37
He Told Me
Kylie
Nash kicks off his shoes and lets me pull him onto my bed.
He lies between my legs with his head on my chest, and I keep running my fingers through his hair.
I can tell he’s exhausted, so I don’t say anything and let him rest. I scroll on my phone for an hour, and I think he’s asleep. When he finally shifts, I rub his back.
“Are you hungry, Nash?” I whisper.
He nods. “Yeah.”
We order food, and I walk down to the front entrance to pick it up.
We eat out of the containers sitting on my bed with something on my laptop that neither of us watches.
He eats an entire order of fried rice without saying four words.
He isn’t being weird. He’s just done. It’s all sitting on him, and he’s using about nine percent of himself to be in this room.
Tessa comes back at ten with her laptop under her arm. She looks at Nash sitting shirtless on my bed with a container of rice and a fork, at his shoes under her side of the desk, and at me in his T-shirt.
“Hi,” she says. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine.” I smile at her. “It’s your room too.”
She sits at her desk and puts her headphones on.
Later, with the lights off, I ask him once. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
And I mean it. Which is new to me. I’ve never been able to go two seconds without knowing something, but right now I understand, so I respect it. I lie there with my head on his arm and let the whole thing sit in the dark, unexplained. He’s asleep in about five minutes.
I lie awake for a while with my hand on his chest, thinking about his hands. When he was sitting on the edge of my bed watching that video, they were shaking so hard. Two hours later, he came back and took my hand in both of his, and they were steady.
On Monday, he has meetings all afternoon: his coach, then somebody from athletics, then his coach again. He’s outside the science building when I come out of my four o’clock, leaning on the railing with his hands in his pockets, and I can tell from his face that something’s wrong.
“I’m sitting Friday,” he says before I can ask.
I stop on the steps. “What?”
“One game.”
Friday is the home opener against Brennan State. It’s been on every poster on campus for two weeks. “Friday’s the home opener.”
“I know what Friday is.”
I scoff. “That’s bullshit.”
“No.”
That stops me flat, because I had about four more sentences lined up behind that one. “He hit you with a hockey stick, Nash.”
“And then I beat the shit out of him,” he says flatly.
I look at him, trying to read him past his anger, and come up short.
“It’s one game,” he says.
He hates it. I can see him hating it. His jaw’s clenched, and he’s looking out at the parking lot instead of at me. But he’s still saying it out loud like he agrees with it.
“What about Greeley?” I ask.
“Three.”
“Three games?”
“Yeah.”
I’m smiling before I can decide not to. “Okay. I feel better.”
The corner of his mouth moves about a millimeter.
We start walking, and he tells me the rest in pieces. There’s a thing he has to do with somebody from athletics next week. The video’s been taken down off two of the accounts. Berwyn said something to the whole room this morning. Then he says, “Layous’s centering the third now.”
“Is that Greeley’s spot?”
“It was.”
“So when he comes back—”
“He’s got to work to get it back.”
I look up at him. “And you’re still second line.”
“Yeah.”
His face doesn’t do anything at all, and that’s how I know. “That’s good, right? You’re happy.”
“I’m suspended.”
“You’re happy about him.”
“No.”
“Nash.”
He walks about ten more feet. “He wanted my spot.”
“Now he won’t ever have it.”
“Nope,” Nash says, and puts an arm around my neck.
“Okay,” I say. “Now I feel significantly better.”
He still has practice. It doesn’t matter that he’s sitting a game; he still has to show up and put in the work, film and lift and ice. He comes back Monday with his hair wet and his mouth in a line, and I follow him into his room, and Rafe comes in a few minutes later.
“He’s been unbearable,” Rafe tells me.
“Nobody asked you,” Nash says.
“He’s suspended, and somehow we’re the ones getting punished,” Koda says from the doorway, and leaves.
Rafe goes with him, and before he does, he turns around. “If you’re gonna fuck, do it now. I’m sleeping in my own bed tonight.”
Nash glares at him, and I lighten the mood.
“Yes, sir.” I salute him, and he goes.
Nash pulls a shirt out of the drawer, sits down at his desk, and opens his laptop, and I don’t talk.
I work on my own laptop at the head of his bed and watch him whenever I need a minute to think.
He watches film with one earbud in, and for two hours, the only sounds in the room are the whistle on his laptop every time he rewinds and my keys.
