He stares at me for a long moment. His expression isn't the grin, or the performance. He’s just tired. And raw.
“Toni.”
“Max.”
“You stayed.” He repeats it. Not an accusation. Not a line. Just the fact of it, held up between us in the empty tunnel. As if he's still working out what it means. I already understand. I knew before I stayed.
That’s the part I can’t put in any file. “Post-game observations,” I say. “It’s part of the job.”
He grins. The cut on his lip pulls slightly with it and he doesn’t flinch. “Right.”
My body has never forgotten Rockford. Now it treats eye contact like foreplay.
“Monday, nine o’clock. Don’t be late for the Price call.”
“I won’t.”
I move past him. He doesn’t step aside but he shifts, just enough, which means I pass close. “Hey.” His voice catches me at the door. I look back.
“Thank you,” he says. “For staying.”
I push through the door before my face does something my professional record cannot support. I attend the disaster of a press conference next and need some time to process.
Talia is in the screening room when I duck in there for some time away from the public. She has the good chair. She always has the good chair. This is a fact of our friendship that I accepted in our second year of school when I arrived at the film lab at seven a.m. and found her already there, in the chair with the lumbar support, editing with the focused serenity of a woman who had clearly been there since the previous night.
"How long?" I'd asked back then.
"Define long," she'd said, without looking up.
I've stopped asking since.
The screening room carries the scent of stale coffee, it’s muted the kind that absorbs things rather than amplifying them. Talia has a blanket over her shoulders, it’s the same gray one she's had since junior year, which has survived two dorm rooms, one terrible apartment, and is now apparently doing arena duty. Her feet are on the desk and she has four browser tabs open and a half-eaten granola bar balanced on the monitor housing.
I drop into the other chair. The bad one. Mine by default and by accumulated history. She hands me the other half of the granola bar without looking up. I take it.
Here is a picture of what four years have been like. No performance. No explanation required for why I'm here or what I need. I showed up, and she moved over, handed me a snack,kept working.
I sit with that for exactly ten seconds before I ruin it. “Tell me you saw that,” I say.
Talia doesn’t look up from the editing monitor. “You’ll need to narrow it down. I process approximately fourteen hockey catastrophes per hour.”
“Max Stevens.”
Now she glances up. “Oh. The eye contact press conference.”
I stop walking. “The what?”
“The eye contact press conference.” She rewinds footage with one finger. “This one?”
On-screen: Max at the podium looking directly toward the back of the room with the expression of a man moments away from writing poetry against his will.
“Oh my God.”
Talia pauses the frame dramatically. “See? Here’s the exact second he forgets how language works.”
“I hate this arena.”
“No you don’t.” She zooms in farther. “Unfortunately, you want to climb him like infrastructure.”
