Chapter 16
The next two weeks I thought about then fucking do it for once approximately eleven hundred times.
The Morr Roar came down from the upper bowl three separate times, which was either a record or close to one. By the time we hit Broderick's, the whole team was running on the electricity of a game that had gone exactly right.
I was supposed to be celebrating. I was, technically. I had a drink, of water, but it kind of looked like vodka, and a table, and Dylan, which was more than most nights.
Cross was near the wall.
He'd positioned himself where he could see the room, drink in hand, back to the corner, and he was wearing—I clocked this without meaning to—dark trousers, a pale gray button-down, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Practical. Nothing flashy.
The thing about Nathan Cross was that he was objectively good-looking in a way that didn't require any effort from him. Black hair. Pale skin. Blue eyes that you could see from across a room. A jaw that had apparently been engineered specifically to make people think about it.
I knew all this. I’d known all this.
What was new was that, from what I could tell, he was also slightly drunk.
The edges of him were softer than usual.
The precise internal management had slipped a notch, just one, just enough.
He was still Nathan Cross—still still, still contained—but tonight he seemed more like a man who had temporarily stopped holding something very heavy and wasn't sure what to do with his hands.
"You've been staring at doc for twenty minutes," Dylan said.
"And you’ve been babysitting me for just as long."
Dylan snorted. “Longer.”
Then Dylan set his beer down like he had something to say and was deciding how to say it.
"You haven't touched your drink,” he said.
I picked up my drink. “It’s water.”
Dylan let that sit for a second. "Did you know Cross used to work for the Portland Ravens?"
I turned. "What?"
"Before he came to us." Dylan had his elbows on the table, turned slightly toward me. "Three, four years back. I was still in juniors but I heard it from Voss, who heard it from someone on the Ravens staff."
"What happened?"
"Player got hurt," Dylan said. "Career ending.” He paused. "From what I heard it wasn't Cross's fault. Surgery went fine, recovery went wrong. But Cross took it hard. Left after the season."
"Who was the player?"
"Don't remember the name.” Dylan picked up his beer. "Why?"
"Just—" I stopped.
"That's probably why he's always up your ass," Dylan said.
I choked on my water.
The undignified, full-body thing. Dylan watched me with the patience of someone who had seen worse, which he had, most of it my fault.
"You good?" he said.
"Fine," I said. "Went down wrong."
The thing was—Dylan knew about something from Cross’s past. Voss knew.
Whoever Voss heard it from knew. The Ravens staff knew.
There was apparently a whole network of people who had information about Nathan Cross, who had been in rooms with him and watched him work and seen what happened when something went wrong, and I was not in that network.
I knew he drank tea. I knew his cat's name.
I knew what he looked like working out at seven in the morning. I knew the sound he made when I got past his guard.
But I didn't know about Portland. I didn't know about the player. I didn't know what it had cost him or how long he'd been carrying it.
Everyone else seemed to know something about Nathan Cross.
I wanted to know more.
I wanted to be the person who knew things about him. I wanted to sit across from him and ask about Portland, and I wanted him to answer, and I wanted to be the person he answered.
And if he wanted to talk about moving from Portland to Boston?
I knew something about moving. About going somewhere new and building the version of yourself that worked there. About leaving the old version behind in whatever house you'd just moved out of.
The Morrisons had been my twelfth place.
I got up and crossed the bar.
Cross saw me coming. He watched me approach with a slightly-slower-than-usual focus, like he was recalibrating.
"Wesley," he said.
"How many of those have you had?" I asked.
"That’s not your business," he said.
"Oh no," I said.
Cross looked at me. "What."
"You're symptomatic."
"I'm—"
"Follow my finger." I held up my index finger and moved it slowly left to right in front of his face. "How many fingers am I holding up."
"Wesley—"
"What's today's date? What's the name of the Hawks’ starting center. Do you know where you are right now?"
"I know exactly where I am."
"That's what someone who doesn't know where they are would say." I tilted my head. "Do you have a penlight on you?"
"I don't carry a penlight to bars."
"You absolutely carry a penlight to bars." I reached toward his jacket pocket.
He caught my wrist. Not hard. Just stopped it, his hand around my wrist, and we were suddenly close in the way the bar kept making us close, and his ears were slightly red, which was new information that I was filing immediately.
"Wesley," he said.
"Nathan," I said.
He suddenly let go, and I stood next to him against the wall.
The bar went on around us, the team in various states of celebration, the music doing its thing.
For a moment we just stood there. I was aware of him in the way I was always aware of him.
The warmth and size of him, but also something new, the image of a player on the Portland Ravens.
"I heard you used to work for the Ravens," I said.
Cross's grip on his glass shifted slightly. "Where did you hear that?"
"Around. Locker room. The streets. You know how it is."
"So Dylan."
"I feel like I don't know anything about you," I said.
“Do you need to know anything about me?”
I flinched.
"I've been in your apartment. I know your cat. I know you drink tea.” I paused. "I know what sounds you make when—"
Cross's hand came up and covered my mouth.
Flat palm, directly over my mouth, solid and certain, the way he did everything. The bar kept going around us. Someone across the room laughed at something. Cross's hand was warm, and he was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on Nathan Cross's face before.
His ears were still red.
I didn’t move.
Nathan was blushing. Standing in a bar with his hand over my mouth, ears red, jaw set, blue eyes slightly unfocused.
Oh. I should have realized it earlier.
Nathan was drunk.
That was why the hand. That was why the ears. That was why he was standing in a bar with his palm flat over my mouth in public instead of just saying don't finish that sentence in the voice that made me sit down without deciding to.
