"Andrew," Matthew said. Still not looking up. His hand still on Knox's arm, which was doing significant structural work.
"I'm fine," Knox said. He picked up his fork. Put it down. Picked it up again. "Foster," he said.
Foster looked at him.
"Welcome to the team," Knox said, in the tone of a man saying the opposite of that.
Foster looked at him for a moment. "Thanks," he said. Flat. Sincere. Completely immune to the subtext.
Jenkins, who had been watching this exchange with his fork suspended halfway to his mouth, leaned over to me and said, very quietly: "I like him."
"Don't tell Knox that," I said.
"I heard that," Knox said.
I moved my eggs around the plate.
The thing about road game mornings was that everyone managed the pre-game in their own way and you learned to read the room early.
Dylan ate and said useful things about the opposition and was already mentally on the ice.
Knox performed aggression at any statistic that suggested the other team was good, which was its own kind of preparation.
Jenkins asked questions that revealed he hadn't been listening.
I usually fed off all of it. Usually I was in the middle of it, the noise, the energy, giving it back at a markup. That was the system. That was what I was good at.
Dylan looked at me across the table.
"Did you check in with Mom and Dad?" he said.
"Dad texted me from the hotel,” I said.
Dylan nodded. He picked up his coffee. "You talk to them today?"
"I'll see them after," I said.
Dylan looked at me for a second. Then he looked at his coffee. "Okay," he said, in the tone of a man who had more to say and had decided not to say it.
I pushed my eggs around for another two minutes and then gave up and went to stand in the corridor outside the breakfast room, because the corridor was empty and the eggs were doing nothing for me and I needed approximately thirty seconds of not being watched by Dylan.
The corridor was quiet. Hotel quiet. I leaned against the wall and looked at the carpet, which was aggressively patterned in the way hotel carpets were aggressively patterned, presumably to hide everything that had ever happened to them.
I heard Nathan before I saw him.
Not his voice — just his footsteps, which I had apparently learned to recognize. He came out of the breakfast room, and he was moving with purpose. Then he saw me in the corridor.
He stopped.
The hotel was quiet around us. Somewhere behind the breakfast room door Knox was probably still vibrating about Tomas Selig's save percentage.
Nathan looked at me for a moment. Then he looked at the corridor in both directions—left, right, same check as when he'd pulled me into his room, which felt like a year ago and also like this morning—and then he crossed to where I was standing against the wall.
He kissed me.
His free hand coming up to my jaw the way it always did, the thumb, and his mouth warm and deliberate and—Nathan, just Nathan, the real version, the one from the hotel room and the pizza place and all the rest of it.
He pulled back.
