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Practice is at ten. I observed you did not eat the eggs. Please reconsider.

I have discovered a sandwich called a “Reuben.” I have opinions.

I’d stare at my phone in the shower line with the dumbest smile on my face and type back things like ur an alien and what kind of opinions and ice prince do u know what an emoji is , and he’d answer with perfect grammar and no punctuation errors: I know what an emoji is. I do not approve of them. There is one of a small yellow face weeping with laughter and I find it inaccurate. No one weeps that much.

I saved every single one of them. I’m not going to talk about it.

I also had a rule, which I’d made up on the spot and told nobody. I would give myself four days before I let anything else happen, four days of texts and stolen minutes and sitting three tables away from him in the dining hall pretending not to look. I wanted four days to figure out whether I was a guy going through something or a guy who was just a guy who liked Maksim.

It was going great. By day three I’d stopped calling it a rule and started calling it a phase. By day four I’d gotten a hickey I hadn’t asked for, from a kiss in a supply closet I definitely had.

Then he stopped answering.

It happened between one text and the next. I sent did u see the score from Toronto lol at 9 p.m. on the fourth night and got nothing. Sent another at midnight: nothing. In the morning, at ten a.m. practice, I finally spotted him on the far side of the ice, and my stomach dropped like a stone through water.

He looked terrible.

I don’t mean sad. Maksim is never sad in public; he doesn’t have the muscles for it. I mean wrong. His skin, always pale, had gone the color of candle wax. His eyes were sunk. His movements were still clean, still perfect, still faster than any human’s, but there was a stiffness in them, a careful economy, like a man walking across a frozen lake in bare feet, trying not to put weight down. When the horn sounded, he was last off the ice. He put a hand on the boards and stayed there for two full seconds, and no one else noticed.

I noticed.

I’d gotten good at noticing him. That’s the thing nobody tells you about liking someone. It turns you into a surveillance system.

I waited until the rink emptied. Then I found him, exactly where I’d known I would, in the back corridor by the equipment room, sagging against the cinder block with his eyes shut and one hand pressed low against his stomach.

“Hey.”

His eyes snapped open. For half a second they flashed red. Then it was gone, and his face went smooth and blank, and he straightened as though someone had pulled a string.

“I am well.”

“Yeah, you look incredible. “

“Lex. Go away.”

“No.”

“Please.”

There it was again, that word. Please. It always stopped me for a second. But I was too worried to be gentle, and when I’m worried I get mean, so I crossed my arms and looked him up and down.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“I do not—”

“Don’t. You ate. Pizza, day one. Bread, day six. You fed the night I followed you, and that was—” I counted. “Nine days ago. Ten. And you’ve been running around a rink with an entire arena of humans at a hundred and ten percent. Your team’s captain asked me yesterday if you were sick. Asked me. Why would he ask me? “

He looked at the wall.

“Maksim.”

“Nine days,” he said at last, very low. “Eleven since the bar.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“Say it.”