"Are you okay?" he asked.
"I think I need to recalibrate my entire understanding of myself."
"Is that a yes?"
"That's a yes."
"Good." He pressed a kiss to my sternum. "For what it's worth, your hands are not what I expected."
"What do you mean?"
"I expected them to be rough. They are, on the outside. The scars, the calluses. But the way you touch is..." He paused, searching. "Careful. Like you're handling something you're afraid of breaking."
"I've never been touched like I wasn't going to break. I didn't want to do that to you."
He lifted his head and looked at me. His hair was a disaster and his lips were swollen and there was a mark on his neck that I had put there and the sight of it, my mark on his skin, sent a possessive heat through me that was entirely new and entirely welcome.
"You're not going to break me," he said. "And I'm not going to break you."
"How do you know?"
"Because you already survived everything that tried. And so did I. Two unbreakable things finding each other. That's not fragile. That's the opposite of fragile."
I pulled him closer. He came willingly. The couch was too small for two men of our size and the positioning was ridiculous and his elbow was in a place that elbows should not be and none of it mattered because Luca Moretti was lying on my chest in a Midtown apartment with a compass rose tattoo and a golden retriever named Cannoli and a grandmother whose biscotti recipe had single-handedly dismantled the most fortified emotional defense system in the NHL.
"Luca."
"Yeah?"
"Thank you."
"For what?"
"For knocking. When everyone else walked past."
He pressed his face into my neck and I felt him smile against my skin. The warmth of it. The specific, localized heat of a smile pressed against the place where my pulse lived.
"You were worth knocking for," he said.
The echo of something Cole had said to Mik, carried forward through the series like a relay baton passed between people who understood what it cost to open a door and what it meant when someone was waiting on the other side.
I held him. The shaking in my hands was gone. Not suppressed, not controlled, not channeled into bread dough at 2 AM. Gone. Replaced by the steady pressure of another person's body against mine and the quiet, profound discovery that the thing I had been baking toward all those midnight hours was not bread.
It was this.
-e
LUCA
Wes Chen courted me with carbohydrates.
I don't think he knew he was doing it. I don't think the word "courting" existed in his vocabulary, and if it did, it would have been filed under "unnecessary social constructs" alongside small talk and team-building exercises. But that is what was happening. Wes Chen, who communicated primarily through silence and controlled violence and the strategic deployment of baked goods, was courting me, and the courtship was conducted entirely in flour and butter and the particular language of a man who didn't know how to say "I'm thinking about you" but could say it in sourdough.
The first loaf arrived on a Thursday, wrapped in a clean dish towel, left in my equipment room stall with no note. No explanation. Just bread. I knew it was from him because nobody else on the team baked, and because the bread was perfect, the same golden-crusted, open-crumbed sourdough that I'd eaten in his kitchen, and because when I looked across the locker room and caught his eye, he looked away approximately one-tenth of a second too fast, which was the Wes Chen equivalent of a love letter.
The second loaf arrived on Monday. This one came with butter. Homemade. In a small glass jar with a lid.
The third arrived on Wednesday. Bread, butter, and a jar of what turned out to be homemade strawberry jam that was so good I ate it with a spoon standing in the equipment room at 7 AM and briefly considered proposing to the jar.