Chapter 4
The back door of the bar opened onto an alley that smelled like the end of a long night: dumpsters, cold air, the faint suggestion of a city that hadn't gone to sleep yet. Bare concrete, a single light overhead doing its minimal best. The music was a dull thud through the wall.
I had not agreed to come out here, yet here I was.
"Okay," I said, and turned around. "You can let go now."
Cross let go without ceremony, released my arm and took a step back and stood in the alley with his hands at his sides looking at me like he had all night and nothing better to do with it.
I hated that. The stillness. Most people fidgeted when they were tense, but Cross just absorbed it. He stood there in the cold with those blue eyes and no expression and waited, like he already knew how this was going to go and was just being polite about letting me get there.
I crossed my arms. Mostly to have something to do with them.
"This is dramatic," I said. "I want that on the record."
"You have a grade-two concussion."
"You don't know that."
"I have a strong working theory." He said it the way he said everything, level and precise, like he was reading off a clipboard.
"Photosensitivity. Uneven tracking. Delayed response on the right.
You flinched at noise twice on the ice. Three times in the bar before the shove.
" A pause. "Four if you count the door."
I had flinched at the door. I had covered it. Apparently not well enough.
"You keep a running spreadsheet on me, or am I just your favorite hobby?"
His expression didn’t change, and that kind of pissed me off.
"You're symptomatic," he said. "You've been symptomatic since the second period, and you've been managing it instead of reporting it, which means you've had a few hours of a worsening injury and a bar fight on top of it." A pause. "You're leaving."
Not going to leave. You're leaving. Like the decision had been made somewhere else and he was just delivering the news.
And the thing was, the thing I was not going to say out loud, was that I got it.
I understood the position I was in. I'd spent hours performing fine in a bar while Cross watched from the wall and tallied everything I was doing wrong, and now we were in an alley and the tally was complete and the verdict was exactly what it had always been going to be.
Morrison. Can't help himself. Knew it.
"I need to go back in there," I said.
"No."
"Jenkins—"
“Your teammates are fine." A beat. "You are not fine."
The alley was cold, and my head was doing that thing where every sound had slightly too much weight to it.
I was standing in a bar alley at midnight being looked at by a doctor who had spent the better part of four hours confirming everything he already believed about me, and the embarrassment of it had a specific shape, sharper than the medical stuff, sharper than the headache.
He'd watched me perform all night. He'd stood against that wall and counted my flinches and counted my drinks and watched me climb on a table and get into a fight.
Underneath all of it he'd been running the same assessment he always ran, the one that started and ended with Morrison is a problem that needs managing.
I laughed. It came out wrong.
"Relax," I said. "Franchise property is still intact." I gestured at myself. "Minor dings only. Nothing that affects the resale value."
Cross hadn’t taken his eyes off me.
I kept going because stopping felt worse. "I know that's what this is. The liability thing. Make sure Morrison doesn't destroy himself and wreck the season. I get it, it's your job, I'm not—" I moved my hand. "I'm not making it weird."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Are you done?" he said.
"Probably not."
"Your injury is worsening," he said. "Not because of the team.
Because neurological injuries compound. Because what's a grade two tonight is a grade three tomorrow if you keep doing what you're doing.
Because that shove hit an already compromised system and you're standing in an alley arguing with me instead of lying down in a dark room.
" A pause. Nothing changed in his face. "That's what this is. "
No heat. No emphasis. Just the words, dropped into the cold air between us like facts he was reporting.
I didn't have anything to put on top of that.
The overhead light buzzed. My head was a dull constant pressure behind my left eye.
I thought about the incident report he was going to write tomorrow, the one that started with patient demonstrated predictably poor judgment and went downhill from there.
I thought that if he'd had any lingering doubt about what kind of player I was, what kind of person, I'd cleared it up nicely tonight.
Good work, Morrison. Very efficient.
"Seven a.m.," I said. "I was already coming in."
"You were already coming in," he agreed. "Tonight you're going home."
I turned toward the mouth of the alley. I moved with the energy of someone who had decided to leave, not someone who had been told to, and these were two different things and the distinction mattered, and my right foot came down slightly wrong.
Not a fall. A stumble. The ground not quite where my brain thought it was.
I reached for the wall.
Cross had me first.
Both hands, one on my arm and one at my back, immediate and certain, and he steadied me without a word and didn't let go, and I stood there with the brick wall in front of me and Cross's hands on me.
He thought I was a fuckup.
He was standing in an alley at midnight holding me up because I couldn't manage a flat surface, and he thought I was a fuckup, and the worst part was that I couldn't currently make a compelling argument against it.
"Okay," I said, to the wall.
Cross didn't say anything.
He just held on.
The car was exactly what I would have guessed if I'd ever thought about what Cross drove, which I hadn't, obviously, but if I had.
Dark, mid-range luxury, the kind of thing that cost enough to mean something but not enough to announce itself. Immaculate. Of course it was immaculate. The interior smelled faintly like clean leather and something that was probably the same soap I kept accidentally noticing.
I folded myself into the passenger seat. The door closed. The world got blessedly quieter.
