Chapter Text
It’s June, so early in the summer that Dex has to wear two flannels on his walk to the docks in the morning. He lifts his hands to his mouth, cups them, and tries to warm them with his breath. There is no sun yet. Shrugging his shoulders up against the cold, Dex tucks his hands under his armpits. He should have just worn gloves, but it’s June and he’s stubborn. Besides, it is a short walk to the docks and to his Uncle Donal’s boat.
Dex has been working on the boat since he was sixteen and still thought his mom would kick him out the day he turned eighteen. It was good money and Dex at sixteen would have done nearly anything for good money. Now, at barely twenty, Dex will still do almost anything for good money but he at least isn’t stashing it in a shoebox under his bed anymore.
From above him, a blackbird lets out a caw from its perch on one of the big pine trees that line the road. Dex looks for it, straining his eyes in the pre-dawn grayness, but gives up after a few minutes. The pine trees are too thick and the sky too dark to see anything. Sometimes, Dex wonders why he tries.
It’s only been a few short weeks since the end of the semester. Dex can still feel his anger, and the swiftly ensuing shame, about the coin flip. He knows he overreacted. Dex has lived in a lot of shitty situations. Sharing a bunk bed with Derek Nurse? Wouldn’t even make the top ten.
He doesn’t know why he reacted the way he did, just that he’d been so upset and frustrated and he’d gotten used to his own space in the last four years. It is a halfass excuse at best, but it is better than the mumbled apology he’d given Nurse.
Dex groans. In two short months, he’ll have to deal with that. For now, he just has to worry about catching lobsters and making sure his sister eats something other than Cinnamon Toast Crunch when he gets off the boat.
The rest of his walk to the docks is quiet. It’s too early in the summer for the tourists to start arriving in the Harbor, but they’ll be there soon. Dex both hates and loves the tourists. They pack the ice cream shop and the small grocery store downtown, but they also allow his mom to pick up extra shifts at work. It’s the only time the family ever has expendable income. Dex brings in money from the boats, his little sister makes a killing babysitting tourist babies, and their mom works the night shift at Edna’s Bed and Breakfast six days a week. For a few weeks every summer, the Poindexters are flush with money. They go out to eat and Dex takes his sister to get ice cream and it is good. Summers have always been good to Dex.
His phone buzzes in his back pocket thirty feet from the dock. Dex considers ignoring it, but his sister, Miley, is only twelve and their mom won’t be home from work for another three hours.
With numb fingers, he fumbles for his phone and nearly drops it.
It’s not Miley calling, but Nursey.
---
After the whole dibs flip and before graduation, Ransom stops Dex in the kitchen.
“You’ve got to, like, not kill Nursey,” Ransom says, giving Dex a Look that clearly expresses disappointment and maybe a little resignation.
Dex doesn’t say anything, just lets the shame bury him deeper. It’s been five days since he’s said more than two words to Nursey, since the dips flip and his own terrible attempt at an apology. He’s never been very good at saying sorry and, when it comes to Nurse, he’s never been good at saying much of anything at all.
Dex opens his mouth to say something in defense, but Ransom cuts him off.
“I know, I know,” he says, waving a hand. “You guys are chill now, Holster already heard that from Nursey. But like, you’ve got to watch out for him. That’s what D-men do. You need to promise to watch out for him.”
And, while Dex would argue that he and Nursey are friends, he wouldn’t necessarily say that he goes out of his way to look out for Nursey. Maybe it has something to do with how they started off as freshmen--at each other’s throats, snipping and misinterpreting, and never really apologizing for what they said at the beginning--but they tended to give each other a wide breadth. Sure, they would study at the same desk in Founders and get coffee at Annie’s, but neither of them ever pushed when one was upset or asked questions that might go down a rabbit hole. They were friends and teammates and, apparently starting in August, they would be roommates. But Dex didn’t go out of his make sure Nursey was doing okay, not like Ransom seems to want.
Dex takes a deep breath and says, “Okay. I’ll look out for Nursey.”
And, after that, Dex doesn’t really think too much about his promise to Ransom. During the first week or so of summer break, Dex watches Nursey’s snapchat stories and likes his posts on instagram. They have a group message with Chowder where they chip each other, but it’s been quiet for the last couple of days. Dex figures it’s because Chowder is busy with his summer job back at Samwell and Dex is busy on the boat and Nursey is busy doing whatever the fuck he does in the summer.
The thing is, Dex doesn’t really know how he’s supposed to look out for Nursey.
But he kind of wants to learn.
---
Dex stops walking, right in the middle of the road, and just stares at his phone.
He spent much of May trying to figure out how to have Nursey’s back, but the idea of actually doing something is paralyzing.
Dex is bad at feelings. That isn’t a secret. The first time Miley came to him, crying about what some girl had called her in the bathroom, Dex had panicked and taken her to the arcade. They played twenty dollars worth of Mortal Kombat and never talked about what had happened.
He stares at his phone a moment longer, takes a deep breath, and answers it.
Ransom would answer the phone for Holster. Dex would answer the phone for Chowder or Bitty, if they called. This is what bros do. They have each other’s backs.
“Hey, Nurse,” he chirps, “you buttdail me or something?”
There is a moment of silence, one in which Dex really does think he got buttdialed and considers hanging up, before a voice that definitely doesn’t belong to Derek Nurse says, “Poindexter?”
Dex clears his throat and says, “Yeah?”
“Right, sorry,” says the voice. “It’s Farrah, Derek’s sister?”
Dex hums. He’s met Farrah once, family weekend during sophomore year. She’s a dancer or something, if Dex remembers right, and two years older than Nursey. She had seemed nice enough, the one time he’s met her, but that still doesn’t explain why she’s calling him from Nursey’s phone.
Dex clears his throat, “Hi, Farrah.”
There is an awkward silence. Dex doesn’t know what Farrah wants with him. His mind spirals, as it often does, with a number of seemingly plausible theories: she’s going to yell at him about the dibs flip thing or maybe that Nursey doesn’t want to play on the same line as him anymore.
“Right, Poindexter, this might be weird but could you, like, text Derek?”
Dex blinks. This is not what he expected.
When he doesn’t answer, Farrah continues, “I have this bootcamp in Texas for the next, like, ten days and our parents are out of town and Derek’s been kind of weird since he came home for the summer. I’m worried, but I’m not like worried worried, you know? So I thought I’d ask one of his friends to just check up on him and let me know if he’s okay? And Chris is in a different timezone, so I thought you’d be a better choice?”
Farrah says all of this very fast and Dex is still holding his phone, stopped in the middle of the road, watching his uncle’s boat bob up and down in the harbor. He gets stuck on Derek’s been kind of weird . If it had been a hockey bro saying it, he’s have said something about how Nursey is always weird. But Farrah’s worried (but not worried worried, whatever the hell that meant) and Dex’s promise to Ransom still rings in his ears.
You gotta have his back .
“Yeah, I’ll text him,” Dex says. He doesn’t know what he’ll text Nursey, but he’ll do it. Hell, he probably should have been doing it already but the idea of people wanting to talk to him is still a relatively new concept.
Farrah says, “Great! I’ll text you my number so you can let me know if he gets weirder. And now it’s six and I have to get to fucking LaGuardia in the next hour, so thanks Poindexter for making sure my stupid brother at least talks to someone while I’m gone.”
She hangs up and, a few seconds later he’s adding her to his contacts under Superior Nurse and wonder what Nursey has done in the past to make his sister worry worry.
---
His uncle kicks him off at the docks at noon, before the sun gets too hot, and yells after him, “You tell your mom that we’re having problems with the AC at the shop again, so we need her to come take a look at it when she’s up.”
Dex waves in understanding and starts his walk back home.
Winter Harbor is awake now, full of boats going in and out of the harbor and people mowing their lawns. On his walk, he passes the ice cream shop and old Mrs. Liu touching up the mint green paint on some of the outside tables. He smiles at her and she nods back before returning to her work.
When Dex had first been brought to Winter Harbor, fifteen and angry, he’d hated how everyone knew everyone. It was the smallest town he’d ever lived in, but he’d done it for Miles. And, as it turned it, it was probably one of the best decisions he’d ever made. So, yeah, Dex doesn’t hate how everyone knows everyone in Winter Harbor anymore. He finds it kind of nice, now.
When he rounds the corner, he can see Miley sitting on the porch swing with the family laptop open on her lap. He can see her chewing on one of her braids, a frown on her face.
“Hey, nerdface,” he calls down the street. “You want to get lunch?”
Miley looks up from the computer, a wide grin on her face.
When Dex reaches the front steps, she’s already closed the laptop, ran it back into the house, and stolen a pair of their mother’s flip flops.
“I wanna go to that biscuit place,” Miley says, letting the screen door slam. She takes the three steps in a single jump, stumbling on to the lawn.
“I meant to do that,” she says, righting herself.
