Page 216 of Slashed Bonds

The natural path to not losing your fucking mind. Instead of puffing it up into smoke and getting high enough not to care.

I could roll my eyes at it. I have. But the odd part, the part I keep bumping into like furniture in a dark room, is that the root works better than it should, and I think it’s because the thing under it changed. The thing the drugs were for.

I may have something to live for. That’s the shape of it. I’m not going to say it out loud on a balcony with Dox beside me, but I’ll think it.

I pull on the cigarette.

And my eyes find her before my nose has finished telling me where she is.

Frost. Ozone. The warm thing underneath. From here. From sixty feet and a floor up, through cold air and cruiser exhaust and my own smoke.

That’s new too. I’ve always been able to find her scent. I used to have to be in the room. Now it comes to me across a quad, and it comes to me first, before the others, like my nose has learned a language and is showing off.

She’s down there. By the fountain that doesn’t run, under the second light. Talking with Halloran, Viper, Maddie, and Vix, who I’m not going to call Valerie to her face because nobody does. Arms crossed. Head tilted, the way she tilts it when she’s following a thing closely and deciding whether to say what she thinks of it.

She’ll stay a while yet. Dox is up here, and Vix doesn’t leave a building until Dox does.

I’d put money on those two being more than the business partners they claim. More than the thing they’d call fucking if you pressed them. There’s a way he stands when she’s in a room that I’ve only seen on one other man, and that man is Nikolai, and the woman is standing under the second light with her arms crossed.

She spun on one blade at Ashford. I was at center ice when she did it, and I’ve replayed it forty times since on Cassian’s iPad, frame by frame, because it shouldn’t have worked. Weight on one edge, in slush, at speed, a rotation that takes a quarter second longer than any shooter can afford, and she came out of it with the puck still on her stick and a Beta goalie’s whole body committed to the wrong side of the net.

That’s not hockey. That’s load transfer. She moved her center of mass through a turn and let the ice carry the moment. Somebody taught her that before anybody taught her to shoot, and I’d like to know who, and I haven’t asked.

I don’t ask her things. I read them. It’s slower and it’s what I’ve got.

Not my business. A conversation for the tattoo parlor, if ever.

My eyes stay on her.

They’ve been doing that. Lingering. I’m a man who looks at structures, and she’s a structure, and I’ve been reading her for two and a half weeks the way I read a wall, where the load goes, where the cracks are, which cracks are cosmetic and which ones run through to the other side.

And a thought comes in. The one that’s been coming in.

Would she cry? If I went out. If the dose was wrong one night, or right, and I didn’t wake up. Would she cry?

It’s been with me since Ashford. Since the pile at the far end with her at the bottom of it and the hiss going up out of twenty-two throats, and the understanding, somewhere in the slush, that this wasn’t a short thing. That the room upstairs with the dust on it was going to be lived in.

The idea of hurting her with my absence.

With my death.

It’s a different weight than the one I’ve carried. I’ve thought about dying since I was fourteen the way other people think about weather. A thing that comes. And the only argument against it, for years, has been Nikolai, who’d have been hurt and would have understood, because Nikolai knows what the house was like and knows what the drugs are for and has his own version of the same math.

Mori doesn’t know. Not enough of it. She knows there was a bathroom floor freshman year, and a bottle Cassian keeps. She doesn’t know why I’d need it. She hasn’t been told what the two languages were saying.

Korean on one side of a wall and German on the other, and a boy on the stairs between them learning to read a house by the pitch of it. Which voice meant a door was about to slam. Which silence meant it already had. I learned structure before I learned to skate. Where the load goes in a room when two people are holding it up by hating each other, and which corner’s safe when the load shifts.

She knows I read walls. She doesn’t know I learned it on a staircase at nine, in the dark, with my hands over my ears.

So if I went, she’d think it was about her. That she wasn’t enough to stay for. And she’d be wrong, and I wouldn’t be there to say so.

That’s the thing that got me into Lessard’s office. Not the root. The arithmetic of a woman under a quad light who’d carry one more thing she didn’t put there.

And watching her go through it. That did some of it too. Ten days of taper, and then the crash, three days of a woman I’d seen put a defenseman through glass lying under a comforter unable to lift her head. I brought blankets. Nikolai brought broth. Cassian brought the tape and said nothing, which is his version of a blanket.

She’s different now.

Inventory it. Appetite, up, measurably. She eats a plate at dinner and reaches for a second thing without being watched. Color in her face in the mornings, where there’d been a gray under the skin since tryouts. The first week was vomiting, bathroom-floor, Nikolai sitting outside the door with his back to it. Nothing since. Sleep, longer, deeper, interrupted by nightmares two or three nights in seven, which is down from six.