“Morning.” His voice was rough with sleep. After a moment, he relaxed back into me. “What time is it?”
I lifted my head enough to see the clock on his nightstand. “Almost seven.”
“We should get up.”
“Probably.”
I pressed my face into the space between his shoulder blades and breathed him in—clean laundry, the generic shampoo he used, and something underneath that was just Tanner. My body was responding to the proximity, to the warmth of him, and I had to think about defensive formations and injury statistics to keep from getting hard against his lower back.
“Seth?” His voice was muffled against the pillow.
“Yeah?”
“Are you sniffing me?”
My face went hot. “No.”
“You absolutely are.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “That’s weird.”
“You smell good. It’s not my fault.”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh, and some of the tension drained out of him. We stayed like that for a few more minutes, neither of us ready to face what came next.
“We should talk about this,” Tanner said. “But not in bed. That feels like too much pressure.”
“Kitchen?”
“Kitchen.”
He pulled away, and I let him go even though every instinct I had was screaming to hold on. We untangled ourselves, both aware of morning breath and rumpled clothes and the fact that we’d spent the night in the same bed without actually having sex.
Tanner disappeared into the bathroom first. I heard the shower start, and I made myself not think about the fact that he was naked on the other side of that door. Instead, I changed into clean clothes and headed to the kitchen to start coffee.
The routine was familiar—fill the pot, measure the grounds, wait for the machine to gurgle to life. I’d done this hundreds of times in the months we’d lived together. But now everything felt charged, the ordinary made strange by what we’d admitted last night.
I was pulling mugs from the cabinet when Tanner emerged from the bathroom. His hair was damp, curling at the ends the way it did when it was freshly washed. He was wearing soft jeans and a T-shirt that had seen better days, and he looked young and uncertain and entirely too good for seven in the morning.
“Coffee’s almost ready,” I said.
“Thanks.” He moved to the fridge, pulled out the creamer. We did this dance around each other—not quite awkward, not quite comfortable. When the coffee was ready, I poured two mugs, and we settled at the kitchen counter on our usual stools.
Tanner wrapped both hands around his mug like he was trying to warm them, even though the apartment wasn’t cold. I waited, letting him gather his thoughts.
“I’m scared,” he said.
“I know.”
“Not just about the football thing. About all of it.” He stared into his coffee. “I’ve never done this before. Never let myself want someone enough to try.”
“Neither have I. Not like this.”
His eyes came up to mine. “Really?”
“Really. I’ve hooked up with people. But nothing serious. Nothing that mattered.”
“And this matters?”
“Yeah. It does.”
