Chapter 12
Jamie
I was fine.
On the bus from the airport, the guys were scattered across the seats in various states of exhaustion. Theo was asleep on Luca's shoulder, Bishop had headphones on the size of dinner plates. Mikkola was staring out the window at the Chicago skyline through the overcast.
I sat in my usual spot in the middle of the bus. Abbott was four rows ahead, his head leaned against the window. We hadn't spoken about the phone call.
We hadn't spoken about anything that mattered. We'd played the last game of the trip, an unremarkable 2–1 loss, and boarded the bus with a respectful nod and wrenching distance.
I was fine.
I was supportive. The thing is, I meant it. I did want good things for Abbott. A person who loved someone wanted good things for them. That was how love worked. You held the door open even when the person walking through it was walking away from you.
The bus pulled into the facility lot. I did what I always did, checked in with Mikkola, made sure Morrison had a ride, and confirmed the practice schedule. The work of maintaining a team, the thing I was good at, kept me busy enough to ignore what had happened—or didn't—between me and Abbott.
He walked past me in the parking lot, close enough that our shoulders would normally have touched. There was a new distance now though, that hadn't been there before the road trip, and it was the loudest space in the world.
"See you tomorrow," he said.
"See you tomorrow." I parroted his words back to him.
He got in his car. I watched him pull out of the lot, which I'd been doing for years. But tonight, it felt like watching the end of something.
Home.
My apartment was the same.
Of course it was. Apartments didn't change because their occupants spent ten days discovering their emotional lives were built on a fault line.
I stood in the kitchen for ten minutes.
I didn't do anything. I didn't make food. I didn't check my phone. I didn't reach for the routines that usually carried me from one part of the day to the next. I just stood in my kitchen, looking at the drying rack by the sink.
The blue mug with the chipped handle was sitting there, right where I'd left it before the road trip. I'd washed it the day before we left. Abbott hadn't been over. There was no reason to wash it, but I'd washed it anyway because that's what I did. I washed the mug and put it on the rack to dry.
I picked it up.
It was heavy in my hand. It was solid ceramic, the kind that held heat for a long time.
You wanted to wrap both hands around it on cold mornings.
Abbott's hands. Abbott wrapped his long goalkeeper's fingers around this mug in my kitchen and we talked about nothing and everything.
The silence between us had always been my most comfortable place.
I opened the cupboard and put the mug on the shelf—in the back behind the others, where it wouldn't be the first thing I saw every morning.
I closed the cupboard.
I stood there for thirty seconds.
I opened the cupboard and took the mug back out. I put it back on the shelf in its usual spot, handle angled right.
That was better.
I couldn't put the mug away. Putting it away felt like conceding something, admitting that the space it occupied on the shelf was optional. It wasn't optional. It represented Clay Abbott in my daily existence, and removing it meant something I wasn't ready to face.
I made dinner and ate it standing up. I watched an episode of something—I don't remember what. I went to bed in a one-person bed and I lay on the left side. The right side was empty—which it had always been. It was fine.
I was fine.
At 2 AM I got up and wandered into the kitchen. I stood in front of the shelf with his mug. I was going to be fine.
Abbott was going to take the Denver offer. He deserved to be a starter and a contender, not the backup. Not a contingency.
He was going to leave and the mug was going to sit on this shelf. I would wash it and put it back. It would mean less over time, because that's how things worked. The importance of objects faded as the person they represented became more distant.
I picked up the mug and held it with both hands. I stood in my kitchen at 2 AM and held a mug that belonged to a man who was probably, at this exact moment, lying in his own apartment weighing the value of everything he'd built here against the value of everything he'd been offered.
I put the mug back, handle to the right, in its normal spot.