Chapter 14 Green
GREEN
It takes me all of four hours and seventeen minutes to completely lose my mind.
After I drop Ash at his building, after the silence, after the hooked pinkies and the way his breath caught like maybe he wanted to say something but didn't, I drive home, turn the radio up so loud it could melt the windows, and burn every muscle memory I have into the steering wheel.
It's like my body won't accept it happened, not really, not until I see my own reflection in the car window and notice the red, raw chapping of my lips, the flush still high in my face.
I want to text him before I'm even out of the lot. I want to say, "Are you okay?" or "Did you get inside safe?" or "Did that even mean anything or am I having a very elaborate breakdown?"
But I do none of those things, because the rules are still in effect, and if I'm going to be the anchor, if I'm going to prove to Ash and the world that I'm not just another idiot chasing the next trauma high, then I have to be the one who waits.
It doesn't matter. He texts first.
It comes in at 11:18 p.m., a single period, like he's started and erased the message half a dozen times before giving up.
I stare at it for a full minute. I send back: "?"
He replies, "Just making sure you didn't crash your car thinking about my mouth."
I laugh so hard I almost drop the phone on my face. I type: "Not yet. But the night is young."
There’s a pause. Three dots bubble, vanish, then: "Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow," I write, and then because I want him to know I mean it, "Can't wait."
He doesn't reply after that, and neither do I. I lie on my back, arms over my head, and think about the beach, the way our mouths fit together, the way his hand trembled against mine.
I think about the risk, the thousand ways it could go wrong, and realize that not a single one of them scares me as much as the idea that it might stop.
———
We fall into a rhythm, the way people who grew up on routines always do.
Every day that week, we meet somewhere public, somewhere safe.
Green Lake again, then the running trail by the locks, then the ancient, splintery benches outside the Ballard bakery where Ash’s mom used to take him on the weekends.
It's always early or late, never when anyone from the team might see. We pretend it's just more therapy, just two guys grinding their way through grief and guilt and whatever else the world dropped on their heads.
The rules hold for a week. No physical stuff. No risk.
But the rules are bullshit, and we both know it.
On Thursday morning, it’s pouring, the kind of rain that soaks you through in three steps.
I show up to the park in a jacket that might as well be made of Kleenex, hair dripping into my eyes.
Ash is already there, hood up, water beading on his lashes, book tucked under one arm.
We run, because that's what we do, but the path is half-flooded and my shoes fill up with mud in the first five minutes.
After a mile, we stop under a footbridge to breathe, and Ash’s face is red from cold and the effort, his chest heaving like he just sprinted the length of the rink.
“Nice weather,” he says, voice shredded.
“You love it,” I say, and I mean it.
He grins, teeth bright in the gray. “Yeah. I really do.”
We stand under the bridge, shoulders brushing, rain coming down like a curtain on either side of us. It’s the safest place in the world. For a minute, neither of us says anything.
Then, slow, like he’s daring the universe to stop him, Ash lifts his hand and cups my cheek. The fingers are freezing, but the shock of it is pure heat.
He looks me dead in the eye, voice low. “You good?”
I nod, barely breathing.
He leans in, soft, careful, and kisses me. It’s not like the first time, not scared or accidental. It’s deliberate, like he’s staking a claim.
I kiss back, hands on his shoulders, and for a second the rest of the world is a rumor, the rain, the cars, the sound of our own pulse in our ears.
We pull apart, but only by an inch.
“This is going to fuck us up,” he says, and he’s smiling.
“Already has,” I say. “Not sure I care.”
The next day we meet at his place, because the city can drown in itself for all we care.
We order takeout and pretend to watch hockey highlights, but mostly we end up on the floor, tangled up in each other, laughing at every dumb thing either of us says.
He reads me a paragraph from Borges, something about infinite libraries, and I swear I almost tear up at the sound of his voice.
It’s so easy. It’s so dangerous. I can’t get enough.
———
There’s a freedom to it, but there’s a pressure too, a tightness in my chest every time we step outside the bubble.
The first real test is at the gym.
It’s a Saturday, and I’m late, because the city is a parking lot and Ash said “don’t worry about it,” but I worry about everything, always.
By the time I get there, he’s already deep into his circuit, sweat turning his shirt see-through, arms shaking on the last set of overhead press.
I watch him from the entryway, the way his shoulders bunch and the veins stand out on his forearms.
