6. Hudson
HUDSON
Huh. That was probably the dumbest thing I have ever done in my life.
Not because anything hurt. Not because anyone crossed a line we didn’t address first. Not because I regret a single second. I don’t.
But the minute the ceiling starts to pale and the room remembers it’s a room, the truth clicks. I can’t go back to anything else now. Not after that. Not after her.
I’m not built for casual when it comes to Meg. I know that about myself. I knew it before last night and I know it with my whole body now.
I could pretend I’m a guy who can take a good thing and tuck it back where it belongs, but that’s bullshit.
Now that I’ve had her—had her laugh and moan in my mouth, had her hand fisted in the front of my shirt, had her say my name in a way that rearranged my spine—no one else will do. It’s in my bones. Permanent.
She’s asleep when I open my eyes, and all the dumb sayings people have about heaven start sounding like something I could believe in.
She’s curled into me, leg thrown over my hip like it always wanted to be there.
She’s wearing my team tee from last night, the one I tossed toward the chair and missed.
Her breath slides against my sternum in even counts.
Her brown hair tickles my throat. I could stay like this forever and not get bored.
I could learn the way her chest rises and falls and make a life out of it.
The room is quiet in the way rooms get after they’ve been loud. My head is louder.
We’re best friends. I’ve had a crush on her since we were kids.
Only Oliver and Rocco know. I never told her because I didn’t want to ruin the thing that saved my whole life from being sharp all the time.
That’s the truth I keep pressing with my thumb like a bruise to make sure it still hurts.
I let everyone believe I was fine with just being the guy who carries boxes and tells jokes and makes breakfast, because being that guy meant I could be near her without breaking anything.
Now, I don’t know if I’ve broken anything, and we’ve got a season to fix.
We have jobs that require us to be obsessive about sleep and food and not doing dumb things that put your head somewhere that isn’t the next shift. Meg is a giant distraction in every way that word can be, good and bad. That’s not her fault. That’s just reality.
I stare at the ceiling and count slow. Not to fall asleep.
To slow the part of me that wants to wake her and ask if she meant it and if she wants it again and if she wants me again and if I can keep this shirt on her forever because it looks better on her and that feels somehow like cheating on my team.
Her hand twitches against my chest and I freeze because the last thing I want is to make her feel like she has to reassure me. She doesn’t. Last night happened. I was there. She asked. We said yes. That’s enough for right now.
I slide out from under her and leave the blanket where it is, tucked around her. She makes a small sound and then settles again. I stand beside the bed and look because I can’t help it. I don’t touch. I want to. But I don’t.
I pull on sweats and go to the kitchen before I talk myself into doing something stupid like crawling back in and pretending morning hasn’t happened.
The kitchen is the same as it was yesterday and a little different because I’m in it now with a body that has new information in it.
I wash my hands even though they’re clean.
I set the pan on the stove. I open the fridge and take out eggs, then put them back like they bit me. Not again. Not after yesterday.
I love her. I’ll eat whatever she makes without blinking. But how did she mess up toast? How was it soggy and sharp at the same time? It was like somebody told bread it was being demoted, and it tried to cry and failed.
I open the freezer and stare at the bag of sausages, and I grab the pancake mix I keep around for mornings when the world needs rescuing with butter and syrup.
I can make pancakes from scratch. I do, most Sundays.
This is not a Sunday. This is a triage situation.
I move like I’m trying to make my brain quiet with my hands.
I am maybe overcompensating. I don’t care.
The whole apartment starts to smell like breakfast and childhood cartoons.
It’s safer than thinking. I pour the first pancake and watch for bubbles.
I flip it when it tells me to. Golden. Not a brag.
A fact. I flip the sausages and feel better than I have any right to feel about meat browning in a pan.
This is what I can do—make a meal that tells a person they are cared for. I don’t know how to solve history. I do know butter, and heat, and when to flip.
The first plate goes in the oven. I pour three more pancakes.
I try not to imagine her waking up to nothing and thinking we ran.
We didn’t. We won’t. Oliver doesn’t run from anything except a bad cut of lumber.
Rocco doesn’t run when somebody cries, even if it’s his own face doing it.
I sure as hell don’t run from what I want.
I run from what I might do to what I want if I don’t sit on my hands.
The way Rocco walks is different from the way Oliver walks. That’s how I know who’s behind me. Rocco pads. Oliver strides and then remembers to soften it so he doesn’t wake anybody. Rocco yawns without covering his mouth like a cat and leans on the doorframe like he grew there.
“Smells good,” he says. His voice is sanded from sleep.
“Pancakes. Sausage.”
“Thank God,” he says. Then, because he is not stupid, “No eggs.”
