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His jaw set and the muscle under his ear jumped once.

“Yeah,” he said. “You will.”

Then he started past me. I had the wall behind me and there still wasn’t room, and he put his hand on my hip and moved me two inches out of his way, the same as he did in his kitchen, the same hand, the same pressure, finished before I had a vote in it. His palm was hot through the mesh. His thumb sat on the point of my hip bone for those two inches, and the soaked collar of his undershirt brushed my arm.

My shoulder blades came off the cinder block when he turned me, and for about a second and a half the entire hallway had a clean view of the back of that sweater, five letters and two digits, under the caged lights.

I stayed where he put me and let them have it.

In his kitchen the hand meant nothing. He’d been doing it since August and we’d never said a word about it. He’d done it in a corridor in his own building in front of all of them, and it wasn’t nothing. He counted everything. He had to have counted them, and he’d done it anyway.

The door swung shut behind him. Maren waited until it latched before she said, “I am going to need a complete account of this evening,” and I said, “Not a chance.”

I drove home with his name on my back and the windows down and a stuffed dragon buckled into the passenger seat. I replayed the corridor so many times that I drifted out of my lane and had to pull it back. His mouth came open every time, and his thumb sat on my hip, and he said Go home in that low, wrong voice. I didn’t turn the radio on once.

CHAPTER 13

Eli

I drove home and didn’t hear a word of the postgame in the truck. The jaw had its own pulse by then, and the tape over the split pulled at my lip when I swallowed, and I tasted iron and swallowed that too.

She’d been wearing my number. They’d handed me forty-four at nineteen and I hadn’t worn another number since. It went on my back before a game and came off after, and I’d never once handed one to anybody. Nobody had asked her to. What I should have said in that corridor was mine, and I’d swallowed it, and I didn’t think I could swallow it twice.

Her car was in the driveway. The kitchen light was on. I sat in the garage with the engine off, which I hadn’t done since I was twenty-two and afraid of a phone call. She was in my kitchen, in my sweater, with my daughter in Peoria, and I had a split lip and no plan whatsoever. Then I got out and let myself into my own house.

She was standing at the counter with a bag of ice made up on the granite in front of her.

She was still in the jersey. It came down to the tops of her thighs and fit her everywhere above that. I stopped inside the door with my jacket over one arm, and my name was right there across her back. Her hair was down. Her feet were bare on my tile, the leggings under the jersey black to the ankle, and I wanted her so plainly that getting hit again would have been easier.

Gerald was on the counter beside the sink, propped up and turned to face the window. Iris had left her dragon behind for the first time in her life, and somebody in this house had decided he needed a view.

“Sit down,” she said.

Those were the first words out of her. She didn’t say hello. She’d read my face and skipped straight past every ordinary thing people said on a Saturday night.

“I’m fine.”

“Sit down, Eli.”

“Delaney.”

“You have a black eye coming in and a cut lip and you drove all the way home with neither of those things on ice, which is the one thing Maren told you not to do.” She pulled the stool out from the island with her foot, and not gently. “Sit.”

I’d taken almost no instructions well over the years. I dropped the jacket on the stool next to it and sat down.

“Head up.”

“You’re enjoying this.”

“I’m not enjoying anything.” She stepped around in front of me with the ice wrapped in the towel. “Head up.”

I put my head up. She pressed the ice against the swelling with the heel of her hand. The cold drove through the towel and into the bone, and then the bone stopped reporting and the cold moved back into my molars instead.

Her wrist sat just off my mouth. It smelled like dish soap and, under the soap, the salt of her own skin.

“That’s cold.”

“It’s ice.”