The voice didn’t come.
Instead, there was Finn beside him and the distant sound of traffic on the street outside, the sheet pulled up to their waistsand Finn’s palm flat to Evan’s sternum, fingers curled slightly, like even in sleep he was holding on.
The blazer was on the floor by the entrance, and Evan did not get up to hang it.
For the first time in years, Evan did not want to be anywhere else.
5
FINN
Evan had stayed. And he looked like he’d meant to.
Finn lay on his side and watched him. In sleep, Evan looked younger. The lines at the corners of his eyes had softened, the set of his jaw loosened, his chest rising and falling with a steadiness that had nothing to do with discipline. His hand curled near his face, palm up, fingers open. The silver at his temples caught the thin morning light, darker now, sleep-warm and disheveled on the pillow. His lashes were long at his cheekbones, and the angle of his shoulder where the sheet had slipped was enough to make Finn’s throat tighten.
Finn had catalogued a lot of details about Evan Tremblay over the past two years. How he rubbed the back of his neck when he read something on his phone that bothered him. How his posture changed when boosters left the room. The one-inch tie loosening at 5 PM every day like it was a scheduled event. But Finn had never seen him like this: unguarded, unperforming, hisface stripped of every mask he wore through the building. It was the most honest Evan had been with him yet, and Evan wasn’t even awake for it.
Then Evan’s eyes opened. Not gradually. All at once, his frame going rigid for a half-second before the room registered.
Evan looked at the ceiling first. Then the window. Then Finn. His gaze flicked to the nightstand, the entrance, then back to Finn, his jaw already tightening, the masks reassembling themselves in real time.
“Stop thinking so loud.”
“I’m not—”
“You have this face. Like you’re doing long division.” Finn reached over and pressed two fingers to Evan’s jaw, where the muscle had gone taut. Evan went motionless under his touch. “There. That.”
Evan exhaled. The tension loosened a fraction.
Evan sat up. The sheet pooled at his waist, and he looked at the window, the low autumn light coming through the blinds, and his fingers found the edge of the mattress and pressed white into the fabric. Already gathering himself to stand. Already running the calculations: where his clothes were, how long the drive home would take, whether anyone would see his car in the lot.
“You should get coffee first. I have the good kind. Not the pods.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I know I don’t have to.” Finn stood and found his sweatpants on the floor where they’d landed sometime around midnight. “Sit. You’re getting coffee.”
Finn heard Evan stand behind him. The rustle of sheets, the small sounds of a man reorienting himself in an unfamiliar room. Finn padded out to the kitchen without looking back, because if he looked back he was going to see Evan in his bedwith his hair wrecked and his chest bare, and he was going to do something that would make the math worse.
The kitchen was small and cool, the heat not having kicked on yet. Protein shake bottles he kept meaning to throw away colonized the counter. Finn filled the kettle and got the coffee down from the cabinet and stood there waiting for the water to boil, thinking about all the versions of himself this apartment had seen.
Coming out to the team had been its own education. Hayes had handled it first and best, the earnest “cool, man” that set the tone for everyone else. But not everyone had followed Hayes’s lead with the same grace. Decker, their six-foot-four defenseman who ate protein bars the way other people breathed oxygen, had asked if bisexual meant Finn was “half-straight,” grinning like it was a joke but waiting for the answer with genuine confusion in his eyes. Miller, a winger from Minnesota who kept a rosary in his locker and never swore on the ice, had nodded and said “So you’re just, open to whatever,” in a tone that suggested Finn had announced he was open to robbing banks. The worst had been the ones who’d done research, who used the right words but kept their eyes on Finn’s forehead instead of his face, as though being into guys and girls meant he was performing some advanced-level queerness they needed to study before they could look him in the eye again.
They’d all gotten there eventually. Decker had been the one to buy Finn a drink at the end-of-season party and say, unprompted, “I was an asshole about the half-straight thing.” Miller never quite managed eye contact during locker room conversations about hookups, but he’d started passing Finn the puck on the power play without hesitating, which was its own kind of acceptance.
Last spring, Finn had brought a guy home for the first time. Not a hookup. A guy from his Kinesiology lecture, someonehe’d been seeing for a few weeks. The first time Finn had had someone here, in his space, overnight. The guy had looked around at the hockey photos on the wall, the jersey hanging in the closet, and asked if Finn’s teammates knew. When Finn said yes, the guy’s shoulders had dropped two inches: he uncrossed his arms, let his spine touch the couch, stopped glancing at the front entrance. Like some part of him had been calculating exit strategies until that moment, and Finn’s answer had given him permission to stop.
It had been a good night. They’d watched a movie and made out on the couch and the guy had stayed until morning and left with a kiss and a promise to text. He’d texted. They’d gone out twice more before it fizzled, the natural death of something where neither person was willing to be the one who cared more.
Finn was thinking about that when Evan appeared in the kitchen entrance wearing yesterday’s slacks and his shirt, buttoned wrong by one so the collar sat crooked. Evan’s eyes tracked over the hockey gear by the front entrance, the stick leaning next to the wall, the textbooks stacked on the table by the couch.
“It’s cleaner than I expected.”
“What were you expecting?”
“You’re twenty-one.”
“I’m a twenty-one-year-old with a mother who made him do his own laundry since he was fourteen.” Finn set two mugs on the counter. “Sit down. You look like you’re about to make a speech.”
