Chapter 8
"No?”
Cross looked over his shoulder at me. “That’s what I said. You will clear your schedule and continue to be monitored today. By me.”
Oh hell no.
I looked at Cross standing at his counter in his kitchen in his apartment where I had woken up this morning and made a series of discoveries about myself that I was not prepared to spend an entire day in close proximity to.
Being a hundred percent real, I had no intention of sticking around thinking about how I was attracted to a man who hated my very existence.
"I understand that you feel some kind of responsibility for me—"
“I don’t.”
“Oh. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I take responsibility for my own actions, anyway.
And, um, thanks, I guess, for—" I gestured vaguely at the apartment, the tea, the eggs that were still happening on the stove.
"Last night. The shoes. I'm replacing your shoes.
Those were nice shoes; we've established that.
" I put the mug down. "But I cannot spend my entire day off sitting in your apartment. "
"You can," Cross said. "And you will."
"I feel fine, doc. You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to miss the next game or jeopardize anything for the team."
He gave me a look over his shoulder that communicated, without words, exactly what he thought of that assessment.
There was just no way that after spending the last ten minutes in his gym doorway having a private crisis about his bicep curls, and the idea of an entire day of this, an entire day of Cross being Cross in his own space, unhurried and precise and occasionally shirtless—was —
That was a problem.
"I'm not—" I stopped. Started again, because I had to find the version of this that didn't include I can't stay here because my body seems attracted to you and my self-control is already compromised. "I'm not spending the whole day—"
Benched.
The word I wanted to say was benched. Cross had done it before. It was the end of my rookie year, the playoffs, and a decision I'd spent the whole summer hating him for. He was doing it again. Different room, same move.
We hadn't talked about it. We'd never talked about it. It just lived there, between us.
He benched me then. He was trying to bench me now. Same move, different setting.
"I’ve improved, you said so yourself," I said. "I am significantly better than last night, which I acknowledge was not my best performance—"
"You vomited," Cross said, "multiple times."
"Once," I said. "It was once."
"It was twice." He turned back to the stove, which he'd been standing at when I'd started this conversation. "The second time was in the bathroom. You were barely conscious."
I had no memory of the second time. That was probably the point.
I pressed my mouth together and looked at the kitchen island and thought about being an adult with full agency over his own choices, which was a thought I was finding difficult to sustain while sitting shirtless and hungover at Cross's counter with a headache I was describing to myself as manageable.
He put a plate in front of me. There were eggs and something that was probably toast and what appeared to be an organized pile of vegetables at seven in the morning or whatever time it was. Everything was precise. Portioned. Positioned like it had been thought about.
It looked completely inedible.
That was the hangover. Probably. The hangover was doing something to my perception of the plate, making it look like a medical document rather than a meal, and under normal circumstances I would have eaten it because Cross had made it and there was something about Cross making something that implied it would be exactly what it was supposed to be.
Currently it looked like a hostile act.
"I can't eat that," I said.
"You can."
"My stomach—"
"Your stomach needs something in it." He set a fork next to the plate. "Eat.”
I picked up the fork. I looked at the eggs. The eggs looked back at me. I put the fork down.
"You still have my phone?"
Cross reached into his pocket and put my phone on the counter. No preamble, no conditions, just set it down. I picked it up.
The screen was a disaster.
Seventeen texts from Jenkins, which I was not going to read in sequence because life was short. Four from Searcy. One from Knox that said only call me which meant Knox had his concerned face on and had decided to be economical about it.
Six missed calls from Dylan.
The phone rang while I was looking at it.
Dylan.
I picked it up and slid off the stool and walked back down the hallway toward the bedroom. Whatever Dylan was about to say, he was going to say it at volume and Cross's kitchen didn't need to hear it.
"Hey," I said.
"Where are you."
Not a question. Dylan didn't do questions when he was in this mode. He did statements with question marks attached, which was different.
"Good morning to you, too."
"It is not a good morning. It is mid-day and—”
“I think, it’s like, seven?”
“Whatever. I've been up since four because Jenkins called me at four— Jenkins, Wes, he called me.
Do you understand how bad it has to be for Jenkins to call me?
Nobody could tell me where you were, and you didn't answer your phone, and I thought—" He stopped.
I could hear him deciding not to say what he'd thought. "Where are you?"
"I'm okay," I said. "I'm being looked after."
"That is not an answer to the question I asked."
Cross's bedroom was the same in the morning as it had been last night, the same precise order, the same made bed with the corner of the blanket I'd been under turned back exactly the width of one fold, the same single book on the nightstand.
I picked it up without thinking. The Peloponnesian War. What the fuck was that?
"You know what your problem is?" Dylan said, which meant the tirade was entering its second phase.
I knew this phase. I had a whole relationship with this phase.
