She reads my face. "Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to say something insufferable."
"I was going to say," I tell her, "that you are the most interesting person I have ever been in a room with.” I take a beat. “And that it works because you taste amazing!”
She picks up her mug. Hides her face in it. The tips of her ears go pink, and I file that next to everything else I’m keeping. The word MINE moves through my head before I can stop it and I don't examine that.
The thing I want to say sits in my brain. All that momentum, nowhere to go. You stayed. Two words. I couldn't even get them out before I stopped myself, which is not something that has ever happened to me. I have never once in my life started a sentence and swallowed it. I chirp. I run my mouth. I say the thing before I've decided whether to say it. That is the entire architecture of who I am.
She breaks off a piece of croissant. Sets it on the edge of her plate.
I look at the Lake.
“The Bakersfield game Thursday,” she says, because she is already back, already in the role.
“I know.”
“Your focus has to be there. Mine does too.”
“I know, Toni.”
She wraps both hands around the mug. Outside, Chicago is going. Traffic. Somewhere a horn. “What if it doesn’t have to be nothing?” she says. I put down my fork.
“Not public.” She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at the lake. “Not anything that touches work. But not like last night didn’t happen.” Her thumb traces the rim of the mug. “I’m not asking you to pretend.”
I let the silence sit. I know better than to jump at this. “Define the terms,” I say.
“I’m still your compliance trainer. In public, in the building, in front of anyone, that’s all I am. But privately.” She sets the mug down. “Privately I don’t want to act like this is nothing.”
“How privately?”
“Private like two people who are...” She pauses. A subtle tension locks her expression. “Figuring this out. No one knows.”
I should push for more. I know I should. I should tell her this is not enough, that I have spent weeks watching her from across the ice and across conference tables and across restaurantbooths pretending I don’t know exactly how she sounds when she finally lets go, and privately is not what I want.
But she is offering me something she wasn’t offering an hour ago, and Toni Amato doesn’t offer things she doesn’t mean. “No pictures,” I say. “No one knows.”
She meets my eyes. “Yes.”
“Deal.”
She picks up the coffee. Finishes it. Sets it down with precision, the small deliberate movements that are so entirely her. She doesn’t smile. The guarded face opens, just at the edges.
I take it.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Toni Amato
The secret has a texture I wasn't prepared for. It feels like this: walking into morning skate and registering exactly where he is on the ice before I've looked for him. Filing the information under professional awareness and feeling the specific dishonesty of that label. It feels like the moment in the film session when our knees are four inches apart under the table and neither of us moves. Those four inches are entirely voluntary, and we both know it and say nothing.
It feels, most accurately, like the text at eleven forty-three that reads:
Max: You left your pen.
My pen. On his kitchen table. It was not left by accident. Ileft it because some part of me wanted a reason, and I am only prepared to admit this to myself at eleven forty-three p.m. in the dark with nobody watching.
