Chapter 20
It was closed.
Fuck.
Not closed like maybe-there's-a-back-entrance closed. Closed like lights off, chairs up, a hand-written sign on the door that said CLOSED TUESDAYS in letters large enough that there was really no ambiguity about the situation.
I was standing on the sidewalk outside a closed restaurant in the good jacket five minutes early.
But the restaurant was closed and I had not checked whether the restaurant was closed because it had not occurred to me to check whether the restaurant was closed because I had been too busy doing the Morr Roar in my bathroom mirror.
Those were the facts of the situation.
I took out my phone.
The website said: Closed Tuesdays.
I put my phone away.
I looked at the sign.
The sign said: Closed Tuesdays.
It was Tuesday.
I stood on the sidewalk in the good jacket and thought about going home.
Just getting in my car and driving home and texting Nathan something—what, I didn't know, something that explained the situation in a way that didn't include the words I didn't check—and pretending this whole evening had been a scheduling conflict rather than the most preventable disaster of my adult life.
I was still standing there when Nathan arrived.
He walked up the sidewalk in a dark jacket, collar open, and he looked at me, and he looked at the restaurant, and he looked at the sign, and he looked back at me.
I spread my hands. "It's closed."
Nathan turned back to the sign. Closed Tuesdays. Then back to me.
"I didn't check," I said. "I know. I didn't check. I should have checked. I just—I had a lot going on today and I didn't—" I stopped. "I'm sorry. I can find somewhere else. I'll look right now, I'll find—"
"Do you like pizza?" Nathan said.
I stared at him.
"Pizza," he said again. "Do you like it?"
"Yes," I said. "Obviously I like pizza, Nathan, everyone likes pizza—"
"There's a place," he said. "Two blocks."
He said it like this was just information he was providing rather than a rescue he was conducting. Then he turned and started walking, and I stood on the sidewalk for one more second facing the closed restaurant and the sign and the Tuesday that was absolutely happening, and then I followed him.
Because that was what you did when Nathan Cross walked somewhere.
The pizza place was called Sal's. It was small and cash only and had six tables and a chalkboard menu. The guy behind the counter looked up when Nathan walked in and said "The usual?" before Nathan had his jacket off.
"Not tonight," Nathan said. "We'll order."
I studied the menu on the chalkboard.
"Margherita," I said, to Sal, with the confidence of a man who had been rescued. "Large. And whatever he's having."
Nathan ordered without consulting the menu. Of course he did.
We sat.
The table was small and the chairs were slightly mismatched and someone had carved something into the edge of the table that I wasn't going to examine too closely.
Sal brought bread. I took a piece. Nathan took a piece.
The bread was good. The candle on the table was one of those stubby ones in a glass holder that had clearly been refilled approximately a hundred times.
Outside the window Boston was doing its Boston thing, cold and self-contained, and inside it was warm and nobody knew who I was, and it felt, as we started to talk, like exactly the right place to be.
"—and the thing is," I was saying, "Dylan had already told Coach he was fine. He'd told the trainer he was fine. He'd told me he was fine. He skated three full shifts on it."
Nathan was eating bread with the unhurried consideration of someone for whom bread was a thing worth doing properly. I had already eaten most of mine without noticing.
"And then?" Nathan said.
"And then he went to tie his skate after practice and couldn't bend his knee enough to reach it." I pulled off another piece. "Just sat there on the bench. Wouldn't ask for help. I had to tie it for him."
"How old were you?"
"Sixteen. He was twenty." I pointed the bread at Nathan. "Twenty years old. Alternate captain of his junior team. Needed his sixteen-year-old brother to tie his skate because he would not under any circumstances admit that his knee hurt."
Nathan looked at me. "And you?"
"I would have told someone immediately," I said. "First sign of anything wrong, I'm flagging it. That's just smart."
Nathan's expression did something.
"That's—okay, that's different," I said. "That was different and you know it."
"Was it?"
"I always tell you when something's wrong."
"You told me you were fine approximately eleven times while symptomatic."
