I think about the question. Mars knowing is not Alexei knowing. Mars knowing is data stored by a man who stores data the way other people breathe: automatically, comprehensively, without the impulse to weaponize it. Mars stored the data aboutCole and Mik before Cole and Mik were public. Mars stored the data about Wes and Luca before the bread became a love language. Mars stores data and the data is safe and the safety is the difference between this team and every other team I have played for.
"No," I say. "It is not a problem."
The elevator reaches his floor. He steps out. In the hallway, between the elevator and his room, he turns back.
"Three nights," he says. "Three nights of the system."
"Yes."
"I don't like the system."
"The system is necessary."
"The system is you sitting at a bar watching me from four stools away and pretending you don't want to be in the booth."
The doors begin to close. His face disappears. Then his hand, catching the door, holding it open for three more seconds.
"I want you in the booth," he says.
The doors close. The elevator takes me to my floor. Lindqvist is asleep. The room is dark. The Scandinavian crime fiction is face-down on the nightstand.
I lie in the hotel bed in Nashville and I think about the system and the bar and the booth and the hand-graze in the hallway and Mars Santos's two-second look that contained a career's worth of data and Eli's face in the elevator saying "I want you in the booth."
The booth. Not the bed. The booth. The ordinary. Sitting with the man I am sleeping with and the team I play for and the two facts existing in the same sentence.
The wanting is new. Not the body wanting, which has been present since the corridor. The ordinary wanting. That is why it frightens me more.
The ordinary is the thing the control prevents. The ordinary is the thing Alexei made impossible. The ordinary is the thingthis team has built and that I have been living inside for three seasons without accessing because accessing the ordinary requires the control to step aside and the control does not step aside.
Except the control stepped aside in an elevator. And in a kitchen. And in a bedroom. The control has been stepping aside in increments and the increments are building and the building is approaching a threshold and the threshold is the booth.
I close my eyes. Nashville is quiet outside the window. The game is won. The system is intact.
The system is also, I am beginning to understand, a prison with excellent plumbing.
Irina's voice in my head, unbidden: "Control is my gift to you, Kolya."
The gift is a prison. The prison is a gift. The distinction is the thing I need to learn.
Three nights.
The system holds for three nights. And then the system changes.
ELI
Icall Ava from the balcony of Nikolai's apartment at 9 PM on a Tuesday because the apartment feels too quiet for what I'm about to say and the balcony feels like a room with an exit.
Atlanta is below me. The city does its thing: traffic, light, the specific hum of a place that is alive at a frequency I am still learning. Nikolai is inside, reading on the couch, his reading glasses on because the reading glasses go on for books. The glasses-on-for-books is different from the glasses-on-for-film. The book glasses are softer. Less defensive. The book glasses are the glasses of a man who is not analyzing but receiving, and the distinction took me three weeks to identify and is now one of the things I track without deciding to.
Ava answers on the second ring. "You said you'd call immediately. It has been four days."
"I was busy."
"You were chickening out."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
"Talk."
