Work Text:
polyglot
noun. a person who knows and is able to use several languages.
mid 17th century: from French polyglotte, from Greek poluglōttos, from polu- ‘many’ + glōtta ‘tongue.’
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Eric Bittle @omgcheckplease 10 September 2015
Apparently Nursey finished his language requirement freshman year. Good for him.
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Latin
From day one, Bitty makes it clear to all the Frogs that they’re “welcome at the Haus any time, no matter what.”
Dex had kind of thought he was just being friendly, but the third time he hesitantly shows up in response to one of Bitty’s “FREE PIE IN 20 MINUTES GET IT BEFORE IT’S GONE BOYS” texts and is greeted with a beaming smile, he figures it’s okay for him to come even if it’s not a whole team thing.
The only problem with the whole “door always open” policy is that Nursey is always at the Haus, too.
Like right now, when Dex and Chowder come in after their Intro to Programming class and Nursey’s already there, sprawled across the couch in the living room in a way that the part of Dex’s brain that gets stupidly distracted by long legs and sloping shoulders wants to call languid, but the part of his brain that can’t fucking stand Derek Nurse calls lazy. He’s got a book in his hands, a beaten-up paperback with weird artwork on the cover, but he lowers it when they walk in.
“Sup, dudes,” he says, sitting up. “How was your class?”
“It was super fun,” Chowder says, putting his backpack down. Nursey moves his legs and Chowder plops down on the couch next to him with a grin, craning his neck to look over Nursey’s shoulder. “What are you reading?”
“Metamorphoses,” Nursey says. “Ovid.”
Dex snorts, sitting down on the floor because he doesn’t want to squash himself onto the couch with Nursey and Chowder. Of course Nursey’s reading old poetry.
“Oh,” Chowder says. “For one of your poetry classes?”
Nursey shakes his head. “Nah, I just like it. I got, like, super into mythology in high school. I like Greek mythology better than Roman, honestly, but Ovid’s poetry’s just--I don’t know, I like the flow of it in the Latin.”
“Wait,” Dex says. Because there’s no way. “Wait. You’re not actually sitting there reading it in Latin.”
Nursey shrugs, takes an actual bookmark out of the back of his book, marks his page, and hands the book across to him. Dex opens it, and--yeah, holy shit, that’s definitely the shit he remembers from his one year of Latin in high school. “Bullshit,” he says.
“What, bullshit?” Nursey cocks an eyebrow. Just one. It’s infuriating that he can do that. “Bullshit, like, you think I’m just sitting here staring at a book in a language I can’t read?”
Dex leans back against the wall. “Wouldn’t put it past you,” he says.
“Guys,” Chowder complains. “Don’t fight.”
“Bro,” Nursey says. “Why the actual fuck would I do that? Just to look cool?”
Dex waves his hand. “You do like your whole…y’know. Chill image. All hipster and shit.”
Nursey narrows his eyes at him, his absurdly long, dark eyelashes making them look even greener. “Give me that,” he says, holding out his hand.
Dex blinks. “Give you what?”
“The book, Poindexter. I took four years of this stupid language; I’m gonna prove it to you.” Nursey wiggles his fingers, and Dex flushes, handing over the book. Nursey opens to the page with his bookmark, sticks the marker into the back of the book again, fixes Dex with a firm, pointed look, then takes a deep breath and starts to read in a smooth, steady voice.
“Oh, faithful night, most faithful keeper of sacred rites--Oh golden-lighted stars that with the golden moon succeed the fires of light--oh, Hectate! Grave three-faced queen of these enchanters and enchanters’ arts, come, to aid the witches’ art, and all our incantations. Oh fruitful Earth, who yield the sorceress’ herbs of magic; Oh gentle breezes and destructive winds! You, mountains, rivers, lakes and sainted groves, and every dreaded god of silent night--attend upon me!”
He lets his voice shift to something strong and commanding, and Dex finds himself leaning forward, caught into the rhythm and motion of the words, despite the old-fashioned language. “When my power commands, the rivers turn from their accustomed ways and roll far backward to their secret springs! I speak—and the wild, troubled sea is calm.” He closes the book and looks up, his eyes bright and pleased. “Satisfied?”
Dex opens his mouth, and finds himself...speechless.
Nursey grins, smug. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I fuckin’ thought.”
Dex reaches into his backpack, pulls out the apple he’d been saving for his afternoon snack, and throws it at Nursey’s head.
Spanish
They don’t fight on the ice often.
For a lot of reasons. NCAA rules don’t allow it, so it’s an immediate game disqual and a suspension, followed by an absolute reaming from Jack and the coaches. But they’re also just not really a team of fighters--they defend each other on the ice, sure, but the coaching staff make it clear from the Taddy Tour that they expect that defense to come in the form of clean play, not fists and penalty time.