"That's—" I stopped. "That's a medical context. That's different."
"Mm," Nathan said, which was not agreement.
I ate more bread.
"Dylan’s the most stubborn person alive. It's genetic, I think. Or—well." I paused. "Not genetic for me, obviously. But he got it from Rob, who got it from his dad, and it just—maybe it's in the air at Morrison family events. You breathe it in."
"You're very different from him," Nathan said.
"He's been playing longer. Works harder. Does everything right." I moved my hand. "I just show up and do the thing. So far that’s worked out.”
Nathan was quiet in the way that meant he was listening. Not waiting for me to finish, but actually listening.
"I was adopted," I said. Like it was nothing, because it mostly was nothing. It had been in the press since my rookie year, and surely Nathan had read everything. "When I was eight. Almost nine."
Nathan didn’t fill the silence. Instead he waited.
"I was in foster care before that," I said. "A few different placements. Nothing bad." I paused. "Nothing catastrophic. Just temporary homes. Everything was temporary and then it wasn't."
"The Morrisons," Nathan said.
"Yeah," I said. "Rob and Linda. They already had Dylan. He was older. He was not thrilled." A pause. "He came around. Kinda."
I stopped there. Not because there wasn't more. There was more. There were eleven other places and the system I'd built and the transaction that had been running since I was four years old, but because the more lived under everything and I didn't take it out and look at it directly very often.
"Anyway," I said. "They're good people. They gave up a lot for me."
I stopped there.
Nathan set down his water glass.
The pizza place did its thing around us. Someone at another table laughed. Sal dropped something behind the counter and swore quietly about it.
"I know," Nathan said.
I went still.
"You play like someone who needs to be worth it," Nathan said. Quiet. Factual. Like he was reporting something he'd been sitting on for a while.
I dropped my eyes to the table for a second.
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
Nathan picked up his water glass. Put it down. I watched him almost fidget, which with Nathan was its own category of information.
"And you," I said, because the honesty was going in one direction and I wanted to send it back. "Siblings? Back in—" I paused. Just a beat. "Portland?"
One dark eyebrow went up. He knew what I was doing. He always knew. But he answered anyway.
"I'm from Boston," he said.
I blinked. "You're from Boston? What about Portland?"
"What about Portland?"
"You worked for the Portland Ravens."
"Yes."
"And then came back to Boston."
"Yes."
I didn't push.
A beat.
"No siblings," he said. "Just me."
There was something in that.
I heard it. Didn't say anything about it.
Sal, or Bill as his name tag said, arrived with the pizza.
We ate.
The margherita was good—straightforward and correct, the kind of pizza that didn't try to be anything other than what it was.
Nathan ate his half with the same unhurried precision he brought to everything and I ate mine the way I ate most things and we talked, easy and slightly careful, two people figuring out new terrain.
I was mid-sentence—something about Searcy, something about the last away game, the wave he'd tried to start at the opposing team's rink—when someone stopped at our table.
Young, maybe nineteen, Wardens hoodie that had seen better days.
"Sorry," he said. "Are you—you're Wesley Morrison."
I put my pizza down. Smiled. The smile came automatically, the full one, the one that was for exactly this. "Hey, man. Yeah."
"Oh my god." He looked like he might vibrate out of his own skin. "I'm so sorry, I can see you're eating, I just—the Morr Roar. I've been doing it since you joined. My whole section does it.”
"Which section?"
"Upper bowl,” he said. “214."
"214 is loud. I hear 214."
He made a noise that was not quite a word.
"You want a photo?" I said.
He absolutely wanted a photo. We took it. I said something that made him laugh. He thanked me three times, apologized twice, backed away from the table like he was trying very hard not to run.
I picked up my pizza.
Nathan was looking at me.
"What? Do I have food on my face?”
"No," he said. “That’s not it.” Nathan looked at his pizza. Ate some of it. "You remembered the section number.”
"I always remember the sections." I pulled off a piece of crust. "214 has been doing the roar since my second home game. There's a guy up there, huge guy, red jacket, starts it every time. I look for him."
