Chapter 25 #2
"You said it was Dylan," he said. "You said your parents were watching.
You said you owed him one more shift." His jaw moved.
"I know what that means. I've been watching you for two years and I know what that means and I—" He stopped.
Started again. "It wasn't a medical decision.
It was—I looked at you in that tunnel and I made a decision about you. Not about the numbers. About you."
"Nathan," I said.
"It was wrong," he said. "It has to go on the record. The assessment, what I found, what I cleared you with." He looked at his tablet. "The call I made."
"Nathan—"
"I'm sorry," he said.
I reached out and put my hand over his.
He looked at it.
He didn't move away.
We sat there for a moment in the particular quiet of something that had been decided and couldn't be undecided.
Nathan Cross had been unable to be anyone other than who he was when the person he'd been in a hotel room with the night before was looking at him from the ice, and the record was going to reflect that, and neither of us could do anything about it now.
"We need to get you to a hospital," Nathan said eventually.
"Okay," I said. "Let me just—my parents. I need to go find—"
"It's handled," Nathan said.
I looked at him. "What do you mean it's handled?"
"Coach spoke to them," he said. "They know where to go."
I opened my mouth. Something about that—the efficiency of it, the fact that it had been arranged before he'd even said the words hospital—was doing something in my head that I didn't have the processing power for right now.
Nathan stood and helped me up.
I looked at him properly for the first time since the locker room had emptied.
Something was different.
It took me a second to find it, my brain running slightly slower than usual, and then I found it and I didn't know what to do with it. His coat was the same. His shirt was the same.
But his lanyard—the Wardens medical staff lanyard he wore to every game, every practice, every facility interaction, the one with his name and his credentials and the institutional weight of Nathan Cross's professional identity—was gone.
He wasn't wearing it.
The space where it should have been was just his shirt.
I stood there.
The lanyard had a clip. A specific clip, the kind that attached to a collar or a pocket, and Nathan Cross had been wearing it every day for two years in every professional context I had ever seen him in.
It wasn't there.
He'd already done it. Before he came into the locker room. Before the assessment. Before I'm sorry in a Toronto locker room.
He'd already done it.
He reached down and took my hand.
There. In the corridor. Walking out of the locker room with Coach twenty feet ahead of us and the facility staff moving around us and whatever was left of the team somewhere behind us, Nathan Cross took my hand like it was a thing he did, like it was a thing either of us did, like this was just what was happening now.
I did not have the processing power for this.
The lanyard was gone. He'd already reported himself. He was taking me to an ambulance he'd called before the game ended and holding my hand in a team corridor and his face had the quality of a man who had made several decisions tonight and had stopped managing the fallout of them individually.
Nathan Cross, who checked corridors before kissing me.
Who said there's no one into a phone with me three feet away.
Who had maintained professional distance in every team context for two years with a precision that I had spent months cataloguing, that Nathan Cross was walking down a facility corridor in Toronto holding my hand where anyone could see it.
This felt right, but also felt wrong.
Not wrong like bad. Wrong like, the rules had changed and nobody had told me which rules and my head was an eight and I couldn't find the thread that connected the lanyard to the ambulance to the hand to whatever was on Nathan's face right now, which was tired and certain and something I didn't have a category for yet.
Coach turned around.
His jaw did something. He looked at our hands. He looked at Nathan. He made the decision of a man who had managed human beings for years and knew when a conversation belonged in a corridor and when it didn't.
"Morrison," he said.
"Coach," I said.
Nathan didn't let go.
He looked at Nathan. Something passed between them, brief and weighted.
Nathan looked at his hands.
Outside the facility doors there was an ambulance.
Not parked urgently, lights going—just there, quiet, waiting. Which meant someone had called it before the final buzzer. Which meant someone had known before the game ended that it was going to be needed.
I looked at Nathan.
He was still looking at his hands.
The ambulance had been called before the game ended. Before the assessment. Before he'd even come into the locker room.
He'd known.
"You already told them," I said. "Before you even came into the locker room. You already—"
"Get in the ambulance, Wesley," he said.
Not unkind. Not the wall exactly. Something more tired than either, something that had the weight of a decision already made and already reported and already on the record, and Nathan Cross standing in a Toronto facility corridor without his lanyard because the decision about the lanyard had apparently also already been made.
"Nathan," I said.
"The ambulance," he said. "Please."
Coach put his hand briefly on my shoulder. Once. The way you touched someone when there wasn't anything to say.
I looked at Nathan one more time.
He looked back at me. Those blue eyes, the real version, and underneath everything—underneath the tiredness and the wall and the thing that had already been reported and recorded—something that was still there, still present, still the hotel room and the hand and one shift said in a tunnel in Toronto because I'd said it's Dylan and he'd understood.
Still there.
I got in the ambulance.