Chapter Text
Friday Night
“He thinks you’re a better player than me,” Jalen says, a little past midnight on the roof of a dugout down the road from the Brunson house. And then, as Josh passes him the blunt: “Is this gonna show up on a drug test?”
“Nah,” Josh says, watching Jalen set it between his lips cautiously. He doesn’t inhale right away. Josh knocks one of his knees into Jalen’s. “And I am a better player.”
“Fuck off,” Jalen says around the blunt, taking it between his fingers again, looking at it. Does he really think Josh won’t notice him pretending to smoke? He isn’t that stoned yet. “He likes you,” Jalen adds, passing it back.
Josh blows his smoke out into Jalen’s face, which makes him cringe and wave a hand in front of his face.
“Dude,” he says. “Can you not?”
“Don’t want daddy to smell it?” Josh says, grinning wickedly.
Jalen glares at him. “Fuck off,” he says, with the hard edge his voice always gets when Josh mentions his dad.
Rick Brunson is one inch shorter than Josh (officially), and Josh isn’t scared of him.
It was Rick’s idea to invite Josh over for the long weekend—it has to be, because Josh knows Jalen would never suggest something like that to his dad in a million years. So Josh is pretty sure Rick is sizing him up, keeping him close so he can… well, Josh doesn’t really know exactly what, but it feels like a message to stay the fuck in his place, which… as far as Josh is aware, he’s doing. He’s not in Jalen’s draft class like Donte, he’s not a threat to the prince. He’s not even really a better player when it comes to their stats. So whatever it is that’s making Rick Brunson glare at him like he thinks Josh is about to kneecap Jalen the minute they’re alone in their double is pretty much all in big dog’s head.
It’s weird. Josh and Jalen are together a lot by necessity, but they never really hang out like this. Even at night when Jalen gets back late from extra practice with Rick, they don’t talk too much. Josh thought Jalen might loosen up a little at home, but he’s still all quiet and nervous.
“No way he likes me,” Josh mutters. His eyelids are starting to feel heavy, thoughts getting all buzzy and smooth, and he looks over at Jalen with a smile. “I don’t even think he likes you.”
Jalen wilts. Josh watches it happen in slow motion; the slow tilt of his eyeline downward, rounding of his shoulders, tiny frown that Jalen always puts on to say he doesn’t give a fuck, but just makes him look like a sad puppy.
“Can you please take a hit so I don’t feel like a dumbass?” Josh says.
“You are a fuckin’ dumbass,” Jalen says. “Gonna fall off this roof and break your leg.”
“Ohhh, I see,” Josh says. “That your big plan? Push me off the roof so I’m out for the season?”
Jalen cracks a tiny smile at that.
“Nah,” he says. “Not out for the season. Maybe just a sprain. Miss the Christmas game, that’s all.”
“Asshole,” Josh says, pushing Jalen lightly.
Jalen takes the bait and pushes him back. Josh brings his hands up quick, grabbing him by the wrists and holding, joint still pinched between two fingers.
Jalen grunts in annoyance as he struggles against the hold, and it sends a weird little shiver down the middle of Josh’s stomach. He grips tighter. Jalen’s eyes widen, just a little, like he’s scared.
Josh kind of wants to hold him like this. Squeeze tighter, make him whimper. He doesn’t.
When Josh lets his wrists go, Jalen retreats again, curling into himself, looking out into the dark. Josh takes another hit.
Jalen looks over at him, nostrils flared, and for a thrilling second, Josh thinks he’s finally managed to crack the ice and Jalen is actually going to yell at him or show some kind of emotion beyond just shutting down. Instead, he says: “Fine. Fuck you. Give it to me,” and reaches out for the joint.
“You ever tried that before?” Josh asks, handing it over.
Jalen says nothing, bringing it up and sucking smoke into his mouth. Josh smiles at him, tilting his head.
“You gonna inhale that?” he asks. “Or’d you just wanna taste it?”
Jalen looks at him questioningly.