Still, it happens. Two games into Dex’s first semester, Wicks gets ejected from a game for dropping his gloves when one of St. Lawrence’s d-men slams a puck into Ollie’s face and he ends up with four stitches in his chin. Three games later, Holster punches one of Quinnipiac’s forwards in the gut after he crosschecks Ransom into the boards. They don’t talk about the one time Shitty gets into a fight, because it’s honestly just pathetic--over in three seconds and no one really even sees what starts it. Dex suspects it was a comment about the ’stache.
Dex...well. Dex has always had a shitty temper. He drops his gloves for the first time in late October, when one of Colgate’s opposing d-men grins at him through his mouthguard and makes a comment about his mom, and just kind of blacks out after that. He gets a bit of a rep on the team for being a hothead, cops a lot of lectures from Jack and Coach Hall, and kind of just tries to keep his gloves and helmet on after that.
But Nursey never does. He’s always cool, always, Dex thinks, a little bitterly, chill. He plays hard and brutal, checking people into the boards and chirping opposing players with a wicked grin. He takes shit when he has to, gritting his teeth when he hits the boards or the ice and setting his jaw when another team’s insults don’t quite roll off his back, but Dex never sees him snap.
Then, in November, they have a game against Harvard.
It’s always, Dex thinks later, fucking Harvard.
One of the forwards has been giving Nursey shit whenever they’re on the ice, chirping him just a little to the left of friendly, checking him hard. When he’s close enough to hear him, Dex startles a bit when he realizes that the guy’s talking to Nursey in Spanish, not English, and that the tightness in Nursey’s mouth makes it clear he understands him.
Then again, Nursey’s from New York. He probably hears a bunch of languages all the time.
The third time they skate back to the bench for a line change, Nursey takes out his mouthguard to drink some water, and Dex nudges him. “Hey,” he says. “You want me to cover that asshole awhile?”
Nursey glances at him, surprise in his eyes. Dex gets that. They’re not really friends, even though the animosity between them is starting to simmer a little, but they still don’t really do this kind of thing. After a moment, Nursey shakes his head. “Nah. I’m okay.”
Dex narrows his eyes, not sure he really believes him, but shrugs. “Alright,” he says, and pops his mouthguard back in.
Dumb idea.
They go back out with Jack and Bitty’s line, and that same guy starts right up again, only this time, he’s throwing shit at Bitty and Jack and Einhardt, and Nursey’s getting more and more riled up.
Dex doesn’t hear whatever it is that actually makes him snap, not that he would have understood it anyway, only knows that it was directed at Bitty, and that Nursey drops his gloves and throws his helmet aside so fast that even Jack, who lunges for him, doesn’t stand a chance of grabbing him to pull him back. Nursey’s yelling at the guy in rapid, furious Spanish and the guy is yelling back and then there’s a fight, and Dex is suddenly really, really glad that shit between him and Nursey never came to real blows, because Nursey fights just as hard as he does everything else.
The refs break up the fight, because of course they do, and Nursey skates off the ice with blood on his face and on his hands and a satisfied smirk curving his lips, and Dex thinks, wildly, oh, shit, he’s hot.
Coach Hall puts Ransom and Holster back in, so Dex follows Nursey back to the locker room, not really sure what else to do. He finds him sitting on the table in the trainer’s room, getting his face patched up--his lip is split and there’s bruises darkening around his cheekbone and on his jaw, and he’s already got ice packs on the knuckles of both his hands. “Jesus, Nurse,” he says.
Nursey shoots him a grin. “You should see the other guy,” he quips.
“I did,” Dex says, though he didn’t really--just a glimpse. He did see that the asshole had to be helped off the ice by his teammates. He doesn’t feel that bad about it. “What the fuck were you thinking, man? You’re gonna be suspended.”
“Pot meet fuckin’ kettle,” Nursey says, and then adds, “ow,” as the trainer takes the ice pack off his left hand. The trainer gives him an unimpressed look and starts prodding at Nursey’s knuckles.
“What did he say, anyway?” Dex asks. Nursey glances at him, confused. “Ramirez. What did he say that made you…”
“Oh.” Nursey’s lips thin. “He told Bitty to--it doesn't matter. It was way the fuck out of line.”
Dex raises his eyebrows. “It's hockey, dude.”
Nursey shakes his head. “Trust me. You'd have hit him, too.”
There's something cold but fierce in his voice that tells Dex that he's probably right, so Dex just nods. He hoists himself up into the table next to Nursey. “I didn't know you spoke Spanish,” he says.
It's a sorry excuse for a subject change, and the look Nursey gives him makes it clear he knows what Dex is doing, but then he shrugs. “Yeah,” he says. “I...well.” He turns his face away, looking down at his hands, watching the trainer poke and prod at his knuckles. “My parents--They worked a lot, when me and my sister were little. We were basically raised by nannies until I was like...I don't know, six? A lot of them spoke more Spanish than English, and we learned it from them--we were so young we just kind of soaked it up, y’know?”
Dex doesn't know--he didn't start learning a second language until he started his required language classes in middle school, and it had been like pulling teeth. “I guess,” he says.
