The sentence lands between my ribs and sits there. I press my thumb against the arm of the couch.
"Yeah," I say. "Me too."
"Good night. Love you."
"Love you too."
I sit on the couch with the phone in my hand after the call ends. The screen goes dark. His feet on the sand. Aruba.
The apartment is quiet at midnight when I head to bed. The game is hours behind me now. The good feeling from the ice is hours behind me.
I pick up my phone again.
Hey. About earlier. I was tired. Don't worry about it.
Glad you have those guys.
Talk tomorrow.
I send them and put the phone on the nightstand and get into bed. The sheets are cool. The pillow on his side is flat because I make it flat every morning.
In the morning the phone has one new message. Four-twelve a.m., which means he was awake at four in the morning.
night wes
Two words. Lowercase. No punctuation. I read them standing at the counter with the coffee running and his two words sit on the screen above my three texts and my three texts sit above the three I sent before that and all of them are a record of a man who saw a photograph and did not know how to be glad about it.
I put the phone down. I take the coffee to the balcony. The water is flat and gray and the light is wrong again. I pick up the camera and frame the ocean and this time I take the picture. It will be a bad picture. The light is not there. I take it anyway because the camera gives my hands a place to be that is not the phone, and practice is in two hours.
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Chapter 13: Luca
The suit is on the hanger where I left it. Navy. The one I bought in Miami at a store on Lincoln Road where the tailor pinned the cuffs while Wes sat in a leather chair behind me and watched. The fabric has creased across the back and the left sleeve is bunched from where I dropped it on the bathroom floor and hung it without thinking.
The iron is under the sink. I know this because I put it there when I moved in, next to the steamer, next to the lint roller, next to the things that maintain the surface of a person who shows up pressed and correct.
I lie in bed. I think about the iron. I think about how easy it would be to get up and iron the jacket. Instead, I scroll on my phone. It's fine. Nobody is going to look that closely.
My phone is in the cup holder, face down, on my drive to the arena. The last text in the thread is still his from two nights ago.Glad you have those guys.And my short reply.
At the light on Piedmont I pick up the phone and call him.
Second ring. "Hey." His voice is low.
"Hey."
"You okay? I haven't heard from you."
"I'm fine. Busy couple of days. Practice, film, the usual."
"Yeah." A pause. I can hear the apartment behind his voice, can picture every inch of it. "You have a game tonight?"
"Seven o'clock."
"Who?"
"Columbus."
