I stood in the equipment room with a roll of tape and the memory of his hand at my temple and I thought, with a clarity that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with four years of distance and two couches and oneokaythat I was still carrying around like a stone in my chest ,
I can’t keep doing this.
Not the next practice. Not the next drill. Not the next Tuesday on the next couch with the next version ofit can't become a bigger thing. I could not do another four days of being structurally fine and hitting my marks and telling Mivo his positioning was good while Felix catalogued exactly where I was in the room and spent enormous, meticulous energy not looking at me.
I could not keep acceptingwe can'tfrom a man who touched my face without thinking.
I looked at him.
He was still looking at his hand. The hand that had done the unauthorized thing. The hand that had been at my temple thirty seconds ago like it belonged there, like it had been there before, like it was simply returning to a place it already knew.
"Felix," I said.
He looked up. His expression was doing the thing , the controlled thing, the architecture of a man reassembling the structure mid,scene, the careful rebuild I had watched happen in hotel rooms and on balconies and across bar tables. The Felix face coming back down over whatever had been there before it.
I watched it happen.
I let it.
"See you tomorrow," I said.
He looked at me for one long second. Something moved in his face , gratitude, maybe, or its complicated cousin, the relief of a man who had been braced for a conversation and been given a door instead. And under it, quieter, the thing that was always underneath with Felix , the thing I had been watching for two years, the look from the dinner table, the look from the hotel room, the look he was very bad at not having.
"Yeah," he said. "Tomorrow."
He walked out.
I stood in the equipment room with my tape and listened to his footsteps down the corridor and the distant sound of the rink door and then silence, the particular silence of a building that was done for the day, emptied out, just ice and cold air and the hum of the refrigeration units keeping the surface perfect for tomorrow.
I looked at the tape in my hand.
My shot had a half,second hesitation in the release. A thing I could feel but not name. I had been trying to fix it with repetition, with drilling, with showing up and doing the work and not thinking about it.
I was starting to think that was not going to work.
I put the tape in my bag.
I turned off the equipment room light.
I walked out.
Chapter Nine
Shay
Charlie called on a Thursday.
Not a text. A call , which with Charlie meant something specific, because Charlie had adapted to the modern era of communication with the ease of a man who had accepted that texts existed but reserved actual phone calls for things that warranted them. A call meant:I have assessed the situation and determined that it requires more than a voice message.
"Friday," he said, when I picked up. "Dinner. Just us."
"Us meaning,"
"Four."
I was quiet for a moment.
"Henry's already cooking," Charlie said. "It's too late to say no. He's sourced something."