Nursey smiles faintly, then winces as the motion tugs at his split lip. “Anyway, it worked out--When my parents split up, my mom got remarried, and my mama--my stepmom--is from Chile, so now we get to talk shit about my mom and she can't understand us. Apparently our accents are a fucking mess, though. Guess that's what happens when you learn the language from people from like four different countries. Ow, motherfucker.”
That last was directed to the trainer, who snorts, takes his hand off Nursey’s, and picks up a roll of medical tape. “Congrats,” he says dryly. “You have a broken finger.”
Nursey swears under his breath, but when the rest of the team files in at the end of the game, Dex sees him greet Bitty with a faint smile that gets a little wider when Bitty hugs him tight. “I don’t know what he said, but I saw your face,” he hears Bitty say, half-muffled into Nursey’s shoulder. “And I know I shouldn’t be encouragin’ you fighting, but...thanks.”
“Got your back, Bits,” Nursey says. He looks up, and Dex sees him catch Jack’s eyes across the locker room and tense.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, Jack inclines his head in an approving nod. Nursey smiles, and ducks his head back down to Bitty’s hug.
Arabic
“I think you have a fever,” Dex says.
“Dude, I’m fine,” Nursey says, but he looks like shit, his eyes glassy and his cheeks a little darker than usual, like maybe he’s flushed. “It’s just hot as shit in here, I think the heat’s on the fritz.”
Dex rolls his eyes and leans over, sticking the back of his hand against Nursey’s forehead, under the flop of curls that Nursey never bothers doing much to tame. Fortunately--or maybe unfortunately--the heat coming off Nursey’s skin is enough to outweigh the embarrassment and surprise he feels at his own boldness. “No, you definitely have a fever,” he says. “Dude, this is worse than last time.”
Nursey bites his lip, looking away from Dex’s eyes, and Dex knows he’s remembering the day last semester, when he and Bitty had come across campus to bring him soup and meds when Nursey had been laid up with the cold that had knocked out half of campus. Nursey had been stunned into silence to see them, the look on his face making it clear that he hadn’t expecting anyone to notice he was missing, let alone to come check on him, and something in Dex’s chest had twisted.
“I really don’t feel that bad,” Nursey says, after a silence that lasts just a moment too long, and Dex realizes, a little belatedly, that his hand is still on Nursey’s forehead. He moves it away, and watches Nursey’s throat work as he swallows, then winces at the movement. “Seriously, I’m probably just overheated.”
“Bullshit, dude, you look like shit,” Dex says, frowning at him.
Which isn’t really true, because Nursey never looks like shit. It’s one of the things Dex used to find infuriating about him, and now just finds frustrating in a whole different way. Because whereas he used to get annoyed when Nursey would show up to morning practice looking sleepy and rumpled and gorgeous while Dex looked like death very slightly warmed over, now his stomach flips and flutters at the sight of Nursey first thing in the morning, bundled up in his hoodie and beanie, curls mussed and eyes warm and hazy.
But he doesn’t look great now, is the thing, and he’s been coughing into his elbow all afternoon while they’ve been studying for midterms, his hand shaking as he takes his notes on the book he’s reading, and Dex had to say something.
He hadn’t exactly expected Nursey to just straight-up deny anything being wrong, but he can’t really say he’s surprised.
“Alright, dude,” he says, closing his laptop and climbing off Nursey’s bed. “I’m gonna go get you some cold medicine and like, cough drops and shit, because I know you don’t have any here.”
“You don’t have to,” Nursey protests. “Seriously, man, I’m--”
He’s cut off by another round of coughing, and Dex puts his backpack down so that he can pat him on the back, then hand him his water bottle when he starts taking wheezing breaths again. “Thanks,” Nursey rasps, taking the bottle with a trembling hand and wiping his eyes with the other.
“Done telling me you’re fine?” Dex says dryly. Honestly, he kind of wants to text Chowder and tell him to go to the campus store instead--he doesn’t really want to leave Nursey on his own--but that just feels like too much.
Nursey swallows and nods. “Yeah, okay,” he says. “I...thanks, man.”
“Alright. Leave your door unlocked, yeah? I’ll be back in, like, twenty.” Resisting the weird, sudden urge to lean over and kiss Nursey’s forehead, because what the fuck, Will, what the fuck, he puts on his jacket and picks up his bag, heading out.
It ends up taking him a little more than an half an hour, because the store is crowded and busy, and then Dex buys tea and then realizes it has lemongrass in it but Nursey’s allergic so he has to go back to return it and swap it for something else after reading ingredients a little more carefully.
He opens Nursey’s door carefully when he gets back, and finds the room dimmer than it was when he left--the shades are still open, what’s left of the late afternoon light still coming through the window, but the lights are off. Dex squints through the semi-darkness, and realizes that the curled up bundle under the blankets is, in fact, Nursey.
Putting his backpack down, he shrugs out of his jacket and then takes the cough drops and meds out of his bag, bringing them over to put them on Nursey’s desk before sitting down on the edge of Nursey’s bed. The top of Nursey’s curls poke out from the pile of blankets, and he feels an odd burst of fondness that would have been unimaginable to him at the beginning of the school year.
