Page 39 of Take Two

Cyaire studies me for a moment, something shifting quietly behind his expression.

“That sounds kind of nice too,” he says, and there is a quality to it that sits somewhere between admiration and longing, like a man looking at a version of a life he had once and is no longer sure he can find his way back to.

Before I can follow that thread anywhere, his attention locks onto a food stall ahead of us with the focused intensity of a man who has made his decision and is not accepting alternatives. The smell reaches us a half second later, warm and deeply fried and entirely persuasive.

Fried jumbo shrimp, piled generously in paper trays, disappearing into the hands of satisfied people with no regrets.

Cyaire moves toward the stall at a pace that is not quite running but is making no effort to pretend otherwise. He orders without consulting the menu, without hesitation, without the faintest flicker of internal debate.

I look at the menu. I look at him.

“You’re not worried about your nutritionist?” I ask, already reading the answer in the expression on his face.

He doesn’t even pause. “Not after ten hours of filming.”

“What about your trainer?”

“Tomorrow,” he says, with the serene confidence of a man who has made peace with his choices, “is tomorrow’s problem.”

I shake my head. “That is a terrible philosophy.”

“That,” he replies, turning to face me with full conviction, “is the hard-earned wisdom of a man who has spent ten hours pretending to be someone else in the June heat, and who has therefore earned every single fried shrimp in this tray.”

The certainty in his voice is so absolute that I laugh and find myself at the counter without having fully decided to be there.

I order some for myself. Why not. The Stanley Cup feels like sufficient moral clearance.

Cyaire lifts an eyebrow as we step away from the counter together, both of us carrying paper trays.

“I thought professional athletes were disciplined.”

“It’s summer,” I say, balancing my tray in one hand and gesturing toward the waterfront with the other. “Training camp is weeks away. My body is a temple that is currently between visiting hours.”

He still looks skeptical.

I shrug. “I have a Stanley Cup. I am also a man who has earned a few fried shrimp.”

That earns exactly the reaction I was hoping for. The laugh comes freely this time, bright and unguarded, and I file it away somewhere I should probably not be filing things.

We find a spot with a clear view of the water and spend the next half hour doing very little except eating and talking. The conversation moves wherever it wants to. One story opens a door to another, and then another after that. Cyaire tells me about Julian and Malik, the kind of family stories that only accumulate over years of shared history, the kind that are funny in retrospect and were almost certainly not funny at the time. I tell him about my parents, about Tazja leaving behind everything she built in New York to start something entirely new in Seattle, about Jacques, who is somehow simultaneously the most dramatic and most loveable person in my family.

Even Cameron ends up with a tray of his own, though he maintains his careful distance. He leans against a railing nearby while he eats, scanning the crowd with the same quiet attentiveness that doesn’t appear to ever fully switch off. I get the sense he does this whether he is working or not. That it has simply become the way he moves through the world.

Somewhere during all of it, the food disappears. The sun begins its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the bay in shades of copper and deep gold. The afternoon crowd gradually reshapes itself into an evening crowd, looser and slower, people drifting toward restaurants and the waterfront, the urgency of daytime giving way to something more relaxed.

For the first time all day, possibly for the first time all week, I stop checking the clock. I stop tracking minutes or mapping out the rest of the evening or building the quiet mental case for why I should wrap this up and go home.

I am having fun. I am genuinely, straightforwardly enjoying Cyaire’s company in a way that has nothing to do with nostalgia or proximity or the odd gravitational pull of an unresolved history.

The realization is simple enough. It is also, without question, dangerous. The more time I spend with him, the harder it becomes to reconstruct the very sensible argument I had for keeping my distance in the first place.

Eventually, we gather our empty trays and make our way back through the thickening crowd. People move in every direction around us, couples stroll toward the waterfront, families navigate between stalls with shopping bags and takeaway containers balanced in their arms. Somewhere behind us, another round of cheers erupts from the fish market as somebody successfully launches a salmon clean across the counter.

Cyaire is halfway through a story about an audition that went catastrophically wrong involving a malfunctioning smoke machine and a fake dog with poorly timed mechanical issues, and I am laughing hard enough that I almost miss it entirely.

A woman carrying several shopping bags steps directly into his path. The collision is not hard, but it startles her enough that one of her bags drops, the contents shift audibly as it hits the ground, and both of them stop.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” Cyaire says immediately, already bending to help.