“Are you serious right now?”
“I’m always serious.”
He wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring out the stupid windshield, telling me I couldn’t skate, and he wouldn’t even look at me?
I huffed a laugh. "Pulling people off the ice," I said. "You love it." A pause. "Or is it just me you love it with?"
He didn't answer immediately, which with Cross meant something. Cross always knew what he was going to say.
"You're not cleared," he said.
"I need your permission?"
"As the team doctor, yes."
The words sat between us, plain and undefended, just yes, no explanation attached, no apology for it.
I got out of the car.
The air outside was cold and damp. I had my door half-closed when my foot found the curb at the wrong angle, not a fall, not a stumble, just a brief disagreement between my foot and the ground about where exactly the ground was. I caught myself on the door frame.
In my peripheral vision, Cross moved.
Not much. Just forward, toward the passenger side. I didn't look at him directly. I didn't want to see the expression, because I was standing on a sidewalk in his shirt with a headache that was still a four and a half and the last thing I needed was whatever Cross's face was doing right now.
I pushed the door shut.
The car didn't move immediately. I knew this because I walked to the building entrance without looking back. He was still there when I pulled the door open. I could feel it in the way you felt things you were pretending not to notice.
Then I heard him pull away.
The lobby was warm and bright and smelled like the building, familiar and ordinary, and I took the elevator up and stood in it watching the numbers and running an inventory.
Head: four, maybe trending three. Stomach: resolved, mostly.
Dignity: not available at this time, check back later.
I got to my door and got inside and stood in my apartment, which was a chaos of unpacked boxes and takeout containers and the accumulated evidence of a person who lived there without really living there, and looked at all of it.
Then I caught a faint trace of clean soap.
I looked down.
His shirt. Cross's shirt, too wide in the shoulders, still on my body, which I had apparently walked out of Cross's apartment and into the car and out of the car and into my building and up the elevator in without once taking it off.
Great, I thought.
Now I smell like him.
I pulled it off, dropped it on the couch, and went to find my own clothes—and I did not think about the way he'd moved toward the passenger door before I'd slammed it.
I did not think about any of it.
I thought about it the entire time.
10
Practice was at eight the next day, which was a war crime under any circumstances.
