The Gray Case

twenty-eight

Post-practice hours are the ones they spend in the company of each other; finding quietude after consuming all their energy on the field.

They are sitting in a café they've never been in before now, drawing—with words—the fragile lines of a new history.

"I think I like her," Alexander says.

Kevin doesn't flinch. He keeps his pencil travelling on the white sheet, focusing on his work with his head low.

"You've been talking about her non-stop for the past three days... I figured."

Alexander sighs while the window next to them projects the reality of the town outside—rain pours in light and sheer raindrops that crash in swift air motions, dropping on the glass and dripping away from it when that moment is over.

"I'm just afraid it's too soon. After Sofia, I mean," Alexander says, as his hand ruffles the bronze-colored hair that crowns his face.

In return, his friend then, stops. He drops the pencil on the round table and raises his head.

"Fuck that shit, Alex. Both you and I know that you haven't been feeling love for quite a while now, even when you were still together. So are the last months of your relationship even valid? No. That's why I don't think it's too soon."

It comes in like a revelation he has known, he knows and will know even more, even better.
He has accepted the truth of it and now, since she's been gone, denial is not an option anymore.

"But," Kevin starts. 

He doesn't give himself a chance to finish yet, he stands on his tip toes on the fine line between his mind and his tongue.

Alexander lays back on his chair, hair caressing his forehead, and suffused light--from behind the grey clouds—inches on the tips and corners of all his angles, residing in them violent but still timid, still mild.

"But. Senior year is not exactly the best time to fall in love with someone new."

He tosses his thoughts out directly to Alexander's eyes whom are haze glazed, precarious in feel and color whenever Maya is mentioned.

Yet, he doesn't speak. His brow is furrowed and he is not relieved. He, as a canvas, is a portrait, a mirror, an image painted in sheen streaks of a deeper part of him.

"I know you like her a lot. But it's like you want to start this new thing while everything else is ending. We'll all be off for college in a matter of months, we'll meet new people, have new experiences... You know what I mean? Think about it."

The thought crosses his mind quickly and just as fast, vanishes somewhere in the air that has the flavour of brewing coffee beans, the near scent of far teas that find their origin in distant places.

Alexander has grown a new him in the past weeks of his existence, soaked in a still blooming optimism, he has no doubt this time.

His palms are settled on the table, his eyes are mirroring—in intensity—the ones that look back at his.

"Well, I don't want to wait until it gets too late. There's no best time when it comes to things like this, you just feel it. I want to live in the now, so I don't care. Not even if she does."

A smirk is now what Alexander sees on his face. A sip from his cup of coffee, a smile (teasing but always warm) and Kevin has understood him.

"Whatever you say, my man."

The words Alexander speaks remind him of a man that has lived and told him the story of his lifetime, of a man who has learned to love life with more tenderness, of a man who has felt pain but has found solace in the immense therapy of silence.