He met my eyes with that unhurried focus. “Because I’ve been wrong about people before. And paid for it. I decided long ago that I’d rather be slow to conclude than fast and wrong.”
The ice bag lay useless now. I picked it up, set it aside—anything to keep my hands busy.
“Sixty-three days,” I said.
“Sixty-three,” he agreed.
“You watched me for sixty-three days.”
“I did.” Then he gave me that quiet, slight smile—like a secret handshake. “And I’ll add one more.” He stood. “Ride’s here.”
I hauled myself off the table, accepted a shirt from the nurse, but refused Theron’s jacket. Outside, Denver felt cold—but I’d grown up cheering a hockey game in subzero wind off Lake Michigan. If I could handle that, I could handle tonight. I followed him out, ready for one more day under his watch.
Chapter six
Odd-Man Rush - An offensive rush where attackers outnumber defenders.
Theron
The ride back was quiet, and I tried not to be bothered he’d refused my jacket.
Dante sat in the passenger seat of the car I’d called—a sedan from the service the team used, anonymous and warm—and stared out the window at Michigan Avenue sliding past in its nighttime version, all sodium light and late traffic and theemptiness of a city that hadn’t gone to sleep so much as changed shifts. The nurse had found him a clean shirt from somewhere, and he wore it now with the careful stillness of someone managing a headache they weren’t going to mention.
Somewhere between the hospital entrance and the hotel, he’d tried to convince me he was okay on his own. “I’m fine,” he said, to the car window. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
The hotel lobby was quiet at this hour, the desk staff discreet in the way hotel staff learned to be when professional athletes came through at midnight looking like they’d lost an argument with a wall. The elevator was empty. We rode it to the fourth floor in silence that had a feeling to it—not uncomfortable, not quite comfortable, something in between that I didn’t examine too closely.
His room was 412. He had his keycard out before we reached the door, which told me he’d been thinking about the moment he could be alone inside it for at least the last twenty minutes.
“I’ve got it from here,” he said at the door.
I looked at him. The left side of his face had settled into the early stages of what was going to be a serious bruise by morning—the cheekbone swollen, the skin around his eye already darkening at the edges. His eyes were clearer than they’d been at the hospital, which was something, but the slight glassiness hadn’t fully resolved, and the way he was holding himself—carefully, with the specific economy of someone managing pain across multiple sites—told me the ibuprofen had taken the edge off and nothing more.
“Get ready for bed,” I said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You heard what the doctor said,” I told him. “So did I. Twenty minutes.”
The look he gave me was the same one he’d been giving me across the locker room for two months—direct, slightly challenging, the look of someone who’d decided that meeting my eyes was the one form of resistance available to him and he was going to use it. I held it without difficulty, because I’d had two hundred years of practice at being immovable when I’d made up my mind, and after a moment, he exhaled and went inside.
I took his key card and went to my own room—415, three doors down—and changed out of the jacket and into a pullover, because the jacket was the kind of thing you wore when you were performing the role of head coach and this night had moved past that in ways I wasn’t prepared to think about. I washed my hands. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror for some unknown reason.
The man looking back at me was technically fifty-eight years old, which was the age I’d decided on when I constructed this version of myself, and which suited me well enough that I’d stopped noticing most days. Salt-and-pepper hair, thick at the temples and going properly silver at the crown now—that had happened gradually, the way things happened when you allowed them to move at their natural pace rather than managing them. Deep-set eyes that were gray in ordinary light and did something else in my dragon—they shifted then toward copper, toward something older and less easily named. The lines in my face were the lines of a man who’d spent decades outdoors and in arenas, and they fit. What no one else knew was that I would still look fifty-eight in a thousand years.
I gave him twenty-two minutes. Then I went back down the hall and knocked a warning then used the key card.
He was on top of the covers, fully dressed, shoes still on, one arm tucked under the pillow and the other hanging off the edge of the mattress. Out cold. The lamp on the nightstand was on, because he’d made it that far and no further, and in the warmyellow light of it, he looked younger than twenty-three—which was already young enough to be an uncomfortable observation.
I stood in the doorway for a moment.
The room had the standard hotel layout—one king bed, a desk, a chair in the corner that nobody ever used. The television was off. He’d obviously walked in, sat down on the edge of the bed, and simply stopped.
I came in and let the door close behind me.
His shoes first—I crouched and worked the laces loose with the same methodical patience I brought to everything, eased them off without the kind of movement that would translate upward into a sleeping body. He stirred once, a small sound, and then settled. The socks underneath were plain white, the kind you bought in multipacks, and for some reason, that detail made me smile.
