Chapter 253 253

Chapter 253 253
Kevin's POV:

I got a week out of it before I understood what I had actually paid.

It did not start badly. The Sunday after was fine. He was wrecked from not sleeping and I made the coffee and he sat in the chair next to mine and talked at me for forty minutes about a documentary he had watched about a man who built a boat. I thought, with something close to relief, that I had gotten the whole thing right.

Then it started, and because it started small I did not see it as one thing until the end.

Monday he knocked on my door.

He had never knocked on a door in his life. Not once. Not in a dorm, not in this apartment, not in a hotel. Alejandro Martinez came into a room the way weather came into a room, and on Monday at nine in the morning there were two soft raps on my door and then his voice asking if I was decent, which was a joke, except that he waited for the answer.

Tuesday we collided in the kitchen, which happened twice a day, which had happened twice a day since August, and he said sorry.

He had never said sorry for that. It was not a thing that got a sorry. It was a thing that got an elbow in your ribs and a comment about your reflexes.

Wednesday, on the bus, he sat down next to me and left about four inches. Four. I knew that because I had spent four years with the outside of his thigh against the outside of mine on every bus ride I had ever taken with the man. On Wednesday there were four inches of vinyl between us and he spent the whole ride turned toward the aisle talking to Parsons.

Thursday was FIFA.

Thursday was the one that did it.

He suggested it. Nine at night on an off day, he got the controllers out and threw one at me without looking because he knew where I sat, and we played, and it was good. He was terrible. I beat him three straight and he accused me of cheating three straight times, and at one point he threw a cushion at my head and I did not see it coming and it knocked my beer onto my own leg.

And he sat sideways with his knees up against the arm of the couch, and his legs stayed exactly where they were.

His legs had come up across my lap inside about ten minutes of any game we had ever played, without a thought, without asking, without either of us ever once mentioning it. It was the single most reliable physical fact of my adult life.

But we played for two hours and they did not come up.

And that was the part nobody would have seen. He was not cold. He was not distant, he was not weird, he did not go quiet. He was exactly himself all night, loud and stupid and generous, and if you had filmed it you would have watched two friends play a video game.

What you would not have caught was that at about the fifty minute mark he shifted, and his knee came up. His whole body started to do the thing it had done a thousand times, and then it stopped, and he put his foot back down on the floor.

I saw him decide.

That was what I had bought with a week and one true sentence in a kitchen. For four years Alejandro Martinez had touched me the way you touch a table you have had for a decade, and now every single time, he had to decide first.

And I could see the decision. He was not capable of hiding one. His face had never held anything in its life.

So I had not lost his hands, exactly. I had lost the thing that made his hands survivable, which was that they meant nothing. A hand that landed on you without a thought was free. A hand that landed on you after a man had run a check on himself was a gift, and I could not accept a gift, and he did not even know he was giving me one.

He was being careful with me.

Nobody had ever been careful with me. My father was not careful with me, and he loved me every day of my life, and I would have taken a hundred years of a man who watched all of my games without saying anything over one week of somebody handling me like a thing that might come apart. Careful was what you were with strangers. Careful was what you were with something you had just found out was breakable.

On the seventh day I did the count on the edge of my bed and got to the sentence, which was that I had been trying to save the friendship by giving up a piece of myself. Instead I had spent the piece and the friendship had changed anyway, and there was no version of the arithmetic where I came out ahead.

That night was the bathroom.

Four months in that apartment and neither of us had ever picked up a phone about that door. It was a joke by the second week. Nine times a week, easily, one of us walked in on the other one, and nothing had ever come of it, because nothing was ever happening.

I was in the shower. He came in for his phone, which was on the back of the toilet, because he left it there every morning and then forgot about it until something made him want it. The curtain was open on the far side because our curtain was short and the far side flooded if you closed it. He got about two steps in.

"Oh, sorry. Sorry, sorry," he said.

And he backed out.

He said sorry twice and he backed out of a bathroom he had walked into a hundred times, in an apartment we both paid for, with his own phone in his hand.

I stood there under the water with the shampoo still in and did not move for a while, which was what I did, and then I turned the water off and got the towel and went out into the hall. He was standing there with the phone against his chest looking like a man who had backed a car into a mailbox.

"Sorry, I didn't—"

"I cannot even count how many times you have seen me naked in the team showers," I said. "And here you've walked in on me a hundred times."

He opened his mouth.

"Alejandro. A hundred times. You walked in on me in August with a toothbrush in your mouth and stood there and told me about a guy on the Coyotes for four minutes while I was in the shower."

"I know."

"So what's different?"

And he stood in our hallway at nine at night with his phone against his chest and his mouth slightly open, and he did not have an answer. I watched him not have one, and I understood that he had never once put the question to himself in those words until I put it to him.

"Nothing," he said. "Nothing's different."

"Okay."

"Chen—"

"It's fine. I'm dripping on the carpet."

I went into my room and shut the door and stood with my back against it holding a towel, and I did not feel anything for about a minute. Then my throat closed up so fast that I had to sit down on the floor with the towel still on and my hair still wet, and I sat there and did not cry, because I did not.

He knocked twenty minutes later, two soft raps.

"You want to watch something?"

"I'm going to bed," I said.

"Okay."

His footsteps went. The speaker did not go on. It was nine thirty on a Saturday in an apartment where music had played every single evening since August, and the whole place stayed completely silent until I fell asleep.

I started to think that maybe the price had been too high.