“No eggs,” I confirm. “Toast is officially suspended until further notice.”
He huffs a laugh. He goes to the sink and drinks water like he’s just discovered water. “She sleeping?”
“Yeah.”
“How are you?”
I think about lying. I think about telling the truth in a way that will make him roll his eyes. I split the difference. “I’m fine.”
He waits.
“I’m not fine,” I admit. “But I’m not bad.”
He looks at the stovetop like it’s a campfire and something in there can be read. “We need to talk before she wakes up,” he says, quiet.
“I figured.” I flip a pancake. I kill the heat under the sausages because they’re perfect and I refuse to let them go past that.
Oliver appears a minute later, hair damp from a shower, hoodie unzipped. He looks like a brochure for some kind of benevolent lumberjack company and I will never tell him that. He’s smiling the way he does when he’s bracing for a hard thing and wants to soften it with light anyway.
“God bless you,” he says, peering into the pans. “I would eat a stack of those dry with no syrup.”
“You won’t have to,” I say. I point my spatula at the oven. “Plates are warming. Syrup’s warm. Strawberries are not warm, because I’m not a monster.”
Oliver grins at me like I’m making sense. Then he sobers and leans his hip on the counter. “We have to be smart.”
“I know,” I say. The words taste like medicine.
Rocco rubs his hands over his face. “We have a season.”
I plate up the first round—two pancakes and a coil of sausage on each, butter melting down the sides like an apology. I slide plates toward them and take one for myself even though my stomach feels like it’s more air than organ. I eat anyway. I function better when I’m not shaking.
Oliver picks up his fork and then sets it down. “Last night was—” He stops. Too many words would be embellishment and we don’t do that. “Good,” he says instead. “Right. For her. For us.”
“It was,” I say. That’s the problem. It was good and right and I want it again and that’s not a blueprint for not wrecking our lives.
“We can’t make it a habit,” Rocco says. He’s clinical when he needs to be. “Not right now. Not with everything else.”
I swallow and nod. “We need to focus. We need sleep. We need to not look like idiots at practice because our heads are on pillows instead of plays.”
“And she’s—” Oliver blows out a breath. He’s careful with words about her. “She’s not something you half-do.”
“No,” I say. “She is not.”
“We tell ourselves it was a one-time thing,” Rocco says. “We tell her, if she asks, we need to keep the friendship intact and the season from going sideways.”
I look at the doorway down the hall. I hate saying it out loud. I do it anyway. “So, we agree. Last night shouldn’t happen again.”
Oliver grimaces like the words taste worse to him than they do to me. “We agree it shouldn’t,” he says. The word shouldn’t does a lot of work. He doesn’t try to swap it for won’t . He’s not a liar.
“We’re not telling her what to do,” Rocco adds, because he’s not a liar either. “We’re telling ourselves what not to do.”
“Right.” It’s hard to agree to that. But it’s the right thing to do. For her. For us. For the team.
We eat in the kind of silence that isn’t empty. We’re all listening for the soft sounds that mean she’s up.
We’ve always been good at rules. It’s how we got ourselves this far with the pieces still fitting.
Rules about sleep on road trips, rules about shirts on the couch when we’ve been to the gym, rules about who takes the first shower on early mornings, rules about fighting your own team during practice.
Rules about love would be new. Rules about sex are not complicated if you tell the truth.
Rocco pushes his plate away and drains his water. “I’m going to make coffee.”
Oliver stands and starts setting out forks and napkins for two more plates even though we usually eat at the counter like heathens. He’s making the table look like breakfast in a way that says you’re welcome here without using words. It works on me. It will work on her.
I pour two more pancakes. My hands have stopped shaking. The house smells like the kind of morning people write postcards about. The room has that clean feeling that happens when a plan is on the table, even if it’s not a plan anybody likes.
I’m about to flip when the soft scuff of bare feet on carpet hits behind me and takes my brain apart in one second flat.
Meg pads in, sleepy and rumpled and wearing my tee from last night, and that’s it, I’m sunk.
Her hair is a mess in a way that will ruin me when I replay it later.
Her eyes are narrow with sleep. Her mouth is soft.
My shirt hangs to mid-thigh and makes her look like she belongs in my bed and my kitchen and my life like she always did, and I hate how much I love it because it makes every shouldn’t we just said feel like a lie or a dare.
“Morning,” she says, voice low, raw in the best way. She looks at the stove and then at the table and smiles like she knows exactly why I’m cooking and exactly what I’m trying to avoid. She looks at me last. It’s a look that could undo a year of discipline if I let it.
If she asks, I’ll give her whatever she wants.