Nathan was quiet.
"What? Come on, tell me.”
"It’s nothing," he said.
But it wasn't nothing. I was getting closer to figuring that out.
I had also been trying to figure out, for a while now, what it was about Nathan Cross that had gotten through every system I had.
I’ll admit it; I had dated a lot of people. I had been with people who were funnier, easier, people who asked nothing and gave a lot and disappeared cleanly when it was done. The transaction ran both ways, and nobody got hurt. I had been fine with that for years.
Nathan had never once asked for the performance.
That was it. That was the whole thing.
Everyone else got the Morrison experience: the smile, the arms, the give them the moment and get the noise back. Nathan got me eating pizza. Nathan got me throwing up on his shoes.
Nathan got the actual thing and he stayed.
That was why Nathan.
That was the whole answer and it had taken me months of proximity to find it.
We went back to eating. I picked up whatever story I was telling, and I was gesturing with a piece of crust, demonstrating something, when Nathan reached across the table.
His thumb caught the corner of my mouth.
One brief, careful movement. He picked up his napkin with his other hand and finished the job, wiping away whatever I'd managed to get on my face—pizza sauce, probably, I wasn't keeping track—and then he put the napkin down and went back to his pizza.
He hadn't interrupted the story.
Hadn't made a thing of it.
Just saw it and fixed it, the way he fixed things, automatically and without ceremony, his hand knowing before his brain did.
I stopped talking.
Nathan looked up. "You were saying?”
I looked at him.
The thumb on my jaw in the training room. The apartment. All of them clinical or desperate or loaded with something. And then this, which was none of those things. Which was just Nathan Cross, at a pizza table, wiping sauce off my face because it was there and he noticed.
"Wes," he said.
"Yeah. Sorry. Chappell." I picked up my pizza. "He cried at a Gatorade commercial during film review. Not a sad one. The one with the kid learning to skate. Coach had to pause it."
Something happened on Nathan's face. Full and unguarded, there and then contained, the laugh that didn't quite get out but came closer than I'd ever seen it get.
I stored it. Filed it somewhere I wasn't going to lose it.
Sal brought the check before I could ask for it, which meant Nathan had been coming here long enough that Sal knew the timing. I picked it up.
Nathan's hand moved toward it.
"Tea," I said. "Eggs. My shirt. The chair, all night." I put my card down. "I'm buying dinner."
Nathan looked at me.
"Nathan. Please?"
He put his hand down.
We sat in the quiet of a meal that was almost over and neither of us ready for it to be. The pizza place kept going around us, Sal behind the counter, the other table finishing up, the chalkboard menu above us with its words I could actually read.
"I'm glad you said hell yeah," Nathan said. Quietly.
I felt my chest tighten.
"Yeah," I said. "Me too."
Sal came back for the card. Nathan stood up. Slightly too fast. Nathan Cross, who did nothing without consideration, standing up slightly too fast, which I was absolutely filing.
Outside it was cold and the street was doing its Boston thing. We stood on the sidewalk.
"I always drive carefully," I said, preemptively.
Nathan looked at me.
"Getting ahead of it," I said.
"Your approach," Nathan said, "to things that should be done carefully." A pause. "Is not fine."
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true."
The streetlight was doing something to the angles of his face that I was choosing not to think about at length.
"Most of the time," he said.
I heard the rest of it.
He stepped forward and kissed me. On the sidewalk. In public. Brief and certain, the way Cross did everything, but public, which was Nathan making a visible choice on a Boston street where anyone could see.
He stepped back.
"Next week," he said. "I'll pick the place."
I stood on the sidewalk as he walked to his car.
Next week. Nathan Cross had assumed next week. Had stated it as a fact and walked to his car like it was already in the calendar, like there was no question, like this was just what was happening now.
I walked to my car still smiling and the smile didn't go anywhere the whole drive home. I didn't perform it for anyone because there was no one to perform it for. It was just my face doing something true in the dark of my own car on the way home from a pizza place.
It felt right.