Page 39 of Cross Ice

“Getting there.” I reached past him for plates. “I looked you up.”

“I thought you would.” He leaned against the counter, watching me. “The Wikipedia page is pretty dry, for what it’s worth. Whoever wrote it has never actually watched a hockey game.”

I laughed, and it came out relieved. “The contract amount made me put my laptop down.”

“That’s fair.”

“The Instagram comments made me call Danny at three in the morning.”

His easy smile dropped, his eyes moving over my face the way they did when he was trying to figure out how I actually was versus how I said I was. “Evan⁠—”

“He talked me down,” I said. “I’m fine. Or I’m getting there.” I met his eyes. “You’re still you. That’s what I keep landing on. I spent all night reading about Nicolás Briggs, and you showed up at my door and you’re still just… you.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he crossed the kitchen and kissed me—not hungry, not urgent, just warm and deliberate, his hand cupping my jaw. When he pulled back, his forehead dropped to mine.

“Still just Nico,” he said quietly.

“I know.” I exhaled. “I know that.”

We ate at the kitchen island, close enough that our shoulders touched, and the nervousness that had lived in my chest all day dissolved somewhere between the first bite of tacos and Nico stealing a tortilla chip off my plate without asking. He told me about practice, about a drill that had gone badly, his captain teasing him about his footwork, a joke someone had made that was too specific to hockey to translate but that made Nico laugh telling it. I listened, asked questions, and ate my tacos, and by the time we’d cleaned up and moved to the couch, it felt like every other evening we’d spent here.

Except that nothing underneath it was hidden anymore.

We ended up the way we usually did—him with his arm around me, me against his side, the TV on low, and neither of us watching it. His thumb moved in slow circles on my shoulder. Someone passed by in the hallway, their footsteps muffled. Traffic droned by out on the street below.

“Can I tell you something?” I asked.

“Always.”

I grabbed his hand on my shoulder for a moment. Then I said, “You’re not the only one who’s been withholding.”

He went still—not tense, just attentive.

“My last name isn’t really Beckett,” I said. “That’s my middle name. I started using it when I moved to San Jose.” He said nothing. His arm stayed where it was, and he let me keep going. “My name was Evan Hunter. It still is, legally. But after everything with Ryan, I needed to not be findable. So I became Evan Beckett.”

“So that if someone googled you,” Nico said quietly. “They wouldn’t find him.”

“Yes.”

He didn’t say anything else for a moment. Just confirmation without dramatizing or questions I wasn’t ready for. Something eased in me I hadn’t known was braced.

“Ryan Pierce,” I said. “We weren’t just together in my late twenties. We were… it started before that. A long time before that.”

And then I told him. All of it.

I started at sixteen, which surprised him—I felt it in the slight shift of his body, the way he turned fractionally toward me without pulling back. High school in LA, two teens who knew they were gay and found each other before they really understood what that meant.

“First love,” I said. “We were sixteen and stupid and completely sure of each other.”

Nico was quiet, listening.

Coming out together. The sweetness of being seventeen and in love and thinking the hard part was already over. Then college. The natural drift, the friendly distance, the years of separate lives that felt like growth at the time.

“What happened?” Nico asked.

“We ran into each other at twenty-two. A mutual friend’s party. He was across the room, and he looked like someone I used to know and also someone I was meeting for the first time.” I paused. “We chose each other. It felt deliberate. I thought that meant it was real. He was landing small roles,” I said. “Commercials, TV stuff. We moved in together when he got a recurring part on a cable show. It was good. It was really good… for a while.”

Nico’s arm tightened slightly around me.