Chapter 242: 242

Alejandro's POV:

Chen went out on a Friday. Kevin Chen did not go out. Kevin Chen went to the rink, came home, watched film, ate the same four dinners on a rotation and was horizontal by ten thirty. In four years I had seen him leave the building for a social reason maybe eleven times and eight of those I dragged him.

So when he came down the hall in jeans that fit and a black shirt, smelling like he had used something on purpose, I lost my mind a little and I thought I was entitled to it.

I turned him around to look at the back of him and hit him across the ass, once, the way you do. He threatened to break my hand. I asked who it was three times and got nothing, total lockdown, and that was the interesting part, because Chen told me everything. He had told me about his brother's promotion before his brother told his own father. He had told me, unprompted, in a car, on a Tuesday, the exact reason he would not drink milk.

And this he would not hand over. I told him to take my car and I stood there in a towel with a toothbrush in my mouth and thought: "huh."

Then the door shut, and out in the lot the Xterra took two tries to start, like always, and the apartment was empty.

I had never been able to be alone in a room for more than about nine minutes without putting something on. Not music necessarily, just a voice, a game, anything with a person in it. My mother said I was like that at three years old and would follow whoever was talking from room to room like a dog with a favorite.

So I put the speaker on, and then I turned it off, which I noticed myself doing and did not investigate, and I put the Northbrook game on my laptop and dragged it over to the TV.

They were playing Eastbrook. Bad ice, three cameras and a student announcer who called icing twice when it was not icing. I sat there in the dark eating Doritos out of the bag like a man in a documentary about loneliness and I loved every second of it.

And there they were. Eleven and nineteen, first line, our old barn.

Hudson was not the fastest man on that ice anymore and he was not close, and you did not have to be a defenseman to see it. I was a defenseman. I saw it in four strides.

He also did not need to be.

He came off the wall in the second with the puck on his backhand and three guys converging, and the Hudson I played with would have taken one of them on and gone through him. This one got rid of it before the first of them arrived. He was playing about three seconds ahead of everybody in that building because he could not afford to be half a second behind. Then Jaden came down the far side into a gap that had not existed when the puck left the stick, and it was already there waiting for him, on the tape, moving, through a shin pad, and Jaden did not have to slow down by one step. I said "OH" out loud to nobody.

Nobody does that. You do not do that unless you have spent an unreasonable amount of your life learning where one specific person is going to be.

And Jaden did not get more than about fifteen feet from him the whole period. Not on the forecheck, not on a change, not once. The kid was playing right wing and bodyguard at the same time and I would bet money nobody had asked him to.

I texted Connor on our group chat. "REMEMBER WHEN I CALLED IT!"

He answered in about nine seconds. Of course, he was also watching the game and knew exactly what I was talking about.

"You have told me this 400 times."

"I called it in DECEMBER. JUNIOR YEAR. In the LOCKER ROOM, I told you and Chen."

"And we told you to shut up."

"AND I WAS RIGHT!"

Then, after a pause long enough that I knew he had typed something and deleted it: "You're very observant, Martinez."

Which from Connor could mean four things and I only checked one of them.

Because I was right. Everybody else on that team watched those two hate each other for four months and believed it, and I watched them hate each other for four months and thought: that is not what that is.

I could not have told you how I knew. It was in the margins. It was where Harrington's eyes went when Williams was on the ice and he was pretending to talk to me. It was that Williams never once said the man's name without that weird tone on it. And it was two grown men arranging an entire season around standing near each other and calling it a rivalry.

Kaylee texted at nine fifteen: "What are you up to?"

I did not have the car. I could have told her to come to me, and I looked at that sitting in my head for a while and then put the phone face down on the arm of the couch and told myself I would answer at the intermission. Then the intermission came and I watched a student do a rink-side interview instead, and at nine thirty-two I still had not answered.

I did like Kaylee. Kaylee was great. I just did not feel like it that night.

I heard the Xterra come into the lot before I heard anything else, and I sat up so fast I put the remote on the floor. I did not decide to do that, my body just did it the way your body does it when a car backfires.

