Nathan:Different.
Me:Good different or bad different
Nathan:Yes.
I laughed. Right there on the ice, at nine thirty a.m., loud enough that Jenkins looked over and then looked away again when he saw I was just looking at my phone.
Me:Come over tonight. My place this time!
Nathan:I will have notes to finish.
Me:Please??
Nathan:We can order food.
And he did. He came over at seven with his fountain pen and the notebook he'd been keeping since the new role started, and he sat at my kitchen table and finished his notes while I watched film on the couch, which was the most domestic thing that had ever happened in this apartment.
My apartment, for context, still contained: two phone chargers on the couch, one of them plugged into nothing, a single skate near the door whose partner I had located yesterday and reunited it with, and a stack of takeout containers near the sink. They’d been organized into a neat pile at some point tonight, which I had not done, which Nathan had apparently done when he came in without mentioning it.
I watched him write in the notebook with the fountain pen and thought:this is just what it looks like now.
He looked up.
"What," he said.
"Nothing," I said.
He went back to his notes.
I went back to the film.
We stayed like that for a while. The apartment doing its thing around us. The city outside doing its thing. Nathan's fountain pen and my game film and the takeout containers organized into a neat stack near the sink.
Later, when the notes were done and the film was done and Nathan was making tea in my kitchen with the kettle he had brought over last week because he had opinions about my kettle which he had expressed once and would apparently not be expressing again because he'd just solved the problem, I said:
"How is it actually?"
Nathan looked up from the kettle.
"The new role," I said. "How is it actually?"
He thought about it for a moment. Nathan thinking about something looked like stillness: not the managed professionalstillness but the real kind, the kind that meant something was being genuinely considered rather than filtered.
"Different," he said.
"You said that."
"I know." He poured the water. "It's a different kind of work. Less immediate. More—" He paused. "More removed from the outcome."
"Is that good or bad?"
"I don't know yet," he said. "Ask me in six months."
He brought the tea to the couch and sat at his end of it. Leo arranged himself between us. The apartment did its thing.
I watched him for a minute. Nathan with the tea and the notebook closed now and the fountain pen capped and his hands around the mug—Nathan without anywhere to be, which was new, which Nathan was still figuring out what to do with.
"You can come to the game Friday," I said.