Josh takes pity, reaching out and pressing two fingers to the center of Jalen’s chest.
“You wanna breathe it down here,” he says, and watches Jalen do as he’s told, chest puffing out beneath Josh’s fingers for a couple of seconds before he coughs, turning his head away, smoke coming out of his nose. Josh laughs, leaning back.
“Attaboy,” he says, patting Jalen hard on the back a couple times until he settles down, eyes watering, breathing rough, handing the joint back disdainfully.
“Fuck you,” Jalen says again.
“You’ll be fine,” Josh says. “Don’t panic now.”
“He’s gonna smell it,” Jalen mutters. “He’s totally gonna smell it.”
“Then you can just blame me,” Josh says. “And he’ll have another reason to hate me.”
Jalen says nothing. Josh eyes him for a few seconds, thin tee shirt frayed at the collar where he probably chews on it when no one’s looking.
“I’m a bad influence,” Josh says, nodding slowly. “That’s it, right?”
“What?” Jalen says.
“That’s why he’s sizin’ me up,” Josh says. “He thinks I’m messin’ up your game, doesn’t he?”
Jalen sniffles, shrugging.
“Maybe. He thinks you’re a dumbass with a big ego,” he mutters. “Doesn’t mean he doesn’t like you; least you have the stats to back it up.”
“Oh, you think I back my ego up?” Josh says, grinning at him.
“Fuck you,” Jalen says.
Josh rolls his eyes. “Come on,” he says. “I want candy.”
Jalen blinks at him. “You… what? You’re leaving?”
“Uh huh,” Josh says, sliding to the edge of the dugout and hopping down. He looks up at Jalen, who’s currently staring at Josh like he might throw up.
“You got it, short stack!” Josh says.
“Yo, fuck you,” Jalen says, like he really means it, and Josh spends the next minute or so smiling as a lightly stoned Jalen Brunson shuffles his way to the edge of the roof with flat hands against the wood and sneakers braced. When he dangles his legs off the edge, he just hesitates, shaking his head a few times.
“Come on, you got it,” Josh says. “Just jump.”
“Career ending injury,” Jalen mutters, head still moving back and forth.
“It’s like seven feet, come on, you’re at least 6’0.”
“I’m 5’11!” Jalen says.
Josh has to smack a hand over his mouth to stop from snorting.
“JB’s scared of heights?” Josh says when he’s calmed down, raising an eyebrow up at Jalen.
Jalen presses his lips together, shaking his head one more time.
Josh sighs, putting the joint between his teeth to keep it safe and kneeling below Jalen.
“Come on, man,” he says. “Step stool, let’s go.”
Jalen looks at him doubtfully until Josh lowers himself, flattening his back out and waiting for the feeling of one very hesitant sneaker between his shoulder blades, and then a hard thunk down on the dirt beneath him.
He straightens up, putting the joint between his fingers again laughing at the sight of Jalen on his back next to him.
“I did not fall,” Jalen says. “That was an intentional strategic roll.”
“Pussy,” Josh says, standing up to look down at him. “You want Mike and Ikes?”
“Yeah,” Jalen says. Josh extends a hand to help him up, pulling him up faster than he meant to, close enough into his chest that he can smell Jalen’s pot breath and see how wide his pupils are blown out already. From one hit. He’s such a girl sometimes.
Josh clears his throat, dropping Jalen’s hand and stepping back.
“You want another hit?” he asks.
“Fuck no,” Jalen says, blinking hard a few times.
Josh takes a final drag and drops the joint, reaching out to smack Jalen’s ass for no other reason than to earn another death glare.
“Lead the way, player!” Josh says, a little too loud. “It’s your neighborhood.”
“Yo, dude, you gotta calm down,” Josh murmurs, two inches behind Jalen in front of a soda machine. “You look crazy, they’re gonna call the cops on you.”
“I’ll kill you,” Jalen mutters back, strategically combining diet coke with lemonade like a psychopath.
