Chapter 20
Chapter twenty
Kieran
Iprinted the document at a FedEx on West Randolph at four in the afternoon.
Three dollars and eighty cents for the complete written record of how I'd dismantled two futures with a single signature.
My condo was clean when I got home. I'd wiped the counters at six in the morning when my bed tired of me and kicked me out. I'd done the dishes because my hands needed something with a clear endpoint. Gerald was on his coral, picking at nothing, ruling over territory the size of a paperback novel.
I set the pages on the kitchen table. Squared the edges against the surface. Moved my laptop beside them, open to the file in case Heath wanted to see the original.
He had texted that morning.
Heath: After practice. Your place.
I changed out of practice clothes and into jeans plus a fresh shirt that didn't smell like equipment spray. Checked the pages. Sat on the couch for eleven minutes.
At 6:40, the buzzer sounded.
I let him in without speaking. He came through the door carrying cold air and the chemical residue of the rink that clung to everyone for hours after practice—rubber matting, menthol, the sharp mineral edge of ice that never fully leaves your hair.
A bruise on his left forearm had cycled to green-yellow, four days old, collected in a board battle.
His eyes locked on mine. I remained planted in place.
No hug. No contact. Six feet of kitchen between us and seven pages on the table.
"You good?" he asked.
"I don't know."
He looked past me to the pages.
"What's that?"
"Everything."
I pulled out a chair for him. He didn't sit immediately. Instead, he studied the setup, pages squared, and the overhead kitchen light on while the rest of the apartment remained dim.
He sat.
I leaned against the counter across from him. Four feet of tile between us.
"I wrote everything down. Trade calls. Cap math. Grad school timelines. What I knew and when I knew it. What I decided and why." I paused. "You can read it. I won't talk unless you ask me something."
Heath pulled the pages toward him and started reading.
He read without rushing. I watched because I couldn't not watch.
His jaw tensed on page two, the trade section. He stopped on page four. That was the grad school section.
He read slower there. Each line required an extra beat before he could move past it.
"You had already applied," he said.
"Partially. I'd finished the statement of purpose. Letters of recommendation were the outstanding component."
"And the window closed."
"Mid-January. I didn't notice until after I'd signed."
He looked at me.
"You didn't notice."
"I was paying attention to something else."
Heath turned to page five.
It was the most difficult for me. I'd written it at two in the morning after Heath walked past my stall in the locker room and looked at me for the first time in three weeks. The detachment I'd maintained across four careful pages simply quit.
I'd revised it twice. Both times the raw version survived because the raw version was true, and after twenty-three years of polished performance, I owed him at least one document without editorial restraint.
I loved him before I understood what it would cost. I signed because the alternative was watching him disappear from a roster slot he'd earned. I did it without telling him because I was afraid he'd refuse, and I was right to be afraid, and being right didn't make it mine to decide.
I am my father's son. I looked at someone I love and chose for him because trusting him with the full picture meant accepting an outcome I couldn't control.
Controlling the outcome was the point. I see that now.
His reading speed didn't change on that page. He absorbed it at the same steady pace he'd maintained from the beginning, and somehow that was worse than if he'd stopped. He was giving every sentence equal weight, including the ones I'd bled into.
He finished page seven. Set the stack down. Kept one hand flat on top of it, fingers spread.
"You gave up Scripps."
"Yes."
"For me."
"For us. I just did it wrong."
"I don't want to be someone's sacrifice," he said.
"You're not," I said. "You're a choice."
"You should've let me decide with you."
"I know."
I had no defense. I'd written seven pages of context and explanation and structural logic, and the only response that mattered was two words.
Heath exhaled. The set of his shoulders loosened.
He sat back. The chair creaked.
"We don't fix this by pretending it didn't happen."
"No."
"We fix it by doing it differently."
He slid the document toward the center of the table, halfway between his chair and my counter. Evidence filed.
I pushed off the counter and took one step forward. Stopped within arm's reach but didn't close the distance that remained.
Heath turned his face upward toward mine. I reached for his jaw. Two fingers along the hinge. His skin was warm. The muscle beneath my fingertips was tight.
