Chapter 12 The Pact
THE PACT
It takes me a full five seconds to realize he’s not going to laugh.
That this isn’t a setup for some savage locker room chirp or a weird endurance contest or a side bet between friends, “let’s see who can be the more awkward homo in public before one of us melts.”
He just stands there, in the thinning fog and the ruined morning, book still clutched in his hand, looking at me like he just confessed to a murder and is waiting to find out if I’m a cop.
The sun is up now, or at least the suggestion of it.
I can see every bead of sweat on his hairline, the tight set of his jaw, the way his chest heaves just a little too fast for a guy who’s been running since he was twelve.
My own heart’s thudding like a blender full of rocks, which would be a great metaphor if my head could process metaphors right now.
There are exactly three thoughts in my skull, and they all crash into each other at the intersection like a demolition derby.
The first one is so obvious I blurt it before I can stop myself: “What about Nia?”
My voice is hoarse. It doesn’t sound like me. Maybe it never did.
He blinks, and his whole face changes, like the question hadn’t occurred to him and now it’s the only thing he can think about.
The silence lasts for two, three, maybe six years. Then he sets the book down on the wet concrete, like it’s something holy he can’t risk ruining, and says, “I broke up with her.”
There’s no wind on the waterfront but the world lurches sideways anyway. “When?”
“Two days ago. She… She knew before I did, I think. Or at least she wasn’t surprised.” He grimaces, the way you do when you bite down on a tooth you already know is cracked. “We were just… surviving. She said I needed to figure myself out. That I needed to stop lying.”
It lands. It lands like a goddamn train.
He broke up with her for this. For me.
The wall in my head, the one built out of “He’s straight, he has Nia, this is just a post-shooting freakout, nothing is going to happen, you need to shut this down,” crumbles in a heartbeat.
Every memory I have of the last month, the gym, the steam room, the car rides, the way he’d hold my stare just a millisecond too long, the way he always waited for me at the exit, rewrites itself in real time, every time I edited out the subtext, every time I convinced myself I was crazy.
I want to puke. I want to kiss him. I want to go back in time and shake myself by the throat.
The second thought, Tinder. The apps. Every match sitting on my phone right now, a graveyard of “just friends” and “not really my type” and “let’s be chill and see what happens,” all of them instantly eclipsed by this moment, like they were just shuffling paper while the bomb was ticking under the desk the whole time.
There’s a nurse from Harborview who sent a selfie with a thumbs-up.
There’s a bartender with a beard that looks like it could sand wood.
There’s a marine biologist who literally offered to show me the otter enclosure after hours, and I ghosted her because, what, I was scared? No. I was waiting.
I was waiting for this.
I want to say, “None of that mattered.” I want to say, “I deleted the apps.” I want to say, “You’re the only person I’ve ever wanted like this.” But the words stick.
They clog.
Instead I just stare at his shoes, soaked from the run, and wish I knew how to not fuck this up.
The third thought comes with a punch of pure dread, and it’s so strong I almost blurt it out loud: the team.
Two guys on the same roster.
After the shooting, after Caleb.
With the media still camped out on our practice facility and the locker room held together with duct tape, caffeine, and trauma bonding, what happens if this gets out?
What happens to the new guy, the eternal sub, the one everyone just barely tolerates on a good day?
What happens to Darius, the anchor, the captain in all but name, if they find out he dumped his “forever girlfriend” for a benchwarmer who can’t even stay on the same line two weeks running?
I picture O’Doul’s face, the twitch in Raz’s jaw, the raw violence of a locker room when it smells blood.
I picture Coach Vasquez, the only woman I know who can reduce a grown man to rubble with a single look, and imagine her doing the math, realizing she’s got a PR nightmare brewing before the end of the season.
I picture my phone lighting up with a thousand notifications, none of them from the person I want.
That’s the killer. I’d still do it anyway.
But all I manage is, “This is a terrible idea.”
He barks out a laugh, but it’s not mean. “Yeah. I know.”
We stand there, the two of us, the city waking up behind us, the gulls doing their screaming toddler impression above our heads.
My hands want to do something, punch a wall, pull at my own hair, maybe reach out and take his. Instead, I jam them in my pockets, because that’s where my feelings go when I don’t know what else to do.
“Let’s walk,” I say, and it comes out too fast, but he nods and falls in beside me.
