Chapter 251 251

Chapter 251 251
Kevin's POV:

I had known it was coming since Reiner said the word careful, which gave me about ninety minutes, and I used all ninety of them.

That was not a boast. It was the opposite. Any other man on that roster would have spent the drive home furious, and I spent it running the arithmetic on my own life with the wipers going and Alejandro Martinez shaking in the passenger seat next to me.

Because Reiner did not know anything. He was not a man with information, he was a man with a bad night and six minutes of ice and a talent for finding the softest place in a room and putting his thumb on it.

What he found was that I did not give anything away and that we were always together, and he said the ugliest true thing he could think of and let the room do the rest. He did not even say it about us. He took the loud one out of it first, on purpose, and then he came for me on my own. If I had been an alpha he would have had a hundred easier ways in. Because I was not, he had to guess, and he guessed at a shape and not at a fact.

He guessed right anyway. That was what nobody told you about being invisible. It only worked until somebody decided to look, and then it worked against you, because a man who could not read you would make something up, and what he made up would be worse than the truth and impossible to correct.

And Alejandro had sat through the first half of it. He had sat there with his laces in his hands while a man told a room full of people there was nothing in either of us, and that one was about him too, and he did not move.

He had moved when Reiner separated us.

He did not know he had done that. I watched him not know it from eight feet away with a towel in my hands. But he had come up off that bench for me and not for himself, in front of twenty men, on a two-way, and whatever part of him made that call had made it faster than the part of him that talked.

So by the time we came up the stairs I had it worked out.

Alejandro was not going to let it go. He did not let things go. He had never let a single thing go in the years I had known him, and a man who was already asking questions in the dark of an apartment at midnight was going to keep asking. He'd had a week of watching me stacked on top of a hotel room in Detroit and a joke about a wall that had come out of my mouth on a Thursday, and now he had a reason to get up in a locker room and no idea what it was.

He was going to get there. Not this year. Maybe not next year. But he was going to get there.

Unless I gave him somewhere else to stop...

"Sit down," I said. "There's something I need to tell you."

"I don't want to sit down."

"You're going to want to have been sitting down."

He sat. He sat on the arm of the couch, which was not sitting, but it was as much as I was getting.

I stayed at the counter with the stove light on and my hands flat on the laminate, because I had found over the years that if I put my hands somewhere and left them there my voice did what it was told.

"I'm gay," I said.

He did not do anything for about two seconds.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay?"

"Yeah, okay. I mean." He put both hands on his knees. "Okay. That's... yeah. Okay."

"Are you going to keep saying okay?"

"Probably." He laughed, and it was a real one, short, and then it fell off his face. "Chen. Kevin. That doesn't... I mean, I don't care about that, that's not a—"

"I know."

"No, I need to say it out loud, because you're standing over there like you're waiting for something." He stood up off the arm of the couch. "I don't care. I mean I care, I care that you're telling me, that's not what I... You know what I mean, right?"

"I know what you mean."

"Okay."

He ran out. I watched him run out, which did not happen. He stood in the middle of our kitchen with his hands open and nowhere to put them, and then his face changed. I saw the next question arrive on it about a full second before he asked it, which was how I knew we were not done.

"Wait. Is that what Reiner meant?"

"No."

"Then why did you—"

"Because you asked me what he meant, and the honest answer is that he meant nothing. He's a thirty-three-year-old man having a bad season and looking for a soft spot." I picked up my water and did not drink it. "And because he was close enough to something true that I would rather you heard it from me than built it out of nothing on your own."

That was the sentence I had been assembling for twenty minutes of wet highway and it was the best work I had ever done. Every word of it was true. It was also a door with a wall behind it, and he walked into it at full speed and stopped, and stood there, and did not once look for the handle.

"Does anybody know?"

"My father. Kurt. Connor," I said.

"Connor knows?"

"Connor knows everything."

"CONNOR knows." He said it to the ceiling. "Four years... Connor knows and I—" He stopped himself, which was gracious of him, because the end of that sentence was about him and he knew it, and he put it down. That was a thing about Alejandro that people missed because of the volume: he picked up when a moment was not his.

"Since when you...?" he asked.

"Since always."

"No, I mean, have there been..." He made a gesture. It was an unbelievable gesture. It was a man trying to indicate the entire concept of other human beings with two hands in a kitchen. "...people?"

"Yes."

"Yes there have been people."

"Yes."

"How many is—" He stopped. "That's not... forget that. That's not my business."

"It isn't."

"Right." He nodded about four times. "Right, no, obviously."

And then he asked the only one that mattered and did not know he was asking it.

"Just... why didn't you tell me?"

I had my hands flat on the counter and the stove light on, and I looked at the man I had loved since I was nineteen years old standing in our kitchen at half past midnight in a shirt he had owned since freshman year. And I gave him the true answer, which was also the cruelest thing I had ever said to another person, and which he would never in his life understand as cruelty.

"Because you never asked."

He opened his mouth to say something, but then he closed it.

I watched him go back through four years right there in front of me, standing still, in about six seconds. I watched it get to wherever it got to. And his face did something I had never seen on it, which was nothing at all, no expression whatsoever, the whole thing gone flat. I looked at it across four feet with a kind of horror I had no word for, because he had just made the face I had been making my entire life.

"I have to..." He pointed vaguely at the hall. "It's late."

"Yeah."

"Chen." He stopped in the doorway with his hand on the frame. "Thanks. For telling me. I'm not... I mean, I don't know how to say this part right, but I'm glad you..."

"You're saying it fine."

"Okay." He went two steps down the hall and came back. "Are you okay?"

"I'm Chen-fine."

"That's not a real thing."

"It's held up so far."

He looked at me a second longer than he needed to, and he started something. I watched it get as far as his mouth and stop there.

On Thursday I had asked that man whether a song was about putting me against a wall, and he had laughed wrong, and I had spent two days deciding it never happened. Whatever was in his face in that doorway was either that or it was nothing at all.

I could not tell. In all those years, I had never once not been able to tell.

Then he went to his room and shut the door. I stood at the counter with the stove light on and a full glass of water I had not touched, and I understood that I had just gotten away with it.

That was what I told myself. Got away with it. Bought four months, maybe a year, maybe the rest of it if I was careful.

Through the wall his lamp went on, a thin yellow line along the carpet. Alejandro Martinez had kept to the same sleeping habits since he was fourteen, in bedrooms, on buses, and in hotels, even with fire alarms blaring... But the line was still there at two o'clock when I got up to get a glass of water because I couldn't fall asleep.