"I'm not sure about anything. I have never been less sure about anything in my life. But I just kissed you, which means my body has apparently decided to bypass my brain entirely, and my body seems very sure, so I'm going to trust it and hope the brain catches up."
He opened his eyes. The gold flecks were brighter from this close, or maybe I was imagining it, or maybe proximity changed the way light worked when it hit the eyes of someone you were falling for.
"If we do this," he said, "I need you to know something. I don't do casual. I don't do experiments. I don't do 'let's see where this goes' with someone who might decide next week that this was a phase and go back to pretending I'm just the equipment guy."
"That's what your ex did."
"That's what my ex did. And I survived it. But surviving something twice is harder than surviving it once, and I'm not interested in being someone's trial run."
"I can't promise you I have it figured out. I don't. I don't have a label for what I am or what this is. But I can promise you that this is not casual and it is not an experiment and the way I feel when you touch me is not a phase."
"How do you feel when I touch you?"
"Like the shaking stops."
Something broke open on his face. Not tears. Something underneath tears. The specific expression of a man hearing something he needed to hear and hadn't dared to hope he would.
He kissed me. Different from mine. His kiss was not clumsy. His kiss had the confidence of a man who knew what he was doing and who he was and what he wanted, and what he wanted was me, and the certainty of that was so foreign and so overwhelming that my whole body responded.
He cupped my face in both hands and tilted my head and kissed me properly, deep and slow, his tongue touching my lower lip and then my tongue, and the sensation traveled from my mouth through my chest to the base of my spine and I made a sound that was involuntary and raw and came from the same place the bread came from. Somewhere below the surface. Somewhere real.
"We should stop," he murmured against my mouth. "We're in the locker room."
"I know."
"Anyone could walk in."
"I know."
"I'm not stopping."
"I noticed."
His hands moved from my face to my neck, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw, and I pulled him closer by the front of his polo until he was standing between my knees. The position was charged with an intimacy that I felt in every part of my body. His hips were at my chest height and his hands were in my hairand he was kissing me with a thoroughness that suggested he had been thinking about this for longer than three weeks and had a backlog of wanting to work through.
"Not here," he said, pulling back. His lips were red. His eyes were dark. The polo was stretched from where my fists had been gripping it. "My apartment. After practice. If you want."
"I want."
"Wes."
"I want. I don't know what I'm doing and I don't have a label for it and my brain is currently staging a full-scale revolt against my nervous system. But I want you. That's the one thing I'm sure about."
He pressed his forehead to mine one more time. Breathed. Then he stepped back and smoothed his polo and picked up his coffee and said, in a voice that was almost steady, "Your left shoulder pad is crooked."
"You're the one who knocked it crooked."
"Details." He grinned. The real one. The one that made rooms warmer and hearts do things they weren't supposed to do at 6:55 in the morning. "Fix your gear, Chen. You've got practice in thirty-five minutes."
He left. I sat at my stall and fixed my shoulder pad and drank my tea and tried to remember how to be a hockey player when every cell in my body was busy being a man who had just kissed Luca Moretti and was going to his apartment after practice and was terrified and alive in equal measure.
Practice was a blur. I played well. I played clean. I did not fight anyone, which was notable because Carolina's enforcer spent the entire scrimmage running his mouth and ordinarily I would have shut it for him. Instead I skated. I defended. I moved the puck. Coach Callahan looked at me with an expression I couldn't read, which might have been approval or confusion or the early stages of a migraine.
After practice. Shower. Change. The drive to Midtown, to Luca's apartment, to the half-unpacked chaos of a man who had been in Atlanta for six weeks and had organized everyone's life except his own.
He opened the door. Changed out of his work polo into a soft grey T-shirt and jeans. Barefoot. Hair still damp from his own shower. The tattoo on his shoulder blade visible through the thin fabric. I could see the shape of it now. A compass rose. The kind sailors used. Pointing in four directions at once.
"Hi," he said.