"You sure?"
"Very sure. Have a good night."
Chappy shrugged. "Your loss. Jenkins, you coming?"
"Obviously," Jenkins said, and then, to me, quiet and slightly pointed: "You're being weird lately."
"I'm always weird," I said.
"Different weird," Jenkins said, and followed Chappy down the corridor.
I stood there.
Different weird.
Yeah, I thought. That was probably accurate.
Especially since it had been eight days since the sidewalk outside Sal’s.
Eight days since Nathan had kissed me on a Boston street where anyone could see and saidnext week, I'll pick the placeand walked to his car like it was already done, like next week was just a fact about the future.
Eight days and we had seen each other exactly twice, both times in the facility. I had been losing my mind in a way that I was choosing to describe as frustrating and that was actually something significantly more than frustrating.
Here was the thing.
I had done this before. The going home with someone thing, the one night thing, the easy uncomplicated thing where you both knew what it was and it was good and then it was done and nobody lost any sleep over it. I had done that version many times and I had been good at it and it had worked fine.
This wasnotthat version.
Nathan was a person I wanted to know everything about, and the knowing everything about him had made the other thing—the physical thing, the three a.m. thing, the thing that arrived in the shower and mid-practice and apparently right now in a facility corridor—significantly more urgent rather than less.
Which was new.
Nathan had been away. Four days visiting his family in—uh, somewhere. He'd saidI'll be back Thursday,and I had saidokayand had not asked where. Except I had thought about it constantly, had wondered what Nathan Cross looked like in a family context, whether he wore the same neutral practical colors or whether his mother had opinions about that, whether his father asked about work, whether Nathan sat at a family dinner table and performed the correct version of himself for people who didn't know there were other versions.
I had not asked.
But I had thought about it.
I had also thought about other things. The things that involved Nathan Cross's hands, and the six feet and one inch of him, and the jaw, and the blue eyes.
He'd come back Thursday. We'd had a late game Friday and a film session Saturday morning and every time I thoughttonightsomething happened that was not tonight.
Eight days.
And tonight I was going to finally see him.
The thing I had been doing before Nathan, the flings, the easy one-night transactions, the going home with someone because why not, had not involved eight days of this.
I had not understood, before this, that wanting someone you were actually getting to know was a different category entirely from wanting someone you'd met at a bar at midnight.
It was worse.
It was so much worse.
When I gotto his apartment, Nathan opened the door, and I almost forgot how doorways worked.
He wasn't wearing his usual clothes. Not the facility version, not the going-out version, not the apartment version. Some fourth thing. The sleeves were rolled, which—fine, sleeves rolled was a known quantity, I had cataloged sleeves rolled extensively. But the shirt was different. Charcoal. Soft-looking. The collar open one button further than usual, which on Nathan Cross was the equivalent of him answering the door in a robe.