Dex rolls his eyes. Miley goes a thousand miles a minute, leaps before she looks, and has broken her arm twice since Dex has known her. It doesn’t help that she’s in that coltish phase of preteendom where your arms and legs are too long and about the size of number two pencils.
He wraps an arm over her shoulder and pulls her into a hug.
“You smell like fish, Liam,” she protests, halfheartedly. Miley is twelve, but she still thinks the world of Dex, something that Dex has never understood but cherishes.
“Yup,” he says, resting his chin on top of her head.
Miley sighs, “I’m gonna smell like fish now.”
“That was the plan.”
She pushes him away lightly, mumbling, “You’re the worst.”
“I’m your favorite brother.”
“You’re my only brother.”
Miley huffs again, crossing her arms over the Samwell Men’s Hockey sweater he’d given her for Christmas after she’d outgrown her old one. She stands just a little below his shoulder now, a far cry from the little pipsqueak he’d left last summer, and seems to constantly forget her sudden height. Just last week, she’d broken the light fixture in her room by jumping on the bed. She still has a butterfly bandage across her forehead.
“Biscuit place?” she asks.
Dex nods. “Yes, we can go to the ‘biscuit place.’ It has a name, you know?”
“Yeah, but the No Wait Dinner is such a tourist name,” she quips, starting the walk down the drive. “And, besides, Mom really likes their biscuits and jam.”
“Bitty’s jam is better,” Dex mumbles, following her.
---
The next day, Dex texts Nursey after watching the Falconers win game three. It’s the first text he’s sent Nurse outside of group texts since before the dibs flip, as his phone unhelpfully reminds him when he goes to the text thread.
“I watched all of the third period from behind my hands,” he types out, deletes, and then types again.
It’s mostly true and a little embarrassing. Miles narrated parts of it for him as they ate leftover not-as-good-as-Bitty’s pie from the dinner sitting on the saggy couch in the living room. He hopes it’s the right thing to say to goad a response out of Nursey.
After five minutes, Dex slides off the couch to sit with his knees pressed to his chest on the floor. He absentmindedly bites the edge of his thumb while Miley cackles into her pre-algebra homework.
“Shut your stupid face, Miles,” grumbles Dex, unlocking his phone to stare at the little text under his message that still hasn’t changed from ‘delivered’ to ‘read.’
Miley says, “I didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah, but you think loud.”
She throws her pencil at him, misses, and grabs a throw pillow from the couch. She flings it at him and hits his head.
“So do you, buttface,” she says. “Stop staring at your phone like a lovesick booger and let me do my homework in peace.”
Dex flushes. He can feel his ears burning, so he picks up the pillow from where it landed on the rug next to him and buries his face in it. He’s worried, not anything else that Miley might think in her stupid preteen brain. Farrah had been worried, and if Nurse’s own sister is worried, than Dex should be too.
In the last five days, Nursey hasn’t texted any of the SMH text groups (Dex had checked) or made any instagram posts (Dex had checked all three of them, including the one dedicated solely to his cat) or posted on his secret poetry tumblr (which Dex isn’t supposed to know about but does because Nursey broke his laptop, borrowed Dex’s, and left it logged in once when they were freshmen).
“It’s just stupid Nursey,” he says in defense, face still buried in the pillow.
Miley says, “I stand by what I said. Let me live vicariously through you, Liam. I’m homeschooled. My only friends are you, Mom, and Penny from Oklahoma who’s in my virtual history class. I live for the drama.”
“I regret telling you about the dibs flip.”
“No, you don’t,” she says smugly. “I’m your voice of reason. Also, like, I know everything about you so I can tell you that, yeah, you’re the worst at room sharing, but that’s no reason to be a dick about it to your best friend.”
Dex tries not to react to his baby sister calling him a dick. It’s hard, but he’s trying to let her grow up a bit. This year has been hard on both the Poindexter kids. SMH had a bad season, Bitty’d been a hot mess for half the year, and the Haus dryer could only dry one sock when they’d left for the summer. Miley had a worse go of it, but she seems to be taking the whole thing in stride.
“I know,” Dex says instead. “I’m trying.”
“I know that, but does Nursey?”
If Dex is honest with himself, he knows the answer to that.
When it comes to Derek Nurse, their whole relationship can be summed up in, ‘open mouth, insert foot.’ Dex can’t think of a single time he’s ever managed to tell Nursey what he means without making an ass out of himself.
When he’d found out that Nursey’s birthday was Valentine’s Day, he’d said he’d gotten his best friend nothing. He’d meant he hadn’t known, but he’d said, nothing yeah nothing because he’s an idiot who doesn’t know how words work. Or, more accurately, he doesn’t know how to get words from his brain to his mouth in a way other people understand.
So, yeah, Dex is trying to be a good friend to Nurse.
Does Nurse know?
No.
Is Dex going to tell him?
Also no.
His phone vibrates.
“Finally,” says Miley. “Read it, read it!”
He tosses the pillow back at her. It hits her in the face with a satisfying thump .
“how’d you know falcs won then?” is what Nursey’s text reads.
Dex breathes a sigh of relief. He doesn’t know what he was worried about, just that it disappeared the second he saw Nursey’s text.
He quickly types back, “Miley gave me the play by play.”
“the nicer poindexter,” Nursey types back almost immediately.
Dex laughs, “Nursey says you’re the nicer Poindexter.”
“Duh! You threw a pillow at my face!” Miley exclaimes.
“You threw it at me first.”
Miley says, “At the back of your head, not your face!”
“Sorry I couldn’t figure out another way wipe that know-it-all look of your face!” Dex retorts, turning back to his phone.
“She only did it to get out of math homework,” he sends back.
A moment letter Nursey texts back, “she’s smart too. fuuuuuuuck math.”
Dex doesn’t bother to reply to that one. Instead, he leans back against the couch and takes a deep breath. Nursey is fine. There’s no reason to be worried, but Dex can’t quite shake the feeling of unease in his stomach.
---
On Tuesday, Mom wakes up for her shift early enough to make them all dinner.
She makes her way down the stairs at 2:13 in the afternoon, hair still up in its scarf.n, almost four hours before she’s due at Edna’s.
Dex is sitting at the kitchen table, tapping his fingers on the oak wood. He’d texted Nursey after he’d gotten off his uncle’s boat, over two hours ago, and he still hasn’t heard back. He’s opened up Farrah’s contact information three times in the last twenty minutes.
“Nickel for your thoughts?” she asks, making her way to the coffee pot. In the summer, Dex always puts on a pot after he gets back from the docks.
“Isn’t it supposed to be a penny?”
Mom pauses, her back to him and her head in the refrigerator looking for the half-and-half, and says, “Liam, you know your thoughts are worth more than a penny. What’s got you all worked up?”
Mom has always known when Dex is lost in thought. That first day in Winter Harbor, when he’d stood in this same kitchen with a much younger Miles trying to drag him upstairs to show him his new room, she’d known he was stuck in his own brain. She’d told Miley to go upstairs and grab some board game or something, giving Dex a moment to breath without the stifling excitement of a seven year old.
There are about six different things he wants to tell her, but when he opens his mouth all that comes out is, “Have you ever been worried worried about me or Miley?”
Because, really, that’s what has been weighing on him. He’s been thinking it over for days, wondering what Farrah had meant, and probably making it worse in his head. Dex does that a lot, overthink and make situations worse by living too much in his head.
Mom hums thoughtfully, pauses, and says, “I worry about you two all the time; that’s kind of how caring about people works, kiddo.”
Dex finds that less than helpful but, in his mom’s defence, he hadn’t really asked the question right. He knows what it’s like to really worry about someone. When he’d been separated from Miles after their first placement together, he’d worried about her constantly. He worried about where she’d end up and if they’d treat her good. He worried about who’d fix her hair and make sure she practiced her letters every night. He’d only really been worried worried about her once, when their foster father had found Dex painting her nails and screamed and screamed at them until Miley was crying and Dex was shaking.
Mom walks towards the table, two cups of coffee in her hands. One smells like the hazelnut creamer she likes and the other, Dex knows, is full of enough sugar to give you a cavity.
“What’s eating at you?” she asks, sitting next to him and sliding the extra mug across the table. “And don’t you dare say nothing, I know you better than that.”
Dex smiles as he takes a drink of his coffee. Nothing and fine were his two favorite words, she’d joked once. When something is bothering Dex, he bottles it up until he wants to hit something or yell. He usually only does the latter and usually only while he’s driving, windows rolled up, so no one can hear him.
“Nursey’s sister asked me to check in on him while she’s away for the next few weeks,” he says, tracing patterns in the grain of the oak table.
Him mom hums and waits for him to continue. She has her elbow resting on the table, chin in her hand.
When he says nothing, she prompts, “And?”
“She said she’s worried worried about him,” he says.
Then there was the tone of Farrah’s voice, slightly on edge and full of some kind of meaning Dex hasn’t thought about since he was like seven years old and people used to ask after his birth mom in the same way. But he didn’t say that to his mom.
