I look forward to the sessions. I tell myself this is professional. I tell myself these things because the alternative is a classification I cannot afford.
Tuesday. I call my mother. We talk on Tuesdays because we have talked on Tuesdays since I left for college and because my mother believes that routines are the infrastructure of love, which is evident in every Tuesday call, every birthday card that arrives two days early, every container of kimchi that appears at my door when she visits, labeled with the date and heating instructions in her precise handwriting.
"How is the apartment?" she asks.
"Fine."
"Fine means small."
"Fine means adequate."
"You need a bigger kitchen. You can't cook properly in a kitchen that small."
"I don't cook, Mom."
"That is the problem I'm describing."
We discuss Christmas. I'll fly home on the twenty-third. She's making japchae and galbi and the sweet rice cake that takes two days and that my father pretends to help with and actually hinders. My father is a hockey coach who understands zone entries but cannot be trusted with glutinous rice flour.
She asks about work. I tell her about the roster evaluation process, the analytics systems, the quality of the facility. She listens the way she listens to everything: completely, with the full attention of a woman who spent thirty years as a librarian and who treats every conversation as a text that deserves careful reading.
"Are you making friends?" she asks.
"I'm making professional relationships."
"Those are not the same thing."
"They're sufficient."
"Sufficient is the saddest word in the English language, Caleb."
She asks if I'm bringing anyone home for Christmas. I say no. She says "Hmm." The "Hmm" is Soo-jin's way of marking a page she intends to return to later. I have heard this "Hmm" approximately four hundred times in my life. It has never once meant acceptance.
We hang up. I sit in my apartment, which is fine, which is adequate, which is sufficient. Which contains everything I need and nothing I want. The gap between need and want is the space I have been living in since Rebecca stood in the doorway of our shared apartment in Nashville and said, "I hope you find someone you're willing to be interrupted by."
I have not been interrupted by anyone in four years.
The film room. 10 PM. The screens glow. I'm reviewing neutral-zone forechecks from the Detroit game.
The door opens. Nolan walks in. Bag over his shoulder. Jacket on. He sits down. He smells faintly like cold air and athletic tape, the same way he has smelled every night for six weeks, and the consistency of the smell is doing something to me that I cannot professionally justify.
He looks at the screen. His jacket sleeve brushes the armrest of my chair as he settles in. He does not notice. I notice.
I press play.
We watch the forecheck develop. He points out a weak-side rotation that I missed. I show him the passing-lane heat map that confirms his observation. We are good at this. We are better at this together than either of us is alone.
Between the hockey sentences, there are silences. The silences used to be empty. The silences are not empty anymore. The silences are the space where his sleeve is touching myarmrest and his coffee is on the console next to my coffee and the two cups are closer together than they need to be.
I move my coffee slightly to give him more room. He does not adjust his cup. The cups stay close. The closeness is not data.
There is a sequence on the screen I have watched forty times and I play it again anyway, because playing it means he stays, and him staying is the only outcome I am actually managing for. He catches me. Of course he catches me. He reads delay the way he reads a forecheck.
"You've seen this clip," he says.
"I'm checking something."
"You're checking whether I'll leave when it ends."
