Chapter 244 244

Chapter 244 244
Kevin's POV:

That night he picked the movie, which meant it was going to be bad, and it was. Some heist thing with two guys and a car and a plan that anybody who has ever seen a plan could have taken apart in the first twenty minutes.

He talked through all of it. He talked through everything. He was the only person on earth I would watch anything with, which was a fact I had examined once and set down and did not intend to pick back up.

He got the lights and I got the couch.

I sat in the middle.

It was a four-cushion couch. For four years, I had sat on the end. Left end, arm under my elbow, one whole cushion of nothing between us that he closed at his own speed while I held still and took no responsibility for any of it. That was the system. He crossed, I did not, and nothing was ever my fault.

On Sunday I sat in the middle, where there was nothing to put an arm on, and I put my feet on the table and one arm up along the back of the cushions, and I did not look at the doorway when he came in with the bowl.

He stopped for about a second.

"You're in the middle," he said.

"There's a draft on the end."

"There's no draft."

"There's a draft."

"There is no—" He looked at the window, which was nine feet from the end of the couch and was shut, and then he looked at me, and his mouth was doing something. Then he shrugged and sat down two inches from my hip and put the bowl in my lap without asking, because a lap was storage to him. He hit play.

About forty minutes in he was on his side with his knees up against the arm and his head somewhere around my ribs, which was normal. Then a scene came on where nothing was happening and he shifted and rolled over and put his head in my lap.

Awake. Face up.

He did not lie down and pass out and end up there by accident at one in the morning, which had happened maybe a dozen times before and which I had a whole protocol for. He was awake with his eyes open, and he took the bowl out of the way himself and set it on the floor, and then he put his head down on my thigh and looked up at me from about eight inches with those green eyes.

"Move your leg, there's a bone."

"That's my femur," I said.

"Get rid of it."

And he settled in and went back to the movie like a man lying on a beach.

From down there he had a clear run up the underside of my jaw, which was the only angle in that apartment where the mark was visible, and he had it for the next hour. It had gone from red to something browner and duller and it had four or five days left in it.

He did not say one word about it. I could not tell whether he had never seen it or whether it had been filed under my business by Saturday, and I never could tell with him, and that was the entire condition of my life.

I had a bag of ice where my chest was supposed to be. I looked at the screen, which was a discipline I had discussed with myself. The light off the TV was coming up under his jaw and doing something obscene to his eyelashes, and his hair was all over my leg, and he was warm the way he was always warm.

It turns out you can feel a person's pulse through the back of their head if the room is quiet enough and you are paying an unreasonable amount of attention.

My hand was up on the back of the couch. It had been up there since the lights went out. And at some point during that scene, without any part of me signing off on it, my hand came down off the cushions and stopped about four inches above his hair.

I could feel the heat coming off his head on my palm. That was how close it was.

I moved my hand away.

It was the only genuinely brave thing I had ever done, and nobody was in the room, and it took under a second.

There was nowhere to put it, which is what the middle of a couch is. I ended up laying it flat on the cushion beside my own hip, palm down, like a man waiting to have blood taken.

He went and got it himself four minutes later. His hand came up off his chest and found my wrist down on the cushion and took it and put it on his head, and not carefully. He moved it the way he moved furniture.

"My head hurts," he said.

"Your head doesn't hurt."

"It could."

So I did it. I put my fingers in his hair and moved them, and he shut his eyes and made a sound about two notches below a word. His whole face went loose. A professional defenseman, one of the hardest men on that roster to move off a puck, and you could switch him off with a hand.

He said something with his eyes closed about the guy on the screen driving like his cousin. Then he stopped talking.

He stopped making any noise at all, actually, and his breathing went long and even. The permission ran out somewhere in there without either of us marking the spot.

And I did not stop.

That was the part. He asked for it and then he left, the way he left every room he had ever been in, and there was nobody awake in that apartment telling me I could keep going, but I kept going for twenty minutes.

My left leg went numb under the weight of his head, that dead heavy nothing from the hip down. I did not shift. I did not adjust. I sat in it, because moving would have moved him.

The movie ended. Neither of us reached for the remote and the streaming thing went to its little menu music and neither of us reached for that either.

Then he opened his eyes. My hand was still in his hair and I did not take it out. He did not seem to be in any hurry about it.

"Hey," he said.

"Hm."

"Are you happy?"

It came out of nowhere. He asked it the way he asked everything, straight up off the floor of him with no lid on it, and I had about a second to decide what I was going to be.

"Are you?" I said.

"Where else would I be?"

He said it like it was an answer. He was not being clever, he did not do clever, he genuinely could not think of anywhere. Same team, same apartment, same defense pair, his best friend's leg under his head and a bad movie finished and his mother two time zones away and healthy.

That was a complete list for him. That was the whole world and it closed.

I looked down at him and he looked up at me and neither of us said anything for a while, and the menu music went around again. Something in his face went from open to almost-something and then closed itself, quick, like a man remembering he left a burner on.

"You didn't answer me," he said.

"You didn't ask again."

"I'm asking again."

I had a whole shelf of answers ready for that one, all of them true and not one of them an answer.

"Yeah."

He picked his head up half an inch to look at me properly, and then he put it back down.

"Okay. Good."

It was true, and it cost me more than the lie had.

Then he reached up. He did not sit up to do it. He brought his hand off his chest and put two fingers on the mark under my jaw. It was not a poke, he set them on it and left them there, the way you press a bruise on somebody else to find out whether it hurts.

Everything from my collarbone to my ear locked. I did not move my head, because moving my head would have been an answer.

"Does that hurt?"

"No," I said.

"Hm." He took the fingers back and looked at them like they were going to have something on them. "I don't like her."

"You've never met her."

"I don't have to meet her."

He said it in the voice he used for jokes, and then he did not put a joke after it. So I filed it where I filed everything about that man: he did not want the shape of his week to change. It was the counter and the Gatorade again, in a different room.

It was not about a mouth.

Then he sat up, and my hand came out of his hair on the way. He rubbed the back of his own neck.

"Bus is at nine," he said, which was not true, we had a ten o'clock skate and he knew it.

"Yeah."

He stood up and stretched and something in his back went off like a knuckle and he made a whole production out of it. I went to get up and my left leg was not there.

It had been gone for a while and I had not checked on it. I got halfway up and came straight back down on the arm of the couch, and Alejandro Martinez laughed at me until he had to put a hand on the doorframe.

"Your LEG."

"It's asleep."

"You have one job." He was delighted. He was genuinely, completely delighted. "Skate. One job."

"Your head weighs forty pounds."

"My head is a NORMAL HEAD."

He came back and got me under the arm and hauled me up, and I stood on one working leg with my hand around his forearm while the blood came back into the other one and stung all the way down to the foot. He put that leg to sleep himself, with his own head, over an hour, and it did not occur to him.

"You good?"

"Yeah."

"Night, Chen."

"Night."

He went. I heard the bathroom, and then his door, and then the wall.

I stood in the dark with my hand on the back of the couch and waited for the leg to come back. It took about two minutes and it hurt the whole time, and I let it.