Chapter 11
The training room smelled like antiseptic and athletic tape.
I sat on the table because Cross pointed at it. I didn't have the energy to argue, which was its own kind of alarming.
My helmet was still on. I didn't take it off.
Some part of me had decided that the helmet was a boundary, that as long as I was still in full gear I was still technically a hockey player in a medical room and not something smaller, something that had just been walked off the ice in front of reporters while the whole team watched.
Cross set his tablet on the counter. Washed his hands. Dried them with the deliberate, unhurried movements of someone who was not rattled, who was never rattled, who had apparently been assembled in a factory that didn't manufacture rattled.
He came to stand in front of me and reached for my helmet without asking.
"I can do it," I said.
He unclipped the chin strap anyway. Lifted it off.
Set it beside me. His expression was the usual, nothing, just this focused professional attention, the same face he brought to everything, and I had a brief and unwelcome memory of it being a slightly different face at the boards with Jenkins twenty minutes ago.
"Look straight ahead," he said.
I looked straight ahead.
He went through the assessment. I'd been through this enough times in the last forty-eight hours that I could have run it myself, lights and questions and balance, the same machinery, and I answered everything correctly because the answers were always the easy part.
The hard part was sitting still while he did it, being this close to Cross in a quiet room without the noise of the rink and the crowd and twenty-three other people to diffuse whatever the problem was.
He wasn't filling the silence. He never filled the silence.
"Jenkins looked fine," I said.
Cross didn't answer.
"Knee thing. He always favors his left edge when he's cold, someone should tell him to—"
"I'm aware."
"Right." I looked at the penlight when he moved it. "Obviously. You're the doc."
He stepped closer, the balance check. I fixed my gaze on a point on the wall behind his shoulder and breathed and told myself what I always told myself, which was that this was medical, this was his job, there was nothing happening here that required my attention beyond answering questions correctly.
He smelled like clean soap.
Cross held my chin to angle my head, and I had a system for this, I had a whole established system for the proximity and the grip and his attention, which was to focus on a fixed point and wait for it to be over.
The system had been built before I knew what Nathan Cross looked like lifting weights in his own home, before I knew his heartbeat wasn't steady, before I'd spent a significant portion of time lying in his bed thinking about clean soap and the back of his neck and what was wrong with me, which was apparently quite a lot, which I was going to deal with at some unspecified future date when I had the resources.
Currently I did not have the resources.
Currently Cross's thumb was on my jaw.
The system worked fine until his thumb moved.
Not dramatically. Not like a signal. Just a small shift, the pad of his thumb tracing a short slow line along my jaw where his fingers were already resting, and it was probably an adjustment, probably a repositioning, except that he didn't reposition after.
He held, a half-second longer than the assessment required, and I heard myself breathe in.
Cross heard it too.
We had both heard myself breathe in, and I wanted to die.
It's the proximity, I told myself. It's the thumb. Anyone's thumb. On anyone's jaw. In a quiet room. This is just a physiological response to sustained close contact and has nothing to do with Nathan Cross specifically.
Then he stepped back.
"You passed," he said. He picked up his tablet. "You're likely presenting with a subclinical accumulation from the previous impact combined with dehydration and inadequate sleep."
"That’s a lot of fancy words."
"Don't." He made a note. Didn't look up. "Don't minimize it."
I slid forward on the table slightly, not getting off it yet, just restless, just needing to do something with my hands. "You said I passed."
"I said you passed today's assessment. That doesn't mean you're fine." He set the tablet down. Looked at me, the full-attention version. "Repeated subclinical impacts accumulate. You are twenty-three years old, and you are making decisions that will follow you to thirty."
I looked at his face and found nothing I could use there. No frustration to deflect, no visible crack I could widen into something manageable. Just this direct, factual attention, like he was telling me something he considered obvious.
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
He turned back to the counter.
I got off the table. Some reflex, some bad wiring, I got off the table and I took two steps toward him, which put me too close, closer than the situation required, close enough to see the line of his shoulders and the back of his neck, and I said:
"You always think you know better."
He turned around.
Which meant we were close. Which meant the last ten seconds were right there, not filed, not gone, and the wall was up but I could see it was a wall, could see the architecture of it, and I didn't know what I was doing, standing here with this information.
"I do," he said. Not smug. Not unkind. Certain, the same way he was certain about everything.
Something in my chest went tight and hot.
"Must be nice," I said. "Being right about everything."
"It's not."
I didn't have anything for that.
We stood there, close and stupid, and something moved across his face, barely a flicker, and then he stepped back and went to the counter and came back with something that wasn't my jersey.
My shirt. The one from the bar. Folded. Clean.
He held it out.
He washed it, some part of my brain noted. He washed your shirt and folded it and he's giving it back.
That was not asset management.
I didn't know what it was.
I took the shirt. The fabric was warm from wherever he'd stored it, and it smelled—it smelled like his laundry detergent, clean and specific, the same thing underneath the soap smell I'd been cataloguing against my will for weeks.
I stood there holding my own shirt that smelled like Nathan Cross's apartment.
He was giving it back.
Obviously he was giving it back. It was my shirt. That was the correct and normal thing to do with someone else's shirt.
And he was giving it back.
I didn't know why that made me want to put my fist through the wall.
I pulled off my gear while he waited, not caring how sweaty I was or what happened to my gear or how long it was taking while Cross stood there. I pulled on the shirt, and it smelled like his apartment, and I hated that I noticed.
Then, without appearing to think about it, he reached out and straightened my collar where it had gone crooked. One brief precise movement. His knuckle caught the back of my neck.
He pulled his hand back.
"Go home," he said.
I looked at the counter where my shirt hadn't been a minute ago.
"Sleep. Eat something real. Don't look at your phone."
"This is a lot of instructions."
"You're done for today, Wesley."
I picked up my helmet and walked out. The door swung shut behind me.
I stood in the corridor.
The facility noise came back in stages—skates, music, ventilation—and I stood in the middle of all of it and ran an inventory of my own body the way Cross had just done, except my findings were different from his.
My pulse was up. Not from the fall. From the knuckle on my neck and the shirt in my hands and the irrational anger of receiving my own property back in perfect condition.
He washed it, I thought again, and didn't know what to do with that either — the fact that he'd washed it, the fact that he'd folded it, the fact that it smelled like his apartment and he'd given it back anyway, and somewhere in the logic of all of that was something I couldn't locate clearly enough to argue with.
The back of my neck was warm. One small precise line of warm where his knuckle had been, which my nervous system was apparently going to keep reporting indefinitely.
I pressed the back of my own hand against it. Different. Not even in the same category.
I put my hand down.
You're done for today, Wesley.
The way he said my name. I had a whole system for not thinking about the way he said my name. The system was not currently operational and hadn't been for some time.
I started walking.
By the time I hit the parking lot I had it mostly managed, filed under physical response to sustained tension, perfectly explainable, not interesting.
My shirt still smelled like his apartment.