His mom reaches across the table to take his hand, stilling it from its incessant pattern tracing. She gives it a squeeze before letting go.
“You’re a good boy,” his mother says. “How is he?”
Dex snorts, “I have no idea. He’s Nursey. He only replied to my texts yesterday to make fun of me and he hasn’t said anything today.”
“You text him?”
Dex nods and says, “Yeah, a picture of some lobsters. I thought he’d jump on the chance to make fun of me, but he hasn’t.”
Mom nods. She takes her hand back and a sip of coffee, her warm brown eyes on Dex, and purses her lips. Dex recognizes it as her thinking face.
“Text him a question,” she suggests.
Dex asks, “Why?”
“Because when you were giving me the whole silent treatment in the beginning, the only way I could get you to say anything is if I asked you a direct question. ‘Liam, have you seen Miley anywhere?,’ ‘Liam, can you help me carry in these groceries?’. It always worked with you, when you were in a funk.”
Dex raises his eyebrows. A ‘funk’ was one way to describe Dex’s behavior when he’d arrived in Winter Harbor. More or less catatonic was another. So was a hot mess.
She gets to her feet, resting a gentle hand on his shoulder before she heads over to the sink with her empty coffee cup.
Dex pulls his phone out of his pocket and types, Meme suggestions for when the falcs win the Cup?
He puts it down on the table and waits.
Less than an hour and no reply from Nurse, Miley thumps down the stairs.
“Best day ever!” squeals Miley, wrapping her thin arms around Mom’s waist. She leans over to catch a whiff of the pot of chicken and dumpling soup on the stove, her braids dangling dangerously close to stove.
“Shoo,” says Mom, playfully shoving Miley aside. “It only needs another few minutes. Go sit at the table with your brother.”
Dex waves half heartedly from his spot at their small, round dinner table. His phone is sitting on the table, facedown.
“Boy problems?” coos Miley, sliding into the seat to Dex’s left.
Their mom turns around at that and says, “Miley, you leave him be. He’s worried about a friend.”
“All of his friends are boys,” Miley points out, “so technically boy problems.”
“Not all,” he mutters, eyeing his phone suspiciously. “What about Lardo?”
Miley asks, “Are you worried about Lardo?”
“No.”
“So, it’s a boy problem!”
Dex lets his forehead hit the table and mutters, “Sure, whatever you say, Miles.”
Miley lays her head next to his, her hand resting on his back sympathetically.
---
When Dex had met Miley, he hadn’t been Dex and she hadn’t been Miley. He’d still called her Miles, though, he’d always called her that. She’d been three and he’d been eleven, living with a foster family and about three other revolving door foster kids. Miley was a fussy toddler who was prone to throwing tantrums and Dex an angry preteen with a penchant for solving problems with his fists. They both got into trouble with their foster parents a lot.
It was Dex’s first placement. It wasn’t Miley’s.
“I’m a girl, you know,” Miley said one day, age four, as Dex brushed her hair.
Dex just said, “Okay,” and bought her a tiara with the change he found between the couch cushions the next day.
The tiara, as it turned out, was the start of problems.
Later, sometime after Miley had turned five and before Dex had turned thirteen, their foster dad had snatched it out of Miley’s hand and snapped it in half.
It wasn’t long after that that they’d sent Miley along, claiming she was too much to handle.
It wasn’t long after that that Dex had smashed the windows to his foster dad’s car with his hockey stick and been carted off to a group home.
It was much, much too long after that (almost three years) until Leona Poindexter brought them together again.
---
Nursey does eventually text back his meme suggestions, complete with images. One is a picture of Jack on the bus to an away game from last year with a clipboard and text that reads ‘Netflix and game plan.’
Dex sends back an image of a Canadian goose next to a scowling image of Jack.
“Spot the difference ,” he texts.
Nursey does not text back again that night, but Dex feels better.
The next few days pass in a similar fashion. Dex texts Nursey after he gets off work and usually, sometime after his mom leaves for work but before he shooes Miley off to bed, Nursey replies two or three times.
If Nurse finds anything odd about Dex’s sudden desire to communicate, he doesn’t say anything. And, if he did, Dex isn’t sure what he would say. He feels a familiar hot spark of shame when he thinks about Farrah’s phone call and his promise to Ransom. If Dex really were a good bro, he wouldn’t have needed the pressure of Nurse’s sister to keep in touch. If Dex was a good bro, he’d have already been doing it. But Dex isn’t a good bro, at least not to Nursey.
Dex hadn’t really had friends before Samwell. When you’d bounced around different places, it was hard to make friends. He’d had friends when he’d been younger before--well, just before--but they’d figured him out before his dad had and that put an end to his elementary school friendships. When he’d moved to Winter Harbor, he’d been friendly with a few of the guys on his hockey team, but he’d been too worried about his mom kicking him out to let anyone get close to him.
Now, Dex isn’t afraid to admit (at least to himself) that he sucks at the whole friend thing. He always says the wrong thing and he hates to apologize. One of the therapists he’d seen while in foster care had said he didn’t like apologizing thanks to some of the shit his dad had done. Dex thinks that’s bull, but he’d nodded along while she’d told him how bad things didn’t decided his future and past abuse didn’t excuse his actions, just explain them.
He gets stuck in thought about it on Thursday and decides to text Chowder.
“ Am I a shitty friend? ” he asks, sitting on the porch swing with an orange Otter Pop.
Miley is in the front yard, trying to get Dex’s old skateboard to roll down their gravel driveway. Mom is at work.
Chowder calls him less than a minute after he texts.
“What did Nursey say to you?” asks Chowder over the phone.
“Nothing,” begins Dex, but he quickly changes it to, “wait, what did he say to you?”
Chowder snorts, “Not much. He just asked if I told you to text him. I told him I didn’t.”
“So he’s not talking to you either?” ask Dex, trying to bury the guilt that, while it hadn’t been Chowder that asked him to talk to Nurse, but it had been someone.
“Not really? He sent me some Jack memes and like, a picture of his cat sometime last week,” Chowder says and then adds, “I’m worried. He texted me every ten seconds last summer.”
Dex fights the urge to say, me too .
He sighs, drinking the orange juice of the melted Otter Pop from the wrapper. Nursey hadn’t texted every ten seconds last summer, but he had texted at least once a day. And he’d updated his instagram just as often. This summer, the last update from Nursey’s instagram is a picture of SMH after graduation. That was almost two weeks ago, now.
“Yeah,” says Dex, trying to remember some of those breathing exercises he’d been taught when his biological mom died. He’d thought they were dumb as a kid, and he kind of thought they were dumb now, but they helped slow down his hummingbird heart.
“You’re not a shitty friend, Dex,” Chowder tells him in a firm voice. “You are sometimes a dick and you’re bad at apologizing.”
“Gee, thanks, Chowder.”
“You didn’t let me finish!” whines Chowder. “You say shitty things to people all the time, but you make it up to most of us. When you’re an asshole to Bitty, you do the dishes. When you upset me, you help me with my stats homework even though you hate statistics. With Lardo or Ransom or Holster, you fix things up around the Haus. What do you do with Nursey when you’re a dick to him?”
Dex takes a moment to breathe. When Chowder had said he was a dick, it had hurt. But, as it turns out, he might be right. Dex goes out of his way not to use his words to apologize. Just the idea of saying sorry is enough to make his hands start balling up into fists. He tries to say sorry with his actions, but he doesn’t do that with Nurse. He just pretends it never happens and then they get into another fight.
Dex mumbles, “I don’t do anything, I guess, but neither does he.”
“You’re not a shitty friend,” Chowder repeats, “but maybe next time you and Nursey get into a fight you can find a way to make it up to him.”
There is a small (okay, maybe not that small) part of Dex that wants to protest and whine. He wants to complain about being the bigger person, about taking the first step, but he bites his tongue. Miley’s words from the other night play in his head--does Nursey know he’s trying?
Dex tries to think about it from someone else’s perspective, someone who doesn’t go into zombie-screaming mode anytime another person so much as raises their voice or freeze like a deer in the headlights when someone touched him.
Trauma doesn’t excuse your actions, William , said a therapist to him at sixteen, still nursing a long set of stitches under his eye.
He takes three deep breaths--in through the nose for a count of three, hold for three, out for three--and remembers his promise to Ransom.
“Thanks, Chowder,” he says, crinkling the Otter Pop wrapper and stuffing it into his jean pockets.
“No problem, Dexy!” Chowder says. “I’ll keep trying to talk to him too, okay?”
Dex says, “Me too.”
He hangs up his phone.
He has to try harder. He has to show Nursey he has his back.
The next afternoon, he asks his uncle for the rest of the week off. When he gets home, he asks Mom to borrow the truck. Then, he texts Farrah for the Nurse’s home address.
When he throws a duffle bag into the passenger seat of his mom’s 1998 bright green Toyota Tacoma, Miley says what he’d been thinking all day, “This is stupid.”