“Hey,” he says, putting a hand on what he’s pretty sure is Nursey’s shoulder. “Hey. Nursey?”
Nursey mumbles something unintelligible and burrows more firmly under his blankets.
Dex sighs. “C’mon, man, I brought meds for you.”
“Shh,” Nursey says, mostly muffled. “’m sleeping.”
“Nursey,” Dex begins, the old familiar annoyance beginning to prickle between his shoulder blades, but he’s cut off by the sound of Nursey’s phone vibrating on his desk. Dex leans over to look at it. The display reads Mom, shows a gorgeous woman with Nursey’s green eyes, her skin a little lighter than his. Dex can’t tell if she has Nursey’s curls--or rather, if Nursey has hers--because she has a really pretty purple scarf wrapped around her head. “Nursey, your mom’s calling.”
Nursey makes an unhappy sound, but sticks his hand out of the blanket cocoon. Dex hands him the phone.
“Ammi,” Nursey says, sounding sleepy and hoarse, worse than he had when Dex left, and then says something in a language Dex doesn’t recognize. He pauses for a moment to listen, and Dex hears a sympathetic sound come through the phone, tinny through the speakers, and then a response.
Nursey sniffles, and Dex suddenly feels--
“Hey, Nursey,” he says, gently. “I’m gonna go make you some tea, okay? I’ll be right back, you just talk to your mom, alright?”
He gets off the bed, starts to leave, but Nursey’s other hand darts out, catches his wrist, and he turns back. Nursey’s looking at him, and his eyes are still glassy, but they’re tear-bright now, too, and Dex feels a lump in his throat. “Don’t go,” Nursey says, and Dex’s knees turn to jelly.
He sits back down. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
Nursey only talks to his mom for a few minutes. Dex can’t understand what he’s saying, so he just listens to the sound of his voice instead. He’s never heard Nursey talk to her before, and it occurs to him, kind of strangely, that Nursey doesn’t ever call his parents around the rest of the team. Nursey’s voice sounds different, softer, moving over the unfamiliar words like a river tumbling over stones.
Dex isn’t sure if it’s the language, or who he’s talking to, or both, but he’s never heard Nursey sound like this before.
Finally, Nursey hangs up the phone, reaching to put it on his desk. He lets go of Dex’s wrist with a small, embarrassed sound, like he hadn’t realized he was still holding it. “Sorry,” he says, and sniffles again, rubbing at his eyes. “I get...I get stupid emotional when I’m sick.”
Dex opens his mouth to chirp him, instinctive, but shoves the instinct down. “It’s okay, man. Here.” He picks up the box of Cold & Flu medication from the desk, punches two pills through the packaging, and hands them to Nursey with his water bottle. Nursey swallows them without protest, which is almost as worrying as the tears, but Dex just takes the water bottle back when Nursey hands it to him.
“You, uh, freaked me out a little when you answered the phone,” he says after a moment, just to break the silence. “Kinda thought you were speaking in tongues.”
Nursey laughs softly. “No. Uh, my family’s kind of a mixed bag, language wise. My step-mom’s from Chile, so there’s Spanish there, and my mom moved around the Middle East when she was a kid so she grew up speaking Arabic, and my dad--” He breaks off, his smile fading. “Anyway, when they were together they mostly spoke to us in English, because my dad didn't like the idea of my mom having a language with us that he didn't know. My mom started teaching us Arabic after they divorced. It was our thing, I guess. It’s kinda the closest thing to a hug I can get over the phone.”
“I get it,” Dex says. “I mean, not languages or anything, but like. The hug thing.” He does get it. He still calls his mom, like, four times a week. Last semester, it had been more like once a day. “I got you some tea. Twice. First time it had lemongrass.”
“I’m allergic,” Nursey says, almost apologetic.
“I know, dude, that’s what I’m saying. Brought it back. I got you, uh.” Dex pulls the bag over, takes the box of tea out. “Madagascar Vanilla? It’s got this dope picture of a lion drinking tea on it.” Nursey laughs, more genuine this time, and Dex grins, feeling warmth spread through his chest. “Want me to go make you some?”
Nursey shakes his head. “Thanks, but I’m okay. Do you think you could--”
He trails off, looking down at his hands in his lap like he’s uncertain, and Dex puts the box of tea back on the desk. “What? Hey, c’mon, bro, I’m your d-man. I’ve got your back.”
“Could you just...stay?” Nursey’s voice is very small, and very unsure. “For a little while?”
Dex stares, just for an instant, but realizes in a heartbeat that he doesn’t want to give Nursey time to put his walls back up. “Yeah, man, of course.” He kicks his sneakers off. “Budge over.”
Nursey blinks. “What?”
“What, what? You said stay, I’m staying. You’re sleeping. Make room.” Dex shoves at him, but gently, and Nursey gives him a confused look but wiggles closer to the wall to make space on the bed. Don’t make it weird, Poindexter, Dex tells himself firmly, and slides under the blankets with him, pulling them back up around Nursey’s shoulders and then, too warm himself, slinging his arm over Nursey’s waist over the covers.
