Page 58 of Omega’s Forward

JP is quiet for a long time.

He turns his cup a quarter, and then another quarter, and looks at the syrup shelf. I let him take as long as he wants. He is the only living soul who knows any of this.

“Okay,” he says at last. “I get it. If Sacco picked up a phone to put me down, I’d never say his name again either.”

Another quarter turn of the cup.

JP shrugs, slow. “It was a knife. I’m not arguing that. But maybe it didn’t have your name on it.”

“He owns the team, JP.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t ask for it and never pretended he wanted it.” He drains the coffee and stands and puts the chair back where he found it, one-handed. “Hockey isn’t everything, Brody.”

He knocks twice on the table on his way past.

My hour ran out ten minutes ago and I’m still sitting here.

Hockey isn’t everything. Maybe not, but it’s been everything to me for most of my life.

But it doesn’t matter anyway.

He doesn’t want me back. He made that clear. He said so at the beginning. He made it clear after.

You can turn that over as many ways as you like. If any part of him had wanted any part of this, I’d know.

There’s no point mooning over somebody who doesn’t want you. Every sixteen-year-old on the planet knows that one.

The latte has gone cold. Cold, it’s even sweeter. Syrup all the way down, cinnamon thick in the last swallow.

I drink it anyway.

The kid calls “see you next week” while I’m shouldering the door open. Automatic, the way he’d say it to anybody. I lift a hand without turning around, and I don’t correct him.

18. Everett

I drink my tea out on the terrace, both hands around my mug, watching the river traffic push against the tide.

My flat is on the top floor of a converted warehouse. It’s exposed brick and old beams. I was worried when I bought it that the large open space wouldn’t retain enough heat over the damp London winter, but it’s always been cozy.

The terrace was the reason I bought it. On a clear day I can see the whole stacked skyline across the water. Today it’s gray. London does gray properly, and I’ve missed it. That sounds strange, but there’s something soft and muted about a cloudy London day.

The tea is peppermint, because my stomach is currently unreliable before noon. Coffee is out entirely. The smell of it drifting up from the café at street level nearly finished me this morning, which is a cruel trick to play on a man whose drink of choice is espresso combined with syrup.

Pumpkin spice isn’t a big London thing. There’s a café on the far side of the city that does a version that comes close, but an hour and a half of London commuting doesn’t make it worth it. The place on Fifth has a lot to answer for.

Priya sends me a short club summary every Friday. Belanger has the room eating out of his hand. None of it needs me, which is the point. I probably don’t even need to read it. If there’s an emergency, she’d call me, but what kind of hockey emergency would need me to do something from here in a completely different country? The team is in capable hands.

I did the right thing, coming home. My work is here. My life is here. If you ask anyone in this city what the Barons are, they’ll think you’re talking about the aristocracy.

Which makes the subscription harder to explain.

It’s an American sports package meant for homesick expats, and it cost an indecent amount of money. I paid a year up front without blinking. There was a time in this city when my mother fed the meter in fifty-pence pieces and skipped dinner so I didn’t have to. Wasting money is the entire point of having it.

I hate hockey. That hasn’t changed. And on game nights I’ve been sitting up into the small hours with the lights off watching the Barons. I haven’t missed a game yet.

Okay, I don’t watch the Barons. I watch him.

He plays angry now. Even I can see it, and the commentators certainly can; they love him for it. They talk about his physical game while I sit alone in the dark of my own living room, an ocean away, wanting to bite him. Then the final horn goes and I take myself to bed, disgusted, and the next game night I’m back on the sofa with the lights off.