"For what it's worth," I said, "you can throw up on me if you want. I feel like I owe you one."
Something happened at the corner of Nathan’s mouth. Not a laugh. The thing adjacent to it.
"I'll pass," he said.
"The offer stands."
He looked at me. Those blue eyes, less focused than usual, more present than usual, both things at once.
"You don't have to go," he said. To the ceiling. Not looking at me.
I didn't say anything.
"Leo likes you," he said.
I glanced down at Leo, who had followed us down the hall and was now sitting in the doorway looking at me with his warm brown eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
Nathan lay back on top of the covers without getting undressed, which I was going to let happen because it wasn't worth the conversation, and I went back to the living room and took the couch and Leo climbed up and arranged himself on my chest like an animal who had decided this was his location and wasn't taking questions.
The apartment was quiet.
I stared at the ceiling.
Since the first game,I thought.
The first game. Nathan had been carrying this since my first game, when I’d thought he was the Ice Doc.
Two years of Nathan looking at me like I was a problem he was managing.
Two years of me looking at Nathan like he was the problem.
We had both been wrong about what kind of problem the other one was.
Leo purred on my chest, a small engine, steady and warm. Somewhere down the hall Nathan was asleep or getting there, and the apartment smelled like clean soap, and I was lying on Nathan Cross's couch in the dark thinkingsince the first game.
17
Practice was at nine, and Nathan wasn't there.
I noticed at warm-ups, which was when Nathan usually appeared at the boards, tablet in hand, running his pre-practice checks.
The boards were empty. The training staff was there, the assistant coaches were there, Coach was there with his coffee and his clipboard and his expression of mild existential suffering that he wore to every practice.
No Nathan Cross.
I told myself it wasn't notable. Nathan had things to do that didn't involve standing at the boards watching drills. He had paperwork and assessments and probably a whole section of his tablet dedicated to things that had nothing to do with me, and the fact that I knew his schedule well enough to clock his absence in the first five minutes of warm-ups was—that was just familiarity. Proximity. We'd been in the same building for months.
I was fine.
"Morrison!" Knox, from the blue line, with the particular volume he reserved for when I'd done something that wasted histime. "Are you skating or are you sightseeing? Because if you're sightseeing I've got notes."
"I'm skating," I said.
"Then skate like it!"
I skated like it.