“There,” he says, more matter-of-fact than he feels, like his brain isn’t absolutely freaking the fuck out about being spooned in bed with Derek Nurse. “Go back to sleep, Nurse. I’ll wake you up in like an hour so you can eat something.”
He kind of expects more of a fight, but Nursey just sniffles, sighs, and relaxes, his back melting against Dex’s chest, and oh, shit, this was such a bad idea. “Kay, habibi,” he mumbles. “G’night.”
It takes less than two minutes for his breathing to even and slow. It takes less than one after that for Dex, moving carefully so that he doesn’t wake him, to cave to curiosity, take out his phone and Google, habibi meaning, and feel his face heat to burning at what he finds.
As he shoves his phone back in his pocket, he tells himself, firmly, that it’s probably just Nursey’s fever talking.
But he can’t help but hope that it’s not.
Portuguese
Dex and Nursey leave Faber together after the Taddy Tour their freshman year to find one of their prospects, a deceptively lean guy with side-swept hair and sharp brown eyes who hadn’t really responded much to Bitty’s beaming personality or gift bags, attempting to calm a very small, very emotional woman with grey hair and tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Vovó,” he’s saying, almost pleading, “Vavó, está tudo bem, por favor, acalme.”
Dex, immediately uncomfortable dealing with other people’s family drama--especially people who couldn’t even warm up to Bitty, Jesus--is ready to sweep right by, but Nursey catches arm.
“Hey, hold up, I’m gonna check in,” he says.
“Dude, we’re gonna miss pie,” Dex says.
Nursey rolls his eyes. “We’ll get pie,” he says, and heads over to the pre-frosh and his...grandmother? Probably? “Com licença, está tudo bem?”
They both look at him in something like surprise, and then the kid starts talking, and the grandmother starts crying again, and Nursey’s talking to both of them, calmly and gently, in a language that sounds sort of like Spanish but definitely isn’t while Dex, feeling awkward, loiters by the stairs.
Nursey’s got a way with people’s families--Shitty calls it his Andover Charm, and Dex knows that’s some of it, the smile that doesn’t reach his eyes that he can paste into place when he has to deal with people sometimes, but this is different. This is how he’d acted when he’d met Bitty’s mom and Dex’s siblings and Chowder’s parents at Family Weekend, bright and charming and open and friendly. There’s a sinuousness to him that Dex might, once, have called fake, like he’s molding himself to fit the situation, but now he realizes that Nursey isn’t changing himself to fit.
All the parts of him are always there, bright and shining--he just lets them through in different ways.
It takes about ten minutes, but finally, the kid and his grandma head out, the kid with Nursey’s number in his phone, and the grandma having yanked Nursey down--he has to bend at the waist--so that she can kiss both his cheeks. Nursey laughs, and kisses her back, then winks at the kid and claps him on the back as they head to their car before he comes back to Dex.
“So,” he says. “Haus? For pie?”
Dex looks at him for a moment, and then shrugs. “Yeah, sure,” he says.
They fall into step together easily, the path from Faber to the Haus all but autopilot now for both of them. “So,” Dex says. “Who in your family speaks--what, Italian?”
Nursey laughs. “Wow,” he says. “Uh, you’re in the same language family, white boy, but no. Portuguese. And nobody. Learned from an ex, but I’m not, like, fluent or anything.”
“You looked pretty fluent back there,” Dex says, gesturing over his shoulder. “What was that about?”
Nursey shrugs one shoulder. “Just, like, separation anxiety stuff I guess. I think he’s a first gen college student. And I don’t know, I guess I have, like, an ear for languages? I pick them up fast.”
Dex snorts. “Or something.” This makes four languages--shit, five, if he counts English, and that’s just the ones he knows about. Whereas Dex speaks English, as long as he’s not so pissed off he forgets how to talk, and, after six years and a four on the AP test, remembers enough Spanish to ask for a drink and the location of the nearest bathroom. “It was nice of you to talk to them.”
“Don’t have to sound so surprised,” Nursey says, sounding amused. He glances at Dex from under his stupidly long eyelashes. “You’d have done the same thing.”
“I don’t know if I would have,” Dex admits, because he thinks he and Nursey have come far enough together now that he doesn’t have to have the moral high ground all the time.
Nursey looks at him for a long moment, and then, gently, bumps their arms together. “Don’t sell yourself short, Poindexter,” he says, his voice soft and fond. “That angry ginger heart of yours is bigger than you like to let on.”
Dex flushes, and bumps him back, and they walk the rest of the way to the Haus in silence.
(When he gets back to Samwell after break for August training, the kid he last saw thumbing Nursey’s number into his phone is being introduced to him as Whiskey, and he’s still a little standoffish and a little unsure, but there’s a little more warmth in his eyes.)
