Sorry About Earlier

POV: KhyleThe phone screen had gone dark and bright three times since Khyle had set it on the table. He hadn't touched it. But he'd been watching it the way you watched something you weren't sure was going to hurt you, like a bruise you weren't ready to press.The first two times had been his dad checking in from the house in the suburbs, because the weather had gotten worse and Khyle had mentioned going to Gunner's mother's place and his dad had opinions about driving in weather that strong. The third time was Shane.Khyle hadn't answered any of them.The coffee had been good and he'd drunk most of it sitting on the couch in the dim living room. He hadn't turned more lights on. He wasn't feeling the brightness of his own apartment right now. He was feeling the specific quiet of a day that had gone from unremarkable to enormous and back to unremarkable in the span of a few hours, the way some days did when you were inside them and couldn't see them clearly yet.His cheek was fine. It

The Name

POV: GunnerHe had been watching Khyle skate for twenty minutes.Not obviously. Not the way you watched someone when you wanted them to know you were watching. The other way. The way you watched something when you were trying to understand it, when the act of looking was itself an act of figuring something out that you had been not-figuring-out for a very long time.Khyle moved differently when he thought no one was paying attention. The precision was still there, the efficiency that came from two decades of muscle memory, but the performance quality dropped away and what was left underneath it was something more animal. More honest. He cut across the ice with the specific fluency of someone for whom movement in this environment was not learned behavior but native, and Gunner stood at the boards and watched him do it and did not pretend he was watching for any other reason than the one that was true.He had been pretending for a long time.Not about everything. He had known about the

The Drive

POV: GunnerThey drove back mostly without talking.Not because anything was wrong. Or rather, not because anything was wrong in the usual way. The silence between them had stopped being a failure of conversation a long time ago. It had become something else, the comfortable kind, or close to it, the kind that did not require filling.But Gunner was not comfortable. He was sitting with a very large and recently acknowledged truth in the passenger seat of Khyle's car and trying to behave normally while Khyle drove and the city came back at them through the windshield and the heater ran and the mixed CD played something that should probably not have been on a mixed CD that was going to be shared with another person.He had named his stick Khyle.He was in love with Khyle Santos.He let both of those sentences exist in his head at the same time without doing anything with them. It was a new experience. Normally by now he would have moved. Decided. Done something about whatever the thing

The Door

POV: Dual, Khyle and GunnerKhyle's building.Gunner pulled into the visitor spot he had started to think of as his and cut the engine. Khyle had one hand on the door handle. He stopped.The specific quality of the pause between them was different from other pauses. Gunner felt it and he suspected Khyle felt it and he suspected Khyle suspected he felt it, which was the particular kind of awareness that had been running between them for months and which Gunner now had a name for but had not yet applied out loud."Thanks," Khyle said. To the dashboard, mostly."For what?""The rink. The Cooper thing." A beat. "All of it."Gunner looked at him."You set it up," he said."Yeah but." Khyle stopped. He was looking at his own hand on the door handle. "You showed up."The way he said it landed at a specific address in Gunner's chest. Not the rink. Not the Cooper session. You showed up. Like that was the thing. Like that was what had mattered.Gunner thought about Petra's voice on the porch. H

All Chapters of Pucking Around with Fate: Chapter 171 - Chapter 174

Sorry About Earlier

The Name

The Drive

The Door