Chapter 236

Kevin's POV:

I woke up at six because I always wake up at six, even on a day off with nothing on the schedule until practice tomorrow. My body didn't care that it was allowed to sleep. It had been getting up at six since freshman year and it was not open to discussion.

The apartment was not quiet, because Martinez was still asleep, and a sleeping Martinez was the only quiet Martinez and even then he sounded like a man trying to start a lawnmower underwater. I could hear him from my doorway. He had not made it to a bed.

He was on the couch where I had left him, and at some point in the night he had gotten out of his jeans. They were on the floor. The blanket had done what a blanket does to a man who moves in his sleep, which was end up over one shoulder and across his ribs and off him completely from the hip down.

So it was boxers and the shirt he had played in. He was on his front with one knee drawn up and the boxers had twisted around with him and were doing very little on that side.

Hockey builds a particular leg. So many years of pushing off an edge had put something on the back of his thigh that does not exist on men who do other work, and asleep it had all gone heavy and slack and still looked like that.

I looked...

Standing in my own doorway at four minutes past six in the morning, with my hands cold and my day in front of me, I looked at all of it and at what the cotton had given up on. I got hard, and there was nothing complicated or beautiful about it.

That was not a nice thing to think about a person I loved, I knew. It was just what happened. I had a body, it worked, it had been about three weeks, and there was a twenty-two-year-old built for the job asleep on my furniture with his mouth open and his hair wrecked, snoring like a small engine.

None of that helped. That is the part nobody warns you about. It did not have to be flattering: it only had to be him.

I stood there just four seconds. Then I went to the kitchen, because there was a routine and the routine did not care what was on the couch or what was happening on my sweatpants.

I did the band work at the counter, both arms, the way I had every morning since I was seventeen. A skate had opened up my left shoulder blade in juniors, which is the part people used to see, but the same collision had done something underneath it that nobody ever put a clean name to, which is the part that counted. A doctor wrote three exercises on a sheet of paper and I had done them every morning for five years, because I was the kind of man who did the thing on the sheet.

It was talking to me that morning. Two shifts on a kill was more than it had carried in weeks and it was letting me know, low and dull, the way it always did after a heavy night. It would be gone by lunch. It always was.

The left one was fine, and a thing you have to tell yourself every morning is not a thing you believe.

Then I stood at the counter, because of nine words in a locker room: "Good hands. One of you had to have them."

Here was my problem with those nine words, and I knew how small they sounded: I could not read them. Not the words, the man. Every alpha in that room had turned toward Reiner while he had said it, and whatever he had been putting into the air they had got it while I just got a sentence.

I had spent my life reading people off things that were not chemical, off shoulders and hands and the half beat before a word, and I was better at it than anybody I had met. But I stood in my own kitchen at six in the morning unable to tell whether a man had just complimented me or insulted me.

That had never happened to me before. I had never once been in a room I could not read, and I had been in that one since October.

I went to make coffee. Martinez's phone was on the counter where I'd left it the night before, after his mom had talked to me for forty minutes about her garden and her cousins and whether I was eating enough, while Alejandro smiled at me from the couch and then fell asleep sitting up.

I had not tried to move him. He would have come half awake around the hallway and been up for an hour talking to me about it. So I hung up and put his phone on the counter and got the blanket off the arm of the couch and put it over him. He turned his face into the cushion and did not surface. His hair was a disaster, his nose was pressed sideways, and his back went up and down slow and even.

I had looked at him for about five or six seconds, which was like three longer than I allowed myself. Then I had turned off the lamp and gone to bed.

The screen lit up while I was measuring grounds. Two scoops, the way I always did. I wasn't looking at it. The screen lit the way screens do when nobody wants them to, and the name was right there on it.

Kaylee, with a heart after her name: "Still thinking about the other night. When do I get to see you again?"

I didn't read it... But I read it. Both of those are true, because I saw the words the way you see a billboard from the highway, not because you are looking but because they are in front of your face. Then I turned the phone facedown and finished the coffee and stood there thinking about nothing. I was very good at thinking about nothing. I had years of practice.

The coffee was too strong, but I drank it anyway.

Then I showered.

It was a longer shower than my showers are. I came out of it at ten to seven with the problem dealt with and the cause of the problem still asleep eleven feet from the bathroom door with his mouth open. I did not look at him on my way past, which I would like some credit for.

Kurt called me at eight. He called at eight on Sundays, and had since I signed, and before that it was Sunday nights all through college, and before that it was whenever he remembered, which was still most weeks. I had never once had to wonder whether the phone was going to ring.

"Hey."

"Hey," I said.

"You're up."

"I'm always up."

"How's the shoulder?" he said.

"Fine."

"It's not fine. You were favoring it last night."

"It's fine," I said.

"Okay." I heard paper moving on his end, or a newspaper, or a cabinet. Kurt did other things while he talked to me and I had never once taken it personally, because I did them too. "Dad says your gap control looked better."

"He watched it?" I said.

"He watches all of them."

"Okay."

"Eat something that didn't come out of a bag."

"Okay."

"Alright."

Ninety seconds, maybe less. I set the phone down on the counter and stood there in our kitchen and did what I always did after Kurt called, which was nothing, because there was nothing to do with it.

My father had watched every game I had played since I was nine. He had never called me about one, not after the best night of my career and not after the worst, and he would never bring it up on his own. But if I brought it up he had an opinion so specific it could only come from a man watching with his entire attention, and then the conversation would be over.

That was the arrangement. Nobody in my family had said I love you out loud, not to me, not to each other, not at the funeral, not on a single birthday, not once in twenty-two years, and I had never doubted it for a second. I would not know how to say that to someone like Alejandro in a way that didn't come out sounding like a defense.

He woke up some minutes later, because Martinez guarded his eight hours the way other people guard a prescription. He came off that couch in boxers and the shirt, with his hair flattened on one side and standing up on the other, scratching his stomach and squinting at the window like the sun had insulted his family. He did not go and put anything on. It would not have occurred to him.

He poured himself coffee from the pot I'd made at six and didn't complain that it was cold, which was strange, because Martinez complained about everything as a form of affection.

I kept my eyes on my own mug, which was empty, and had been empty for a while.

"Morning," he said.

"Morning."

He sat at the table. I stayed at the counter. He looked at me over the mug with those green eyes, still swollen with sleep, and said, "You've been weird."