And it is. It is stupid of him to drive to Nursey’s house in New York City when, one, he hasn’t been invited, two, he hasn’t told Nursey he’s coming, and, three, he’s not sure Nursey wants him there. But Random had asked Dex to have his D-Man’s back and Farrah had asked him to check in on her brother. Chowder had said he sucked at using his words, so what else is he supposed to do? He didn’t know how else he was supposed to look out for Nursey.
“Yeah,” Dex says, closing the driver’s side door, “it is.”
Miley nods and says, “Just making sure you’re aware of its stupidity.”
“Miley,” Mom warns, shaking her head. “Leave him be.”
Miley holds up her hands defensively and says, “If he wants to waste the gas money, fine, but he better at least take some pictures. It’s New York! In June!”
“It’s not a vacation, Miles,” he says with a shake of the head. “I’m just gonna make sure that Nurse is okay, maybe stay a few days if he lets me, and then head back.”
“That wasn’t a no,” Miley says knowingly, smirking.
Dex replies, “If I can.”
Miley punches a fist into her and squeals, “Yes!”
Mom hands him a plastic grocery bag through the open car window.
“I threw in some snacks and my car charger, which I want back when you’re home,” Mom says, reaching through the window on give Dex’s shoulder a squeeze. “Call me if you need anything. I mean it. I don’t care if I’m working, Edna can deal.”
Dex laughs, “Okay, Mom.”
“And text me when you get there, okay?” she continues, her hands knotting in front of her. “Tell Derek we say hi.”
“I will.”
And Dex backs down the gravel driveway and tries not to think too much about what he’s doing.
---
Dex likes driving. It’s a mindless activity, just busy enough that he can’t think too much about what’s waiting for him in New York, about what worried worried might look like on Nurse.
One of Dex’s last memories of his birth mom is driving. He doesn’t know where they were heading--he was seven, it might have been hockey practice--but he remembers she’d let him sit shotgun and they’d had the windows down, drinking in the weak April sunshine. She’d held his hand, before touching other people made him want to scream, and called him, “My sweet boy,” like she used to.
Dex has a lot of bad memories from before foster care and a lot of bad memories during it, but this one of his mother always comes to mind when he drives.
---
Farrah, in her foresight, had given Dex the code to the garage so he doesn’t have to park the truck on the street. Besides, Dex isn’t sure that a car like his is allowed on a street like this one where all the house cost more money than his whole town.
The problem is, after parking the truck, Dex isn’t sure what to do. It seems rude to enter through the garage, so he walks outside and up the front steps.
He rings the bell and waits.
Waiting is not one of Dex’s strong points. Left to wait, he often starts to worry and gets worked up imagining the worst case scenario. It’s one of the many reasons he’s “not chill,” according to Nurse. Dex knows it’s just the way it is for him, but he doesn’t do anything to try and fix it because that would mean changing things and Dex hates change more than he hates how worry gnaws at his belly.
Worried worried.
What if Nursey can’t answer the door?
Dex swallows the thought, mouth dry. He’s about to ring the bell a second time when the door swings open.
It’s Nursey who opens it, of course. He’s wearing what Bitty would call lounge clothes and Dex would call pajamas--some band tank top and black sweatpants--and a beanie, even though it’s in the eighties. He has a few days worth of stubble on his jaw and a very fluffy cat with a squashed-looking face under one arm.
Dex wants to cry in relief. And also maybe hit Nursey for not replying to his text messages. But the relief is winning out at the moment.
“What the actual fuck, Poindexter,” he says, and it’s not a question but more of an exasperated statement of disbelief.
Dex tries to smile, but the effort falls flat as he opens his mouth to say, “Hey, Nurse.”
He doesn’t move to let Dex in. Instead, he steps further into the doorway to block Dex’s view into the house. Another time, Dex would have let his anxiety turn into barbs and say something about inviting him in, but he’s trying to remember to try differently where Nurse is concerned. After all, he didn’t drive eight hours to piss Nursey off. This trip isn’t about him, it’s about Nursey.
“Why are you here?” Nursey asks tersely, but wearily. There is something just barely held together about him and it unsettles Dex. He’s never seen Nurse like this, tired and without something cutting to say.
He suppose Nursey has never seen Dex like this, worn thin with worry and watching his words.
He thinks they might not know each other at all.
“We were worried,” he says, but he’d almost said ‘ I was worried ,’ which is true but embarrassing. “Me and Chowder.”
Nursey’s eyes are still narrowed, but he takes a step back and lets Dex see into the house.
“Get off my stoop like a sad sack, Poindexter, and get in the house before Zams claws the shit out of me.”
The cat, Zams apparently, mews plaintively and tries to wriggle out of Nursey’s arm.
Dex does get off the stoop, muttering, “Thanks.”
Nursey closes the door behind him, letting the cat jump to the floor.
“Invasion of the body snatchers,” Nurse says under his breath as he starts down the white tiled hall. “You following or are you gonna stand in the doorway?”
Dex toes off his shoes, even though Nursey is wearing his, and follows. He tries not to stare at things as he does and tries not to think about all the space, tastefully empty. He definitely doesn’t think about the group homes where he’d shared a room with three other boys that was smaller than Nursey’s ‘doorway.’
Nursey stops in the kitchen, leans back against the counter, and says, “Worried? Poindexter, I’m touched.”
There’s something in Nurse’s words that border on sarcasm, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark. Dex can tell his heart isn’t really in it.
“You look like shit,” Dex says, ignoring the previous comment.
It’s true. Nursey looks like he hasn’t slept since the senior’s graduation, since Dex had caught the shuttle to the bus station and told Nurse to, “actually do something with your summer.” The memory brings a new, more urgent feeling of guilt to the surface, but Dex squashes it down. He’d meant it as a joke, but now it makes him feel almost sick.
“Thanks,” Nursey replies, pushing himself off the counter, “you really know how to make a guy feel like shit in his own home.”
He reaches down to pet the cat, who’d followed them into the kitchen, under the chin. The cat rubs its face on Nursey’s hand and Nursey smiles, just a little, and Dex feels a knot loosen behind his ribcage.
“That’s not what I meant,” Dex defends. “You just look tired. It’s nine at night and you’re still in pajamas.”
“Break’s for staying up too late and not getting dressed,” Nurse says in what Dex could best described as a voice of forced chill and normalcy.
Dex sighs. He doesn’t know what to say that won’t be interpreted as an insult, so he says nothing. Instead, he slides his back along the cabinets and sits crossed legged on the cool tile floor.
“What’s his name?” Dex asks, holding his hand out for the cat to smell.
The cat, mostly white with a little bit of gray on its ears and nose, sniffs Dex’s offered hand tentatively. Then, it pushes gently into his palm and closes it’s big, blue eyes.
Nursey joins him on the floor and says, “Her name’s Zamboni.”
“Zamboni?” Dex laughs, unable to help himself.
Nurse smiles and says, “Laugh it up, Poindexter. I named her when I was eight. You’re lucky her name’s not Fluffy or Snowball.”
“That’s…” Dex begins, but he trails off. He was going to say adorable , but the idea of saying that causes the tips of his ears to burn. Instead, he says, “That’s a pretty good name. Better than I would have done.”
“In my defence,” Nursey argues, some of the tightness leaving his shoulders, “she was Zamboni, like, twelve years before the Falcs started calling Jack Zimboni .”
The two sit in silence for a few minutes, Zamboni sprawled out on the tile between them. She’s purring, a low sound, and Dex is afraid if he says something he’s going to break the very fragile calm that had settled. But, Dex knows he has to say something.
Does Nursey know that? Miley had asked, spurring all this.
No.
Would you check up on him? Farrah had asked, spurring all this.
No, that’s not it either.
You gotta, like, have his back. Ransom had said, spurring all this.
Yes. That one.
“You were kind of freaking me out, bro,” Dex says. “Not replying to texts, not posting on instagram. And Chowder said you weren’t talking to him either.”
Dex holds his breath. This is the closest to honest Dex has ever been. He never tells anyone what’s on his mind, let alone Nursey. But, if he wants to make good on his promises, he doesn’t know what else to do.
“I’m fine,” Nursey says.
He sounds like had Dex, at age fifteen, answering his social worker on the drive to Winter Harbor with a pack of frozen peas held to the side of his swollen face. Nursey was no more fine than Dex had been after Hunter Pucowski and his stupid friends had lain into Dex after a game of shinny.
Dex knows better than to push at those fine’s.
“Alright then. Want to catch the Falcs game? I bet your TV is nicer than mine and you can tell me about your memes instead of texting me them.”
There is a beat, a moment where Dex fears that Nurse will say no and send him the eight hours home.
He doesn’t.
“Okay, you missed most of first period. Falcs are up 1-0.”
Dex lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
Nursey is okay. Well, maybe not okay, but he’s there and Dex finds himself feeling better than he has in days.
