Me:u knew that they knew?
Nathan:It seemed likely.
A pause.
Nathan:Come over. After.
Me: I love you, too.
I put my phone in my pocket.
We had a game in two hours.
We lost.
Not terribly. It was a tight game. Nobody said much. I said less than usual, which Jenkins clocked and didn't comment on.
I played fine. Not well, not badly. Fine, which for me was its own kind of bad, the kind that didn't show up in the stats but that I could feel in the way you felt things when you were playing with half your brain somewhere else entirely.
The other half was at Nathan's apartment.
I showered. Got dressed. Was almost at the door when Dylan appeared at my elbow.
I felt my whole body do the brace. Because this was how it went, this was the system. After a loss Dylan found me and he had observations and he had been holding them for the appropriate amount of time and that time was now.
The third period. The gap in coverage. The moments I hadn't read, the moments I'd been slow, the general Wesley Morrison inventory of tonight's failures delivered in a flat voice to somewhere slightly past my left ear.
I was ready for it.
I had been through this enough times to know the shape of it. I squared my shoulders. I thought about the third period. I ran through my defensive zone decisions and identified the three that were going to come up and prepared my arguments for all three, which were as follows: I'd read the play correctly, I'd read the play incorrectly but for defensible reasons, and that one wasn't my fault and I had witnesses.
Dylan looked at me for a moment.
"I know what he did," Dylan said.
I had prepared the wrong arguments.
I stopped. "What?"
"Cross." Dylan said it like the name was information. "I know what he did. The job. What he left."
I didn't say anything.
"That's not a small thing," Dylan said. "Leaving a job like that."
"He didn't leave medicine," I said. "He left one position."
"I know what he left," Dylan said. The jaw again. "It means he choseyou.”
The locker room was mostly empty now. Just us and the overhead lights and the hum of the facility doing whatever the facility did at eleven p.m. when everyone had gone home.
"So don't you dare fuck it up," Dylan said.
"I'm not going to fuck it up."
"I know," Dylan said. "I'm saying it anyway."
I looked at him.
