Page 133 of The Grumpy Defenseman
The place looked like him.
Functional. Sparse. Clean in a way that suggested he knew where everything belonged because he had never owned enough to lose track of it.
A couch that looked comfortable because comfort was the point, not presentation. A kitchen with enough equipment to feed one person without drama. Skates drying on a rubber mat near the hall closet. A black-and-burgundy Stampede quarter-zip slung over the back of a chair.
On the counter, beside a coffee maker that had clearly survived years of daily use, sat a framed photograph.
A man in a Zamboni uniform. A boy with a hockey stick held at the wrong angle.
I did not ask about it.
Some things spoke better when you let them.
Evan had made dinner.
Or tried.
Pasta sat in a shallow bowl on the table, covered in a sauce that looked slightly toothick and smelled like effort. The plates matched. That part should not have affected me as much as it did.
“You cooked,” I said.
“I assembled.”
“Close enough.”
He gave me the almost-smile, the one I had started thinking of as a rare local species.
We ate at the small table near the window. The pasta was a little soft. The sauce needed salt. It was still the best thing I had eaten all week because he had made it in a kitchen that had not been arranged for company and had invited me into the quiet anyway.
Every so often, he looked up and found me already looking.
Neither of us made a joke about it.
That felt new, too.
After dinner, we ended up on the couch with the lights low and the city glowing through the glass. There was space between us at first. A careful amount.Enough to pretend we were two reasonable adults watching the night settle over San Antonio.
The fiction lasted maybe four minutes.
I moved first.
Or he did.
Maybe it did not matter.
What I remembered was his hand at my waist and the warmth of his mouth when he kissed me. Not the urgency of the downtown night. Not the charged, almost reckless pull of a door closing behind us.
This was slower.
Chosen.
He kissed me like we had time. Like time itself had finally stopped being something he had to manage. His hands moved over my back with a kind of attention that made me feel seen without feeling studied.
That difference mattered.
I touched the side of his face and felt him turn into my palm.
No flinch.