The Falcs win game five and Dex watches the game, perched at the edge of Nurse’s white leather couch, waiting. He’s not sure what he’s waiting for--questions, the other shoe to drop--but he spends more of the game worrying than watching.
“You need to fucking chill, Poindexter,” says Nursey after the game.
Dex makes a strangled noise, but says nothing.
“I mean it,” Nursey says. “If you keep looking at me like that I’m gonna hit something.”
And, because he’s an idiot, Dex asks, “Like what?”
“Like I’m Bitty stress making jam or Chowder sleeping on the green couch,” Nursey says. “We don’t do that shit, Dex.”
“We’re going to be roommates, so maybe we should.”
Nursey turns off the TV where some newscaster had been talking about the Falcons chances of winning the cup. He stands in front of Dex with his arms crossed, more confrontational then he’s been since they were freshmen and really hated each other.
Nursey says, “I don’t want your pity, William. Whatever you think is going on with me isn’t. I’m fine and, in the morning, you can drive yourself back to Poindexterville, Maine.”
“Winter Harbor,” mumbles Dex. “And for fuck’s sake, Nurse, I’ve never pitied you! Look at this place. It’s like a movie set or some shit.”
Dex knows it’s the wrong thing to say, but it’s what comes out of his mouth anyway.
Nursey snorts, “Sure, make this about your weird money issues. That’s always what it boils down to with us, isn’t it? You hate me because my family’s got money and you don’t.”
Dex takes a breath. Yeah, the money thing is still weird for him. When he’d arrived at Samwell, just barely eighteen and only a handful of good eating years on his bones and a lot of shitty experiences bubbling just beneath the surface of his skin, it had been hatred he’d felt. He’d been mad about the years he’d pocketed ketchup packets at school so he’d have something to eat for dinner and the fact that all of preseason he’d had to answer invasive questions about why he’d taken six years ‘off’ of hockey.
Dex doesn’t hate Nursey now, doesn’t think he ever really did, not once they got to know each other. He might have been using Nursey as a stand in for every asshole who’d called him a throwaway kid.
“I don’t hate you, stupid,” Dex says, which probably doesn’t help diffuse the situation because Nursey, somehow, looks even angrier.
“News to me.”
And maybe it is. Dex hadn’t really thought about it before. Maybe Nursey really does think Dex hates him.
Dex pushes himself up from the couch to cross the room and stand in front of Nursey. Nursey stands up straighter, his arms dropping to his sides.
“Look,” says Dex, “I don’t hate you and if you’re still pissed at me about the whole fucking dibs flip thing, well, I’m sorry. I fucking suck at sharing rooms and maybe I shouldn’t have said some of the shit I said.”
“Maybe?”
“I’m trying, okay Nurse? Maybe it doesn’t look that way to you, but I’m trying here,” Dex says, trying to tampen down the way he wants to just start shouting. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like we weren’t bros enough to room together or whatever. And I probably should have said more than just sorry afterwards.”
What Dex doesn’t say, because he doesn’t want to get started on his Lifetime Original Movie worthy sob story, is that the fact he even managed to say sorry at all was a big fucking milestone. His counselor at Samwell had literally whooped in excitement when she’d heard about it.
For a moment, Dex thinks Nursey is gonna say something like, “ Try harder ,” but he doesn’t. He just nods tursely.
“I’m fucking exhausted,” he says.
Dex agrees, “I drove eight fucking hours and, before that, had to listen to my sister tell me this was the stupidest idea I’d ever had.”
“It was stupid,” Nursey says. “You didn’t even ask, but I guess it’s chill. You’re here now. How long you staying?”
“Through the end of the series?” Dex says, trying to play off the visit. “If the Falcs actually win…”
Nursey shakes his head and says, in a serious tone of voice, “Don’t fucking jinx it, Poindexter.”
“It’d be nice to watch the game with a Wellie,” Dex finishes in a rush, because he really doesn’t want to jinx it.
“I’ll show you the guest room,” Nursey says. “And you should put your car in the garage, it doesn’t have a New York parking permit.”
Dex follows Nursey up the stairs and to a door on the right hand side.
Nursey says, “It was Farrah’s room before she moved out, so there’s still a lot of her shit in there. There’s nothing on the bed, though, so you’re welcome to it. Bathroom’s across the hall. I’m next to the bathroom. The garage code is 1993. Don’t let the cat out and for the love of god don’t wake me up before noon.”
With that, Nursey gives Dex a mock solute and enters his room across the hall.
Dex heads downstairs, out the front door, and pretends he's moving his car. All he really does is get his duffle bag and the half eaten bag of Chex Mix from the passenger seat. He doesn’t know why he didn’t tell Nursey that Farrah had given him the garage code, just that he doesn’t.
He reenters the house through the garage door and meets Zamboni in the kitchen.
“That went better than I thought it would, don’t you think?” he asks the cat.
She meows in return.
Dex isn’t sure if she agrees or not.
---
It’s past two in the afternoon when Nursey gets up the next day.
“Jesus, Poindexter, it’s creepy to just sit in a dark room,” Nursey says as he descends the stairs. “How long have you been there?”
Dex has been up since seven. It’s a minor miracle and a testament to how exhausted he is that he’d managed to sleep that late. If he’d been home, his alarm would have gone off at 5:00 AM sharp. He had briefly left the house at around 8:00 to get a shitty coffee and a package of Little Debbie donuts from the bodega a few streets over. He’d been too afraid to touch any of the food in the Nurse house. He had, however, fed the cat when he’d returned because the bowl on the kitchen floor was empty and she was meowing pitifully at him.
“It wasn’t as dark before,” he mutters, looking down at his phone. He’d been texting Miley, but her replies had been sporadic at best.
Nursey shakes his head and flops down on the couch next to Zamboni.
Dex tries to look at Nursey in such a way that Nursey doesn’t know he’s looking. Nursey’s hair is wet (Dex had heard water running about forty minutes ago) and, while he’s still in sweats at least they’re a different pair than yesterday.
Dex spends a few minutes trying to think of something to say, but he finds words won’t come. He looks over at Nursey and sees him petting Zams, head turned away from him. They sit like that for a while, silent.
“I have bipolar disorder,” says Nurse eventually, decidedly not looking at Dex. “I’m kind of in a lowish funk right now and stuff so I’ve probably been a little weird. It was worse before Farrah left for her dance thing. So could you please stop looking at me like that? I’m fine. I’ve always been like this. I know how to handle it.”
Dex listens and he breathes. He doesn’t do much else. He listens and breaths, watches the easy rise and fall of Zamboni’s chest and tires to match it.
That’s why Farrah had been worried worried. Or almost worried worried. Her brother was in the middle of a depressive episode, their parents were mysteriously absent, and she was about to leave him alone.
After a moment, when Dex can focus on something other than his breathing, he says, “I didn’t think you couldn’t handle it--whatever it ended up being--I just thought maybe you shouldn’t have to handle it alone.”
Nursey says nothing, just buries his face in Zamboni’s fur.
Dex clears his throat and says, “Thanks for trusting me with this moment,” in his best approximation of Shitty’s voice.
This produces a low rumble-like laugh from Nursey, “Dude, this is so awkward.”
Dex shrugs, even though Nursey can’t see him.
“I think this is the longest we’ve ever gone off ice without screaming at each other,” Nursey continues, turning his face so he can look at Dex. “Isn’t that weird? We’re going to share a room together and this is the longest conversation we’ve ever had.”
"We don't really talk," says Dex, starting to pick at his lip. It's chapped from the summer heat, peeling from a sunburn he’d gotten on the boat a few days ago.
Nursey gives him a look and says, "Because we fight about everything. So, if we only talk about, like, the team or Mario Kart or Samwell gossip, we can't argue too much."
Dex absentmindedly reaches for Zamboni. She’d gotten up when Nursey had moved, perching herself on the arm of the couch, further away than it is comfortable to reach from the armchair. But Dex needs to do something with his hands before he does something stupid like tell Nursey he is sorry about how he behaved their freshmen year. Not that he isn’t sorry, but Dex has reached an apology limit for the time being.
“Should we?” Dex asks, voice embarrassingly small. He felt embarrassingly small and soft in that moment, like when he’d had to ask his mom for new shoes his junior year of high school because the snowmelt was soaking his socks.
Nursey watches him pet the cat, his expression less tight than last night but still just as tired. Even though every instinct in his body says to turn away, Dex looks back.
“I don’t know,” Nursey says in a voice just barely louder than a whisper. “What if we don’t like what we find? What if talking just makes everything worse?”
“I’m afraid to break it,” Dex had said to his social worker, seventeen and weeks away from his adoption hearing.
“You can call her mom if you want, Liam,” she had said in a gentle voice . “It won’t break anything. You can try and be happy, it’s okay. You deserve it.”
Dex shakes the memory and says, “What if it doesn’t?”
