I don't look. Not yet.
In the locker room, I change out of my gear. Bennett appears at my stall. Bennett's face is doing the Bennett thing, which is the expression of someone processing information and is processing it through every emotion simultaneously.
"Bro," Bennett says.
"Yeah."
"That was huge."
"It was three words."
"Three huge words." He claps me on the shoulder with the force of a man who expresses support through structural damage. "I got you. Whatever you need."
Jonah appears. Jonah's face is the Jonah face: warm, vibrating, the restraint of a man who wants to say something supportive and is containing it through heroic effort.
"I'm not going to make a thing of it," Jonah says.
"Thank you."
"But if I were going to make a thing of it, the thing would be that I'm really proud of you and also do you want pad see ew, because Ren is ordering and we're getting extra."
"Pad see ew sounds great, Jonah."
Cole catches my eye across the room. The look is brief. The look is the Cole look, the look of a man who did this first and who knows what the next forty-eight hours will feel like and who is saying, through the look: I'm here if you need me. The look does not require a response. The look is its own response.
I drive to Nikolai's apartment. Our apartment. The word is becoming ours even though neither of us has said it.
Nikolai is on the couch. The reading glasses are off. The phone is in his hand. He has been reading the internet. The internet is doing what the internet does.
"You saw," I say.
"I saw."
"Are you mad?"
He looks at me. The look is not anger. The look is something I haven't seen on his face before. The look is pride, quiet and specific, the pride of a man who keeps his emotions in a vault and who is currently allowing one to be visible through the vault door.
"You said 'including me,'" he says.
"Yeah."
"In a media room. On record. To a reporter."
"Yeah."
"You are the least cautious person I have ever met."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It is a fact that terrifies me and that I find..." He pauses. The pause is the vault door opening another inch. "Admirable."
I sit next to him. His arm does the automatic thing. The arm goes around me because the arm goes around me.
"The internet is going to be a lot for a few days," I say.
"The internet is always a lot. The internet is the least useful data source in existence."
"Mars would disagree."
