Sergio’s mouth waters. It’s simple, like the tea. Taking another sip, he looks around Jeremy’s place and notices, like he does most days, the lack of any displays of Jeremy’s accomplishments. The absence is still striking. Lord knows Holden and Rose have an entire trophy room that doubles as their office. But in Jeremy’s case, if not for the fact that Sergio has been watching him skate every day, he’d believe Jeremy had never once stepped foot on the ice. He’s never had the chance to ask Jeremy about it before, but the shared vulnerability they’ve been experiencing all day has opened the door for Sergio to inquire.
“You keep things pretty simple around here, huh?” Sergio asks, his eyes on the functional living space. The only extras are Jeremy’s collections of books and plants, neither of which overwhelms the room. Instead, they make the place feel quaint and inviting.
Jeremy shrugs and slices through a crisp onion. “I’m not really working with a lot of space.”
“True,” Sergio says and turns around to get a better look at Jeremy, whose eyes are watering from the onion. “But I get the feeling that even if you had the big house for yourself, you wouldn’t go overboard.”
“Old me may have,” Jeremy says with another shrug. He slices through the onion with his knife again, releasing its sharp aroma. “But now, I honestly can’t really be bothered. I don’t always have the energy to keep up with daily tasks, so the solution is to simplify. Less stuff to clean, less stuff tomove around, less stuff to maintain. More energy for what’s important.”
“And what’s that?”
“Living,” Jeremy says with a smile as an onion-induced tear slides down his cheek. Jeremy lifts his hand from the knife and brings it towards his face, presumably to wipe his eyes.
“Let me,” Sergio says, stopping him. He reaches for Jeremy, whose eyes slowly close, releasing a stream that Sergio wipes away. “There. There. No need for all the tears. It’s only dinner.”
“Shut up.” Jeremy laughs and goes back to his vegetables, this time to begin cutting the less-likely-to-provoke-tears red bell pepper.
“But really, I think that sounds nice.”
“What? Living simply or not having energy to do regular daily tasks?”
“The simply part of course.” Sergio takes another sip of his tea. “I must admit, I’ve had a bit of a revelation recently. That maybe simple isn’t so bad.”
“Huh.” Jeremy slides the chopped bell pepper to the side, then slices into a head of broccoli. “I never actually saw you as someone who lived all that un-simply.”
“What do you mean?”
Jeremy pauses and looks at Sergio with his bottom lip trapped between his teeth. “Well, no offense, but you tend to come across as pretty shallow, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for extra.”
Not sure how to feel about that statement, Sergio furrows his brow.
“I said no offense,” Jeremy tries to explain, and Sergio can’t help but laugh.
Jeremy’s not wrong. Sergio has another revelation that before all of this, he never would have taken Jeremy’s proclamation so lightly.
“You might be onto something,” he says, looking at Jeremy with his lips lifted on one side. Jeremy grabs a pan and drizzles oil into it, then lights the burner. “Perhaps my shallowness is what has gotten me into this predicament.”
“You think?” Jeremy asks, sarcasm and teasing thick in his voice. He may as well have hit Sergio with the frying pan to punctuate his bluntness. Thankfully, instead, he tosses the vegetables into said pan, then adds some seasoning and gives it all a good mix with a wooden spoon.
“Touché,” Sergio says, laughing some more. “But it does make sense, doesn’t it?”
Jeremy grabs a package of pre-cooked soba noodles out of his cabinet and opens them with a knife. “It makes sense, assuming it’s working. Do you feel less shallow?”
“I’m drinking tea in a studio apartment above an ice rink-slash-barn, and it’s the happiest I’ve been in months. What do you think?”
Jeremy mixes the vegetables again and adds a splash of soy sauce. “Then I think perhaps you’re finally figuring out what’s important to you in this life.” Jeremy looks at him and lets his eyes rove up and down Sergio’s body before they come to rest to stare directly at Sergio’s face from beneath Jeremy’s furrowed brow. He grins. “Or … you’re crazy and all of this is some ploy that will never work to get into my pants.”
Sergio blushes at the thought of getting into Jeremy’s pants. It is quite an enticing option. However, the history of this day has told him how unlikely that is to happen. “As wonderful as that sounds, the longer I live this day, the less I think getting laid is the solution to getting me out of it.”
“Well, when has sex ever solved anything, anyway?” Jeremy asks and dumps the noodles into the pan, and begins to mix them in with the vegetables.
“As I’ve come to recently reflect, never.”
“I guess it’s a good thing you and I have never actually slept together then, huh?”
“Very good.”
“Wait.” Jeremy stands up stock straight and looks at Sergio, then tugs at his left eye. His tone and expression lose all traces of teasing and shift straight into something serious, with even a hint of concern. “We haven’t ever actually slept together, have we?”
