"You left," he said.
Nothello.Just that, breathy and immediate.
"I went home," I said.
"After the game." A muscle in his jaw. "You didn't—" He stopped. Something moved through his expression, brief and unguarded, and then the assembled look arrived—the professional posture pulling itself back into place like he'd caught himself leaning. "We need to talk about what happened."
"Okay," I said.
He glanced over his shoulders to the hallway outside my apartment. "Not out here."
I looked at him for a second. The loosened tie. The unbuttoned coat. The something behind his eyes that was doing its best to look like nothing.
"Okay," I said, and stepped back and let him in.
Cross walked into the middle of my living room and started talking.
He was saying something important. I could tell it was important by the quality of his voice.Professional boundarywas a phrase I caught.Team context. Hisrole, myrole. I registered these the way you registered weather: present, noted, not fully processed.
He had very blue eyes.
I was thinking about that, too. About how blue they were in my apartment, in the low light of my living room with the lamp on. I had been cataloguing the different versions of Nathan Cross's eyes for months without meaning to and the apartment version was—
He said something aboutbefore it became something that affected—
He was still talking.
Something about the team. Something about what was best.
He had a small scar below his left ear that I'd never noticed before. Faint. Old. I wondered how he got it and then I wondered if I was allowed to ask that.
I was standing in my own space in bare feet with my hands in the pockets of my sweats, and Nathan Cross had driven here to tell me something important that I had almost entirely not heard because of his eyes and the scar below his left ear.
"You drove here," I finally said, interrupting him, probably.
Cross froze.
"You could've texted," I said. "You could've waited until tomorrow. Pulled me aside at the rink, kept it professional.” Ididn't move yet. "Or, shit, you could have called, I guess. But you got in your car tonight and drove here."
He didn't say anything.
"Why'd you drive here, doc?"
The question sat in the room between us. Cross looked at me with that expression, and his jaw was set and his hands were still and he was doing everything exactly right except for the part where none of it was convincing either of us.
I moved.
Not fast. Not the way I'd moved in the corridor. I crossed the distance slowly this time, giving him every foot of it to make a decision, and I watched his face and his face watched me back, and he didn't step back, didn't do anything except stand there while I closed the space between us until there was barely any left.
We were close enough that I had to angle my chin up slightly.
Cross was taller, but I was right there. I could feel the warmth of him and hear him breathe and see the way he was looking at me, which wasn't clinical at all.
"You should—" he started.
"Tell me to go to hell," I said. "Or don't."
I waited. He was definitely going to tell me to go to hell, right? Because the alternative was. . .