The path hugs the bay, slick with old rain, the benches empty except for the one where a homeless guy is using a plastic bag as a pillow.
Darius’s stride matches mine, down to the microsecond. We walk like that for a minute, not touching, but the space between us is a live wire, crackling with every second of silence.
I want to ask him what changed. I want to ask why now, why here, why me. I want to ask if he’s scared.
But the truth is I already know the answer, because it’s the same for me. It’s always been the same for me.
The air smells like salt and diesel.
The cold snaps at my face and makes my teeth ache. The sun is up now, really up, painting everything in a sterile, uncompromising blue.
I glance sideways. His face is set, eyes fixed on the horizon, but the corner of his mouth twitches every time I look too long.
“You ever think we’re just…” I trail off, no idea how to finish.
He waits. “Fucked up?”
“Yeah,” I say, and the word tastes like relief. “That.”
He shrugs. “Everybody’s fucked up. Some people just have better cover stories.”
He says it like a joke, but I want to take it apart, see how it works. I want to ask him what his cover story was, before this. I want to ask him if he’s happy, if this is what he wanted, if he ever doubted it for a second.
The truth is, I don’t think he has. I think I’m the only coward here.
We hit the bench overlooking the pier. It’s our bench now, even though we’ve never claimed it, never needed to. It’s the only place in the city that feels like a pause, a safe zone, a place where nothing has to be decided.
I sit first. He sits next to me, not touching, but close. The book is still in his hand, and he opens it, flips to a random page, pretends to read.
We watch the water. We don’t talk.
His knee bounces, a tiny earthquake. My hands drum the railing, quiet, nervous.
The city noise ramps up behind us, but here, it’s just the sound of the tide sucking at the rocks and the occasional warble of a ferry horn.
After a minute, he says, “I’m terrified, Ash.”
I want to say, “Me too.” But I don’t. Instead, I say, “You were always the brave one.”
He turns to look at me, really look, and I see it, the mix of fear and hope and raw animal hunger that’s been hiding under the surface since we met.
“Not about this,” he says. “Never about this.”
We sit with that for a long time.
I don’t know how to be here. I don’t know how to hold this moment without breaking it.
So I do the only thing I can think of. I reach out, slow, careful, and cover his hand with mine. Just for a second.
Just long enough to say, “I’m here. I want this. I don’t know how to do it, but I want it anyway.”
He closes the book.
He doesn’t let go.
The city keeps waking up. The world keeps spinning.
We sit like that, two idiots with nothing to offer each other but the thing we were both most afraid of.
For a minute, it’s enough.
———
We stay like that for a long time, or what feels like a long time, our hands together on the bench, not really holding but not letting go either.
The skin-on-skin contact is barely there, but it might as well be a live wire running through the cement.
Darius stares at the horizon, his thumb twitching in micro-motions against my knuckles, the way you’d test a surface to see if it burns.
I’m hyper-aware of my own pulse, my shitty breathing, the fact that at any second someone from the team could walk by and see us, and that every part of me wants to keep holding on anyway.
The sun’s higher now, the fog burned off, and a gang of gulls have decided the air above our heads is their personal stadium.
The city across the water is waking up, delivery trucks whining, a crew of guys in orange vests setting up traffic cones, a jogger with a dog that looks like it’s made entirely of PTSD.
For a while, the world outside is loud enough to keep us from having to talk. We just sit, and breathe, and don’t say anything, and that silence is its own kind of relief.
Eventually, though, Darius breaks it.
“I’ve never done this before,” he says, so quiet I almost don’t catch it.
“Yeah,” I say, “me neither,” and the words feel wrong the second they’re out, so I add, “Not like this. Not with someone who matters.”
He looks over, really looks, and I have to fight the urge to squirm. “You’ve…?”
He doesn’t finish, but I know what he means.
“Nothing past ninth grade,” I say. “Jake Halpern. JV locker room. He kissed me and I nearly dislocated his jaw.”
Darius snorts, then bites it back. “You always know how to defuse a situation.”
“Yeah,” I say. “My superpower is making everything less sexy, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
He lets that hang. He’s waiting for me to get serious. I almost never do, but for him, I’ll try.
“I’ve known since forever,” I say, finally. “But I always figured… I don’t know. That it wasn’t real. That if I ignored it long enough, it’d just go away.”
He nods. I can tell from his face that this is hitting closer to home than he’s letting on.
“You?” I ask. “Was it always Nia, or…?”