"Yes."
"Thank you," I said.
A pause.
"You're welcome," he said.
We sat there a while longer.
The warm night did its thing.
Tomorrow we were going home.
Nathan had already figured out what home looked like.
I was, I was fully aware, completely in love with him.
That hadn't changed.
That was not going to change.
"Nathan," I said.
"Mm."
"Obviously," I said.
A pause.
"Obviously," he said.
32
Ilooked around the Wardens locker room.
I took a deep breath.
Cleared my throat.
"I have a boyfriend," I announced.
Jenkins kept talking.
Knox didn't look up from his phone.
Dylan taped his stick.
I looked around the room again. Twenty-three people. Nobody had reacted. Nobody had even glanced over.
There was a new guy at the end of the room.
Not new like Foster was new, Foster had been new in the way that meant unknown quantity, unknown energy, unknown whether Knox was going to adopt him or eat him. This was different.
This was Dr. Paulson, who had been the Wardens team physician for a couple weeks now, who had a clipboard and good credentials and had done nothing wrong, and who was not Nathan.
Nobody had said anything about it. Not officially. Not in the locker room. The team had collectively absorbed the change the way teams absorbed things they didn't want to examine directly.
Dr. Paulson did his job. The team let him do it. Knox had been slightly more aggressive in every interaction, which Knox would deny and which everyone had noticed.
