Chapter 247 247

Chapter 247 247
Kevin's POV:
There was a context in which a man put his hands under another man's arms, lifted him clean off the floor, and carried him to a bed. That context was not hockey. My body knew the difference before my brain caught up, which was why my hands went flat on the bedspread and my chest forgot the sequence and my face, for about a second, did something I had never given it permission to do.
He saw it, but he didn't understand it. I lay there in the dark being grateful for that with my whole body.
And he'd said my name while he was holding me up. Kevin. Two syllables, right into my face, from about four inches, with my feet off the ground. He used it maybe four times a year and never on purpose, and I had never once managed to be ready for it, and this time it came attached to his hands under my arms and the whole weight of me in them.
So I lay in a hotel bed in Detroit at twelve-forty in the morning next to Alejandro Martinez, taking inventory of a nervous system that was not returning my calls.
"You up?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Can't sleep?"
"Thinking," I said.
"About the game?"
"Sure."
He was on his back with one arm behind his head. I could see him at the edge of my vision, the profile cut out by the parking lot light through the curtain: the crooked nose, the jaw, the eyelashes that had no business being on a man who ate gas station beef jerky for dinner two nights before and wiped his hands on the seat.
"Kaylee texted before the game," he finally said.
He said it the way he said everything, which was by putting it on the table without checking what was underneath.
"Yeah?"
"She wants to meet my parents. The whole thing, do a weekend."
"Hm."
I had not even met that girl yet and he was already planning to take her home to his mom... Yeah, it seemed even more serious than I had thought.
"She asked me to teach her some Spanish. For the trip," he said.
"Your mom speaks English."
"I know. She just wants to." He was quiet a second. "She asked how to say she's happy to meet them."
I knew eleven words of Spanish. I'd counted them once on a bus, out of boredom and something else, and all eleven were stolen. Four summers in that house and nobody had ever sat me down and taught me anything. I'd picked them out of the air the way you pick up a song off a radio you aren't listening to, and I used them at the table because his mother's whole face changed when I did. Gracias, señora. Buen provecho. Qué rico. She corrected my accent every August and she had never once made me feel stupid about it.
But nobody had ever offered me lessons.
It was a small thing. I knew it was a small thing. I looked at the clock on the nightstand, 12:47 in blue numbers, and did the arithmetic anyway, because that was what I did. She got lessons. I got four years of osmosis.
And she was going to sit at that table in August, in a chair I had sat in, and eat the food I ate, and meet the sister, and laugh at the father's jokes. The whole family would open up for her exactly the way it had opened up for me, because the Martinez family opened up for everybody Alejandro brought home. Except that I was the friend and she was the future, and I had been living inside the distance between those two words for four years without making a sound about it.
His mother had been working on the sister for three summers by then, with the cheerful determination of a woman who had already chosen a color scheme. The sister, Aleyda, was lovely. She was genuinely, completely lovely, and at the last barbecue she and I sat on the back steps for an hour talking about her job while neither of us mentioned that her mother had seated us together on purpose again. I'd thought the sentence at myself that night: they wanted to marry me off to the wrong sibling. It had been almost funny at the time. It was still almost funny.
In four years he had never been to my father's house. He had never asked and I had never offered, and I could not work out which of those two was worse. There was nothing to show him anyway. A television, a thermostat at sixty-six, and three men who loved each other sitting in a room not saying so.
"You think she'd fit in?" Alejandro said. "With them?"
"Yeah. She'd fit."
"Cool."
He went quiet. The TV through the wall had stopped and the room was down to the heater and his breathing and my foot where he'd left his against it, still there.
I looked at the ceiling and thought about the thing I had never said out loud to anybody, which was that I was glad we were what we were. If we had both been born alphas this would have ended years ago. He would have walked into a locker room one afternoon and read it off me like a sign on a door. Instead my body had never once told on me, not in four years, not in a car, not in a bed, and I had hated it and I had needed it, and most days I could not have told you which one was winning.
