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Lee fought the upwards tug of his lips. “It’s not gay erotica.”
“Must you break my heart?” Alex fell back onto the bed with all the flair of a second-rate actor miming a deadly shot, and this felt different—the impish gleam in his eyes, the playful curve of his mouth. As though they’d found a new kind of balance, now that everything between them was out in the open.
“You’ll live,” Lee told him dryly.
“But what a sad and empty life it will be.” Alex let his head loll to the side so he could send Lee a pitiful look. “So what is it, then?”
Ah, what the hell.
“Right now?Thinking, Fast and Slow.”
“That’s that Nobel Prize guy, right? Daniel … something? A psychologist of some sort.”
“Daniel Kahneman, yeah.” Lee loved Oliver, but Oliver would have struggled telling Daniel Kahneman from, say, Djingis Khan. That Alex had at least a vague idea was … really quite attractive. “It’s about how we make judgements and decisions. Like, we think we’re much more rational than we really are. For example, we like and trust a company more if it sounds familiar, even if we have no clue what they do, and we trust a politician more if we happen to smile when listening to their speech. And they had people count the passes in a basketball match, and about halfway through, some guy in a gorilla costume walks in and pounds his chest—and half the people missed it completely because they were too focused on counting passes.”
Alex’s smile was slow and sweet.
“What?” Lee asked.
“That might be the most words I’ve heard you say in one go.”
“Sorry.” Lee ducked his head, and Alex’s smile widened.
“I wasn’t complaining.”
“Right. I guess I get a bit nerdy about stuff like that—psychology, how the brain works.”
For a few seconds, Alex was quiet. Then he shifted up against the headboard, and this time, it didn’t seem like a ploy to draw attention to his body. “Your mum,” he began, stopped, and started again. “Your mum being bipolar—is there a genetic component? Like, are you worried about yourself? Or your sisters?”
“Straight for the jugular, huh?” Lee drew a measured breath and sat down on the edge of his bed. “Answer’s yeah, a bit. Estimates vary, but it’s maybe fifteen per cent hereditary.”
“So between the three of you…” Alex’s teeth tugged on his bottom lip, his entire focus on Lee. “That’s a pretty big chance that one of you may have inherited it.”
Lee’s worst nightmare, dragged into the light. He drew another breath. “Yeah.”
Alex didn’t immediately reply. When he did, it was close to a whisper. “I’m sorry you have to worry about that.”
“It’s like… It’s thisthing, you know?” Lee tucked his hands between his thighs and looked away from Alex. “Me, there’s a good chance I’ll be fine—low prevalence among pro athletes, and half of all cases start before twenty-five, so…”
“You worry about your sisters, though.”
Lee swallowed. “Yeah.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex repeated, low. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, then he got up and closed the gap between them for a gentle touch of Lee’s jaw. “I’m so sorry.”
There were plenty of things Lee could have said. ‘Thank you’, for one, or ‘Not exactly your fault, is it?’ or ‘I really,reallylike you’. In the end, he simply nodded and closed his eyes for a second, leaning into the contact. When he straightened and looked up, there was something painfully soft about Alex’s expression that Lee chose not to examine too closely, his brain already caught up in the memory of Alex saying, “I like you, I find you attractive.”
Instead, Lee cleared his throat. “It’s getting late. Guess I should get ready for bed.”
Nodding, Alex stepped back, his hand falling away. “Yeah. That’s … uh, yeah. It is getting late.”
They stared at each other for a beat, then Lee exhaled and smiled. “Hey, Alex? Thank you.”
“Anytime.” The dim twin glow of the reading lamps brought out the brown undertones of Alex’s eyes. It was Lee who looked away first, chest a little tight.
He’d made the right call. Hadn’t he?
With tension running high aheadof their final group-stage match, dinner was a loud affair. Lee sat back while Jeff dissected the strength and weaknesses of various Moroccan players, Oliver chiming in on occasion with his own opinions, and Alex notably quiet after a phone call he’d taken halfway through the meal.
