"I don't need a babysitter."
"Good, because I'm not qualified. I'm more of a pasta-and-emotional-support kind of guy."
There it was again. The flicker. Faster this time, but I caught it. A movement at the corner of his mouth, the architecture of a smile being assembled and then dismantled before it could be completed. He was fighting it. Fighting the impulse to respond to me with something other than resistance.
"Goodnight, Moretti."
"Goodnight, Chen. Ice those ribs. Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off."
"I know how to ice ribs."
"I know you know. I'm saying it anyway because it makes me feel useful."
He walked out. I stood in the empty locker room and listened to his footsteps fade down the corridor and into the parking garage and then into silence.
I sat down on the bench. The bench was cold. The locker room was enormous and empty and full of the residual energy of the game, the victory, the fight, the injury, the shirt. I could still feel the warmth of his skin on my palms. The smoothness of his shoulders under the cotton. The tension in his body as I dressed him, every muscle coiled and resisting and simultaneously allowing, which was the most Wes Chen thing imaginable. Resisting and allowing at the same time. Fighting and yielding in the same breath.
I pulled out my phone. I did not text Sofia. I did not text anyone. I just sat there, in the quiet, and let the warmth settle.
Dr. Okafor had said two to three weeks for the ribs. Two to three weeks where Wes couldn't play, couldn't fight, couldn't do the one thing that gave him a defined role on this team. Two to three weeks where he would need help with gear, with training modifications, with the daily logistics of being a hockey player in a body that was temporarily refusing to cooperate.
Two to three weeks of proximity that neither of us had asked for and both of us were going to have to navigate.
I thought about my nonna. About lemons and limoncello and being the warm thing. About the way Wes had said "fine" like a man hammering a nail into a door he desperately wanted to open.
I thought about his ribs, bruised and darkening under a clean shirt that I had put on his body with my own hands.
I thought about the fact that for three seconds, while his torso was bare and his guard was down and the locker room was empty, he had let me be close. He had not flinched. He had notpulled away. He had stood there and let me dress him with the bewildered stillness of a man who could not remember the last time someone had been gentle with him and was not sure what to do with it now that it was happening.
I turned off the locker room lights and locked the equipment room and walked to my car in the parking garage and sat behind the wheel and said, out loud, to no one: "You are in so much trouble, Moretti."
The car did not respond. The car was smarter than me. The car knew that trouble was not something you talked yourself out of. Trouble was something you drove into with your headlights on and your seatbelt fastened and your nonna's voice in your head saying "Luciano, the world is cold. Be the warm thing."
I started the engine and drove home.
The warm thing. Right.
The problem with being the warm thing is that warmth travels in both directions. You give it out and it comes back, and what was coming back from Wes Chen, in his grudging silences and his almost-smiles and the way he had stood still while I touched him, was enough heat to melt permafrost.
I was in so much trouble.
-e
WES
The injury created a structure I did not ask for and could not escape.
Every morning for two weeks, Luca Moretti arrived at my stall fifteen minutes before anyone else, carrying two cups. Tea for me. Coffee for him. He set the tea down, said good morning, and then helped me into my modified practice gear with the efficient, impersonal professionalism of a man doing his job.
Except it didn't feel impersonal. It felt like something else entirely, and the something else was the problem.
The ribs were bad. Not broken, which was the good news, but bruised deeply enough that raising my arms above my shoulders sent a lightning bolt of pain from my hip to my neck. Pulling on a shirt required a negotiation with my own body that I lost more often than I won. Lacing skates, which required bending at the waist, was an exercise in controlled suffering.
Luca handled all of it. He arrived with the tea and the steady hands and the specific kind of patience that I had not previously associated with a man who talked as much as he did. He was quiet during the dressing. Not silent. Quiet. He narrated what he was doing the way a surgeon might, low and calm andpurposeful. "Left arm first, that's it, now the right, easy, don't force it." His hands moved across my body with a precision that erased the line between professional service and personal attention.
The intimacy of being dressed by someone is something I was not prepared for.
Luca dressing me was his hands at the hem of my compression shirt, lifting it over my head, his knuckles grazing my stomach on the way up. His fingers on my shoulder pads, adjusting the fit, the heat of his palms bleeding through the foam. The surrender of autonomy was so disorienting that for the first three days I held my breath through the entire process.