Worse. That was way worse.
"What do I want from you?" I tried instead, which was technically more accurate. It was also something I absolutely could not say out loud to Nathan in a restaurant.
I knew what I wanted. That was the problem. I had a very detailed answer to that question, and it was not something you said on a first date. If it was a date. Which it probably was.
"So," I said to my reflection, one more time, with feeling. "Do you come here often?"
My reflection stared at me.
"That's a joke," I told it. "I know that's not—I'm not going to say that."
A pause.
"Probably."
It was time for a different approach. The crowd approach. The thing that had never failed me: the energy, the arms, the grin, the full Morrison experience. I rolled my shoulders back. Took a breath.
I did the Morr Roar.
Full volume. Both hands up, curved into paws. I always did the paws, the crowd loved the paws, fifteen thousand people lost their minds for the paws. I did the paws in my bathroom, at my own reflection, alone, forty minutes before a dinner that was probably a date with my team's doctor.
The sound bounced off the tile and came back at me from four directions.
I stood there in the ringing silence with my hands still up, still curved, still in the paw position, looking at myself.
A grown man.
A professional athlete.
In a bathroom.
Doing paws.
I lowered my hands very slowly.
"Nobody saw that," I told my reflection.
My reflection had seen it. My reflection had seen the whole thing.
"Get it together," I said.
I looked at myself properly for a second. The hair was doing the thing it did, which was whatever it wanted. It was disheveled in a way that worked on the ice and in bars and which I was hoping also worked in restaurants. Brown eyes, which Nathan had looked into approximately a hundred times for medical reasons and which I was hoping he might look into tonight for different ones. The general Wes Morrison situation, which reporters called boyish and which my brother called annoying and which fifteen thousand people did a lion roar for, for whatever that was worth.
It was worth something.
It had always been worth something.
The question was whether it was worth anything to Nathan Cross.
Get it together,I told myself again.
I went back to the closet.
I had things. I had a lot of things. I had expensive things that fit correctly because I had a stylist now apparently, or I had been dressed by a stylist once, and the experience had made me briefly aware that most of my clothes were wrong in ways I couldn't fully articulate.
Too formal: trying too hard.
Too casual: not trying.
