"Jenkins—"
“Your teammates are fine." A beat. "You are not fine."
The alley was cold, and my head was doing that thing where every sound had slightly too much weight to it. I was standing in a bar alley at midnight being looked at by a doctor who had spent the better part of four hours confirming everything he already believed about me, and the embarrassment of it had aspecific shape, sharper than the medical stuff, sharper than the headache.
He'd watched me perform all night. He'd stood against that wall and counted my flinches and counted my drinks and watched me climb on a table and get into a fight. Underneath all of it he'd been running the same assessment he always ran, the one that started and ended withMorrison is a problem that needs managing.
I laughed. It came out wrong.
"Relax," I said. "Franchise property is still intact." I gestured at myself. "Minor dings only. Nothing that affects the resale value."
Cross hadn’t taken his eyes off me.
I kept going because stopping felt worse. "I know that's what this is. The liability thing. Make sure Morrison doesn't destroy himself and wreck the season. I get it, it's your job, I'm not—" I moved my hand. "I'm not making it weird."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Are you done?" he said.
"Probably not."
"Your injury is worsening," he said. "Not because of the team. Because neurological injuries compound. Because what's a grade two tonight is a grade three tomorrow if you keep doing what you're doing. Because that shove hit an already compromised system and you're standing in an alley arguing with me instead of lying down in a dark room." A pause. Nothing changed in his face. "That's what this is."
No heat. No emphasis. Just the words, dropped into the cold air between us like facts he was reporting.
I didn't have anything to put on top of that.
The overhead light buzzed. My head was a dull constant pressure behind my left eye. I thought about the incident report he was going to write tomorrow, the one that started withpatient demonstrated predictably poor judgmentand went downhill from there. I thought that if he'd had any lingering doubt about what kind of player I was, what kind of person, I'd cleared it up nicely tonight.
Good work, Morrison. Very efficient.
"Seven a.m.," I said. "I was already coming in."
"You were already coming in," he agreed. "Tonight you're going home."
I turned toward the mouth of the alley. I moved with the energy of someone who had decided to leave, not someone who had been told to, and these were two different things and the distinction mattered, and my right foot came down slightly wrong.
Not a fall. A stumble. The ground not quite where my brain thought it was.
I reached for the wall.
Cross had me first.
Both hands, one on my arm and one at my back, immediate and certain, and he steadied me without a word and didn't let go, and I stood there with the brick wall in front of me and Cross's hands on me.
He thought I was a fuckup.
He was standing in an alley at midnight holding me up because I couldn't manage a flat surface, and he thought I was a fuckup, and the worst part was that I couldn't currently make a compelling argument against it.
"Okay," I said, to the wall.
Cross didn't say anything.
He just held on.
The car was exactlywhat I would have guessed if I'd ever thought about what Cross drove, which I hadn't,obviously, but if I had.
Dark, mid-range luxury, the kind of thing that cost enough to mean something but not enough to announce itself. Immaculate. Of course it was immaculate. The interior smelled faintly like clean leather and something that was probably the same soap I kept accidentally noticing.
