I’ll admit it; I had dated a lot of people. I had been with people who were funnier, easier, people who asked nothingand gave a lot and disappeared cleanly when it was done. The transaction ran both ways, and nobody got hurt. I had been fine with that for years.
Nathan had never once asked for the performance.
That was it. That was the whole thing.
Everyone else got the Morrison experience: the smile, the arms, the give them the moment and get the noise back. Nathan got me eating pizza. Nathan got me throwing up on his shoes.
Nathan got the actual thing and he stayed.
Thatwas why Nathan.
That was the whole answer and it had taken me months of proximity to find it.
We went back to eating. I picked up whatever story I was telling, and I was gesturing with a piece of crust, demonstrating something, when Nathan reached across the table.
His thumb caught the corner of my mouth.
One brief, careful movement. He picked up his napkin with his other hand and finished the job, wiping away whatever I'd managed to get on my face—pizza sauce, probably, I wasn't keeping track—and then he put the napkin down and went back to his pizza.
He hadn't interrupted the story.
Hadn't made a thing of it.
Just saw it and fixed it, the way he fixed things, automatically and without ceremony, his hand knowing before his brain did.
I stopped talking.
Nathan looked up. "You were saying?”
I looked at him.
The thumb on my jaw in the training room. The apartment. All of them clinical or desperate or loaded with something. And then this, which was none of those things. Which was just Nathan Cross, at a pizza table, wiping sauce off my face because it was there and he noticed.
"Wes," he said.
"Yeah. Sorry. Chappell." I picked up my pizza. "He cried at a Gatorade commercial during film review. Not a sad one. The one with the kid learning to skate. Coach had to pause it."
Something happened on Nathan's face. Full and unguarded, there and then contained, the laugh that didn't quite get out but came closer than I'd ever seen it get.
I stored it. Filed it somewhere I wasn't going to lose it.
Sal brought the check before I could ask for it, which meant Nathan had been coming here long enough that Sal knew the timing. I picked it up.
Nathan's hand moved toward it.
"Tea," I said. "Eggs. My shirt. The chair, all night." I put my card down. "I'm buying dinner."
Nathan looked at me.
"Nathan. Please?"
He put his hand down.
We sat in the quiet of a meal that was almost over and neither of us ready for it to be. The pizza place kept going around us, Sal behind the counter, the other table finishing up, the chalkboard menu above us with its words I could actually read.
"I'm glad you said hell yeah," Nathan said. Quietly.
I felt my chest tighten.