“You’re way too high, man, they’re comin’ for you.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jalen says, wheeling around to look at him, and now his tee shirt is up against the soda mahine and he’s totally going to get sticky and disgusting, which makes Josh grin down at him, and that makes Josh realize Jalen is only pressed up against the soda machine because Josh is standing way too close to him.
Shit. He’s a little high. He backs up. Jalen does too, putting a cap on his soda and taking out his phone. For a second, he just looks down at it like woah and then types in his passcode incorrectly.
“Are you trying to get on MyFitnessPal right now?” Josh asks.
“Uh huh,” Jalen says.
Josh takes the diet soda out of his hand and throws it in the trash. Jalen looks up at him with his mouth open and his brow scrunched up in offence.
“Why would you do that?”
“Imma get you a slurpee,” Josh says, grabbing Jalen by the wrist and dragging him (unwillingly) across the store to the glowing, spinning plastic tubs of slush. It makes Josh’s mouth water. There’s some bullshit old song playing over the speaker that Josh somehow knows the words too and he finds himself singing you wanna hug me? what rhymes with hug me? under his breath as he opens the taps on every flavor and fills up a giant cup, handing it to Jalen proudly.
“I’m not putting this in my body,” Jalen says flatly.
“You scared of a little sugar?’
“You’re not bullying me into this,” Jalen says, reaching out and trying to snatch the slurpee. Josh pulls it out of the way just in time, grinning at him.
“Come on, JB,” he says, reaching to put a straw in it and holding the cup up to Jalen’s face, waving it around a little. “Just the tip?”
Jalen’s mouth drops open.
“You’re disgusting, bro. Where are the sun chips?”
As Jalen walks away to look for them, Josh sips the slurpee himself, eyes fixing on a smudge of dirt on the back of Jalen’s gray sweats. It’s honestly a shame Jalen doesn’t party, cuz he could be cool if he wanted to. If he put in a tiny bit of effort, left the gym once and a while, got his hair braided and talked to girls in those sweats? He’d clean up. And it’s not even Jalen—Josh is seeing that now. Jalen is chill. But Rick is sitting in the back of his head all the time with a coach’s whistle calling a timeout whenever Jalen tries to do anything that isn’t practice fucking left-handed drills.
“JB!” Josh says impulsively, jogging over to where Jalen is looking at the back of a bag of Doritos.
“What?” Jalen says, not looking up.
“You wanna go out?” Josh asks.
“What?”
“Like, find a bar or something,” Josh says.
“Not twenty-one,” Jalen says immediately. “Not till the fall.”
“Well, you wanna get drunk then?”
Jalen looks up at him, eyes narrowed. “We just smoked,” he says. “Now you want to get drunk? You’re such a degenerate.”
Josh smiles. “Big word,” he says.
“Yeah, I still have all my brain cells.”
“Couple less now,” Josh says, flicking the side of Jalen’s head. “C’mon let’s get a bottle of something.”
“You gotta calm down,” Jalen says.
Josh raises an eyebrow, holding up the slurpee again. “Compromise?” he asks.
Jalen glares at him for a long few seconds, then lowers his mouth to the straw and drinks. Josh watches his throat move as he swallows, watches him pull back with a little stain of blue sugar left behind on his bottom lip.
“Get your candy,” Jalen says. “We’re leaving.”
Josh can tell he’s serious about it, so he just nods, ending up dazed in the next aisle, running a distracted finger over cardboard boxes of sourpatch kids and M&Ms until he gets to the Mike and Ikes, raising the straw to his mouth as he picks them out, cold wetness left behind on it from Jalen’s mouth.
He’s still sucking on it absently when someone pinches his waist from behind, a giddy voice close to his ear saying “hands behind your back, punk, you’re under arrest.”
He turns his head to smirk at Jalen, saying, “you’re gonna have to catch me first, officer, you think you could outrun me?”
And Jalen, smiling now, all the sternness of a minute ago forgotten, says: “Don’t have to, I already got you cornered.”