French
“Okay, new fucking rule,” Dex declares, straightening up from the dishwasher and cursing under his breath when he hits his head on the top of it on his way up. “No more Tupperware lids in the fucking dishwasher, crew. This is the fourth plastic lid I’ve had to dig out. This is why it keeps breaking. I--”
He cuts himself off when he realizes he’s ranting to an empty kitchen, huffing out an irritated sigh. “Right,” he mutters, putting the twisted piece of melted plastic in the trash and picking up his wrench so that he can start reassembling the dishwasher.
Then he decides, nah, fuck it, he’s earned a break. He gets to his feet, wincing as his back protests at the number of hours he’s been hunched over inside the dishwasher, and stretches his arms over his head. Taking his snapback off, he pushes a hand through his hair and wipes the sweat off his forehead. It’s a hot day, which isn’t unusual for early September in Massachusetts, and most of the windows in the kitchen are open.
It doesn’t help that the oven’s on, but then, that’s how they get pie. Dex isn’t gonna start complaining.
He fishes a beer out of the six-pack in the fridge and wanders into the living room, and finds Bitty and Nursey where he left them, doing homework on the couch. Only now, instead of Bitty making flashcards and Nursey annotating one of his books, they’re sitting across from each other on the floor--Bitty still refuses to sit on the couch--and Nursey seems to be going through the flashcards with him.
“You?” Bitty’s saying, hopefully.
Nursey raises his eyebrows. “I’m not supposed to grade you on your accent, right?”
“Chirp, chirp, chirp, Mr. Nurse,” Bitty says tartly. “Fine--yeux.”
“C’est bien!” Nursey teases, and glances up at Dex, his eyes lighting up. Something flips in Dex’s stomach--he doesn’t know what to do when Nursey looks at him like that, all warm and soft, like he brings the sun whenever he walks into a room. “Sup, Dex? How’s Mildred?”
Dex blinks. “Mildred?”
Nursey shrugs. “Well, the oven has a name, so. Seemed only fair to give the dishwasher one.”
“You’re such a poet,” Dex snorts, but there’s no bite in it. There hasn’t been for almost a year now, and Nursey grins at him. Dex plops down on the couch--he’s been in the locker room; the couch doesn’t scare him. “What’re you guys doing?”
“Nursey’s helping me with my French flashcards!” Bitty says, beaming. “Did you know Nursey speaks French?”
Dex did not know, but he’s also not surprised. Around the third language, he stopped being surprised, and is now just kind of exasperatedly resigned to Nursey’s linguistic competence.
Maybe it was a trade-off, he thinks. Inability to walk ten feet without tripping over air, complete ability to pick up a language in like fifteen minutes. Not the call Dex would make, necessarily, but he can’t deny that it’s kind of attractive.
“No, I didn’t,” he says, realizing he’s been silent too long. “Uh--that’s cool, Nursey.”
Nursey opens his mouth, then shrugs a little, just one shoulder. He doesn’t look as happy about this as he had about telling Dex about any of the others, and he shuffles the flashcards in his hands. “Yeah, well, it’s--y’know.”
“I never asked,” Bitty says, propping his elbows on his knees and putting his chin in his hands. “How’d you learn?”
“My, uh. My dad’s mom.” Nursey clears his throat. “I’d actually rather not talk about it, if it’s okay?”
Bitty looks taken aback. “Oh--I’m sorry, Nursey. You don’t have to help me, if it’s--”
“No, it’s chill, dude, I just wanna skip the trip to the department of backstory, y’know?” Nursey grins, but it’s his Andover Smile, and Dex hides his frown behind his next sip of beer.
He’s not gonna call Nursey on it front of Bitty, but he can’t remember the last time he saw Nursey paste on the Andover Smile in front of the team. He’d thought they were better than that.
Nursey takes Bitty through another five or six minutes of flashcards, and holy shit, Bitty is awful at French. Nursey’s accent is like--whatever a good French accent is supposed to sound like, wine or fine chocolate or whatever. Bitty’s is...not. He’s trying, though, and he’s got the same determined look on his face as he does when he’s watching Ransom or Holster during strategy at practice, so Dex doesn’t chirp him.
Still, it’s a fucking relief when Bitty’s phone trills at him, and he jumps to his feet. “Oh, that’s the pie alarm! I’ll be back in a few, y’all,” he says, and heads off to the kitchen.
“Holy shit,” Dex says, when he’s pretty sure Bitty’s out of earshot. “Is he, like…”
“Really really awful, yeah,” Nursey says, with a bit of a wince. “But it’s like, French 1A? So, y’know. He’s trying.” He hoists himself off the floor and sits down on the couch next to Dex, flipping through the flashcards idly.
Dex nudges him. “Hey,” he says. Nursey glances at him, one brow raised. “I know we’re not, like, entitled or anything? But, uh, back there, that was…”
Nursey makes a face. “Not chill?”
Dex shrugs. “I don’t know if Bitty noticed.”
“You noticed,” Nursey points out.
“Yeah, well,” Dex admits. “I watch you pretty closely.”
