The cold air hit him and he stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and the warmth already gone from his skin. Across the street, the sign read N U T S in its four surviving letters.
He should go home. He should drive to the apartment and do the rest of the routine, the elevator and the empty kitchen and the bed that was good for recovery and nothing else, and sleep seven hours and wake up and go to practice and be better. It worked. It had kept him functional for eight years infour different locker rooms and three different cities and every version of a night this bad.
It worked fine.
His phone was in his hand. He was looking at the bar’s website, a staff page with a photo that was years out of date. He wasn’t looking for the hours. He knew the hours. He was looking for a name, something that would tell him when the other bartender worked, the one who poured the good bourbon and didn’t ask and didn’t hover and didn’t look at Milo and didn’t ignore him, and the difference between those two things was the difference between a room where the game replayed in his head and one where it didn’t.
Adrian Cross. The name sat on the screen in small type next to a photo that didn’t look like him.
Milo closed the browser. Put the phone in his pocket.
He drove home. The apartment was cold and the kitchen was empty and the refrigerator hummed and the bed was exactly as he’d left it. He sat on the edge in the unlit room and pulled off his shoes and set them at the foot of the frame, aligned, even, and lay back and stared at the ceiling.
Tomorrow. Seven AM. Be better.
The cheap bourbon sat bad in his stomach. Everything about tonight sat bad. The game, the phone, the Columbus jersey, the bartender who asked what he wanted because the one who already knew wasn’t there.
He closed his eyes.
Adrian Cross. He’d found the name and now he couldn’t unfind it, and the name was doing something in his head that names weren’t supposed to do, taking up space, sitting in the front of his brain where the game replay usually lived, and for the first time in as long as he could remember the game wasn’t the last thing in his head before sleep.
He turned onto his side and waited, and the last thought wasn’t the shot or the boards or Kovac’s voice. It was the sports radio playing where the vinyl should have been, and a room that had everything except the one thing that made it work.
Adrian
Adrian heard the door before he saw it open.
He’d been hearing that door all night. Every time it swung, his pulse did a stupid thing, and every time it was someone who wasn’t the man on the third stool, his pulse settled back down and he went back to wiping the bar, which did not need to be wiped. He’d wiped it four times. The mahogany was going to file a restraining order.
This was a problem. This was a recognized, identified, categorized problem, and Adrian was handling it the way he handled all problems, which was to pretend it didn’t exist while his body did whatever it wanted.
The door opened again. Cold air, a big frame moving through it without hesitation, head down, no scan of the room, just the direct line from the entrance to the third stool from the right. Adrian’s pulse did the stupid thing. He reached for the bourbon. The good one, top shelf, the bottle he kept back from the rail for this stool and nobody else. He poured two fingers without measuring and set it down and the man sat and wrapped both hands around it and nodded once.
That was the whole transaction. It had been the whole transaction for two months, and Adrian’s heart rate was up like he’d just sprinted a block, which was embarrassing on a level he was choosing not to examine.
He knew the man’s name. Everyone in Detroit who watched hockey knew it. He didn’t use it. Using it would make the man on the third stool a person instead of a pattern, and Adrian had a rule about patterns. Specifically: don’t fall for them. He’d had that rule for two years and it had worked great right up until a grumpy hockey player started showing up most nights and sitting in the same spot and wrapping his hands around a glass with a grip that said more about his night than any conversation could.
The Grotto was doing its midweek thing. Chet Baker on the turntable, four customers, the black walls pulling the room in close and the cherry mahogany catching what light there was. Adrian moved behind the bar and wiped things. He was very good at wiping things. World-class, honestly. If there were a professional wiping league he’d be first-round draft pick.
He needed to stop thinking about the draft.
The man on the third stool had his jaw doing the thing it always did, the muscle at the hinge flexing and resetting on a rhythm that had nothing to do with anything he was eating, because he wasn’t eating anything. He was just sitting there, holding his bourbon, being angry at it. Or being angry near it. The bourbon was probably innocent.
Adrian had been watching this jaw for two months. He could write a thesis on this jaw. The clench started on the left and traveled right and the release, when it came, happened in reverse. He knew this. He had catalogued it. He was a painter who spent his life training his eye to catch details other people missed, and this particular detail was ruining his life.
Not ruining. Complicating.
Okay, ruining.
The man was shorter than you’d expect for a hockey player. Five-eleven, maybe, with hair that needed a cut and eyes Adrian had gotten a direct look at only twice. Both times the look hadlasted about half a second before the man redirected, and both times Adrian had been left with the distinct impression of having glanced at something he wasn’t supposed to see. Not anger. Not sadness. Something underneath both of those things that didn’t have a name yet, or had a name the man wasn’t willing to use.
A couple near the jukebox was working through some kind of disagreement that had shifted into the resolution phase. Adrian gave them ten minutes before one of them ordered a drink to celebrate. He was right in seven.
* * *
The man’s glass was low. Adrian picked up the bourbon and walked to his end of the bar, and his sleeve rode up as he reached to pour. The blue-black paint stain on his inner wrist, the one that had been there so long it was basically a tattoo, caught the light.
The man’s eyes dropped to it.