“What part of the couch is not clicking to you?” Jalen whispers, sliding the window closed behind them. Josh already kicked his sneakers off on the rug and flopped down on Jalen’s bed.
“Finder’s keepers,” Josh says, stretching his legs out and yawning. “Too tall for the couch, you take it, you’re mini.”
Jalen turns around to glare at him, though any powers of intimidation are pretty much lost now that his mouth is stained blue from the slurpee he split with Josh on the walk back here. He looks like a hypothermia victim in a cartoon.
“Okay, first off, keep your fucking voice down,” Jalen says. “Second off, you can’t sleep in my fucking room, my mom made up the couch for you.”
“I like your room better,” Josh says.
Jalen looks like he might start growling. Like an angry little chihuahua. It’s cute.
“I need to take a shower,” Jalen says, shaking his head.
“Okay, so take a shower,” Josh says.
Jalen looks at him like he’s stupid. “I need to take a shower without them hearing cuz it’s fucking 1am. But I can’t. But I smell like pot now. Because of you.”
Josh clicks his tongue. “Skill issue.”
Jalen’s brows fly up, mouth opening in annoyance. “How is that a skill issue?”
Josh laughs, staring up at Jalen’s ceiling. “You’re way too easy to rile up, man, you gotta smoke more often.”
“I’m not easy to rile up, you just keep saying stupid shit,” Jalen says, stripping his shirt off and walking over to bury it at the very bottom of his laundry basket.
“You know you have dirt on your ass, right?” Josh says.
“Nice try,” Jalen says.
“No, you actually do,” Josh says.
Jalen presses his lips together in annoyance, undoing the draw string of his sweats and pushing them down, going back into the laundry to bury them too.
Josh has seen him change out of the corner of his eye a million times before, but watching feels different, and like maybe there’s something weird about it, so Josh looks away, turning over onto his stomach to look down at Jalen’s bedsheets—dark blue cotton, normal size mattress that he has the luxury of fitting on. Josh wonders if he would play the same if he was tall. Or if it’s the short-guy complex that makes him good. Like, you could put a million people in Jalen Brunson’s body, and none of them would do what he can do, cuz his dad just… molded his brain to be different.
If they put him under an MRI machine they’d probably just get a scan of Rick Brunson twirling his finger to run it back.
The weed is peaking now. Josh runs his fingers over the bedsheets, back and forth across the fabric until it looks like there are ocean waves in the blue, coming and going, his own skin cast a kind of pale blue in the moonlight coming in through the window. He wishes he could smell something other than himself. Wonders if the bedsheets would smell like basketball sweat, or like some other version of Jalen that Josh never gets the chance to be around. After-practice, after-shower, before-bed. Something soft and private and different. He feels himself lowering his head against the mattress, inhaling between the waves his fingers made there. It smells kind of like baby powder and… cinnamon or pine tree or something. Josh wonders what it would taste like.
“Yo.”
Josh pulls his face back, rolling over again, Jalen looking at him with a furrowed brow. He’s wearing a Wildcats tee shirt now, because he has no personality that isn’t basketball. Josh didn’t hear him changing.
“Do not fall asleep in that bed,” Jalen says.
“Aw, but it’s so comfortable,” Josh whines.
“Couch,” Jalen says. “But change your clothes first. You can’t smell like weed at breakfast.”
“My suitcase is downstairs,” Josh says.
Jalen reaches into an open drawer next to him and throws another shirt at Josh. It’s plain black, frayed a little around the collar.
“Fine,” Josh says, not getting up as he pulls his own shirt over his head and kicks his jeans down, letting them fall on Jalen’s floor, momentarily pausing at the cool feeling of the sheets against his back. They’re so much softer than college bedsheets. He hums in approval.
“I’m never gettin’ out of this bed,” he mutters, then glances up and sees Jalen staring at him. Like, really staring at him, like blown-out weed pupils fixed right on him.
“Josh,” Jalen says. “Get up.”