Nathan Cross was drunk and blushing and his hand was on my face.
It was so fucking cute.
I was smiling behind his palm. I couldn't help it. I could feel the smile happening and there was nothing I could do about it.
His blue eyes narrowed.
He knew I was smiling.
I reached up and took his hand off my mouth. Not fast. Just moved it, held it for a second, put it down. Cross let me. He looked at his hand afterward like it had done something without consulting him, which it had, which was very interesting information about the current state of Nathan Cross.
"Tell me something then," I said. “So I can know something about you.”
A pause. Cross looked at the room. His drink. The middle distance.
“Fine,” he said.
I waited. I waited some more. Just when I was almost ready to jump in and say something to fill the silence—
"I don't know what to do with you," he said.
It came out quiet. Not angry, not frustrated, just true.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean exactly that." He turned the glass in his hand. "I've tried to—" He stopped. Started differently. "You're in my head. Constantly. In a way that is"—a pause—"not useful."
I looked at him.
"It pisses me off," he said. "It has always pissed me off. Since the beginning."
"The beginning of what?"
"The beginning."
I stared at him. "Like, of this season?"
Cross looked at me.
"Nathan. This season, right? Like, the first game this—"
"Your first game," Cross said behind clenched teeth. "With the Wardens."
Wait, what?
My first game with the Wardens was not this season.
My first game with the Wardens was two years ago.
My rookie year. I had been twenty-one years old, and I had been so wired I'd had four energy drinks before warm-ups.
I had scored on my second shift and the Morr Roar had come down from the upper bowl for the first time and I had thought: this is it, this is the thing, this is what I was made for.
Cross had been at the bench two years ago, on my first night as a Warden, and he had apparently—
"Two years," I whispered, mostly to myself.
"Yes."
"For two years you’ve—"
"I'm aware," he said through clenched teeth.
Why didn't you ever—" I stopped. Tried again. "You've been thinking about this since my first game. Why didn't you ever—"
"You were twenty-one," Cross said. "You are twenty-three now."
"Okay," I said. "And?"
"I'm thirty-five."
"I know how old you are."
"You date models," Cross said. "And influencers. And. . . stylists. And—" He stopped. "You don't date—" He moved his hand. The gesture covering all of him.
"Team doctors?"
"People like me," Cross said. "You don't date people like me."
I stared at him for a long moment.
"Nathan," I said.
"I'm aware it's not a rational—"
"Nathan."
"Yes."
"You're an idiot," I said, with a warmth that took the edge off it entirely.
Nathan looked down into his drink.
"Possibly," he said.
His ears were still slightly red, and the bar was loud around us and the team was twenty feet away and I didn't know what to do with any of it.
"Nathan," I said.
"Don't," he said. Not unkind. Just not now. Not here. Not like this.
I didn't.
So I drove him home.
Not to my apartment. To his, because that was the right call and I made it without being asked, and Nathan navigated the passenger seat with the careful movements of a man who was functional and knew it and was preserving it deliberately.
I got slightly lost leaving the bar because I'd been too busy watching Nathan navigate to the door to notice which exit we were using. Then I turned the wrong way out of the parking lot, and then I had to turn around, and Nathan watched all of this from the passenger seat.
"Do you know where my building is?" he asked after a while.
"I'm . . . figuring it out.”
"Take a left," he said.
I took a left.
"You should have taken that left four blocks ago," he said.
"I know that now."
We didn't talk much after that. The city did its thing outside the windows.
At his building I got him inside, and into the elevator. Nathan stood next to me in it with his eyes straight ahead and said nothing, and I stood next to him and said nothing, and it was the most comfortable elevator ride we'd ever had.
Leo was on the couch when we came in.
He looked at Nathan. He looked at me. He got up, stretched with the full commitment of a cat who had been asleep for hours, and walked over and sat on my feet.
"He likes you," Nathan said.
"Of course he does.”
Nathan looked at Leo on my feet with an expression that was—something. I didn't have a word for it yet.
I got him water. I made sure he drank it. I walked him to the bedroom the way you walked someone somewhere when you were being careful about it, not touching, just present and close, and Nathan moved through his own apartment like a man who was tired and knew it and was almost there.
He sat on the edge of the bed.
I looked at him.
"For what it's worth," I said, "you can throw up on me if you want. I feel like I owe you one."
Something happened at the corner of Nathan’s mouth. Not a laugh. The thing adjacent to it.
"I'll pass," he said.
"The offer stands."
He looked at me. Those blue eyes, less focused than usual, more present than usual, both things at once.
"You don't have to go," he said. To the ceiling. Not looking at me.
I didn't say anything.
"Leo likes you," he said.
I glanced down at Leo, who had followed us down the hall and was now sitting in the doorway looking at me with his warm brown eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
Nathan lay back on top of the covers without getting undressed, which I was going to let happen because it wasn't worth the conversation, and I went back to the living room and took the couch and Leo climbed up and arranged himself on my chest like an animal who had decided this was his location and wasn't taking questions.
The apartment was quiet.
I stared at the ceiling.
Since the first game, I thought.
The first game. Nathan had been carrying this since my first game, when I’d thought he was the Ice Doc.
Two years of Nathan looking at me like I was a problem he was managing.
Two years of me looking at Nathan like he was the problem.
We had both been wrong about what kind of problem the other one was.
Leo purred on my chest, a small engine, steady and warm. Somewhere down the hall Nathan was asleep or getting there, and the apartment smelled like clean soap, and I was lying on Nathan Cross's couch in the dark thinking since the first game.