"You're welcome,” I said.
"Wes—"
"He's handled," Cross said to Jenkins, which was a sentence that I was going to have opinions about as soon as I had the brain power to deploy them. He looked back at me. "I'm taking you home."
"You don't have to—"
"I wasn’t asking for permission.”
The bar went on around us, Jenkins hovering, the highlights cycling on the screens above like none of this had happened, and Cross was standing there with his hand on my arm looking at me with that expression I couldn't crack, and I thought:this is it, this is the version of me he's going to carry around, this is the file, Morrison, twenty-three, liability, confirmed.
The Ice Doc had always thought I was a fuckup.
Tonight I'd just made it easy for him.
"You're very annoying," I said. "For the record."
"I know," Cross said, steering me toward the door.
4
The back door of the bar opened onto an alley that smelled like the end of a long night: dumpsters, cold air, the faint suggestion of a city that hadn't gone to sleep yet. Bare concrete, a single light overhead doing its minimal best. The music was a dull thud through the wall.
I had not agreed to come out here, yet here I was.
"Okay," I said, and turned around. "You can let go now."
Cross let go without ceremony, released my arm and took a step back and stood in the alley with his hands at his sides looking at me like he had all night and nothing better to do with it.
I hated that. The stillness. Most people fidgeted when they were tense, but Cross just absorbed it. He stood there in the cold with those blue eyes and no expression and waited, like he already knew how this was going to go and was just being polite about letting me get there.
I crossed my arms. Mostly to have something to do with them.
"This is dramatic," I said. "I want that on the record."
"You have a grade-two concussion."
"You don't know that."
"I have a strong working theory." He said it the way he said everything, level and precise, like he was reading off a clipboard. "Photosensitivity. Uneven tracking. Delayed response on the right. You flinched at noise twice on the ice. Three times in the bar before the shove." A pause. "Four if you count the door."
I had flinched at the door. I had covered it. Apparently not well enough.
"You keep a running spreadsheet on me, or am I just your favorite hobby?"
His expression didn’t change, and that kind of pissed me off.
"You're symptomatic," he said. "You've been symptomatic since the second period, and you've been managing it instead of reporting it, which means you've had a few hours of a worsening injury and a bar fight on top of it." A pause. "You're leaving."
Notgoing to leave. You'releaving. Like the decision had been made somewhere else and he was just delivering the news.
And the thing was, the thing I was not going to say out loud, was that I got it. I understood the position I was in. I'd spent hours performing fine in a bar while Cross watched from the wall and tallied everything I was doing wrong, and now we were in an alley and the tally was complete and the verdict was exactly what it had always been going to be.
Morrison. Can't help himself. Knew it.
"I need to go back in there," I said.
"No."