Cross was already in the driver's seat, already doing whatever adjustments needed doing, already a person who had a destination in mind. He drove the way he did everything, completely, without wasted motion.
I let my head tip back against the headrest.
The streetlights moved across the ceiling of the car in a pattern that was almost manageable if I didn't try to track it directly.
"Do you want to tell me where you live," Cross said, "or should I guess?"
"Surprisingly, yes," I said. "I want to see you guess."
Nothing.
"I'm kidding." I gave him the address. He put it somewhere—I didn't see where, didn't hear him type it—and pulled out into the street. "You could've just asked Jenkins."
"I did," Cross said. "He gave me three different answers."
I laughed, and it came out more genuine than anything I'd laughed at inside the bar. "That tracks. Jenkins doesn't actually know where I live. He's been to my apartment twice, and both times I drove."
Silence for a moment. The city slid past.
"Do you have food at your apartment?" Cross asked.
"I have a fridge."
"That's not the same thing."
"I have things in the fridge."
"What things?"
I thought about it. This took a second. "Leftover something. Those little cheese rounds with the wax on them. I went through a phase."
Cross's expression didn't change. I was watching his profile because it was either that or the streetlights, and the streetlights were doing the thing. He had good profile. That was just a fact, observable and medical and not interesting.
"You need water and a dark room," he said. "Not leftover something and wax cheese."
"This is a very judgmental car."
He didn't respond to that. We stopped at a light. The city did what cities did at this hour, sparse and self-contained, everyone with somewhere to be or somewhere to avoid. My head throbbed in a slow, patient rhythm that had given up being urgent and settled into a kind of grim tenancy.
I was drunk, I knew. Not falling-down drunk, but the kind that loosened the bolts on the machinery you normally kept torqued.
"Why are you doing this?"
He looked at the road. "Doing what?"
"The—" I moved my hand, which was a lot of effort. "The whole—" Another move of the hand. "This."
"You had a head injury, and I'm a doctor."
"Yeah but." The light changed. We moved. "You could've put me in a car. You didn't have to—" I was not finishing that sentence in any direction that helped me. "You're very thorough."
"Yes," Cross said.
I looked at the ceiling of the car. The streetlights moved across it. I was tired in a boneless way that I kept trying to get on top of and kept not quite managing, and the loose-bolt feeling was getting looser, and the things at the edges of my thinking were getting closer to the middle.
I must have drifted.
There was an elevator. That was the next thing I was certain of, an elevator, and the elevator had a light that was doing me no favors. I was leaning against Cross in the way you leaned against the nearest solid object when the floor was making decisions without you.
He had one arm around me. I knew this because I could feel it, steady across my back, the same certainty as the alley wall except warmer.
"This isn't my building," I said.
"No."
"This is your building?"
"Yes."
I processed this. The elevator hummed. "You brought me to your apartment."
"You need monitoring overnight. Someone needs to wake you every two hours."
"Dylan would've—"
"Morrison would have ignored you until you were dying and called me in the morning anyway." Another pause. "I skipped the middle part."
That was. . . that was probably accurate.
And anyway, paparazzi. The thought arrived slow and sideways, the way drunk thoughts arrived.
Someone could have seen us leaving the bar together.
Someone with a camera and a caption already written.
LITTLE LION AND TEAM DOC: WHAT'S GOING ON?
Cross would know that. Cross would have thought of that before I did, because Cross thought of everything before everyone.
So that was what this was.
Asset management, again, all the way down. He wasn't here because he wanted to be. He was here because he'd calculated the least damaging option and executed it, the same way he calculated everything.
I was leaning against Cross more than I'd registered. Not dramatically, I hadn't gone boneless or dead weight. I was still standing, but my body had decided that Cross was a reliable surface and had adjusted accordingly.
I was too tired to correct it, and he hadn't moved away. I was aware of the warmth of him along my left side in a way that was going to be embarrassing tomorrow.
"Cross."
"Mm."
The question had been sitting in the loose-bolt place all night, probably longer. I was too tired to keep it there. It came out quieter than I meant it to, the words not quite landing in the right order, more like something I was noticing aloud than something I was asking.
"Why do you hate me?"
Cross didn't answer immediately. He never did. I felt his arm shift slightly across my back. Adjusting. Not pulling away.
"I don't hate you," he said.
I thought about that.
"You're very good at it," I said.
"At what?"
"For a guy who doesn't hate me." I could hear how it sounded when I said it out loud. "You're very good at seeming like you do."
Cross didn't say anything. The elevator went ding, and the doors opened onto a hallway that was quiet and dim.
I didn't push off. He didn't remove the arm.
We stood there for a second, in the open elevator.
"Come on," he said, and moved us forward into the hall.
I went.
I was thinking about I don't hate you and what that meant coming from Cross, who did not say things he didn't mean, who chose his words with the same precision he chose everything, who had just told me something with that sentence that I didn't have the capacity to look at directly.
He stopped at a door. Dark wood, clean lines, a keypad instead of a key, because of course. He reached past me and entered the code and the light went green.
The door swung open.
I looked into Cross's apartment for the first time and thought, distantly, that I knew absolutely nothing about this man.