"Okay." I swallow. "Okay."
The apartment is quiet. The quiet is different. Not the controlled quiet of a man living alone. The shared quiet of two people in a room who do not need to speak because the speaking has been done and the staying has been decided. Enough.
Gerald's desk. The lobby. The building settling into evening.
Gerald picks up his phone.
The rookie stayed.
Lorraine: On the roster?
Gerald: On the roster. And in the building. And in the apartment.
Lorraine: You're collecting them, Gerald.
Gerald: I just watch the door.
NIKOLAI
The road trip to Nashville is the first test of a system that does not have a manual.
At the apartment, we have a rhythm. Eli sleeps in my bed. His toothbrush is in my bathroom. His sneakers are by the front door in a configuration that would make a shoe organizer weep. The rhythm has been forming for eleven days.
On the road, the rhythm breaks.
On the bus to the airport, I sit in my usual seat (fourth row, window, left side). Eli sits three rows behind me with Bennett, who is already talking about something involving a restaurant in Nashville that serves, according to Bennett, the best hot chicken in the southeastern United States. Bennett's voice carries the way weather carries: across all available space, without regard for boundaries.
The three rows between us are the system's first road-trip decision. The three rows say: we are teammates. The three rows say: the bus is public and the public is where the performance operates and the performance does not include sitting next to the man whose body was in my bed at 6 AM this morning.
I can hear Eli laughing at something Bennett said. The laugh fills the bus the way his laugh fills every space it enters.
At the airport gate, Jonah Park slides into the seat across from me, still half asleep, and says: "Weird question, but why does Mercer smile like that every time you walk into a room?"
I put my coffee down very carefully before I answer. "He smiles at everyone."
Jonah tilts his head. "Not like that, he doesn't."
Jonah moves on because Jonah always moves on. But the sentence stays.
I open my book. The book is Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita, which my mother sent from Detroit with a note that said "you need to read something that is not hockey" and which I have been reading in ten-minute intervals between film sessions and practice and the time-consuming project of learning how to share a living space with a person who considers organization a hostile concept.
The book does not hold my attention. The book is not holding my attention because my attention is three rows behind me, laughing with a Canadian defenseman about hot chicken.
At the hotel in Nashville, the rooming assignments are posted in the lobby. I am roomed with Anders Lindqvist, a Swedish forward who communicates primarily through silence and who considers the ideal hotel room interaction to be: enter, nod, sleep, wake, nod, leave. I have been roomed with Lindqvist for three seasons. The arrangement works because Lindqvist requires nothing from me and I require nothing from Lindqvist and the mutual nothing is the ideal roommate dynamic for a man whose emotional bandwidth is fully allocated elsewhere.
Eli is roomed with Bennett. This is the correct assignment. This is the assignment that maintains the professional boundary. This is the assignment that does not require explanation or adjustment or the career-ending conversation that would begin with "Coach, I'd like to room with the rookie" and end with the end of everything.
In the hallway, between the elevator and the rooms, Eli passes me. The passing is ordinary. Two teammates in a hotel corridor, moving in the same direction, separated by the three feet that the corridor provides.
His hand brushes mine. Not an accident. A graze of the back of his fingers against my palm, the contact lasting less than a second, hidden by the angle of our bodies and the corridor traffic and the fact that nobody is looking because nobody expects to see it.
The graze is fire. The graze travels from my palm up through my wrist and settles in the place behind my sternum where the match-strike lives, the place that has been warm since the corridor and the folder and the first time Eli Mercer's skin touched mine.
He does not look at me. He keeps walking. Bennett is ahead of him, still talking, and Eli follows Bennett with the casual stride of a man who did not just set fire to another man's central nervous system in a hotel hallway.
I go to my room. Lindqvist is already there. Lindqvist nods. I nod. The mutual nodding is complete. Lindqvist opens a book (Scandinavian crime fiction, always Scandinavian crime fiction, the man has read every murder committed in Sweden). I open mine.
I do not read. I sit on the hotel bed with Bulgakov in my hands and my palm burning from the graze and my brain performing the specific, failing calculation of how to survive three nights in Nashville with Eli Mercer three rooms away.