He covered my hand with his and held it against his face for a single beat. Then he guided it down and set it on the table beside the document.
"Ask," he said. "Tell me what you want."
His voice was steady.
"You," I said.
"Then ask."
"Can I touch you?"
My voice came out quieter than I'd planned.
"Yes."
I put my hand on the side of his neck. Felt his pulse through my palm.
He leaned into my hand, and the slight pressure of his weight against my fingers reached something behind my ribs that I'd been holding rigid since the night I signed the extension.
A physical brace, the kind your body builds around an injury to keep you upright, exhausting to maintain.
I kissed him.
Slow. My mouth on his with my eyes open until his closed. His lower lip between both of mine. He tasted of coffee. His mouth was warm, unhesitating, and I stopped thinking about what came next.
I pulled back an inch.
"I want to be closer."
"Then be closer."
I stepped between his knees where he sat. His legs bracketed mine, his hands finding my hips to steady the distance between us. He tipped his head back, and I kissed the underside of his jaw, the tendon that shifted when he swallowed.
I reached for the hem of his t-shirt and then waited.
"Yeah," he said.
I pulled it over his head. The fabric caught on his ear, and he huffed a sound that was almost a laugh, the first one I'd heard from him in three weeks.
Heath's chest was bare beneath the kitchen light. I knew his body: the freckles scattered across his shoulders and the bruise on his forearm that continued beneath his shirt as a faded shadow curving along his left side. It was the shape of someone's shoulder from Tuesday's board work.
I put my palm flat against his chest. His heart pounded, steady.
"Keep asking," he said, and covered my hand with his, pressing it harder into his chest.
I leaned down and kissed his collarbone. The hollow at the base of his throat and the ridge of his shoulder where I could still see the faintest discoloration from a crosscheck three weeks ago. I put my lips on the place where it had been and felt his breath stutter.
His fingers swept into my hair and held without pulling. An anchor.
"Your turn," he said against my ear.
He stood. The chair scraped back against the tile.
He was still taller than me standing, arms, legs, and sharp angles.
He pulled my shirt over my head in one motion, and then his hands landed on my shoulders and traveled down my arms, thumbs pressing along the muscle of my forearms, reading me by feel.
"Bedroom," I said.
The hallway was twelve steps long. He rested his hand on my lower back, warm and steady. The bedroom was dark except for the ambient light of the city and the blue-green glow of Wendell's tank on the nightstand.
We fell onto the bed the way we always did, in an awkward heap. His elbow caught the headboard. My knee pressed into his thigh with enough force that he grunted.
"Furniture still hates us."
"My apartment's worse," Heath said.
"Your apartment is actively hostile. My condo is just indifferent."
He laughed. Short and real, still rough at the edges from weeks of disuse.
I braced above him on one forearm as Heath lay on his back. The light from Wendell's tank washed across his chest in slow blue-green waves. His eyes were dark, pupils dilated, and he was breathing through his mouth now. Slow. Audible.
"What do you want?" he asked.
"I want to touch you everywhere. And I want to take my time."
"Then take it."
I started with my mouth on his neck, slow enough to feel his pulse speed up against my lips.
His jaw. The spot below his ear where his breath caught when I stayed too long.
Down the center of his chest, following the path of the tank light across his skin.
He arched into it, his stomach contracting as I kissed below his navel.
I traced the edge of the bruise along his side with my thumb—carefully, reading the border between discoloration and undamaged skin.
He flinched once, then settled. Let me explore it.
Let me acknowledge what it cost his body to do what it did every night, standing in spaces designed to punish his brand of stubbornness.
I moved lower. Let my hands tell him where I was going before I arrived. When I hooked my fingers under his waistband, I waited.
He raised his hips.
I wrapped my hand around the base of his cock and took the head into my mouth. He was hot and heavy against my tongue, and I heard him stop breathing. He placed a hand on the back of my head, fingers spread.
I went slowly. Listened for the catches in his breathing, the short inhale that meant more, and the held breath that meant close. When his thigh tensed against my shoulder, I adjusted. When his fingers tightened in my hair, I stayed.
"Kieran—"