Page 28 of Diamond Ring
Chapter Eight
December
Jake
Alex flies into Dulles the day before New Year’s Eve. Before he departs, he sends his flight information and anI can get a cab.
Jake: I’ll come get you.
Of course, with his elbow, Jake has to ask his mom to drive him, feeling very much like a kid asking for a lift to his friend’s house.
“You can’t wait another hour to see him?” she says when he asks.
“Cab fare’ll be like a hundred bucks.”
Her eyebrows lift. “Sure, Jake, I can give you a ride.”
The drive out to Dulles is as painless as the trip can ever be—so moderately painful, the airport existing in a weird pocket of reality where it always takes an hour to get there. Traffic varies from a crawl to a standstill. Jake gets an impatient itch under his skin that has nothing to do with his stitches. By the time they pull up to the arrival gate, he wishes he took Alex up on his offer of getting a cab. At least he’d have another hour. Because it’s possible Alex came out of some misplaced sense of responsibility for Jake’s injury or to bury their lingering disagreement—and nothing more.
Alex is standing outside the gate wearing a peacoat, beanie pulled down over his ears, an expression like he doesn’t mind the fine forty-degree mist of rain that’s causing the atmospheric ache in Jake’s elbow. Alex looks better rested than the last time Jake saw him, without the exhaustion of the postseason.
Good, Jake amends. He looks good.
“That’s him,” Jake says, unnecessarily, since his mom has met Alex at a handful of games. “I’ll go help him with his suitcase.”
His mom doesn’t point out that Alex can bench more than Jake weighs and that Jake had one of his arms recently repaired by a surgeon’s gossamer-fine stitches. Instead she throws a knowing glance in the rearview mirror, a chance for him to deny that it’s not like that. Which sounds less and less true every time he thinks it.
Out of the car, the wind bites through Jake’s jacket. His elbow intensifies its complaints. Neither matters when Alex smiles like Jake’s rarely seen him smile, an expression that rearranges his face from gruff to handsome.
He moves to hug Jake but pauses when he sees the lump of Jake’s slinged-up arm under his coat. “Can I?”
Jake nods.
Up close, Alex smells like wet wool, the faintly metallic scent of airplane air, a little like strawberries. His arms wrap carefully around Jake’s shoulders. Jake mostly doesn’t notice the difference in their heights, because Alex always seems bigger than he actually is. But it’s hard not to be aware of Alex’s careful breath against the exposed skin of his neck. Or the way he’s hugging Jake like he’s a sailor returned from sea and not just a teammate gone home to Rhode Island.
Eventually Jake pulls back. “Did you get new shampoo? You smell like strawberry Mambas.”
“Evie got me body wash for Christmas. I think there’s glitter in it.”
Alex’s neck has a faint shimmer that Jake attributed to the rain. One that could descend past his shirt collar, down the breadth of his torso and...
Honking interrupts Jake’s contemplation, his mom blowing the horn impatiently, likely being edged out by other vehicles eager to greet arriving guests.
“Let me get your bag,” Jake says, though Alex waves him off, picks up his suitcase, and hefts it into the opened hatch of the station wagon, then climbs in the backseat.
Jake, on consideration, follows, even if he’s folded up. And his mom moves the seat forward without comment.
“Thank you for coming to pick me up, Ms. Fischer,” Alex says. Alex’s aunts insist on being called by their first names, even though there’s a screaming sense of wrongness that Jake tried to explain to him once—that calling an adult something without a “cousin” or an “aunt” or whatever else was like trying to pitch with someone else’s glove. To which Alex said,Jake, you know you’re an adult too, right?
Alex isn’t exactly impolite with reporters—he’s succinct, which is subtly different, and the press seems to find charming—but Alex always addresses his mom with the kind of deference he shows Courtland, Gordon, and practically no one else.
Inevitably, the drive takes an hour. It feels like a date, like being driven to the movies. Like they could clandestinely hold hands. Or could if Jake’s arm wasn’t in a sling and Alex wasn’t answering Jake’s mom’s questions, giving her the cleaned-up version of his offseason. Not that Alex’s home life is particularly racy; it’s mostly just weird in a specific way that makes Jake’s gut flare defensively when guys razz him about it.
Alex once showed him pictures of Sofia’s house—massive, slightly ramshackle—which Jake made the mistake of calling a Victorian. When Alex corrected that it was a Queen Anne, Jake laughed and threw socks at him until Alex wrestled him to the floor, pinning him and giving him a long slow look through his eyelashes before letting him up.
A memory that glows with nostalgia even if it happened a few months ago. One that makes Jake very aware that they did surgery on his dominant arm and that jerking off with his right hand doesn’t work the same way. It’s been more than two weeks. Alex is coming to sleep on a sofa bed a room away from him. He’ll be fine. They’ll be fine.
He shifts, arm smarting, and grunts with discomfort.