He flushes as soon as he says it, but Nursey doesn’t seem to notice--or if he does, he lets him get away with it, looking down at the flashcards instead. “My grandmother--my dad’s mom--she grew up in Pétionville, in Haiti. It’s, um, a suburb of a Port-au-Prince, but like…” He snorts. “It’s like, LA, but with barbed wire? She grew up speaking French, unlike, y’know, ninety percent of the rest of the country. And like, all the shit you thought about rich people when we started here last year, that made you hate me? She pretty much embodied it.” He rubs a hand over his face.
“You don’t talk about your dad’s side of the family a lot,” Dex says, carefully.
Nursey shakes his head. “We’re not close,” he says, in a way that makes Dex thinks there’s a lot more buried there than not close, because Nursey’s face lights up when his mom or his step-mom calls but shuts down whenever his dad’s name shows up on his caller ID, and he goes moody and quiet for hours after he talks to his dad, and that’s if he answers at all.
Dex can’t really relate--he’s close with both his parents, even if he knows they don’t understand him as much now that he’s started pushing back more and more politically, but they’re trying and he’s trying, and he knows he’ll always love them for how much they’ve always, no matter what, always fucking tried.
“You tell me a lot of stuff about your family,” he says instead, because he’s not sure what else he can say that won’t sound trite. “And I just...I’m glad that you do. That you feel like you can trust me with stuff that you don’t tell other people.” He swallows. “I...It means a lot to me, Nursey.”
Nursey’s quiet for a moment, and then he says, slowly, “Dex, I--”
“Boys,” Bitty announces, coming back into the room and bringing the smell of powdered sugar and strawberry pie filling with him, the way he always does when he’s just pulled a pie from the oven. “I’m not saying that’s the prettiest pie I’ve ever baked, but that is probably the prettiest pie I’ve ever baked, my gosh. I almost don’t want to let you eat it. I mean, I’m gonna let you eat it, obviously, I’m not a monster, but--” He pauses, glancing back and forth between them. “I’m sorry, did I interrupt something?”
“No,” Dex says quickly. He takes a sip of his beer, leaning away from Nursey--he hadn’t realized he’d leaned so far into his space in the first place. “No, we were just, uh--I was looking at your flashcards.”
“Well, the pie needs a few more minutes to cool anyway,” Bitty says glumly, sitting back on the floor. “Hit me with the next round, Nursey, I’m ready. Can we switch and do French to English? I’m a little better that way.”
“Sure.” Nursey shuffles the cards, and pulls one out. He snorts out a laugh. “Here, you should like this one,” he says. “Amoureux fou?”
Bitty frowns. “Amour...Oh, hell, that’s one of the romance ones, our stupid professor slipped them in because she thought they’d be fun, I don’t…” He makes a face. “What is it?”
Nursey smiles, but when he reads the translation, he’s looking at Dex, not at Bitty. “Head over heels.”
Dex.
“The day we met, he looked at me and I saw the same thing I’ve seen in a hundred other boys faces before, and I thought: this is not the one for me.”
Dex sits in the back of Annie’s, silent and staring. When he’d come in earlier and seen the lights dimmed for poetry night he’d thought it was just some aesthetic, but he’s glad for the darkness, for the anonymity, because now no one here can see the way he’s watching Nursey at the mic. Nursey is a different being here, at once vulnerable and intense, the single spotlight casting shadows on his cheekbones, his curls falling over his forehead in a way that makes Dex want to run his fingers through them.
He holds his breath, and he watches.
“The day we met, he looked at me and I saw the faces of the boys who would never kiss me in daylight. I saw the boys whose hands I held in movie theaters, whose lips kissed my neck in dark hallways and dorm rooms after dark, who played symphonies into my skin until I learned how to sing. The day we met he looked at me and I saw the boys who left not before I woke but before I fell asleep, whose eyes never met mine in sunlight but whose hands always found my ass when the lights went out again.
“The day we met, he looked at me and I saw a hundred heartbreaks looking back at me, and maybe it was wrong, but fuck it--I hit first.
“The day we met we learned how to fight and we kept on fighting, and I learned to read anger in the galaxies in your skin but never taught myself to unlearn how to find them fucking beautiful. The day we met you learned how to spit fire at me--or maybe you never had to learn, but I never stopped tasting blood in my mouth and wondering if that was what it would taste like to kiss you. If it would taste like whiskey or frat-party liquor or blood or anger or a year’s worth of heat or just nothing at all, just lips and teeth and tongues, and maybe I’ll finally get to know if your hair is as soft as it looks.
“The day we met we learned how to fight, and then somewhere along the line we just--”
Nursey stops, lets out a short, uncertain laugh. “We learned how to stop.
“The day we met he looked at me and I thought: this is not the one for me. But fuck if I’m not a romantic, if I don’t see the dancer’s grace in the way you move, if I don’t watch the way you use your hands and know the fucking melodies you could finger out of me. But fuck if I haven’t noticed that you don’t bite me with your words anymore, that those eyes of yours are soft for me now, when you don’t think I’m looking--and even when you know that I am.