I thought about the one fact I had organized my entire adult life around, which was that Alejandro Martinez was a straight man who loved me as much as a straight man could love another man. That amount was enormous. It was more than most people got from anybody. He would have fought a stranger for me in a parking lot, he would have taken the middle seat on every flight for the rest of his life if I'd asked, and he told me things before he told his mother.
It was never going to be the other kind. I'd known that since sophomore year and I'd built the whole house on top of it and the house was a good house.
But knowing it was one thing. Lying in the dark next to him while he talked about a girl who got to want him out loud, in that exact tone, the one I would have used about him if I had ever been allowed a tone about him, was a completely different thing, and nobody had ever explained to me that the two were different.
I wanted to cry. But I did not cry.
That was not a boast and it was not a tragedy. It was the equipment I came with. Sixteen years since the funeral and I could not have told you what my father's face did when he did it, or Kurt's, or whether either of them ever had, and neither of them could have told you the first thing about me. Whatever the three of us ran instead of crying had never failed me once.
It came close in that bed. The pressure behind the eyes, my throat going tight, my nose starting to run for no reason at all, which was the stupidest part and the part nobody had ever warned me about. And I just lay there in the dark breathing through my mouth like an idiot.
None of it was his fault. That was the part I had to be honest about. He hadn't done anything to me. He'd told his best friend about a girl, which was what best friends were for, and if I'd had a girl for real I would have told him and he would have been insufferable about it for a month. He was being exactly what he had always been and exactly what I had signed up for.
It just hurt anyway. Both of those were true at the same time and I didn't have anywhere to put either one.
"I'm tired," I said. "Going to sleep." And I rolled onto my side, facing the wall.
"Chen." His hand landed between my shoulder blades where it always landed. I could feel every finger through the shirt.
"I'm good. Just wiped."
"Come on." He dug two fingers into my ribs, that exact spot he'd known about since junior year, the one that got me no matter how ready I was. My whole body jumped, and he laughed behind me, short and warm and pleased with himself.
"Ale..."
I had never called him that. Not once in four years, not out loud, not to his face. It came out of me before I had a vote in it.
"Please. Just let me sleep."
He stopped.
His hand stayed flat on my back a few seconds longer. Then he took it away.
"Okay," he said. His voice had gone down to one layer, and Alejandro's voice had never in its life had fewer than ten. "Okay."
The mattress moved as he rolled over. I heard him fix the pillow, and then the sheets, and then his breathing going long behind me. I lay there with my face at the wall and my eyes open and did not cry, but I had never been that close to it.

When I woke up in the morning the first thing I noticed was his arm across my waist. Not holding, just landed there, the way an arm lands when the man attached to it is unconscious and his body goes wherever it wants.
His forehead was against the back of my neck. I counted his breathing, because I had counted his breathing through a wall since August and this was the first time it had ever been on my skin, and I was at thirty-seven when the clock turned 6:04.
The room was too warm. My mouth tasted like the inside of a shoe and my neck had a crick in it from the hotel pillow and his arm was heavy over me, but I did not move. Because I never moved, and I let myself have it from 6:04 to 6:10.
Six minutes.
Then I got up. He shifted into the warm space I'd left and made a sound that wasn't a word. I stood at the window looking at the parking lot, and breathed out through my nose. The sound was louder than I wanted it to be.
I had always been fine with this. That was the arrangement I had made with myself years ago and it had held up through all this time and I'd been, honestly, kind of proud of it. So I didn't know when it had started costing more, or why I had to hold on tighter every month to get to the same place I used to get to for free.
"What time is it?" he said into the pillow.
"Six-fifteen."
"That's a war crime." He didn't open his eyes. "Come back."
"No."
"Five minutes."
"Bus is at nine."
"Five minutes, Kevin. Five."
Twice in one day. In four years it had never once been twice in one day, and arithmetic was what I had instead of a nose, so I stood there with my hand on the bathroom door and counted to four.
Then I went and sat down on the edge of the bed, and he threw an arm over my leg without waking up, and I let him.