27 #3
They play, and I don’t understand any of it.
Somebody scores, and Rafe says something in a flat voice that makes Nash’s shoulders move like he’s laughing without making a sound.
There’s a blue Gatorade on the windowsill, half gone.
I lean over, take it, and drink some. It’s still cold.
Nash reaches back without looking with his hand out, and I give it to him, and he drinks and hands it back without looking either.
At some point, his hand ends up wrapped around my ankle.
He’s still playing. He’s just using my leg like the arm of a chair.
“What’s with your pants?” he says to the TV.
“What?”
He looks down. “Fruit?”
“Good observation, Kennebeck. Do you know what kind?”
He turns his head and looks at me like I’ve said something unhinged.
“You do know what a strawberry is, right?”
Rafe scores on him. Nash looks at the screen, then back at me. “You made me lose,” he says, and goes back to playing.
That ends their game, so Rafe stands and stretches until his back cracks. He unplugs his phone charger and wraps it around his hand, picks his pillow up off his bed, tucks it under his arm, grabs his hoodie off the chair, and goes to the door. “Night.”
Nash lifts his chin. “Night.”
The door shuts behind him. Nash switches to a real hockey game with the sound so low it’s just a hum and leans back against the wall beside me, his shoulder against mine and his leg against mine.
He tells me why a guy got a penalty. I look at him, and then he looks back at the TV.
I look at his hands folded in his lap. I keep waiting for something to happen, and nothing does, and then I wait to feel weird about that, and I don’t.
The game ends. Red loses. He turns off the TV, and the room goes dark except for the streetlight through the gap in his blinds, one orange stripe across the floor and up the side of the desk.
“You tired?”
“Yeah.”
He pulls the covers back, and I crawl under them to the wall side, because that’s the side I had Friday.
He gets in after me, and the mattress dips and rolls me into him, and neither of us fixes it.
He smells like his body wash. My face is an inch from his throat, and I can feel him breathing.
His jaw is right there, so I kiss the edge of it, and then his mouth.
He kisses me back, and my whole body wakes up.
It’s slow at first, so slow I don’t notice his hand moving up the back of my shirt until it’s warm against my spine.
I get my fingers behind his neck and pull him closer.
He rolls half on top of me, his knee pushes between mine, my body is already humming.
A sound I don’t recognize comes out of me low in my throat, and I yawn.
Right into his mouth. A huge, jaw-cracking, eyes-watering yawn, and there’s nothing I can do about it once it starts.
Nash pulls back. I slap a hand over my face. And he laughs, really laughs, out loud, with his forehead dropping onto my shoulder and his whole body shaking on top of me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him smile that big.
“Go to sleep,” he mumbles into my shirt.
“No.”
“You just yawned in my mouth.”
“That’s because you’re boring.”
He lifts his head and looks at me in the orange stripe of light, still smiling a little at the corner, and I’ve seen him do a lot of things in the last week, but I don’t think I’ve seen that.
Then he rolls onto his back, hooks his arm under my neck, and drags me across the mattress into his side.
My cheek ends up on his chest, and his hand ends up on my hip, over the strawberries.
“Nash—”
“Sleep,” he says.
I listen to his heart and wait for him to try something.
His hand doesn’t go anywhere. His thumb moves back and forth over my hipbone, slower and slower, and then it stops, and his breathing goes long and even under my ear.
I lie there with my eyes open. I came here to hook up.
I said hopefully, out loud, to my friends.
And I’m lying on his chest while he falls asleep, and nothing happens.
I let myself relax, and only then realize I’ve been tense this whole time, and I follow his breathing down.
I wake up because he moves. It’s still dark, and the stripe is still on the floor.
The mattress shifts, there’s a rustle, a long breath out, and then it’s still again, and his arm isn’t under me anymore.
I open my eyes. He’s rolled onto his side, facing the room, and all I can see is the back of his shirt and the shape of his shoulder and his hair against the pillow.
There’s cold air where he was, and I don’t like it.
I scoot across the mattress until my knees fit behind his and my forehead rests between his shoulder blades, and I put my arm over his waist.
His hand finds mine in the dark on the first try, like he knew exactly where it would be, and pulls it against his stomach and holds it there and goes still again. My palm is flat against him over his shirt, right in the middle, where it’s warm. I close my eyes.