The television murmured from somewhere behind him, low enough that Marcos knew Greg had probably been sitting there half-watching something and waiting to hear the door.
“I am rested and ready,” Marcos replied, and his father snapped his fingers.
“English. Jesus.”
Marcos let out a breath through his nose. “I said, I’m going to bed now.”
Usually, the snap of Greg’s fingers would have irritated him enough to answer badly. Tonight, it barely found him. He was too tired, too loose, too full of something Greg couldn’t see.
Greg grunted and walked away from the entrance, mumbling under his breath.
Marcos shut the door and slipped out of his shoes, surprising himself. He stared down at his feet, socks slipping a little on the wooden floor, his shoes lined up next to the door.
His mouth twitched anyway.
Diana poked her head out from the kitchen, looking Marcos up and down. Her hair was pulled back messily, and she had one hand braced against the doorframe.
“Are you hungry?”
“No, thanks, Mama,” Marcos said, offering her a smile, which she returned before disappearing again.
The smallness of it landed somewhere soft in him. No questions from her. Not yet. Just food offered because that was what she did when one of them came home late.
He threaded through the house, keeping his steps light out of habit. The hallway felt narrower at night. Family photos, the old side table he had to swerve to dodge. Becca’s room was shut, music pounding through the door. He almost knocked just to annoy her, then decided against it.
Further down, Paula’s room had the light on, the door ajar.
Marcos slowed before stopping outside her door, hand hovering.
He shouldn’t go in.
Paula would know something had happened. She always did. She’d look at him, wait him out, and Marcos wasn’t sure he wanted to talk about the night yet. He wasn’t sure if saying any part of it would make it easier to hold or harder to keep still.
He sighed, then he stomped hard on the ground.
Not to be loud, but to get Paula to feel it through the floor.
The door opened not long after, and she stood in the doorway, wrapped in a blanket, eyebrows knotted. They loosened at the sight of Marcos, but only slightly.
She eyed him for a minute. ‘You look weird.’
Marcos looked down at himself. Dress pants. Shirt pulled on properly but sitting wrong at one shoulder because he had dressed too quickly in Sebastian’s room and hadn’t looked at himself properly to fix it.
His damp hair sat awkwardly and unkempt, and he ran his hand through it before lifting a shoulder. ‘Can I come in?’
Paula stood to the side, closing the door as Marcos stepped inside her room.
It was smaller than his, but neater in a way that always made him feel vaguely judged.
Her bed was pushed against the wall, blanket folded back from where she had clearly been sitting under it rather than sleeping.
The desk near the window held a laptop, homework books, and a small lamp that was the only light turned on, causing the room to sit on the cusp of darkness.
The walls were plain with nothing cluttering them.
The only thing that did clutter was vinyls.
They lined one shelf and half of another, stacked in neat rows with a few covers facing outward.
Marcos had bought her the first one for her eighth birthday because he thought he was hilarious, giving his deaf sister a record she couldn’t hear.
Paula had stared at him for almost a full minute before signing that he was an idiot, then kept it anyway.
So, he bought her more the next year, and it became a tradition. She complained every time and still cleared space on the shelf before her birthday came around.
Marcos crossed the room and lowered himself onto Paula’s bed. She sat on her desk chair and wheeled it a little closer to him, blanket still wrapped around her shoulders. Her gaze studied his damp hair, then dropped to his dress pants.
‘Where did you go?’ she asked.
Marcos rubbed his palms along his thighs once. ‘To see a friend.’
‘Friend?’ Paula raised her eyebrow.
‘Not sure how else to describe it.’
Her eyes sharpened in that annoying way they always did when she was seeing more than Marcos was telling her. ‘Is she nice?’
Marcos let the question sit, not because he didn’t know the answer, but because he didn’t know if he was ready to tell Paula the truth.
Not when he was still wrapping his own head around it.
Not when Sebastian’s mouth still sat too clearly in his mind, along with the look on his face when he had thanked Marcos for staying. When he had asked him to take control.
Marcos looked at his hands.
He could lie. Though he knew Paula would be able to tell. The delay in his signing. The waver in his hands. The drop in his shoulders. There was always something she was able to latch onto.
So, he chose the easiest truth that wasn’t the whole truth.
‘Sometimes.’
Paula smiled. ‘Do you like her?’
Marcos’ hands stilled.
He had said it to Sebastian earlier. Had told him how he was feeling.
At the time, the words had sat strangely in his mouth. Not wrong. But new. Now, sitting in Paula’s room with his damp hair curling around his face and the night still warm under his skin, the answer felt heavier than it had before.
He thought of Sebastian at the door. Soft and smug and stupidly pleased with himself. Watching Marcos like he knew exactly what it meant that Marcos hadn’t run.
Marcos swallowed. ‘I think I do, yeah.’
Paula watched him, eyes sliding over his face. Then she leaned back in her chair. ‘Try not to be stupid then.’
Marcos blinked. ‘What?’
‘Don’t be stupid and mess it up.’
A chuckle slipped from Marcos’ lips as the weight in his chest eased a little.
Sebastian Nguyen had spent most of Marcos’ life being the exact kind of person he could be stupid about, which probably meant Paula’s advice had arrived too late.
‘I’ll try.’