They look at each other. Nursey still kind of looks like shit and Dex knows he probably looks just as bad. His mouth feels dry and powdery, although he’d finished the little sleeve of donuts hours ago. This moment seems pivotal, a turning point in both their lives.
“Okay,” Nursey says after a while. “What are we supposed to talk about? And please don’t say my mental health because I’d like to pretend that never happened.”
“Are you excited for the new Star Wars movie?” asks Dex because he’s a fucking nerd who sucks at small talk.
Nursey lowers himself to the couch and says, “I don’t know. I’ve never seen any of them.”
---
"I don't know, man," Nursey says, halfway through Clone Wars with a mouthful of Pad Thai. "It's just like, don't you have things that you don't tell people? Even when they're your bros? I know you do because I know shit for all about, like, anything in your life.
Dex picks at a scab on his lip and says, "I'm allergic to gluten." Because any of the other things--the whole adopted thing, the whole not straight thing--are too big. He kind of regrets saying they should talk more. Bros can have secrets from bros, but maybe there's one too many festering between them.
"Shit man," Nursey says with a low whistle, "but I've seen you eat Bitty's pies! Won't that, like, kill you?"
Dex shrugs and says, "Lack of self-preservation."
"Same," says Nursey.
Suddenly, the room is a lot tenser. From the TV screen, Jar Jar Binks is doing something fucking stupid, but Dex isn't paying attention to that. He's watching Nursey playing with the strings of his hoodie, decidedly not looking anywhere.
"I'll make you a deal, Nurse," Dex says, trying to pretend everything is normal. "No, a challenge."
Nursey looks up at that, eyes darting tentatively in Dex's direction.
Dex smiles like his stomach isn't churning and says, "I dare you to tell me one thing everyday that you normally wouldn't."
"Why?"
Dex shrugs and shoves a mouthful of fried tofu into his mouth to give himself a second to think. He chews thoroughly before he replies, “Because we’re trying to actually talk to each other and not just yell?”
Nursey looks back down, this time at his hands. They've been shaky all day. Dex stupidly wants to reach out and cover Nursey's hands with his own. To stop the shaking, he tells himself. But he doesn't because, no matter what people want to believe, Dex isn't a jerk. Nursey is radiating "don't touch me" vibes that could be picked up from mars. So, instead Dex looks away politely.
"Alright," Nursey says after a few minutes. "I'll accept your challenge if you accept mine."
Dex sees something of the old Nursey--no, that's not right, he really needs to stop thinking about Nursey as a before and an after--something of a less burdened Nursey for a moment.
"Which is?" Dex asks, trying to sound challenging when all he wants to do is tip toe around Nursey.
Nursey smiles, the first time he has done so without a bite since Dex got here, and says, "Quid pro quo. That means--"
"I know what quid pro quo means, Nurse," he replies, rolling his eyes. "A secret for a secret?"
Nursey nods. "A secret for a secret."
“I think we’re square for the day,” Dex says.
Nursey nods in agreement. “Yup. I one hundred percent agree with you and cannot stand the embarrassment of you knowing anymore about me. However, I believe we are currently two for one?”
“What?” Dex sputters, “how?”
“Mental illness and Star Wars to one food allergy,” Nursey points out. “Now, I’m not the Computer Science major, but that there is a ratio of two to one, Dexy boy, so that means you owe me one.”
Dex rolls his eyes. “Chirp, chirp, Nurse. But because it was my idea, I’ll humor you. I’m an applied mathematics major. I started off as comp sci freshman year, but switched last fall because I missed doing math.”
Nursey flings a noodle at Dex’s head.
“Nerd.”
---
The next two days pass in relatively the same fashion. Dex wakes up hours before Nursey does, don’t bring himself to touch the fridge without explicit permission, and gets shitty coffee at the bodega.
On Sunday, Nurse catches him at it.
“We have coffee here,” Nurse says as Dex opens the door.
Dex nearly drops his cup.
Nursey is still at the island in the kitchen, a mug in one hand, and a bemused expression on his face. Dex, however, doesn’t find anything about the situation to be humorous. Instead, dread forms in the pit of his stomach. He doesn’t know how he’s going to explain this one to Nurse, and the panic starts to eat at him.
The smirk falls from Nursey face and he sets the mug on the counter. He slides off the stool and walks over to the door. He takes the paper coffee cup from Dex’s hand, gently prying his fingers from their vice-like grip. He leads Dex to the island, sets the cup down next to his own, and nudges Dex into the stool next to his own.
Nursey doesn’t say anything and Dex, he’s still trying to hit the ‘escape’ button on the crashing program that is his mind.
“Hey,” Nursey says after a while. “It’s chill. I don’t care if you like shitty bodega coffee or if you like to walk around or whatever.”
Dex takes a breath and says, in a very small voice, “Does anyone really like bodega coffee?”
“No, not really,” Nursey says with a little chuckle. “Why are you drinking it and...aren’t you allergic to those things? Donuts are definitely made of gluten.”
Dex looks at the crumpled package of donuts in his left hand. He is very much allergic to the donuts but eating them won’t kill him, but just make him feel like shit later. Before he’d developed the allergy, his dad had bought him the same donuts at the gas station by the rink after practice. It was one of Dex’s only okay-ish memories of him.
“I didn’t know if I was allowed to,” Dex manages to say, jaw tight.
Nursey asks, “Allowed to what?”
“Don’t make me say it,” Dex says in a voice that sounds a little too much like begging. It’s embarrassing that, after all these years, he’s still afraid of opening cabinets.
The food hoarding had stopped pretty quickly, about a month after moving to Winter Harbor. His mom had handed him a box of granola bars after finding a few stale dinner rolls in his sock drawer and that had been that. The permission thing was still a problem, but one Dex managed to avoid by never going anywhere where he’d need to ask anything. It had, in his defense, worked well until this moment.
Nursey gets up, crossed the kitchen, and takes a mug from on of the upper cabinets. It is Samwell mug with the crest and Samwell Mom written on it. Nursey fills it with coffee from the machine by the stove and walks it over to Dex. Nurse sets it down and comes back with a sugar bowl, creamer, and a spoon.
“Dude, you’re welcome to anything here,” he says. “You don’t have to ask, but if you need reminders, that’s chill too.”
Dex nods and looks at the offered mug. There is a small part of him that feels like this is a trap, but he quickly smothers it. Nursey is a lot of things, but he isn’t cruel. He wouldn’t do that to Dex, not even before he’d shown up at his front door.
“They used to lock the cabinets,” Dex says, because this feels like the right time. No one at Samwell knows about Dex’s history, except the coaches and his counselor.
Nursey furrows his brow and asks, “Who?”
Dex shrugs, reaches for the sugar, and mutters, “The fosters. I can’t remember which ones. Not all of them, but enough.”
While Dex carefully measures out six spoonfuls of sugar, Nursey stares at him. Chowder knows Dex is adopted, but not the whole story. Bitty knows his dad isn’t in the picture, but not the whole story. No one else on the team knows because Dex doesn’t talk about himself, not if he can help it. And, in the rare cases he does, it’s always about his family in Winter Harbor and mostly about his little sister.
“That’s shitty,” Nursey says. He doesn’t push, but if he did Dex might let him know more. Something about this moment, early in the morning and without bitterness, makes Dex want to tell Nurse about his life.
Gross.
Dex adds a seventh spoonful of sugar to his coffee and takes a sip.
“It was,” is all Dex says on the matter.
Nursey drops it.
Nursey, who has never known how to leave good enough alone, takes a sip of his coffee and calls Zamboni over from where she’s sitting in the kitchen window.
Dex wonders what weird world he’s entered where Dex voluntarily shares things about his past and Nursey doesn’t ask questions, or at least not too many.
“Game six is this afternoon,” Nursey says, when Zams refuses to answer his calls.
“Yeah.”
Nursey says, “If the Falcs win, we know a Stanley Cup champion.”
“More than one,” Dex counters, “if you count Tater. He’s, like, an honorary Wellie at this point.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about someone,” Nurse jokes and Dex knows it’s a joke by the slight upward tilt of Nursey’s lips and when did Dex figure that out?
Dex snorts, “Well, he’s better at pong then you are. Next kegster, I’m phoning in a new partner.”
“You wouldn’t dare, Poindexter,” Nursey says. “Somethings are sacred. You can’t ruin our streak.”
“Our losing streak.”
Nursey reaches over and pulls him into a headlock. Dex’s heart begins to rabbit in his chest, but all Nursey does is ruffle his bristly hair and let go and say, “Let’s get lunch before the game. I was thinking Indian. There’s a place that has the best samosas ever.”
And they do get samosas and Dex has to admit they’re pretty good, but watching Nursey actually leave the house for the first time in days is even better.
---
After the Falcs crushing defeat that evening, Dex and Nursey stare at the television in silence for a good ten minutes. Playing and losing a close game is awful, but watching someone else do it isn’t much better.
