I passed it to him, our fingers brushing briefly in the exchange. Even sick and distracted, I was aware of the contact, the warmth of his skin, the way he handled the small components with surprising delicacy for someone with such strong hands.
“You know what’s funny?” Adan said as he secured another connection. “I’m better at this than I am at most of my classes.”
“You’re majoring in business, right?”
“Yeah.” He made a face. “Most of it’s pretty boring. Marketing principles, accounting, organizational behavior—it’s all so theoretical.”
“And you prefer hands-on learning.”
“Exactly. Like this.” He gestured at the furniture taking shape between us. “I can see what I’m doing, see the progress. It makes sense in a way that reading about market segmentation strategies doesn’t.”
“Perhaps you’re more of a kinesthetic learner. Some people need to physically engage with material to understand it fully.”
“Is that a real thing or are you being nice?”
“It’s definitely a real thing. People process information differently. There’s nothing wrong with learning better through doing rather than listening.”
“Huh.” He seemed to consider this. “That actually makes me feel better about struggling with some of my professors. There’s this one guy who talks at us for an hour and expects us to absorb everything.”
“What subject?”
“Economics. Professor Henley. The man could make winning the lottery sound boring.”
I laughed despite my lingering nausea. “I had a similar professor for statistics. He had this monotone voice that could put an entire auditorium to sleep.”
“See, that’s what I don’t get about college. Half the professors act like they don’t want to be there, but then they get mad when students don’t pay attention.”
“Teaching is a skill separate from expertise in a subject,” I said. “Unfortunately, not all academics develop both.”
We were building one of the interior shelves now, a process that required us to work closely together, Adan holding pieces steady while I secured the connections. The proximity should have felt awkward, but instead it felt natural, like we’d done this before.
“So what was university like for you?” he asked. “Was it different from what you expected?”
The question made me pause. How much could I safely share without revealing too much? “It was an adjustment for sure. The academic culture was different from what I was used to in Sweden. More competitive, though from what I understand, not as competitive as the US.”
“Were you homesick?”
“Terribly, at first. Everything was different: the food, the social customs, even the way people talked about hockey.”
“How so?”
“In Sweden, hockey is respected, but it’s seen as one path among many. In Canada, it felt like hockey was everything. Players were celebrities on campus.”
“That must have been weird for you.”
“It was. I wasn’t accustomed to that level of attention.” Which was both true and ironic, given my actual background.
“I bet you handled it better than most guys would. You seem pretty level-headed about that stuff.”
If only he knew.“I tried to focus on the hockey itself rather than everything surrounding it.”
“Smart approach. Some guys get caught up in the party scene and forget why they’re there.”
“Did you? Get caught up in parties?”
Adan laughed. “Me? Nah. I’m too focused on hockey. Plus, my parents would kill me if I was blowing my scholarship on partying. They’d probably like you, actually. My mom always approves of coaches who push me to be better.”
The casual comment shouldn’t have meant anything, but something about it—the idea of meeting Adan’s parents, of being approved of by people who mattered to him—made my pulse quicken in a way that had nothing to do with being sick. “That’s very kind of you to say.”
