Chapter 240 240

Chapter 240 240
Kevin's POV:

On Wednesday, at a table in Edgemont, a woman I had met two hours earlier asked Alejandro if he had somebody, and he said yes, and then he gave her the name.

In four years I had never once heard Alejandro Martinez hand a girl's name to somebody's family. Girls came into his dorm room and went out of it and by the following Wednesday he could not always tell me which one, and none of them had ever gotten a name at a table with a fork in the air. Kaylee got one, from a chair three feet from mine.

Six days before that I had not known what she was called. I heard it through a wall and got it wrong twice and could not have told anybody whether it was Kaylee or Kayla.

And then he stopped.

Half a second, maybe less, the width of a word he could not find, in a man who had never in his life run out of words. I was the only person at that table built to catch it. I caught it, and I put it away before Helen finished asking about the pie.

Here is what I did with it: I decided it meant the thing was serious. That he had stalled because he was sitting in a stranger's dining room working out how much of it to hand over, which is what a man does when there is something in his hands worth protecting. I was better at reading people than anybody I had ever met and I did that whole calculation in about the time it took him to say she was great.

Then she came over on Thursday.

The part everybody assumes is the problem was not the problem. I had equipment for that part and I had had it for years and it still worked fine.

What I did not have was anything for the laughing.

They laughed for two hours. Not at anything, because that was not how he worked. He did not need a reason. He laughed the way other people breathed, and I lay in the dark with the earbuds out, because the earbuds were for the other thing. I listened to the sound I had spent four years dragging out of that man with everything I had, coming through a wall, for free, at somebody else.

And there was nowhere to go. At Northbrook I could have walked to the library. I could have sat in a dining hall at eleven at night with two hundred strangers in it and let the world dilute it down to nothing. Here the world was two bedrooms and a wall, and I was on the wrong side of it with my shoes off, doing arithmetic on how many weeks it had been.

I texted Owen at eight fifteen on Friday and he answered at eight sixteen, which was one of the four things I liked about Owen.

We met in August, three days after the move. He was thirty-two, he worked in claims for an insurance company and could talk about it for nine minutes straight without once making it interesting, and he had a whippet named Pilot who was afraid of the dishwasher. He had never asked me a single question about hockey. He knew I played the way you know a neighbor drives a truck.

He was also a beta, and that was not an accident, and I had known it was not an accident from the first night in a way I was never going to say out loud to a professional. There was nothing in the air in that apartment. Nothing coming off him, nothing coming off me, no information anywhere in the room, just two men and no chemistry doing any of the work. An alpha would have walked in and read me like a receipt.

I had built my whole life inside that nothing. Then I went out and found more of it on purpose.

There was also a rule, and I broke it that night, and I knew I was breaking it while I put my shoes on: I did not go out when Alejandro Martinez was in the building.

Never once.

I went when he was at his parents' for a weekend, or with Connor or the team, or out with somebody and telling me about it four days in advance and then again on the day. I built those nights the way you build anything you do not want questions about, and there had never been questions, because there had never been anything to ask about. I never wrote the rule down. You do not write down the thing you are actually doing.

Two hours of my hand on his ankle on Sunday, and two hours of him laughing at somebody else on Thursday. Neither of those made me happy. Between them they made me careless.

So I put on the jeans that actually fit and the black shirt I bought because Kurt told me black suited me better than gray. I did all of it with a man singing in the shower on the other side of a wall, and I went anyway.

I did not have a car. I had never needed one, because I had not once had to get anywhere Alejandro Martinez was not already going.

I came down the hall to ask him for his, and he was on his way out of the bathroom in a towel with the toothbrush still in his mouth. He stopped dead in the middle of it like a man who has walked into a museum.

"Whoa."

"Move," I said.

He took the toothbrush out. He looked at the shirt, then the jeans, then back up, taking his time about it. I stood there and let him, because leaving would have been information.

"Where are you GOING?"

"Out."

"You don't go out." He pointed at me with the toothbrush. "You have never gone out. In four years you have gone out like eleven times and eight of them I dragged you."

"Then this is twelve."

"Turn around."

"No."

He was already moving. He got a hand on my shoulder and turned me halfway anyway, the way he turned me for everything, and made a noise of professional appreciation.

Then he hit me across the ass. Once, open-handed.

It was the same swing he used on a teammate's pads coming off the ice. It meant exactly that much to him and not one thing more.

The sting went through the denim and kept going and took the back of my neck with it, and I had about a tenth of a second to shut that down before it got as far as my face. I shut it down. Then I was standing in my own hallway while a man I had been in love with since I was nineteen years old grinned at me about how good I looked on my way out to somebody else.

He was so happy for me. That was the part. He was completely, uncomplicatedly delighted.

"LOOK at you," he said.

"Do that again and I'll break your hand."

"You would, too. That's the thing about you."

"I need the car."

"Take the car," he replied. It came out with no gap in front of it at all, in the middle of him putting the toothbrush back in his mouth, and then he was following me down the hall talking around it. "Who is it? Is it someone from the gym? It's the one with the sleeve tattoo, isn't it? I've seen you not-look at people, Chen, I know what your not-looking looks like—"

"It's not someone from the gym."

"Is she nice?"

She...

He said it with his shoulder against the door frame and toothpaste at the corner of his mouth and absolutely nothing behind it, the way you ask a man if he wants ice in it.

In four years that pronoun had never once wobbled. Not in a car, not in a hotel room at one in the morning, not on a bus with his feet in my lap. He had asked me about my brother and my sleep and my gap control and whether I thought his mother sounded tired on the phone, and he had never asked me who I wanted. And now he finally had, sort of, sideways, in a hallway, in a towel. And he had answered it himself on the way in.

That was the closest that man had ever come.

"Yeah," I said.

One syllable in the wrong shape. I had lied to Alejandro Martinez exactly once before, two nights earlier in a car, and that one I had said to a windshield with him driving. This one I said to his face, and it cost me nothing, and that was the part I did not want to look at.

His keys were on the counter where his keys always were. I took them and put them in my pocket and did not correct it.

"You're not going to tell me."

"No."

"CHEN'S GOT A THING." He said it to the whole apartment. There was nobody else in the apartment. "Be safe. Be respectful. Text me if you're not coming back so I don't call your brother."

"You don't have my brother's number."

"I have everybody's number."

That was probably true.

"I'll wait up," he said.

"Don't."

"I'm going to wait up."

I got out before he could ask again. And here is the part I could not put anywhere: he did not push. He asked three times who it was, loud, and then let it go. He never asked me where I was taking his car, or when he was getting it back. Martinez pushed about everything on earth except the things that mattered, and I had spent years unable to decide whether that was a talent or an accident, and I had needed it to be an accident.



Owen's building had a buzzer that worked and an elevator that did not. He met me at the door in a t-shirt with his glasses on. Pilot came around the corner and lost his footing on the wood the way he always did, and Owen started to say something about his week.

But I just kissed him in the doorway, which I had never done, because usually we got as far as the couch first and made small talk neither of us meant.

He made a surprised sound against my mouth, and then he went with it. He put a hand around the back of my neck and kicked the door shut behind me.