"Your problem is that you have never once in your life had to deal with the consequences of anything.
You do something stupid and someone fixes it.
You get hurt and someone carries you. You disappear for a night and people lose their minds worrying while you're off being—" he stopped.
I could hear him deciding. "Being looked after. "
Something small and warm pressed against my ankle.
Leo had followed me. He was sitting on my feet, looking up at me with those brown eyes. Young cat, I could tell up close, still a little leggy, not quite grown into himself. A year old, maybe. Something about the way he was looking at me was so uncomplicated it was almost funny.
I picked him up.
No fighting this time. Leo settled immediately, boneless and purring, tucking his head under my chin. I stood in Cross's bedroom holding a cat I hadn't known existed twelve hours ago and listened to Dylan cover the final quarter mile of the argument.
"I do something stupid," Dylan was saying, "and I deal with it myself. Because that's how it works for me. That's always been how it works for me."
When he stopped, I said: "I'm with Cross."
A pause.
"Cross?" Dylan's voice shifted. "You’re getting checked out?"
I hadn't said that. I also wasn't not saying it. "Some follow up assessments," I said, which was true in a technical sense that I was not going to elaborate on.
"You’re such a fucking baby. I swear you would lose your own ass if it wasn’t part of your body."
“How is that even possible?”
“Shut the fuck up, Wes. That's—yeah, okay. This is good. Cross won't let you get away with shit."
"No," I said. "He won't."
"And actually,” Dylan said. “The Ice Doc might be the only one who can make you listen. He hates when you pull this stuff."
"Yeah," I said. "I know. Cross hates me in general, so."
"I didn't say that."
"Still true though."
"Wes." A pause. "Just let him do his job. Don't make it difficult. Can you do that? Just once, can you not be difficult?"
"I’ll have you know I’ve been told I’m very easy, actually."
"Damn it, Wes, listen to me.” He stopped. "I'll see you at practice tomorrow. Text me if anything—" Another stop. "Just text me."
"Okay," I said. “Anything else?”
"Wes."
"Dylan."
"It’s time to grow up and get your shit together.”
He hung up. I stood there for another second, Leo heavy and warm in my arms, and then I looked up.
Cross was in the doorway.
It was impossible to know how long he'd been standing there. He was dressed now, which I was registering as relevant information without being able to explain why, and he was looking at me in that way that I couldn't get a read on and had stopped trying to.
Had he heard?
The math was bad. I'd said he hates my guts. Into a phone. In his bedroom. In his apartment. Where he'd spent the night in a chair waking me up every two hours to make sure my brain was still functional.
Cross's face gave me nothing.
“Put Leo down," he said.
I looked at the cat. The cat looked at me.
"Leo," I said.
"My cat," Cross said.
"I know he's your cat. I was just—" I put Leo down. Not carefully enough, probably, more of a gentle deposit than a graceful set-down, and Leo hit the floor and gave me a look of profound betrayal before sitting down and beginning to clean himself with great dignity.
"Sorry," I said. To the cat. Not to Cross.
Cross looked at Leo. Then he looked at me. Then he reached back through the doorway, into the hallway, and threw something at me.
I caught it.
A shirt. Dark gray, clean, soft in the way things got after enough washes.
"Yours is in the wash," he said. "I'll bring it to the facility."
I stared at the shirt in my hands. Cross's shirt.
"If you think you're ready to go home," Cross said, "then go. I'll drive you."
Something in his voice. Not different, exactly. The same precision, the same economy. But the air in the room had a quality I couldn't name, something that hadn't been there before the phone call or had been there and I hadn't noticed it, and I didn't know which of those options was worse.
I pulled the shirt over my head.
It was too big. I knew it would be too big, Cross had at least a couple inches on me and broader shoulders, but knowing it and wearing it were different.
The fabric settled against my skin, and it smelled like him, clean soap and something underneath that, something warmer. I was standing in his bedroom wearing it while he stood in the doorway watching me, and I had nowhere to put any of this information.
I looked up.
He was looking at me in his shirt the way you looked at something you were trying not to have an opinion about, and not entirely succeeding. I could see the not-succeeding from here, and I had nowhere to put that either.
I held his gaze for one second.
Two.
He looked away first.
That had never happened before. In the months of Cross looking at me and me looking away first because I had things to do and not for any other reason, Cross had never once been the one to break it.
I stood there with that information and the shirt and the clean soap smell and felt something shift in my chest that I was absolutely not examining.
"Let's go," he said, to the hallway, and turned and walked down it.
Leo was watching me from the floor with his warm brown eyes.
"Not a word," I said.
I followed Cross down the hall, and the whole drive home I sat in the passenger seat in his shirt thinking about the two seconds before he looked away.
The Ice Doc definitely hated my guts.
Right?