The day we met he looked at me and I thought: this is not the boy for me. But God, God--”
A soft breath, and Dex finds himself holding his own.
Nursey smiles, a small, faint, fragile thing. “What if he was?”
A hushed murmur goes through the room like a sigh, and Nursey steps back from the mic. The cafe erupts in snapping fingers, and Nursey slips away, into the darkness of the room. Dex loses track of him for a moment, as the next poet takes the stage, and then he sees the door to the cafe open and close, Nursey shrugging his jacket on as he steps out into the night.
And Dex, wild and sudden, thinks--Wait.
He scrambles to his feet, fumbling his phone out of his pocket just in case, and runs for the door.
“Nursey,” he calls, as soon as the door closes behind him, pulling his own coat on as he hurries to catch up. “Nursey--bro, wait up.”
Nursey stops dead and then turns, slowly. The look on his face is one of alarm and, Dex thinks, his stomach twisting, fear. “Dex,” he says. “I...Shit, dude, I…” He takes a step backward, like he’s going to bolt, and then stops, plants his feet like he’s bracing for a fight, and that’s almost worse. “What were you doing at poetry night?”
“I…” Dex hesitates, not really sure if there’s a right answer to that question. The truth sounds shitty, but it’s probably the best option. “You never share any of what you write,” he admits, feeling suddenly ashamed. “And I...was curious.”
Nursey snorts a laugh. “Bet you regret that now, huh?”
He says it bitterly, not meeting Dex’s eyes, and Dex just--can’t. “Nursey,” he says. “Nursey, no, I don’t. It’s--God, do you know what it’s like? Being around you?”
Nursey parts his lips, his brow furrowing. “I--no?”
“Nursey.” Dex steps forward, definitely in Nursey’s space, and takes his arms. Nursey startles, but doesn’t pull away. “Nursey, you’re--You’re beautiful.”
He’s never said it out loud before, even though he’s thought it a million times. Because it’s impossible not to, even the most racist person in the world couldn’t look at Derek Nurse and not see how beautiful he is, but saying it makes it real somehow, that Dex thinks it and feels it, and his cheeks flame hot but he keeps talking, stumbling over his words in a way that he’s never seen Nursey do, never, not once.
“You’re beautiful, and you’re just--you’re so warm, and I always want to be around you--I wanted to, even when I couldn’t fucking stand you. And you’re smart as fuck, and you’re so fucking good at hockey--”
And okay, maybe he should be embarrassed that that’s on his list of things about Nursey that tongue-tie him, but whatever. Sue him, he likes sports, but he also likes dudes, Nursey ticks multiple boxes. “--And you always listen to everyone when they need you to, and fuck, Nursey, your fucking thing with languages, I--”
Nursey frowns. “What about my thing with languages?”
Dex falters, losing momentum, and then barks out a laugh. “Are you kidding me? The thing where you fucking speak, like, all of them, apparently, and it’s hot as fuck, but also, like, fucking intimidating, because Jesus, is there anything you don’t understand, I mean--”
“You,” Nursey says quietly.
Dex breaks off again, but this time, he stares. “What--what?”
“You, Dex,” Nursey repeats, looking at Dex like he’s a fucking idiot, but also like he wants to kiss him, and Dex realizes with a weird lurching sensation in the bottom of his stomach that holy shit, holy shit, Nursey looks at him like this all the time. “I’ve never, ever been able to understand you. I never know if what I’m gonna say is gonna piss you off, or if I’m gonna cross some no-homo line and fuck up our friendship because you can’t tell if I’m chirping you or flirting with you, because I can’t even tell half the time, or…”
Nursey stops, shaking his head, and huffs, “Feel free to put me out of my misery any time here, Dex.”
Dex looks at him. Under the glow of the streetlight, Nursey’s brown skin looks golden, his green eyes soft and vulnerable. His lips are trembling, and he’s not looking at Dex, and that’s just…He can’t deal with that anymore.
“Derek,” he says quietly, and reaches out.
Nursey’s lips part in surprise at the name, but he doesn’t move away, and in his boldest move since he’d climbed into Nursey’s bed last year, Dex kisses him.
When he’d finally allowed himself to start thinking about the possibility of kissing Nursey--not just kissing a boy, but kissing Nursey--he’d always pictured it hard and fast and messy, something brutal or biting. On the ice, maybe, or in the locker room, or in a hotel room after a roadie.
Not like this. Not soft and sweet and chaste and gentle, his thumbs brushing over the smooth skin of Nursey’s cheekbones, snow settling gently on their shoulders and in their hair.
He doesn’t know how long it takes him to pull away, only that Nursey’s eyes are still closed when he does. Dex laughs quietly, and Nursey flutters his eyes open, and looks at him.
Dex takes a deep breath, but when he speaks, his voice still comes out in a whisper. “Did you understand that?”
“Yeah,” Nursey says. “Makes perfect sense.” He smiles, eyes dancing, and reaches to wrap his arms around Dex’s waist, to pull him close again. “Say it again.”