“Good night, Théo.”
No response. Already gone.
I turned and went to my bedroom.
I did not think about how it had felt, coming through that door. The apartment lit by the blue flicker of the TV, Aspen in his spot, someone asleep on the couch. The specific domestic warmth of coming home to something other than silence.
When Samantha watched Aspen, the routine was different. I’d drop him off before road trips and pick him up the next day. Practical. Efficient. It also meant I always came home to an empty apartment and I’d filed that undertotally finewithout actually examining what was underneath it.
I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and thought about Mackenzie. The way it had felt to come home to her, early in Chicago when everything was new and hard and she was the one constant that made sense of it. I had loved her since I was 16 years old. I didn’t know how to want someone who wasn’t her, hadn’t needed to learn, and then she had made the decision for me in the most brutal way possible and left me with a blown knee and a concussion and a gaping hole in my chest.
I hadn’t dated since. Hadn’t wanted to. Hadn’t had the bandwidth, or the trust, or whatever it was that made a person willing to hand someone else that kind of access again.
That was the explanation. That was the whole and complete explanation for the weird pang in my chest when I’d seen Théo on the couch.
I was lonely. That was all. A lonely person coming home to find the apartment occupied and feeling the ghost of what that used to mean.
That was ridiculous. He was my teammate’s younger brother. He was 21 years old and he had fallen asleep watching a baking competition and I happened to have a comfortable couch and a dog who had apparently adopted him.
I lay back and stared at the ceiling.
Thekeep him warmthing was a fluke. A misfiring. My brain producing random output the way brains did when they weretired and travel lagged and had consumed an airport sandwich that was not sitting well. I had spent the better part of the last year largely alone, by choice, because the alternative required something I didn’t currently have. That kind of isolation did things to a person’s wiring. Made the brain reach for warmth where it found it, regardless of—
Regardless of what, exactly.
I turned that question over in the dark for a moment and then set it down carefully, the way you set down something fragile that you’re not sure about yet.
Théo was not the same person as the one I watched on those YouTube videos. That much was certain. Broken in ways I didn’t fully understand yet and wasn’t sure he’d let me understand.
I should go keep him warm.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum like I could physically locate whatever had generated that sentence and have a word with it.
I was not going to examine this right now. I was tired and slightly confused by my own brain and the airport sandwich had definitely been a mistake. I was going to go to sleep and in the morning Théo would be gone and Aspen would need walking and I would go to practice and everything would be straightforward and uncomplicated and fine.
I closed my eyes.
Dreamed of dark hair and pale skin and a downturned mouth that was, undeniably, lush enough to be its own problem.
14. Théo
Sunlight was starting to break through the tightly packed buildings when I gave up on sleep entirely.
I had been awake for twenty minutes, maybe longer, staring at the ceiling and listening to Aspen’s light snoring at my feet. The soft morning light filtered through the shades making the apartment hazy—it made it easier to pretend that I was anywhere but Derek Sullivan’s apartment.
I didn’t move. Aspen was sleeping and I didn’t want to disturb him.
That was what I was telling myself.
A faint creak from the hallway. Muted shuffling. Then Derek emerged.
Shirtless. Low slung athletic shorts. Hair sticking up in every direction, eyes still carrying the particular blurriness of someone who had not yet fully committed to being awake. Stubble shadowed his jaw and a thin scar bisected his left eyebrow—I hadn’t noticed that before. It was strangely satisfying, that small imperfection. Proof that the golden boy wasn’t entirely factory standard.
He moved through the apartment with the unhurried confidence of a man in his own space, bleary but unselfconscious, and I had approximately three seconds to compose my face into something neutral before he looked up.
There were a lot of muscles and bronzed skin and veins popping in places I didn’t know veins could pop. Dark hairdusted across his pectorals, down his sternum, a trail of it disappearing into his waistband, which sparked a curiosity I found immediately inconvenient.
I focused on a spot on the kitchen cupboards.
