"Yeah."
"Full range of motion?"
"Yeah."
"So this is the last time."
The sentence hung in the air between us. A factual statement. An observation about the conclusion of a medical necessity. There was no reason for it to carry weight. No reason for the six words to land in my chest the way they did, heavy and final, like the last note of a song you didn't realize you'd been listening to until it stopped.
"Yeah," I said. "I guess it is."
His hands were on my shoulder pads. Adjusting the straps. His face was close to mine, closer than it needed to be, the proximity a byproduct of the mechanics of the task. I could see the gold flecks in his brown eyes. I could count them if I wanted to, the way Mik Volkov had counted Cole Briggs's freckles, the way people count the details of someone they are trying not to love and failing.
Seven. There were seven gold flecks in his left eye. I'd counted them on the third morning, through my peripheral vision, while pretending to look at the wall.
"Luca."
He stopped. His hands on the straps. His eyes on mine. The use of his first name did what it always did between us, which was to shift the register from professional to personal in the space of two syllables.
"Yeah?"
"I don't know what I'm doing."
"About what?"
"About you."
The locker room was empty. 6:50 in the morning, the fluorescent lights buzzing, the ice plant humming its distant drone. Just us. Just his hands on my shoulder pads and my heart doing something that defied the resting rate it was supposed to maintain.
"You don't have to know," he said. His voice was careful. Gentle in the specific way of a man approaching a wild animal. "You don't have to have it figured out. You can just be here."
"I'm not good at just being here."
"I know. You're good at fighting and baking and intimidating rookies. Being here is a different skill set."
"You're making fun of me."
"I'm making fun of the situation. You, I take very seriously."
His hands had stopped adjusting. They were just resting on my shoulders now, warm through the padding, and the weight of them was the most grounding sensation I had experienced since the last time he'd done this, which was yesterday, which was twenty-four hours ago, which was too long.
I kissed him.
I did not plan it. I did not run it through the analytical framework or the risk-assessment protocol or any of the systems I used to evaluate decisions before committing to them. My brain was the last one to the party, as Cole had said, and the body had already made the call.
I leaned forward and pressed my mouth to his and the world went quiet.
The kiss was clumsy. I want to be honest about that. It was not smooth or practiced or any of the things that first kisses are supposed to be in the stories people tell about them. My nose bumped his. My hands, which had been at my sides, came up and gripped the front of his polo with the desperation of a man who had decided to jump and needed something to hold onto during the fall. The angle was wrong because I was sitting and hewas standing and the height differential created a geometry that neither of us had solved.
But his mouth was warm. And soft. And for three seconds, before either of us adjusted or calibrated or made any conscious decision about what was happening, his mouth was on mine and my hands were on his shirt and the silence in the locker room was total and I was not shaking.
He pulled back first. Not far. An inch. His forehead rested against mine. His breathing was uneven and his eyes were closed and his hands were still on my shoulders, gripping now instead of resting.
"Wes." My name in his voice. Low and rough. "Are you sure?"
"No."
"That's honest."