Chapter 252 252

Chapter 252 252
Alejandro's POV:

I did not sleep, which had not happened to me since I was fourteen.

A bad night for me was not a bad night the way it was for other people. I had slept eight hours a night since ninth grade, when my mother put a chart on the refrigerator about it. I had slept on buses, on floors, in a hotel in Vermont with a fire alarm going off down the hall, through Chen's alarm, through a neighbor's dog that went off at four every morning for a month, through an entire hurricane. I put my head down and I was gone and I woke up eight hours later and that was the transaction.

I lay on my back with the lamp on until two in the morning, and then I turned the lamp off and lay there until the window went gray.

What I did with those five hours, because I could not stop, was go back through four years.

That was the part I did not see coming, not the news. The news took about ninety seconds and it did not change one thing about the man in that kitchen, I meant every word of that and I would have said it again in the morning. What took five hours was everything else.

Because Kevin Chen had been gay his whole life and I had known him since he was eighteen, and that meant there had been an entire man walking around next to me for four years who I was not looking at.

There was a guy sophomore year. Whitman, third-line winger, transferred out after one season, and I once spent a whole bus ride telling Chen that Whitman was a good dude and he should hang out with him more, and Chen said one word and put his headphones in. I did not know what that was. It was probably nothing. That was the point. Everything was probably nothing now, and I had four years of probably nothing, and I could not get to the bottom of any of it because I was not the one who had been there.

He had never once mentioned anybody. In four years. I had told that man about every single person I had ever been with, in detail he did not want. I gave him all of it and I never noticed he was not giving me any of it, because he did not give people things. That was Chen. That was just how Chen was.

Except it was not. He gave Connor things.

I thought about that for about forty minutes.

And then the Friday. The one weeks ago, the jeans and the black shirt and me turning him around in a hallway and slapping him on the ass like he was a guy coming off the ice, telling him he looked like a person, asking who the girl was like four times.

But there was not girl: it was a man.

I lay there in the dark and put that sentence together one word at a time. He got dressed in our apartment, and I stood there in a towel with a toothbrush in my mouth being funny about it, and he went out to see a man. He came back forty-one minutes later, and there was a mark on his neck that I looked at for exactly as long as it took to notice a thing.

I had a whole feeling about that at one thirty in the morning and I could not name a single part of it.

It was not disgust. I knew exactly what I was and exactly how it looked, and I had never once in my life had a problem with any of it. Junior year I decided that my job was Supportive Ally, capital letters, and I sent Hudson eight videos. A compilation of people coming out to their families. A thing called How to Be a Better Ally in Seven Steps. Two golden retrievers, captioned this is you two. He answered the first one and he told me he was going to block me on the seventh and I sent an eighth anyway, and I meant every second of it, and nobody was going to take that away from me.

But I sent eight videos to one of my friends, and I never once sent anything to the guy eleven feet away on the other side of a wall, my closest friend ever, basically my soulmate friend, who had been carrying this since he had memory. And the reason was not that I would not have. The reason was that nobody told me, and nobody told me because I never asked.

Because you never asked...

He had said it flat. He had said it the way he said everything, without one gram of accusation in it, standing at our counter with his hands down on the laminate, and it went into me like a skate.

So I went looking for what I had asked him, over four years, and I could not build much of a list. I had asked him about his gap control and his sleep and his brother's job and whether my hair was doing something weird. I had asked him about the three K's on a bus outside Hartford.

But I had never asked Kevin Chen what he wanted. Not one time. Not ever.

And there was a green bowl on the shelf in his room that I had looked past a thousand times and never asked about either. I did not know why that came to me at four in the morning, but it did, and it would not leave.

By five I was doing something worse.

Because if there had been people, and there had been, and I never saw any of it, then either he was the single greatest liar I had ever met or I had been standing next to a man for four years with my eyes shut.

And I was not a man with his eyes shut. That was the one thing I had. I had known about Hudson and Jaden before the rest.

So which was it? Had he looked at somebody in front of me and I missed it?

Or had I seen it, and put it down, and walked away, the way I put everything down?

I could not answer that one. I still could not at six, with the window going gray.

And then, somewhere in there, with my alarm about to go off for a ten o'clock skate, my brain handed me a Thursday night in our kitchen.

A pan of rice. An onion I had burned. A song about a summer and a car with a whistle in it, and me pointing a wooden spoon at a speaker and saying: "Chen, this one's for you."

"Is that one about having me up against a wall until I can't remember my own name?" he had asked.

"Why would I want to do that?"

"Yes."

And it was not the joke that got me. The joke was fine, the joke was Chen, he did that, he took a thing you said an hour ago and dropped it on you when your hands were full, and it was one of the funniest things about him.

It was that I laughed WRONG.

I heard myself do it. I heard it come out high and stop early, and I stood at that stove with my back to him and did not turn around. I had never in my life had to think about my own laugh. Not once. It just happened to me like weather.

Why did I laugh like that?

That was the question I got at ten past six in the morning, after five hours of the other ones. Not why did he say it, but why did I do that?

I got up. I did not lie there and think about it, because if I had kept lying there I was going to keep going and I did not want to know where it went. So I got up at six twenty on nothing and went out to the kitchen.

Chen was already there. Of course he was. He was making coffee, the way he always did it, in the shirt he slept in, and he did not look up.

"You're up early," he said.

"Couldn't sleep."

He stopped. His hand actually stopped, on the lid of the coffee thing, and then it kept going.

"You always sleep," he said.

"I know."

He got a second mug down out of the cabinet without being asked and put it next to the machine, and nothing else got said. I sat at the table in the chair next to the one he was going to take and waited for the coffee with my mind still messed up.

And the truth is that everything was messed up, not just my mind.