"Shh. Yes. But that's not important."
I tried to talk around his finger. "What is important?"
"Okay so." He pulled his hand back and turned toward me fully, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. Very serious. "You ever needed a little extra help to feel brave?"
"Not really."
"Well, I do. Right now." He held up the empty shooter. "And tequila has me feeling like everything is about to work out perfectly."
I stared at him. "That's not how tequila works."
"It is tonight."
"Marcus—"
"No, seriously. Tequila has me convinced this is a fantastic idea."
I laughed. "You drank one shooter."
He pointed at me. "See? That's the kind of negativity tequila has freed me from."
"The tequila has been in your system for twelve seconds."
"You're missing the point."
He scooted even closer on the couch. Close enough that ourknees were touching. "The point is I needed it because I have to tell you something. Something important. And I need you to take it seriously."
He reached out and took my face in both hands. Tilted it up so I had nowhere to look but directly at him.
"Rhys." All the act dropped out of his voice, so it was just Marcus. Just my name, just him, just this small dorm room and his hands clinging to my face and those caramel eyes unguarded. "I really like you. I think you're — god, I think everything about you is—" He stopped. Started again. "The best parts of my days are the parts with you in them. Every single day. That's it. That's what I've been trying to say for months."
I was freefalling through the floor.
"I—"
"Absolutely not. I'm not done." His thumbs pressed slightly into my chin, keeping me there, keeping me with him. "I don't know how you feel. I think I have an idea, fuck, I hope I have an idea, but I don't know. And if I'm wrong, this is going to be the most embarrassing moment of my life." A breath. "But I needed you to know. I couldn't keep not saying it. I couldn’t keep looking at you and feeling like that and not say it.”
I looked at him for a long moment.
Marcus who the whole world came easy to — the team, the ice, the room always organizing itself around him without him asking. None of that was here right now. Right now he was just a person sitting on a couch having said the terrifying thing and waiting to find out what happened next. He was doing it, being brave, for me. We both knew I wasn’t going to.
"Marcus." My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "I like you so much it's been making me insane. Like embarrassingly, a completely unreasonable amount. For months." I held his gaze. "I thought I was going to have to just live with it forever, or at least until one of us died."
The breath that left him was shaky. He dropped his forehead almost to mine, eyes closing for just a second, like something in him finally released. "Okay," he said. Almost to himself. "Okay. Good. I'm a little tipsy by the way, I was nervous, I needed the liquid courage—"
"Marcus."
"You have my full consent—"
"For what?"
"For—"
He grabbed me.
Both hands back in my hair, pulling me in, and his mouth found mine and every careful, measured, sensible part of my brain just — stopped. Months of it in the kiss — every coffee, every meal, every look held a second too long, every time I'd talked myself out of reading into it.
All of it hitting at once.