Then the door went, and I looked at the microwave clock before I looked at him, and it said nine forty, and he had left at eight fifty-nine.

Forty-one minutes.

"That was FAST," I said.

"Traffic."

"There's no traffic. It's nine forty on a Friday, there's no—"

And then I got there, and I put both hands on top of my head.

"Oh no. Oh NO. Chen. Chen, buddy."

"It wasn't that," he replied.

"I didn't say anything."

"You're saying a lot of things."

"It happens to EVERYBODY!" He went into the kitchen and I went as far as the counter. "It's happened to me. Twice." I held up three fingers. "Once."

He took it. He did not fire anything back, and he always fired something back, and he stood at that sink with his back to me the entire time I was talking. His shirt had come untucked on one side. And there was a mark on his neck that had not been there when he left, up under the jaw, small.

I looked at it for exactly as long as it takes to notice a thing and then I looked at the TV.

Something went through me sideways and I did not like the taste of it and I put it down fast.

"You want to watch the third? It's Eastbrook, they're getting destroyed, Hudson's got two."

"I'm going to bed."

"It's ten."

"I know what time it is," he said.

He went. His door clicked.

And I sat there on the couch in the dark with a bag of Doritos and a college hockey game and the apartment finally back to the correct number of people in it. I felt so stupidly, uncomplicatedly GOOD about that, about him being forty feet away behind a door doing nothing instead of somewhere across the city doing something, that I stopped and asked myself why.

First time in four years.

I did not like the shape of it, so I put the speaker on and turned it up loud enough to bother the neighbor, and it did not work, so I turned it off again and lay back down.

And then I did a thing I had never done in my whole life, which was think about Kevin Chen for two hours. Not about what was wrong with him. About him.

Here was my problem. I had been telling people my best friend was a catch since I was eighteen years old. I said it at parties. I said it to my mother and to my sister. I said it in a locker room in front of twenty-five men with him sitting right there taking his skates off. And I had been saying it the whole time the way you say your hometown is nice, which is to say without ever once looking at it.

So I looked at it, lying on my own couch at eleven at night with a bag of chips on my chest.

The guy was twenty-two years old and two hundred and five pounds of professional athlete and none of it showed in a shirt, which was worse, not better, because the ones you could see coming were a type and the ones you could not were a surprise. He had a jaw, and forearms my cousins would say something about out loud at a table in front of everybody. His hands did not shake, ever, and I had watched people notice that about him from across a room and not know what they were noticing.

And then the ass. Kevin Chen had an ass that women had asked me about. Actually asked, out loud, using words.

He was also, and this was the part that irritated me, one of the two or three smartest people I had ever been in a room with.

So he was hot, and he was smart, and he made what I made, and he was the most reliable human being I had ever met, and in four years he had never once made me feel like a project.

And nobody had him.

Except somebody did now.

I got up at some point and went down the hall for no reason at all and stood outside his door with a glass I had already emptied. There was nothing to hear, because Kevin Chen slept the way he did everything. I went back to the couch.

Forty-one minutes. I did the math on it again lying down in the dark like a man with a hobby. Nine minutes each way in that car if you hit the lights right on Fourth, and I knew that because it was my car and they were my lights, which left twenty-three. You could not do anything in twenty-three minutes. You could do some things in twenty-three minutes.

And somewhere inside that she had put her mouth on his neck and left it there where the whole world could see it.

That was the place I kept arriving at. Every time I got there I turned around and went somewhere else, and every time I went somewhere else I came back. Somebody whose name I did not have, whose face I had never seen, had had her mouth under his jaw inside those twenty-three minutes and had marked him with it, and then he had come into my kitchen and stood at my sink and said traffic.

He told me everything.

So it was not about her. Obviously. It was about him not telling me, that was the whole thing, that was all it was, and I was annoyed the way a man gets annoyed when somebody moves his stuff without asking.

I went to bed at one. I never went to bed at one.

And I was still at it at two, doing arithmetic on a man I had known since I was eighteen, and the only question I could get to hold still was who she was.