Page 20 of Locked & Loaded

“Alright,” he says after a moment, his voice flat. “I’m going to get some sleep.”

He lies down without waiting for me to reply, his feet toward the broken vent, probably so the cold air isn’t blowing straight at his face. Then he pulls the blanket up over his shoulders, turns onto his side, facing the wall, and goes perfectly still.

Just like that.

I sit on my bunk and watch him in the dark, kind of stunned that this conversation ended so quickly, before I could even process it. One minute he’s telling me something that completely rearranges the last three months in my head, and the next he’s turned away from me like we’ve finished some team-building exercise and should now get some rest.

I get why he does it. I’m not completely clueless. He told me something personal and embarrassing, something he clearly hated saying, and I answered with a huh like a concussed idiot. Of course he wants to disappear into the mattress and pretend none of this happened.

The problem is, I can’t.

The disappointment is still lodged in my throat like something I swallowed wrong. Okay, he doesn’t want to talk about it. I get that. He wants to move on.

I just can’t seem to move with him.

I want to know why he stopped having a crush on me. I want to know what changed—whether I did something, or said something, or whether three months of me being an asshole wore it out of him, or whether he got close enough to realize I wasn’t as interesting as whatever version of me he’d built in his head.

Basically, I want to know why I missed my chance before I even knew I wanted one.

And the fact that I’m thinking of it as a chance at all should probably concern me.

Because this is new. I don’t do this. I don’t sit around obsessing over whether my emotionally unavailable male teammate finds me attractive. I especially don’t do it while said teammate is lying three feet away from me, wearing my hoodie, with his back turned like I’ve personally offended him.

Which, fair.

I probably have, considering how much of an asshole I’ve been to him, especially tonight.

The cold air from the broken vent slides across my bare chest, raising goosebumps along my arms. I stand up and reach for my duffel in the dark, find it by touch, and dig through until my fingers close around a clean T-shirt and a Glacier Saints sweatshirt. I pull the T-shirt over my head, then the sweatshirt, and the warmth settles over my skin.

I lie down the same way—feet toward the window—and stare up at the ceiling. Moonlight catches the metal shelf above me, turning it silver in patches. The train rocks beneath us with the low rhythm that usually puts me to sleep within minutes.

Not tonight.

Minutes pass. Ten. Twenty. Half an hour.

But my heart won’t calm down. My stomach keeps fluttering, and every time I close my eyes, I see Rodriguez’s face when he said it.

I’m gay.

And I sort of used to have a crush on you.

The words replay on a loop, and each time, the same stupid pang hits me in the chest.

Used to.

Past tense.

Over.

Done.

But why the fuck does that bother me so much?

I mean, fine. I know why. Tonight I realized I’m attracted to Rodriguez. That should be the strange part, probably, but somehow it isn’t. Maybe because the realization didn’t arrive like a lightning strike. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It just put a name to a bunch of things I’d been refusing to look at directly.

The way my eyes kept finding him in every room before I could stop them.

The way it pissed me off when he laughed with Rami but barely said two words to me.