"I have depth, Chen. Surprising, I know."
I almost laughed. Not quite. But the pressure in my chest loosened by a fraction, the way a valve releases steam before the whole system blows, and the relief of it was physical.
"Thank you," I said.
"Anytime. And Wes?"
"Yeah?"
"For what it's worth, you're not alone in this. Whatever this turns out to be. You've got people."
I nodded. I stood up. I walked to the door of the film room and stopped with my hand on the handle.
"Briggs."
"Still here."
"The hypothetical person. The one they're having these feelings about."
"Yeah?"
"He makes really good biscotti."
Cole was quiet for exactly one second. Then he grinned, and the grin was the grin of a man who had been where I was standing and knew the territory and was glad, genuinely glad, that someone else was finding the courage to step into it.
"Must be some biscotti," he said.
"You have no idea."
I left the film room and walked to the parking lot and sat in my truck and looked at my hands on the steering wheel. Scarred, swollen, the hands of a man who had spent his career turning his body into a weapon. These hands baked bread. These hands shook in the dark. These hands had been steady when Luca touched them, which was a fact that could no longer be filed under neurological events or static shocks or any other category of denial.
The body knows before the brain. The brain is the last one to the party.
My brain was at the party now. It was standing in the corner with its arms crossed. But it was there. It had showed up. And showing up, as I was learning, was the first step toward sitting down.
I drove home. I did not bake. I did not Google. I sat on my couch in my dark apartment and I thought about Luca Moretti with full, conscious, undefended honesty for the first time.
His laugh. His hands. The gold in his eyes. The way he called me sunshine and meant the opposite and the opposite was somehow better. The way he made a room warmer just by being in it. The biscotti and the tea and the sticky note andthe collarbone and the tattoo I had seen for three seconds and wanted to see for longer.
I let myself want it. Just for a minute. Sitting alone in the dark, with no audience and no consequence, I let myself want Luca Moretti the way you want something you've been starving for without knowing you were hungry.
The wanting was terrifying.
Which meant, according to Cole Briggs, that I was doing it right.
-e
LUCA
The Crease on a Friday night was the closest thing I'd found to church since moving to Atlanta.
Not in the spiritual sense. In the community sense. The sense of a place where you belonged by default, where the people around you shared a language and a purpose and the particular bond of having survived something together, even if the something was just a Tuesday practice that Coach Callahan had designed to make grown men question their life choices.
I was three beers deep and feeling good. The Reapers had won their fourth straight, the team energy was electric, and I was sitting in a booth with Jonah Park and two rookies who were telling a story about their billet family in juniors that involved a pet goat and a Thanksgiving turkey and was getting progressively more unhinged.
Wes was there. This alone was noteworthy because Wes Chen did not typically attend team outings. He existed in the corner booth like a gargoyle who had been assigned to protect the establishment, nursing a single beer with the same grim focus he brought to penalty kills. Occasionally he nodded at something someone said. Occasionally he made eye contact withme across the room, brief and unreadable, and I felt the contact in my sternum like a finger tapping glass.
The ribs were healed. He'd been cleared to play three days ago. Our daily routine of tea and gear and the slow, careful intimacy of dressing and undressing was over, and its absence had left a space in my mornings that I hadn't figured out how to fill. I still brought him tea. He still drank it. But the physical proximity, the hands-on-body closeness that the injury had necessitated, was gone, and I missed it with an intensity that was not professional and was becoming increasingly difficult to categorize as anything else.