Chapter 246 246

Chapter 246 246
Alejandro's POV:

Here is the part I could not do anything with afterward.

On Sunday night I had put my head in that man's lap on our own couch, awake, on purpose, and then I had lain there and waited, and his hand had not come. So I reached up and took his wrist off the cushion and put it on my own head myself, and told him my head hurt.

It did not hurt. He said so, and I said it could, which is what a man says when he has been caught and is not going to stop. Then I went to sleep under his hand like a dog finding the warm part of a floor, and I never once asked myself why I had needed a reason at all.

Less than a week later, in a hotel room in Detroit, I did not bother with a reason: I just got both hands under his arms and lifted him clean off the floor.

The whole way up I knew I was not supposed to, and I did it anyway. I could not have told you which one of us the not-supposed-to was about.

"Kevin!"

He was heavier than sophomore year and I felt every pound of it across my shoulders and my back and the arch of my left foot, which had been cramping since the second period.

I carried him two steps and dropped him on the bed.

"We WON, man! Eleven minutes and we won and Holloway looked at you—"

He landed on his back and did not bounce, did not laugh, did not say anything.

"—and Marsh turned his chair around, did you catch that, Marsh turned a whole chair around for us—"

I looked at him.

He was flat on his back with his eyes on the ceiling and his chest going too fast for a man who had not moved. His hands were open on the bedspread, flat, the fingers apart and stiff. His eyes were wide, his mouth was a line, and the whole length of him had gone rigid.

I had watched that face lose a playoff game. I had watched it take three stitches over the eyebrow and then sit through a two-hour bus ride next to Derek, who asked it questions the whole way.

But I got nothing off it. Not a wrong reading: nothing.

"Chen?"

He blinked twice and came back. All of it gone, packed away inside a second, and his face was his face again.

"You're going to throw out your back," he said.

"You're not that heavy."

"I'm two-oh-five."

"I bench more than that," I replied.

"You bench one-ninety."

"Same neighborhood."

I stood at the foot of the bed with my hands still out like I was holding something. Chen's face did not do things by accident. Everything on it was either chosen or a mistake he fixed inside a second, and that had been a mistake, and I had no idea what it said.

So I just let it be.

There were two rooms. I had a key in my pocket for one of them and it was twelve feet down a hallway, and I did not go, and I did not decide not to go either, which was a lie I told myself standing up in front of nobody.

He did not tell me to. He could have. One sentence in that flat voice of his and I would have picked up my key and gone. We both knew it, and he did not say it, and neither of us said one word about him not saying it.

He got up and turned off the lamp. Then he went to bed again.

The parking lot light came through the curtains in pale flat stripes and we were in the dark. The dark had always been where the best conversations with Chen happened, because his voice opened a quarter turn in it and he said things he would not say with the lights on.

But not that night. That night he gave me half-words and sounds that might have been agreement, and I talked slower and ran out of game to replay and went down into the mattress next to him with that good ruined tired you only get off the ice.

His phone was face down on the nightstand on his side, three inches from the lamp. I knew that without looking. It did not light up once. Maybe he had already texted that girl about the victory. Or maybe he was not going to.

My left foot was still cramping. I pressed the arch against his calf to stretch it and he did not move, because he never moved, and I worked the ankle around slow until the thing let go.

It let go somewhere around the time I stopped talking.

I left the foot where it was.

He asked me one question that whole night.

"Cramp?"

"Little bit," I said.

It was not.

"Hey," I said. "Good game."

"Yeah."

"I mean it."

"I know," he said.

"Good game, partner."

Somewhere in the dark he almost laughed, one short inhale, and then he caught it and turned it into nothing.

I lay there with my foot on his leg and thought about calling my mom in the morning, the clearance first and the Davis nod last, and then I was not thinking about my mother at all. I was standing next to a swimming pool with a cover on it in the cold, and Connor was telling me to ask him a different question.

I had been carrying that around without ever getting to the end of it.

It was right there. I had the whole of it in my mouth.

"You up?" I said.