Chapter 243 243

Chapter 243 243
Kevin's POV:

I knew about Hudson and Jaden before anybody, including Martinez, and unlike Martinez I never said a word about it to a living soul.

He thought he was the only one. He had told that story about four hundred times and he had told it again on Friday, in the group chat, in capitals. I read it at ten past ten that night lying on top of my own bed with my shoes still on and a mark under my jaw that was about an hour old.

Then Connor, underneath it: "You're very observant, Martinez."

I read that one twice.

I never corrected him. Letting Martinez believe he was the only person on that team who saw something cost me nothing and it made him happy for about a week every time.

I saw it in October. Two months before he did. I saw it in a hallway outside the equipment room, and what I saw was not a look, because Hudson was too well built to give anybody a look. What I saw was a twenty-one-year-old alpha stop talking mid-sentence and then start again half a beat later on a different word, and I knew exactly what that was, and I knew it the way you know a word in your own language.

That was the part I had never told anybody. Not that I saw them: that I recognized it.

The whole team spent months talking about those two like it was a rivalry. Even the alphas, who could smell the room and still got it wrong, because a scent tells you the temperature and not the reason.

And I sat in my stall two feet from it, with no nose and no theory and no dog in the fight, and I watched a man reroute a sentence around another man's name and I thought, oh. That was what that was. I knew that one.

I had never been jealous of them for a single second. That was not a virtue, it was just true. What I felt watching Hudson fall apart in public over an entire season was closer to envy in the way you envy someone who lives somewhere warm. His body told on him. He fought it every day for four months and lost, in front of a barn, in front of cameras, and it cost him everything he had. It also meant that at the end of it there was nothing left for him to have to say out loud.

Nobody was ever going to do that to me. My body had kept my secret perfectly for four years and it would keep it for forty more, and it would be all mine forever, and it would be free.

At the door on Wednesday, on our way out of his aunt's house with Martinez three feet away being handed leftovers, Connor put his hand on my shoulder and asked if I was okay. He was not asking about the thing the rest of the world could see. He was asking a much more complicated question, and he got it into three words so I would never have to hear the long one.

I said, "Don't."

Just that.

He took his hand off my shoulder and said goodnight and that was the end of it. Connor had known for a while, and Connor was the safest place on this earth to be known by. He was never going to say it out loud. He was never going to say it to Martinez. He would keep it the way he kept everything, completely and without ever once making me talk about it.

Martinez asked me in the car what he had said.

"Nothing."

He did not take it. He started in on the hand on the shoulder and what the hand meant and how long he had known what the hand meant. So I said it again with his name on the end to close the subject, and I said both of them to the windshield, because he was driving and because I could.

That was the first time in four years I had lied to Alejandro Martinez, and I did it in under a second, and it did not even feel like a decision.

Nothing in me moved while I did it. Not one thing.



He worked on me about the girl all weekend. In the car on Saturday morning, in the room while he taped his stick, in the tunnel, in the kitchen on Sunday with his head inside the refrigerator. Was she from the gym? Was she taller than me? Did I meet her on an app, and if I met her on an app then which app, because he had opinions about the apps. Twice he announced that he was not asking, and then asked.

I gave him nothing, which was not difficult, because there was nothing left to give him. And I liked it, which is not a nice thing to admit. Six days a week that man did not have one question for me he had not already answered himself on the way in. For two days he wanted something out of me that he could not get, and I stretched it out.

Then on Sunday afternoon it changed shape, and I do not think he noticed it changing.

He was sitting on the counter, because he sat on every surface in that apartment that was not for sitting.

"You're not going to get weird, right?"

"Weird how?" I asked.

"Like guys get." He was peeling the label off a Gatorade in one piece, which was a project he had been failing at since he was eighteen. "They get a girl and then it's four months of I can't, man, I've got a thing. And then you see them at Christmas and they've got a different haircut."

I let that sit.

"Just don't disappear on me, okay?" he said.

"I'm not going to disappear."

"Say it properly."

"I'm not going to disappear, Martinez."

"Okay." The label came off whole. He held it up and looked at it like a man reading an X-ray. "Okay. Good."

It cost me nothing to promise, and that was the part I could not work out how to feel about. Owen had taken the option off the table on Friday night while his dog watched. There was nothing to disappear into and there was not going to be. Alejandro Martinez sat on my counter and made me swear I would not do a thing I could no longer do, and he did not know there had been anything to swear about.

It was not about me, either. That was just how he was built. He had made Connor promise him something along the same lines in a hallway in our second year over a girl who lasted five weeks. Martinez needed the shape of his life to stay the shape it was, and I was load-bearing, and that was not the same thing as being wanted.

It definitely wasn't.