We stood like that for maybe a minute. Maybe two. I did not count because counting would have turned it into data and this moment was not data. This moment was warmth, borrowed and mutual, shared in a cold alley behind a sticky-floored bar in Atlanta, Georgia, and it was the most intimate thing that had happened between us and it was not intimate at all. It was just a head on a shoulder. Two people standing close.
I straightened up. He let me go without commentary. The moment ended the way all moments between us ended, with a transition back to the frequency of normalcy that we both maintained in public.
"We should go back in," I said.
"Okay."
"If Ryan is still at the bar, you are not allowed to look at him. Your face will give you away."
"My face doesn't give anything away."
"Your face is currently giving away approximately seventeen homicidal thoughts."
"Twelve at most."
I laughed. The sound surprised both of us. A real laugh, full and sudden, the kind that comes from the collision of tension and absurdity, and it broke something open in the alley. The heaviness dissolved. The echoes quieted. And Wes Chen, standing in the dim light of a back alley, looked at my laughing face and the corner of his mouth twitched. Not a smile. The ghost of one. The architectural plans, submitted and almost approved.
We went back inside. Ryan was gone. The bar was loud and warm and Jonah waved us over and the night resumed its normal programming.
But underneath the normalcy, something had changed. A coordinate had shifted. The distance between Wes and me had been measured and remeasured and the new measurement was different from the old one. Smaller. Closer.
Head-on-shoulder close.
I spent the rest of the night acutely aware of where Wes was in the room. Not watching him. Just knowing. The way you know where the sun is even when you're not looking at it. A gravitational awareness. A warmth at the edge of perception.
At closing time, he caught my eye across the bar. One look. Two seconds. And in those two seconds, more was communicated than in any conversation we'd ever had.
I see you. I see the echoes. I'm not going anywhere.
Then he nodded once and walked to the parking lot and I stood at the booth and watched him go and pressed my hand against the shoulder where his warmth still lived.
I texted Sofia from the parking lot: Something happened tonight.
Her response: Good something or bad something?
I thought about the alley. The shoulder. The twelve homicidal thoughts.
Both.
Sofia: That's usually the best kind.
She was right. She was always right.
Both was the best kind.
-e
WES
The last morning of the rehab arrangement fell on a Tuesday.
I knew it was the last because Dr. Okafor had cleared me for full contact the day before, which meant tomorrow I would dress myself and lace my own skates and the fifteen-minute ritual of Luca Moretti's hands on my body would end, and the ending of it was sitting in my chest like a stone that I could not swallow and could not spit out.
He arrived at 6:45. Tea in the right hand, coffee in the left. The same as every morning for three weeks. He set the tea on the bench and said "morning, sunshine" and I said nothing because I never said anything at 6:45 and the consistency of our respective silences and speeches had become its own language.
He reached for my compression shirt. The same motion he'd performed twenty times. Left arm first, guiding it through the sleeve with the careful attention of a man handling something valuable. Then the right. Then lifting the fabric over my head, his knuckles grazing my stomach on the way up, the contact so familiar now that my body no longer flinched at it. My body had, in fact, been doing the opposite of flinching. My body had beenleaning into the contact with a hunger that my brain was still trying to regulate.
"Ribs feel good?" he asked, adjusting the hem.