“Fuck this,” Nurse says after a while, “I’m gonna get ulcers from this.”
Dex, sitting on the couch next to him, says, “I probably already have ulcers.”
“If you stopped eating food you’re incapable of digesting, you might not,” Nurse chirps halfheartedly, his hands covering his eyes.
“You ordered the samosas!”
Nursey kicks him and says, “Didn’t have to eat them.”
And Dex didn’t, but Nursey had been raving about them and they were mostly filling anyway. He’d only had one and Nursey had looked pleased when he’d said they were the best (and admittedly the first) samosas he’d ever had.
“Let’s watch the next Star Wars,” Dex says because he doesn’t want to say he ate them to make Nursey happy because that’s pathetic.
While it is already almost eight at night, they start The Empire Strikes Back . This one is probably Dex’s least favorite of the original trilogy and he tells Nurse this when Luke meets Yoda.
“It’s just sad?” Dex says eventually, unable to describe the empty feeling he gets at the end of the film.
On screen, Luke is caring Yoda on his back and they’re talking about the Force. He’s talking about all the things Jedi must be and it’s always bothered Dex that they’re so many rules to being a Jedi.
To his right, Nurse has slumped against the armrest and pulled the throw blanket from the top on the couch over his shoulders. He watches Luke train in the swamps with rapt attention. When Dex had made him start with the prequels, Nursey had dozed during some of the less important parts--no one needs to watch Anakin podrace, really--but the original trilogy seems to be holding his attention.
“I like sad things, sometimes,” Nursey mutters. “I like when I’m sad about something real, you know?”
Dex gestures to the screen, where Yoda is raising an X-Wing from the swamp, and says, “Very realistic.”
Nursey stretches out his legs to gently nudge Dex with his toes.
“Smartass,” he says, legs still stretched out on Dex’s side of the couch. “I meant real as in something not made up in my head, memories and shit.”
Dex thinks about it. He can kind of understand where Nursey is coming from. When Dex was a kid, he’d read a lot of books. He’d done this for a couple of reasons. One, library cards were free. Two, his dad had complete control over the TV and watching it with him usually meant you’d be on the receiving end of his anger when his team lost. And, three, books were portable if he needed to get the hell out of dodge. In the books he’d read, he’d always found it comforting when a character suffered and succeeded in the end.
Dex reaches out, rests a hand on Nursey’s calf, and says, “I get that. Still, A New Hope is better.”
“Reserving my judgement until we finish,” quips Nurse. “And then you’ll have to wait until the sequel trilogy and all the standalone movies come out.”
“That’s a lot of movies,” Dex replies. In his head, he’s thinking, “ that’s a lot of years.”
Nursey smiles and says, “I like to be thorough.”
They watch the rest of the movie in relative silence, Nursey occasionally saying something about how hot young Harrison Ford is, and Dex’s hand resting on Nusey’s calf.
---
The next night is the night before game seven and both Dex and Nursey have been snapping at each other all day.
It started when, at 10:00 when Nursey woke up on the couch, and went straight into the kitchen to feed Zamboni. However, Dex had already fed Zamboni. It was a stupid fight, but it set the tone for the rest of the day.
By nine in the evening, they’ve had no fewer than six fights and they’ve shared zero secrets. At seven, Dex had retreated into Farrah’s old room to calm down and avoid another fight.
A little after nine, Nursey knocks on the door and sheepishly asks Dex if he wants to go on a walk.
Dex asks, "Is that safe?"
Nursey laughs, "I have loved the stars much too fondly to be fearful of the night."
Dex stares at him. He knows that line. Miley has a print of it in her bedroom. Mom had bought it for her when she was eight. She had been terrified of the dark, sleeping with all her lights on. Mom gave Dex a stack of little glow in the dark stars and said, "Put them up in Miley’s room, so she won't be so lonely." Dex, sixteen and about as creative as a rock, had put them into real constellations. There was Andromeda and Orion, the Big Dipper, and the little one too. She'd hung up the little poster and while Miley was still hesitant, she started sleeping with only the hall light on, seeping soft light from under the crack of her door.
Nursey takes Dex's silence for either annoyance or confusion and says, "It's fucking Manhattan. It's not like, Samwell safe or like Middle of Nowhere, Maine safe but it's safe enough."
Dex shrugs and says, "Alright."
Nursey looks at him like he wanted more of a fight, like he wants to fight right now. Instead, he slips on a pair of fucking Birkenstocks and waits for Dex to cram his feet into his beat up sneakers.
Outside, it's nice. It smells a little like sewer water, but Dex doesn't mind because Nursey looks less on edge than he has all day. He walks around the sidewalk with his head tilted back and arms outstretched, like how someone might dance in the rain.
Dex looks up to and is surprised to see that there isn't a single star in the sky. He looks around in panic and then locates the moon. Well, at least that was one thing light pollution hadn't managed to fade yet.
"Yeah, the view is kind of terrible," Nursey says, stopping a little in front of Dex on the sidewalk. A middle aged man walking a very small dog brushes past them, but they ignore each other.
"I begged my parents for a telescope as a kid," Nursey says. "I wanted one so bad. I finally got one form my eighth birthday or something. I was so mad when I tried to look outside with it. Couldn't see a damn thing, except the neighbor's cat in the window."
Dex looks down, over to Nursey. He tries to imagine it, Nursey looking for all the stars he'd read about in his mythology books, only to be disappointed by reality.
"You could bring it to Samwell," Dex suggests. "It's got plenty of stars."
Nursey looks over to him and asks, "Bring what?"
"The telescope."
Nursey laughs, "I don't have it anymore, Will. Tossed it."
Dex of just a few weeks ago would have gotten mad, called Nursey out for being a spoiled rich kid who had everything handed to him. Tonight, though, all Dex does is start walking again and wait for Nursey to follow.
When he does, Dex says, "It's Liam."
"What?"
Dex shrugs and says, "Everyone calls me Liam back home."
“Bitty calls you Will sometimes,” Nursey points out.
“Yup, but that’s not my name. My dad was Will, I’m Liam.”
Nursey follows Dex walking towards the direction of the bodega he’d gotten coffee at his first few days in New York.
He says, “William J. Poindexter, Junior.”
“William James Lynch, Junior,” Dex corrects, stopping at an intersection and waiting for the light to change. “I changed my middle and last name when I got adopted.”
Dex waits for Nursey to say something, but all he does grab Dex’s elbow and lead him across the street when the coast is clear. Apparently, if you live in New York, crosswalk signals are ignored.
“What’s the “J” stand for now?”
Dex says, “It’s stands for Jay. J-A-Y. My sister picked it out.”
They walk in silence. Dex grits his teeth. His birth name felt like an invader in his mouth. He hadn’t said it in years. Most days, he didn’t even think about it. Being a Lynch felt like a bad dream.
Nursey leads them two streets over, his hand still on Dex’s elbow, to a frozen yogurt place.
They don’t talk much as they eat their frozen yogurt. Nurse swipes gummy bears from the top of Dex’s pineapple and chocolate swirl and covers his own vanilla cup in Froot Loops. The anger from the morning evaporates, for Dex at least. Nursey looks unsure with each gummy bear he swipes.
Dex pushes his cup across the small table and says, “You can have the rest. Sorry I didn’t tell you I fed Zams.”
“It’s chill,” Nursey says through a mouthful of gummy bears. “Sorry I called the math department the lax bros of academics.”
Dex takes his spoon and steals a bite of Nursey’s frozen yogurt.
“It’s chill,” he says, and try as he might, he can’t do it without bursting into laughter.
---
When Dex wakes up on Tuesday morning to Nursey slipping on his shoes, he kind of freaks out. They’d fallen asleep on the couch trying to finish Return of the Jedi after their late froyo adventure. Dex hasn’t been away from Nursey for longer than a few minutes, sleep excluded, for almost five days
"Where are you going?" Dex asks blearily, struggling to sit up.
"It's chill," Nursey says, making a shushing noise. "I'm just going to get coffee. I'll be back in, like, half an hour."
Dex gets up anyway. Nursey sighs dramatically, leaning a shoulder against the wall.
"It's fine, Dex," Nursey assures him. There's a hint of frustration on his face, something in the narrowing of his eyebrows.
Dex looks around, uncertain. Dex is a worrier by nature and somehow Nursey has ended up on the list of people to worry about.
“I’ll bring back bagels,” Nursey says. “Go back to sleep.”
Dex mumbles, “I’m allergic to bagels. Lots of gluten.”
“I’ll bring you back gluten free bagels.”
“Goss.”
Nurse retorts, “You’re gross,” before exiting out the front door.
Dex doesn’t go back to sleep. He texts his mom, “Still alive. Nurse seems better? I don’t know. ”
Then, he calls his sister.
“Liam!” she answers, “How’s NYC? Did you get me my pictures?”
Dex laughs. He’d almost forgotten her request.
He sits up, yawns once, and pushes the blanket he’d been curled up under off. Next to him, in the space Nursey had vacated on the couch, Zamboni is curled up.
