"I understand that you feel some kind of responsibility for me—"
“I don’t.”
“Oh. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I take responsibility for my own actions, anyway. And, um, thanks, I guess, for—" I gestured vaguely at the apartment, the tea, the eggs that were still happening on the stove. "Last night. The shoes. I'm replacing your shoes. Those were nice shoes; we've establishedthat." I put the mug down. "But I cannot spend my entire day off sitting in your apartment."
"You can," Cross said. "And you will."
"I feel fine, doc. You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to miss the next game or jeopardize anything for the team."
He gave me a look over his shoulder that communicated, without words, exactly what he thought of that assessment.
There was just no way that after spending the last ten minutes in his gym doorway having a private crisis about his bicep curls, and the idea of an entire day of this, an entire day of Cross being Cross in his own space, unhurried and precise and occasionally shirtless—was —
That was a problem.
"I'm not—" I stopped. Started again, because I had to find the version of this that didn't includeI can't stay here because my body seems attracted to you and my self-control is already compromised."I'm not spending the whole day—"
Benched.
The word I wanted to say was benched. Cross had done it before. It was the end of my rookie year, the playoffs, and a decision I'd spent the whole summer hating him for. He was doing it again. Different room, same move.
We hadn't talked about it. We'd never talked about it. It just lived there, between us.
He benched me then. He was trying to bench me now. Same move, different setting.
"I’ve improved, you said so yourself," I said. "I am significantly better than last night, which I acknowledge was not my best performance—"
"You vomited," Cross said, "multiple times."
"Once," I said. "It was once."
"It was twice." He turned back to the stove, which he'd been standing at when I'd started this conversation. "The second time was in the bathroom. You were barely conscious."
I had no memory of the second time. That was probably the point.
I pressed my mouth together and looked at the kitchen island and thought about being an adult with full agency over his own choices, which was a thought I was finding difficult to sustain while sitting shirtless and hungover at Cross's counter with a headache I was describing to myself as manageable.
He put a plate in front of me. There were eggs and something that was probably toast and what appeared to be an organized pile of vegetables at seven in the morning or whatever time it was. Everything was precise. Portioned. Positioned like it had been thought about.
It looked completely inedible.
That was the hangover. Probably. The hangover was doing something to my perception of the plate, making it look like a medical document rather than a meal, and under normal circumstances I would have eaten it because Cross had made it and there was something about Cross making something that implied it would be exactly what it was supposed to be.
Currently it looked like a hostile act.
"I can't eat that," I said.
"You can."
"My stomach—"
"Your stomach needs something in it." He set a fork next to the plate. "Eat.”
I picked up the fork. I looked at the eggs. The eggs looked back at me. I put the fork down.
"You still have my phone?"
Cross reached into his pocket and put my phone on the counter. No preamble, no conditions, just set it down. I picked it up.
