"Of course you don't. You do unilateral withholding and call it independence."
I looked at him. He looked at me. And then I did something that surprised both of us.
I laughed.
Not a big laugh. Not a Luca laugh, which was an event that affected everyone within a thirty-foot radius. A small, huffed exhale through my nose that was closer to a cough than a laughbut was definitely, undeniably, a laugh. The first one that Luca Moretti had extracted from me, and the expression on his face when he heard it was like watching a man discover gold in a river he'd been panning for weeks.
"Was that a laugh?" he said.
"No."
"That was absolutely a laugh. Wes Chen laughed. I need to mark this day on my calendar."
"It was a respiratory event."
"It was a laugh and I'm claiming it. That laugh is mine now. I earned it."
The warmth in his voice was doing something to my chest that had nothing to do with bruised ribs. I looked away. At the wall, the equipment, anything that wasn't his face and his gold-flecked eyes and the specific curve of his mouth when he was delighted about something, which was a detail I should not have been noticing and could not stop.
"My college boyfriend," he said, unprompted, his voice shifting into something quieter. "That's the other worst thing. Besides the shoulder."
I looked back.
"His name was Ryan. He played defense. We were together for a year and a half, which in college is basically a lifetime. I thought it was the real thing." He paused. His leg started swinging again, a self-soothing rhythm. "He cheated on me with a teammate. Another defenseman. I found out because someone at a party thought I already knew and made a joke about it. A joke. That's how I learned that the person I loved was sleeping with someone else. Through a punchline."
"He was an idiot," I said.
Luca blinked. The words had come out of me with a conviction that surprised us both, because I did not typically offer unsolicited opinions about other people's romantichistories, and because the conviction behind the statement was fueled by something that I was not ready to name.
He reached across the space between us and put his hand on my forearm. A comfort gesture. Instinctive. The kind of touch that warm people offered without thinking, the physical vocabulary of a man who had grown up in a family where contact was language.
I pulled my arm back. Not slowly. Not gently. A flinch. The hard, involuntary recoil of a body that had not been touched in kindness by another man in longer than I could calculate.
Luca's hand hovered in the empty air where my arm had been. His face did something complicated. Not hurt, exactly. Recalibration. The expression of a man who had reached for a door he thought was open and found it locked.
"Sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to..."
"It's fine."
"It's not fine. I overstepped. I do that sometimes. I assume people want the same kind of comfort I want, and that's not always true, and I should have asked instead of just..." He pulled his hand back to his lap. "I'm sorry, Chen."
The training room was very quiet. The fluorescent lights hummed. I could still feel the ghost of his fingers on my forearm, the warmth of them, the specific pressure of a touch that had meant I'm here and that my body had interpreted as danger.
"It's not you," I said. The words came out rougher than I intended. "I don't... people don't touch me. Not like that. I'm not used to it."
"Okay." His voice was careful now. Recalibrated. The warmth was still there but it had pulled back a step, creating a distance that he hadn't wanted to create and that I hadn't wanted either but that my body had demanded. "I won't do it again. Not without asking."
"You don't have to ask."
"I think I do. And that's okay. People have different languages, Chen. I'll learn yours."
He hopped off the counter and busied himself with equipment, and the moment passed. But something had shifted. Not between us. Inside him. I had watched Luca Moretti be wrong about something for the first time, and the way he handled being wrong, the immediate accountability, the zero defensiveness, the willingness to adjust without making the adjustment into a performance, told me more about him than six weeks of biscotti and tea and daily kindness had.
He was not a man who was never wrong. He was a man who was wrong sometimes and owned it immediately. That was rarer and more valuable.
"Was that a compliment?" he said from the equipment cage, his voice carefully light, testing whether the room could hold normal again.
"It was a fact."