Page 30 of Cross Check
Slowly, deliberately, Nico unclenched his fist. He spread his fingers flat against my chest again. He pressed down until he could feel my heartbeat, fifty-two beats per minute, steady—the resting rate of a man who'd trained his body to stay calm when everything was chaos.
"I'm okay," he said. His voice was rough. "I'm staying."
He closed his eyes. His breathing slowed. His body softened against the mattress, the tension draining out of him in stages, shoulders first, then spine, then the fist that became a palm that became fingers laced through mine.
14
NICO
I woke up in a bed for the first time in seven weeks. The ceiling was wrong.
Not wrong-bad. Just wrong-different. The guest room ceiling had a hairline crack near the light fixture that I'd traced with my eyes every night since arriving. This ceiling was smooth. This ceiling belonged to a room that smelled like Kieran.
I was in Kieran's bed. The sheets were tangled around my waist. Morning light came through the window in pale stripes. Beside me, the mattress was still warm but empty. The kettle hissed in the kitchen. He hadn't wanted to disturb me.
I lay there and waited for the panic.
It didn't come. Or rather, it came in a muted form, not the full-body alarm ofdanger, you're somewhere you shouldn't be,but something softer, a quiet voice in the back of my head that saidthis is temporary, don't get comfortable. The good thing always ends.The voice sounded like my father. It usually did.
I got up, pulled on my shorts, and walked to the kitchen.
Kieran stood at the counter in sweatpants and a T-shirt, pouring tea into two mugs. He glanced up when I appeared. His expression was blank, the goalie's mask—the one that gave nothing away—but his eyes moved over me. Down, then up. A half-second inventory of the body he'd spent last night memorizing.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
He slid my mug across the counter. Green tea. The perfect temperature because he'd poured the water two minutes ago and let it cool, because he knew I didn't like it scalding.
We drank in silence. It should have felt different, more complicated, weighted with the significance of what had changed. Instead, it felt like every other morning we'd shared in this kitchen. The mugs in their row. The pale light on the counter. Two men drinking tea.
Except that my toothbrush was in his bathroom now.
Over the next week, other things migrated. My phone charger appeared on his nightstand, the left side, because I'd discovered he preferred the right. A Storm hoodie that was mine ended up on the back of his desk chair, and when I went to retrieve it, he said "Leave it" without looking up from his book. My copy ofThe Kalevalamoved from the guest room nightstand to his, and when I saw it there, sitting beside his thriller and his glass of water, occupying space in his most private room, my throat closed with an emotion I didn't have a Finnish or English word for.
The duffel bag stayed in the corner of the guest room, half-packed. I couldn't bring myself to unpack it. The toothbrush could migrate. The hoodie could migrate. But the bag was a boundary I wasn't ready to cross, because unpacking meant believing this was permanent, and I'd learned, through monthsand years of mounting evidence, that nothing in my life qualified.
Tuesday evening at the apartment. Kieran was at the stove, sleeves pushed up, the knife in his hand working through asparagus. The salmon was resting on cedar planks. I sat on the counter beside him, which was new. Before, I'd sat at the counter, across from him. The shift fromacrosstobesidehad happened the morning after that first night, and neither of us had commented on it.
I had theKalevalaopen in my lap. I was reading the passage about Lemminkäinen, the reckless hero, the one who kept getting killed and resurrected by his mother's love. The Finnish words moved through my mouth in a whisper, the vowels soft and round, the consonants doubled in ways that made English speakers' eyes cross.
"You're doing it again," Kieran said.
"Doing what?"
"The Finnish. You mouth the words when you read."
"I've always done that. Mummu used to tease me about it. She said I read like a fish."
"I like it." He said it simply. A statement of fact, delivered with the same certainty he brought to post-game analysis.The angle was wrong. The rebound was controlled. I like it when you read in Finnish.
I looked at him. He was concentrating on the asparagus, his jaw set, a faint flush climbing the back of his neck. The flush told me what the words hadn't, that the admission had cost him something, that the careful, controlled Kieran Walsh who never said more than he meant had just said exactly what he meant and was slightly terrified by it.
"You're staring," I said.
"Observing. There's a difference."
"What are you observing?"