He gets up for water and comes back with two and puts one down by my knee without a word.
When he’s done, he comes over, picks up my legs, sits down, and puts them across his lap.
I watch him for a few minutes. He isn’t looking at me, and I don’t like it, so I rub my foot over his cock.
His eyes dart to mine, and I smile. He doesn’t tell me to stop, and he doesn’t reach over to kiss me.
That lasts about two minutes. The next thing I know, he’s fingering me while I take him in my mouth, and then he’s bending me over his desk with his hand around my throat.
The next day, I have class and my first volunteer shift at a nursing home ten minutes off campus, which I’ve been excited about for two weeks and immediately regret when they hand me fourteen pages of paperwork and a badge with a photo that makes me look recently arrested.
I spend the first hour learning everything I’m not allowed to touch, which is apparently most things.
Then somebody sends me to the activity room to help set up bingo, and an eighty-six-year-old woman named Dorothy tells me I’m putting the cards too far apart.
“Nobody can reach those.”
I move them closer.
“Not that close.”
I look at her. Dorothy looks at me and moves them exactly where she wants them. I decide I like her.
Nash has practice. We meet everybody for dinner at the dining hall, everybody but Koda.
Tuesday night, I’m in Nash’s bed instead of mine.
He keeps his window cracked even though it’s freezing, because apparently sleeping at a normal temperature is beneath him, and when I complain, he calls me a big baby.
I’m not. I tell him I’m going back to my room, mostly because I know exactly what’s going to happen.
I make it two steps before he catches me around the waist and pulls me backward into his lap.
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere with heat.”
“No, you’re not.”
“You just called me a baby.”
“You are a baby.”
“Then let the baby leave.”
His arms tighten around my waist. “No.”
I try not to smile. I really do. “You’re very confusing.”
He pulls me closer. “How?”
“You spend half your life acting like everybody annoys you, and then I try to go three doors down, and you physically restrain me.”
“You’re not everybody.”
I look at his face for a second, at the complete lack of awareness that he’s just said something ridiculously sweet while holding me hostage in a room that’s approximately thirty-seven degrees. Then I kiss him.
This is the part of Nash I think I’m starting to understand best. He doesn’t ask me to stay very often.
He makes room for me before I get there.
He buys enough food for two. He reaches for me in his sleep.
He listens to stories he already heard the night before.
He keeps my charger plugged into the wall beside his bed because I complained about my phone dying once.
And when I threaten to leave because his room is freezing, he puts both arms around me.
I love that about him. I think I love a lot of things about him.
By Wednesday, Friday’s close enough to be real, and he’s worse.
Not at me; he’s never once been short with me about any of it.
But he’s carrying it around. He snaps at Koda about something stupid at lunch and apologizes about an hour later in his own way, which is buying Koda a Gatorade and putting it in front of him without comment.
We’re walking back from the dining hall when I say, “You still have to go Friday, right? Like, be in the building.”
“I’ll be in the building.” He kicks a rock off the path. “Suit. Whole thing.”
“Where do you sit when you’re suspended?”
“Upstairs, probably. Press level, or they put you in the last row behind the bench.”
“Can I sit with you?”
He stops walking. “You’ve got a ticket. You can sit anywhere.”
“I didn’t ask if I had a ticket.”
He looks down at me for a second. “Yeah,” he says. “You can sit with me.”
When we get to the third floor, Nash pulls me into his room.
I don’t even stop at mine. His mouth is on mine the second the door closes, and we make it to his bed, and I lose track of whatever we were talking about before this started.
Something about Rafe. Something about laundry.
It’s gone now, burned off somewhere around the twentieth minute of his mouth on mine.
I plant my knees on either side of his hips, and his huge, rough, ridiculous hands spread wide on my thighs.
He pulls his shirt off over his head without breaking the kiss, without looking at me first to see if I’m examining his scar, the same careless way he does it now when he’s getting into bed, like it’s nothing, like it was always nothing, and every single time I watch him do it, I have to pretend it doesn’t mean something to me.
I kiss his mouth until I’m stupid with it. Then his jaw, and the soft place under it where he’s warmest and smells like his body wash and the rink that never fully washes out of him. When I get to his neck, his fingers dig into my leg, and he breathes in slowly through his nose.