The moment I leave the lockers and step on to the field, I feel loads better. Tipping my head back, I take a couple measured breaths and will my anxiety medication to kick in.
“Marcos the Grouch,” a happy voice says from behind me. I groan.
“Go away, Luke.”
I open my eyes to look at him. He steps up beside me, carefully keeping a foot of distance between us. He knows not to touch me, and thankfully doesn’t make the attempt today.
“How’re things?” he asks, grinning and adjusting the brim of his baseball cap.
“I’m ready for this day to end,” I admit.
“Same, but more because that means I get to go to your place and?—”
“Luke,” I cut him off firmly.
Snorting, he finishes with his hat and brings one arm across his chest to stretch. Stepping in front of me so he can look me in the eyes, he adopts a more serious tone.
“Seriously. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing in particular.” I shrug, immediately resorting to my old standby of avoidance. Luke just waits, stretching his other arm and watching me. I frown. He’s been spending way too much time with Max, and now he knows me way better than I would like him to. “I’m just annoyed, because apparently today is the day my anxiety medication decided to not treat anxiety.”
“That bad?” I shrug again, turning my face away from the pity on his. After a second, he offers a distraction. “Maxy said you’ve got designs on a hockey player.”
I roll my eyes. “Max needs to stop talking to you.”
“I’m going to assume you don’t want to hear my joke about the correlation between the size of the man’s hockey stick and his?—”
“I cannot fucking talk to you.”
He laughs as I walk away from him and over to the fence to stretch. Oddly, I do feel a little better, although I’ll never admit it to him. I’ve spent so long giving Luke a hard time, if I start being nice now, he’ll really start to think something is wrong with me.
I relax further as practice gets underway, and even manage to forget about Nate for a couple hours. Luke spends the entire afternoon finding excuses to talk to me—shouting and winking at me from across the field, and generally giving me a lot of reasons to scowl at him. He’s being supportive in the best way he knows how, and I’m appreciative of it even though I could do without the flirting.
“You’re not so bad,” I tell him grudgingly as we walk together toward our cars. He gasps theatrically.
“I love this for us,” he says, bumping his shoulder againstmine and earning another scowl. He laughs. “It’s funny that half of Max’s friends are so fucking grouchy.”
“I’m notgrouchy,” I argue, even though I am.
“Sure,” he agrees. “See you at home?”
I nod. Luke and Max have both gotten in the habit of referring to our apartment as “home,” even though Luke doesn’t technically live with us. At this point, we might as well add him to the lease and move him into Max’s room. It’s not as though he spends any time at his actual home anyway. His roommates have likely forgotten what he looks like.
“Yeah, Luke. See you at home.”
He beams at me, as though hearing the unspoken welcome in that sentence. Sliding into my car and clipping my seat belt into place, I drum my fingers idly on the wheel. When Luke waves at me from his old beater on his way out of the lot, I come to a decision and reach for my phone. Max hasn’t let what happened sophomore year hold him back. He’s been working hard and putting in the steps to heal and move on. It’s time I did the same.
Marcos
I just finished practice, on the way home now. Is it cool if I call you in about an hour?
Nate
For you, lovely, I’m available any time.
There’s always beensomething of an unspoken agreement between me and Max about his hockey games. Not being big on socialization, I don’t go to many of his games in person. I do,however, watch all of them online. Max, whose schedule is a little more demanding, makes it to even fewer of my own games, but prefers to come in person. In his opinion, watching baseball on television is enough to put even an insomniac to sleep.
In the spirit of that, I wasn’t surprised when Max shouted at my retreating back this morning that he’d be coming to my game this afternoon. It’s a beautiful day, and he has the afternoon free from hockey for once. Now, I squint into the stands and try to pick him out. He’s usually in the same section each time, although the seats change. His hair makes him stand out in the crowd, though, so I don’t usually have a hard time finding him. Today, I can’t locate him. Frowning, I turn my attention back to Coach. Across the dugout, Luke meets my eye and grins.
