I cannot tell you that.
Not a denial. Not a rejection. Something worse. An admission wrapped in a refusal offered barely above a whisper in a room that smelled like cedar and dry-erase markers. Finn had carried it out of that office and down the hallway and across campus. It sat behind his sternum now, warm and heavy, refusing to dissolve.
He rolled over and pressed his face into the pillow. Inhaled deep. Cedar again. Except it could not be. But the scent had imprinted somewhere between the confrontation and the walk home, and now it stayed layered underneath the vanilla and sweat and laundry detergent. Persistent as a bruise.
He breathed in anyway.
He did not let go.
2
EVAN
Evan got home, and the words were in his chest. He stood in his kitchen with his tie loosened and a glass of water he hadn’t touched, staring at the backsplash until the grout lines blurred.
You watch me.
Fuck.
He set the water down, the glass clinking against the counter harder than he meant, then sat at the table. The faucet dripped its metronome. Shelves he’d filled himself, counters he kept clear, everything in its place because if everything was in its place, then nothing was wrong. He rubbed the back of his neck, the same small ritual he mocked in others, and caught himself doing it. Idiot.
It was the same house David had walked out of. David had stood in this kitchen, overnight bag on his shoulder, and said the sentence Evan couldn’t unhear: the house was beautifuland emotionally unavailable, and he wasn’t sure he was talking about the house. Five years together, and the thing David couldn’t forgive wasn’t the distance or the hours or the way Evan’s job ate every weekend from October to March. It was that Evan had never once introduced him as his boyfriend at a university function. Always David. Always just David. And when David finally asked why, standing in this kitchen with his coat already on, Evan had opened his mouth and nothing had come out, because the answer was that he’d spent so long calibrating what was safe to show that he’d forgotten how to stop.
David left. Evan had not changed a single thing since. Not the furniture, not the paint, not the habit of setting the table for one.
* * *
Finn Holloway had been on this team since freshman year, and Evan had been so goddamn disciplined about it. Discipline built into a career, into a posture, into the exact distance he kept from every player who walked through the facility. He’d told himself the awareness prickling under his skin was nothing. Proximity. The standard response to having someone who looked like that in the building five days a week.
It was not a standard response. Evan had known that since Finn’s sophomore year, when he’d come in early to sign for an equipment delivery. The rink was unlit, just the emergency floods throwing long shadows across the ice. He heard the blades before he saw anyone, and he stopped in the tunnel because the sound was wrong. Too fluid. No stops, no crossovers, no drills.
Finn was alone on the ice in sweats and skates, no pads, no stick, gliding through what Evan’s brain needed a full ten seconds to process as a spin sequence. Not hockey. Not even close. His arms pulled in tight, one foot lifted, and he turnedso fast the emergency floods smeared around him. Then he opened up, coasted backward on one blade, and transitioned into something slower, almost lazy, his body loose in a way Evan had never seen during a game.
Evan stood there long enough for his coffee to go cold in his hand, the ceramic growing slick against his palm.
Finn spotted him coming off the ice, toweling his face, breathing hard. Finn didn’t look embarrassed. His mouth twitched, one corner up, chin lifted, like he’d caught someone peeking through a window and decided to leave the curtain open.
“My parents wanted me balanced.” Finn hadn’t been asked. “Figure skating and hockey until I was twelve. Hockey won, but”—A shrug. “Old habits.”
“You’re good.” Evan was an idiot, and it was the only thing in his head.
Finn held the look a beat past comfortable, a beat past professional. “Yeah,” he said. “I am.”
Finn walked off toward the locker room, and Evan stood in the tunnel until the Zamboni driver showed up and asked if he was lost.
What stayed with Evan wasn’t how Finn skated, though that was part of it, the sandy-brown hair damp with sweat, the lines of him fluid and unhurried. What stayed was that Finn had offered something real without being asked, and Evan had leaned toward it like a man hearing music through a wall.
Evan had been running ever since.
Evan thought he’d handled it. Told himself the rink was a single morning, an anomaly. Then at the gala, Evan brought his boyfriend and Finn brought a date, and they spent the entire evening on opposite sides of the ballroom, and Evan told himself that was fine, that was appropriate, that was the end of it. But a few weeks later, Finn showed up at a program event with a girlon his arm, laughing at something she said, filling the room the way he filled every room. Finn kissed her goodbye in the parking lot afterward. Evan was getting into his car three rows away, and their eyes met over the roof of a Honda Civic.
Finn smiled. Every tooth visible. The kind of smile that didn’t need words because it was already a sentence.
I see you watching.
* * *
Earlier that fall, Evan had been in the hallway when Sarah Kellerman cleaned out her office.