Josh sits up, legs splayed out in front of him.
“Cuz you want me to sleep on the couch?” he asks. “Or cuz mommy and daddy want me to sleep on the couch.”
Jalen’s expression flickers a little.
“You’re a fucking terrible house guest,” he mutters.
“Well, if I’m such a dumbass with such an ego problem, and I’m such a bad influence on perfect little Jalen, they shouldn’t have invited me, should they?” he says slowly, each word a challenge.
“You seriously expect me to give you my bed?” Jalen says.
“We could share,” Josh says immediately, too casually. He only really realizes it’s weird when he sees Jalen’s face change. And Jalen’s look, the seriousness of it, makes his own cheeks heat up. “You don’t take up that much space, y’know,” Josh continues. “You could just curl up on the edge there, I’ll take the middle.”
Jalen exhales a scoff.
“Couch,” he repeats, and Josh rolls his eyes, pulling Jalen’s shirt on over his head. It’s too small on him, it pinches around his biceps and squeezes his chest. Jalen eyes him once it’s on, lips a little parted. Josh wonders if he’s still high; if he even really got high off one hit, or just a little buzzed.
“Whatever, man. See you in the morning,” Josh says, leaving his clothes crumpled on Jalen’s floor and walking out, back down the stairs not giving a fuck how loud his footsteps are.
When he gets to the couch, he’s about to flop down when a light flicks on in the kitchen—ajoining to the living room, and Josh freezes like he just got caught comin’ in after curfew.
He spins slowly around, finding Rick Brunson in pajama pants and a tee shirt, holding a diet coke.
Like father like son, Josh guesses.
He braces for impact, but Rick doesn’t start scolding. He just gives him an approving little nod and says, “Trouble sleeping?”
“Uh, yeah,” Josh says, wondering how red his eyes are.
Rick nods slowly, sipping from his can.
“I never sleep good in other people’s houses,” Josh adds.
“Did you wake Jalen up?” Rick asks.
“No,” Josh says.
Rick nods again.
“Good,” he says. “You both should really be getting seven hours a night.”
“Yes, sir,” Josh says, with a little mock salute.
Rick narrows his eyes at him, only slightly, but Josh recognizes the expression. He’s seen it on Jalen enough times.
“You get some rest now,” he says, walking out of the kitchen, flicking the lights out and leaving them in darkness. For a second, Josh has a ridiculous vision of Rick shapeshifting into some kind of creepy fucking monster and attacking him, but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. Josh hears his footsteps on the staircase a second later.
He doesn’t move, just listens. Listens as Rick walks up to the landing, a few steps down the hallway, and pauses.
He hears a soft knock on a door. Hears Rick saying Jalen’s name a couple times and waiting. Nothing, no answer.
Josh hears Rick’s own bedroom door open and close, and only then does he sigh out an exhale, feeling weirdly caught. But Rick already has enough of a residence in Jalen’s head, Josh really doesn’t feel like letting him into his own head too.
The couch is longer than Josh realized. He can actually fit most of his legs on it, which makes sense, Rick is his height. Almost.
The thing about other people’s houses was true though, and it takes Josh ages to drift off, even with the weed. He rolls onto his side, legs curling up to fit on the cushions, hands sandwiched between his legs, and thinks about Jalen.
Jalen, living in a fucking surveillance state all the time. Uptight Jalen who gets home late and doesn’t talk much. Jalen who blushes when Josh tells him what to do.
Fuck.
If this is Rick’s attempt to scare Josh straight before he spends the next nine months sharing a room with his son? He’s gonna have to do a lot more than glare at him across a kitchen.
Everything is a basketball game to Rick, Josh has picked that much up from the way Jalen strategizes. And Rick might have home court advantage here, but Josh is the younger player. He doesn’t even need to make the basket, he’s just gotta get Jalen into the corner and set him up for a late stage teenage rebellion.
The idea makes him smile. Brunson with the ball. Hart with the steal.