#i'm shy...

Thankfully, it’s a little cold tonight, so he and Nick opted for matching Unity track jackets zipped up to their chins instead. Nick’s is probably a little too big for him, but Gray’s fits perfectly. (Because he’s Grayson Black, so of course it does.) The reflective emblems on their chests flash under the streetlights as Nick leaps up to shoot the ball, but before he can even try to sink it into the basket, Gray blocks him. He almost always blocks Nick’s first couple of shots. You don’t know whether or not it’s because it makes Nick play better or because Gray just is better, but you get a kick out of it anyway. 

After half an hour, Nick jogs over to you, distracting you from the funny video of a kitten rolling around in a pile of catnip that you’ve been watching for the past two minutes. He’s a little out of breath, but he’s still smiling brightly. You grab his water bottle to toss at him. “Having fun there, Nicky?” you ask.

“Of course I am,” he answers, running a hand over his scalp while he takes a quick drink. “It’s good training.”

“Training for what? Junior varsity basketball tryouts that you’re 10 years too old for?”

Gray laughs as he appears behind Nick. “You should really join us sometime, Mari,” he says, catching his water bottle when you throw at him, too. Unlike Nick, he doesn’t look the least bit winded. He looks as handsome as he usually does, which is incredibly depressing because you know that if you tried playing you’d end up looking like a hairless cat hacking up a hairball after five minutes. (Actually, more like three. Maybe one, depending on how many cookies you ate before you left the house.) “I promise to go easy on you.” 

Before you can reply, Nick cuts in. “Wait a minute.” He turns to Gray, feigning offense. “You’d go easy on her but not me, your best friend?”

“Oh, Nick...” Gray claps him on the back, smirking slightly. “I do go easy on you.”

You snort, and Nick puts his bottle down as he wanders back onto the court, shaking his head and bouncing the basketball on the cement while he waits for Gray to finish his break. You’ve actually thought about joining a couple of times, days when someone at the supermarket pissed you off or Sally was trying to pick your brain about your crush again and you had more than enough anger to work off, but playing basketball against two Ments is probably the quickest way for you to feel miserable about yourself that you can think of. Besides, there’s no way you could be so close to Gray without thinking something horrifically incriminating. Right now, you barely manage not to stare as he tilts his head back and takes a drink from his water bottle. 

You also don’t manage to look away by the time he’s finished, and he quirks a genuinely curious eyebrow at you as he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand.

You’d probably stop coming to the park with Nick for your own sake if he wouldn’t just start dragging you here again. It’s not like you do anything here that you can’t do at home, right? Now that you’ve graduated, it’s not like you have any homework... watching videos of kittens rolling around in piles of catnip is the only thing you can do if you don’t want to spend the entire night staring at Gray, which is what you end up doing anyway.

Maybe you can fake an injury or something - although it couldn’t be too difficult to really break your own leg, right? If you get Sally in on it...

“Are you okay?” Gray asks.

“Yeah,” you answer, pulling your sleeves over your hands and crossing your arms over your chest. “Yeah, I’m okay. Just a little cold.”

By now, they’ve been playing long enough that it’s dark out. The wind’s picked up, too, and you’re wearing one of Nick’s hand-me-down hoodies that is nowhere near thick enough for a cool Chicago night. (That’s Nick’s fault, though, because he rushed you out of the house when you were getting dressed, so you make a note to take him out of your will before you inevitably die of frostbite.) 

“Oh, here.” Gray starts to take off his jacket. “You can take mine. I’ve worked up quite a sweat, anyway.”

Sometimes talking to Gray makes you feel like you’re living in one of those young adult romance novels that you and Sally used to make fun of in twelfth grade, but you’re not. This is real life, and Gray’s just nice, and he’s offering his jacket to you so you don’t freeze to death but now you’ve stared at him way too long without actually taking it for this to be normal.

Still, you swallow hard and manage to respond with a casual, “Oh, thanks.” When you lean forward to grab it from him, you notice out of the corner of your eye that he’s careful to pull away before either of you get too close to the other.

(You wouldn’t mind him getting close. With everyone else you would, but with him, you wouldn’t.)

“No problem.” He says it like he really thinks it’s no problem, and you bite back a smile. “I should head back out there...”

“Yeah, good luck,” you reply, reluctantly pulling his jacket over your shoulders. “Get out there and kick Nick’s ass.”

He laughs. “I think you do that enough for both of us, Mari,” he says, and he winks at you before turning around and jogging back over to the court, calling out for Nick to pass him the ball.