Chapter 237 237

Chapter 237 237
Kevin's POV:
"I haven't been weird."
"You've been weird. You're at the counter. You're never at the counter. You sit at the table in the chair next to me and you drink your coffee and you ignore me while I talk, that's our deal, and you haven't been holding up your end."
I looked into the coffee. "I'm just tired."
"You've been just tired since Friday."
"Long week."
"Chen..." He set the mug down. "I'm not smart about a lot of things, I know that. But I'm smart about you. And you've been off, so if I did something, or said something, or if it's the ice, or if it's some other thing, just tell me, so I can fix it. I don't like it when you go somewhere I can't follow."
That one lodged in my chest and stayed. I don't like it when you go somewhere I can't follow. He put it out there the way he put everything out there, direct and a little clumsy and completely honest. He had no idea, none, what those exact words did to a person who had been following him for four years without being asked and planned to keep doing it until he died.
"You didn't do anything," I said. "I'm fine."
"You're not fine."
"I'm Chen-fine. It's different from people-fine. Don't you say it all the time?"
He looked at me for a long time. I let him, because looking away would have told him more than the silence did, and what he was circling was wrong but pointed in the right direction, and I needed it to stay wrong.
"Okay," he said, slow, the same okay from the night before. He picked the mug back up. "FIFA?"
"It's not even nine."
"It's a day off. The morning is a suggestion."
"Connor would tell you to go to the gym."
"Connor lives in a mansion and does cold plunges. Connor is not the standard. FIFA."
I looked at the ceiling like I was thinking about it. I was not thinking about it. "Fine. FIFA. Shower first."
"What?"
"You didn't shower at the rink. You slept in it. Shower."
"I smell great."
"You smell like a hockey bag," I said.
"I smell like a MAN, Chen."
"You smell like a hockey bag somebody left in a car." I put my mug in the sink. "If I were an alpha I would be throwing up in that sink right now."
He laughed so hard he had to put the coffee down. Then he stopped laughing, and I saw what was going to happen about half a second before it happened, which was not enough time.
He got a hand up under his own shirt and into his armpit and came at my face with it.
I am not a big man next to him. But I had been getting hit by hockey players since I was nine years old and my hands were faster than his. I caught his wrist six inches from my mouth and turned it and put him into the counter with my shoulder in his chest, hard enough that the mugs jumped.
"OW."
"Don't."
"See, this is what I keep telling people." He was rubbing his chest with the heel of his hand and grinning about it. "Two hundred and five pounds and none of it shows. You stand there being calm and everybody in the room decides you're the small one. You are not the small one. You are just the quiet one."
And then I laughed.
It got out of me before I had any say in it, one short one, and he heard it, and his whole face went up like a scoreboard. He stood there against my counter with his hand still in the air and his shirt riding up and grinned at me like he had won something.
"There he is," he said.
"Go and shower."
He showered in six minutes. I counted, because I did not believe it.
He came back in the sweatpants and no shirt, with his hair wet and pushed off his face, still damp across the shoulders, smelling like pineapple.
Which was worse. The shower had not fixed my morning. It had only changed the shape of the problem.
He got the TV on and threw a controller at me without looking, because he knew where I'd be.
I caught it with my left hand and the shoulder told me about it properly this time, a hot line down under the blade, and my face did something for about half a second.
"What was that?"
"Nothing."
"Chen."
"The old one." I sat down and started the console. "It does that when I load it. Two shifts on a kill is loading it."
Every word of that was true, which was why I could say it in the flat voice, the one that closed a subject.
He watched me a second longer than the answer needed. Then he let it go, and I sat down next to a man who now had somewhere to put the word shoulder.
We played for two hours. He was terrible. He was always terrible, because Martinez played FIFA the way he played hockey, on instinct and chaos and noise. I beat him four straight and he accused me of cheating four straight times, and somewhere in the second game his legs came up across my lap.
That was normal. His legs had been landing across my lap during FIFA since junior year. He did it the way he did every physical thing, without a thought, sideways and up and there they were, heavy and warm over my thighs, and the whole couch smelled like pineapple, because everything in that apartment eventually smelled like him and nothing in it ever smelled like me.
His socks were the ones with the holes in the toes that I'd told him to throw out six months ago and he hadn't, because Martinez did not throw things away, he kept them until they fell apart on their own.
My hand was on his ankle. I don't know when it got there. Well, that's a lie. I knew exactly when: in the second game, when he scored a goal he had no business scoring and jumped in his seat and his legs slid and I caught his ankle so they wouldn't drop, and then I didn't let go. He didn't notice, because why would he, because it was nothing, because we'd been doing this for years.
We had been doing this for years. But my thumb was moving now, slow, back and forth over the bone, and that part was new. He was looking at the screen and I was looking at the screen and my thumb was doing something I had not signed off on and could not seem to stop.
And then it went under the cuff of his sweatpants.
Not far. An inch, maybe two, onto the inside of his ankle where the skin is thinner and warmer and nobody has any business being. I did it once and stopped. Then I did it again, and the second time was not my hand getting away from me. The second time I decided.
He did not move his leg. He did not look over. He was leaning forward yelling at a defender who had let a ball roll under his foot, and I sat there with two inches of him under my thumb and my heart going like I'd finished a shift. I thought, this is how it happens. Not all at once. An inch at a time, on a Sunday, while he yells at a video game.
And that thought about my best friend was pretty fucked up, but I couldn't stop it anyway.
"CHEN. That was offside!"
"It wasn't offside," I said.
"Your guy was three feet past the line."
"Learn the rule, then we'll talk."
"I KNOW the rule!"
"You clearly don't," I replied.
He kicked me with the ankle I was holding. I didn't let go, and he didn't notice that I didn't let go, and the game rolled on. His phone buzzed once on the counter and he didn't get up for it. Neither of us said anything about who it might be, and his legs stayed where they were.
We played for another two hours after that, and I didn't move. I never moved.