“No,” he admits. “I’ve only seen Nurse’s place, a bodega with terrible coffee, a froyo shop, and an Indian restaurant.”
She asks, “What have you been doing with all your time?”
“Watching Star Wars ,” he answers.
And that is a mostly true statement. They have been watching Star Wars but, if Dex is being honest, he’s been spending more time watching Nurse watch Star Wars than actually watching the movies himself.
“Nerd,” she says, but it sounds more fond than anything else.
Dex doesn’t protest, instead he just says, “Nursey had never seen them before. We’re almost done.”
The thought is a bittersweet one. He doesn’t want to movies to end. Or the secrets. Or sitting next to Nurse, Zamboni curled up between them.
Dex shakes his head. Those are dangerous thoughts, he knows, ones best to keep under lock and key and never say aloud. It’s a good thing Dex is good at not saying things.
Miley says, “You’re still a nerd, but maybe Nursey’s one too. I’ll be watching the game tonight, bored, while I watch the Flannery brats down on Forsythia.”
“First job of the summer?”
“Yup, you’ve officially missed the arrival of the first waves of tourists, lucky you,” she quips. “I ran into them all on the boardwalk, hanging up flyers, and it was all, ‘Miley, my dear girl, you’ve gotten so tall. Also, we can’t stand our bratty children so can you please watch them for us?’ Which is nice for business, you know, and the Flannery kids aren’t so bad.”
Dex says, “Remember to lock the doors and--”
“Don’t answer it for strangers, I know Liam,” she interjects. “I’m very responsible.”
“Debatable.”
Miley says, “Yeah, yeah, love you too, booger breath,” before hanging up on him.
Dex sighs and looks over at Zamboni.
“I’m pathetic,” he says to the cat.
The cat responds by walking over and falling asleep in his lap.
Nursey finds them there twenty minutes later, both asleep. If he takes a picture before waking Dex up, that’s his own business. If he posts it on instagram, well, that’s his business too, until Chowder starts chirping him in the comments.
---
It’s a good game. Dex and Nursey watch it from the couch without saying much, too nervous and engrossed in watching the Falcs.
When Jack gets the puck in the third period, mere moments left on the clock, Dex grips Nursey’s arm. When Jack takes a shot, he digs his nails into his forearm. When the puck goes in, they’re both silent for a moment.
The buzzer goes off.
“Holy fucking shit,” Nurse says, turning to Dex. “Jack Zimmermann is a Stanley Cup champion.”
Dex screams, “Fuck yeah!” and throws his arms around Nursey’s neck.
They topple over on the couch, sending Zamboni running from her perch on the armrest. Nursey wraps his arms around Dex’s middle and laughs, a soft and breathy sound, against the hollow of Dex’s throat.
He pats Dex’s side twice and says, “Alright, let me up, Poindexter. I want to see everyone rush the ice.”
Dex, suddenly embarrassed, drops his arms and sits up, his checks burning. He doesn’t know why he’d done that, practically tackled Nursery, but now his skin feels uncomfortably small for his body. He starts wringing his hands in his lap, twisting them together.
Nusey sits up, elbows bushing Dex’s, and points to the TV.
“Hey, look!” he shouts. “It’s Bitty!”
It was hard to see but, in the middle of the crowd rushing the ice is Bitty, running straight for Jack. Dex looks behind him waiting to see Ransom, Holster, Lardo, and Shitty to come running, but he’s caught off guard by Nursey, gently grabbing his arm.
“Holy fuck,” he says, “Dexy, look.”
And Dex follows his gaze to where Jack Zimmermann, Stanley Cup Champion, is kissing his boyfriend on national television.
It probably last no more than a few seconds, but to Dex, it lasts an eternity.
It lasts longer than that first ride to Winter Harbor, where he’d refused to answer his social workers questions. It lasts longer than when he’d kissed Hunter Pucowski, just days before he’d beat the shit out of him. It lasts longer than the look his father had given him, when Dex had told him he was going to marry Keith Thompson from his mini-mites camp.
Eventually, the moment ends.
Bitty and Jack are engulfed in a Wellie group hug on screen and Dex turns to Nursey, a disbelieving smile on his face.
“Go put on real clothes, Nurse,” he says. “We’ve got a Stanley Cup Champion and his boyfriend to congratulate.”
Nursey whoops, “Fuck yeah!” as he runs for the stairs.
Dex opens the group message, already buzzing with notifications from Chowder.
“WHERE is the kegster happening?” he texts. “ We’re coming up!”
When Nurse comes down the stairs, green snapback on, Dex shouts, “Grab my flannel from the kitchen! It’s a four hour drive to Providence, so we better get a fucking move on.”
By the time Dex and Nursey make it to Providence, the party is at Jack’s house and it’s almost one in the morning.
They park a block away and Nursey loops his arm through Dex’s.
“Mother fucking Stanley Cup Champion mother fucking Jack Zimmermann’s appartment, let’s go!” Nusey says, pulling Dex forward.
He laughs.
When they enter the apartment, Nursey lets go and wonders in the direction of the kitchen. Dex spots Chowder watching them from the couch. Next to Chowder is Potts, looking uncomfortable, and Lardo.
Chowder waves him over, shouting, “Dex! I’m glad you guys made it. Bitty’s on his sixth pie.”
Dex laughs, “How does he have time when his boyfriend’s a Stanley Cup Champion?”
“Beats me,” Chowder says with a shrug. “It’s Bitty. Pies just appear.”
Dex stands behind Chowder, leaning over the couch. Lardo shoots him a grin before turning her gaze back to the game of pong happening on Jack’s dining room table.
“Nursey seems happy,” Chowder says, gesturing to where Nurse has emerged from the kitchen with two beers. He’s talking animatedly to Shitty, his hat askew on his curls.
Dex says, “Yeah.”
“I didn’t know you were staying at his place until he posted on instagram this morning,” Chowder says. “You seemed comfortable.”
Dex mutters, “Zamboni is like fifteen pounds of fur. She’s very warm.”
“I wasn’t talking about the cat.”
Dex doesn’t know what to say to that. He doesn’t know how to rationalize his behavior the past week, rushing to be there for Nurse. He couldn’t blame Farrah, for asking him to check on Nursey, or Ransom for asking Dex to have his back. No, this problem is all Dex’s and he isn’t sure how to handle it.
Across the room, Nursey bumps into someone and knocks their beer out of their hands. He fumbles around for some napkins, both hands still full, and ends up spilling one of the beers in his hands. Shitty eventually takes pity on him and holds one of the bottles while Nursey mops up spilled beer.
Chowder says, “I’m glad you went to see him.”
Dex, watching Nursey carry handfuls of beer-soaked napkins to the kitchen trash, says, “Me too.”
Eventually, Nusey makes it over to Dex and Chowder.
“Nice check there, Nurse!” Dex says, grinning.
“Chirp, chirp,” Nursey says. “And here I was, being a good bro, bring you a beer.”
Nursey stands behind Dex, chest pressed against his back, and dangles the other beer over his shoulder.
Oh , Dex thinks, taking the beer.
Chowder calls, “Where’s my drink, Nursey?”
Nursey rests his chin on Dex’s shoulder to talk to Chowder.
Oh , Dex thinks, louder this time.
“I only got two hands,” he says, his voice rumbling through Dex. “Had to give it to my D-Man, you know? We got each other’s backs.
I like Nurse .
The thought isn’t like ice in his veins. It is not earth shattering or completely devastating. It is like the moment of clarity towards the end of a challenging math problem, the a-ha! moment. To Dex, it felt like putting the last piece into a puzzle.
Oh , he thinks. So that’s what this is .
“Right, Dexy?” Nursey asks, turning his head to look at Dex.
This close, Dex could count his eyelashes if he wanted to (which he does), but instead he just swallows and says, “Yeah. We got each other’s back.”
From somewhere behind Dex, Shitty screams, “This baby is a Stanley Cup Champion!”
The moment is over. Nursey lets go, turns around to watch Shitty parade around the room with a framed photograph of Jack as a baby. Dex looks down at his hands.
“Dude…” Chowder whispers next to him.
Dex holds up a hand and says, “Nope. We’re not talking about it. We’re...we’re doing a Samwich run.”
“Dex.”
Dex shouts, “Sandwiches! I’m doing a Samwich run! Who wants one?”
Chowder gets up with a sigh, “Fine. We’re doing a Samwich run.”
Dex takes out his phone to ask the group message how many sandwiches they want, casting one last look at Nursey before he turns towards the door. Nursey isn’t looking in his direction, which is okay. It’s enough.
This is enough.
It is enough.
---
Three days later, after the celebrations die down and Dex and Nursey say goodbye, Dex finds himself repeating the mantra.
This is enough. It is enough. It is enough.
The point of looking isn’t to be looked at.
The point of liking isn’t to be liked back.
This is enough.