He looks so alive, so much more than he ever did at practice or in the locker room. I stand there too long, staring.
I walk over. He sees me, grins, and it’s the secret kind, the one that’s just for me.
“You stalking me?” he says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Sue me.”
He laughs, but just as I’m about to make a joke about his form, someone behind me claps me on the shoulder. It’s O’Doul.
“Webb!” he says, voice way too loud for the gym. “Didn’t peg you for a weekend warrior.”
I stiffen, a kneejerk reaction. Ash freezes too, for a split second, then goes back to reracking his weights, pretending nothing is off.
O’Doul’s talking at me, but my brain is running a thousand calculations, how close did he see us standing, was my face flushed, did I look at Ash the way I wanted to, is this the day everything blows up?
Ash saves me. “Hey, O’Doul, you coming to poker night?”
O’Doul grins, already distracted, and launches into a story about how he’s going to bankrupt the whole team, how last time Ash ended up owing him three Red Bulls and a ride to SeaTac.
Ash plays along, and I do my best to laugh at the right spots, but my heart’s still slamming, my hands a little shaky on the dumbbells.
O’Doul leaves, eventually, and the air in the gym clears. Ash glances at me, a flicker of worry in his eyes.
“You good?” he says, same as under the bridge.
I nod, but I’m not. Not really.
“Maybe we should—” I start, but he cuts me off, quiet.
“I don’t care, Darius. Not about him, not about any of them.” He’s not smiling this time. “You’re the only one I give a shit about.”
I want to tell him he’s wrong. I want to say, “The team matters,” or “This is bigger than us,” but I can’t. Not when he looks at me like that.
“Okay,” I say. “Me too.”
He puts his hand on my shoulder, just for a second, just long enough for me to feel the electricity.
Then we go back to the lifts, pretending we’re just two guys trying to out-bench each other, and not the center of a secret that could break the city in half.
———
I start sleeping again.
Not a lot, but enough that I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, mouth dry, replaying the shooting in a loop of violence and panic and aftermath.
Dr. Sharma notices right away.
“Your blood pressure is down,” she says, eyes bright over the rim of her glasses. “You’re answering questions before I ask them.”
I shrug. “Maybe I’m getting better at this.”
She smiles, but it’s the kind that says she knows I’m hiding something. “Or maybe you’ve found something worth staying for.”
She doesn’t push. She never does. Instead she asks about the team, about practice, about my mom, about the shooting. When I mention Ash, I almost catch myself, but I just say, “He’s good. He’s getting better, I think.”
“That matters to you?” she says.
I think about it. Really think.
“Yeah. It does.”
She nods, writes something down. I wonder if she knows, if she’s seen this a hundred times before, if she’s waiting for me to get brave enough to say it out loud.
I almost do. But then I hear my own voice, the one I used to use at post-game interviews, the one that always dodged the real question.
“Is it wrong to be happy after something so awful?” I ask.
She looks at me, not judging. “It’s not wrong,” she says. “It’s human. Sometimes the only way to survive is to let yourself want things, even if they scare you.”
I sit with that. I let it settle.
When I leave, I text Ash: “You want to run?”
The reply comes back in seconds: “Always.”
———
The next few weeks, we get creative.
We meet at libraries, at Asian noodle places way across town, at the climbing wall where neither of us is any good but the chance of running into a teammate is almost zero.
We get good at hiding, at the calculus of who might see, at the art of standing close without making it obvious.
Sometimes I forget and I touch his arm, and he goes still, a deer in the headlights, but never pulls away.
We talk about everything and nothing: the book, the playoffs, the way the world feels tilted and dangerous, but also like it’s just waiting for us to be brave enough to take it.
Every night, I think about telling my mom. Every night, I think about what she’d say, how she’d hug me so hard my ribs hurt, how she’d feed me rice and beans and say, “The world can get bent, as long as you have someone who makes you feel real.”
But I wait. I wait because the stakes are too high, because the closer I get to Ash the more terrified I am that if I say it out loud, the universe will find a way to take it back.
———
The night it almost breaks is a Thursday, just before curfew.
There’s a party at O’Doul’s place, because there’s always a party at O’Doul’s place, and this time the whole team is invited, plus some girlfriends, plus a couple of hangers-on who show up just for the free beer and to see if they can get Raz to do a keg stand.