Chapter five
Felix
The room was dark. The amber strip from the curtains crossed the floor between the beds, the same as always.
From the other side of the room, Shay's breathing had evened out within twenty minutes , deep and slow and completely, infuriatingly untroubled, the breathing of a man who had said what he needed to say and put it down and gone to sleep.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and ran every version of this forward.
Version one: it was a mistake. One bad night, one bad loss, one moment of weakness on both sides. We agreed it was a mistake. We moved forward. The line chemistry held. Everything was fine.
I had kissed him back with both hands.
Version one was not credible.
Version two: it was not a mistake but it was a single incident. An anomaly. We were adults. We were professionals. We had four years of friendship that was worth more than one moment in a dark hotel room, and we were both capable of making a rational decision about,
His hands had been warm. His mouth had been , I pressed two fingers to my eyes. His mouth had been exactly what I had not been thinking about for two years, confirmed in one long breath that had rearranged several things I had been keeping in careful order.
Version two was also not credible.
Version three.
Version three was where it went wrong, where it always went wrong, where my brain took every good thing and ran it forward until it broke.
Version three was: this becomes real, and the team is already under a microscope, and management has made their position clear, and Henry and Charlie still get photographed outside their own building two years later, and there is a word for what Shay and I are on the ice together and that word is essential and essential things, when they break, break everything around them.
I thought about the GM's speech. No distractions. No headlines.
I thought about Charlie's face when the photo ran. The way he'd held himself together in press, the way it had cost him something that took weeks to come back.
I thought about Shay's dad on the phone. You're always one bad decision away from a headline.
I thought about Shay's face when he'd said it , the practiced shrug, the thing underneath the shrug that he didn't show many people and had shown me, specifically, because he trusted me with it.
The strip of amber light crossed the floor between the beds.
I had said we can't.
He had said: you just did, though.
He was right. I had. And the worst part , the part I was lying awake at twelve,forty,seven unable to argue with , was that I would again.
I knew it with the same certainty I knew my own plus,minus, my own recovery protocol, the crack in my own ceiling at home.
If Shay kissed me again tomorrow I would kiss him back.
If he kissed me in a week I would kiss him back.
The variable that my system had never accounted for was not going away because I had said two words with my hands in his shirt.
We can't.
I had meant: I'm afraid of what this costs.
He had heard the difference. Of course he had.
Shay heard everything I tried not to say , had been hearing it for four years, filing it away with the same care I pretended not to notice, the same way he filed my coffee order and my film session schedule and the specific laugh I didn't do for cameras.
I turned onto my side.
In the other bed, Shay slept. One arm thrown up, face toward the window, blanket doing nothing. The city light touched the line of his jaw, the curve of his shoulder.
I looked at the wall.
The wall was very unhelpful.
At two,thirteen I accepted that sleep was not happening on any schedule the system approved of, and I ran through the defensive coverage breakdown instead because at least that had a solution.
I found the seam their winger had used, mapped the adjustment, made a mental note for film tomorrow.
It took forty minutes. It helped approximately nothing with the actual problem.
At three,oh,four I fell asleep.
At seven,oh,two my alarm went off, which meant I had slept for two hours and fifty,eight minutes, which was the worst night's sleep I had logged in three seasons.
I lay still for four seconds. Then I turned the alarm off and got up, because lying in the dark pretending was not something I was willing to add to the list of things I was currently doing.
I dressed. I packed. I ran through the system , charger, toiletry bag, room key returned, nothing left behind , with the focused efficiency of a man using routine as scaffolding. I did not look at the other bed until I had to.
Shay was asleep. Still. The same position, the arm, the blanket, the city light. The alarm on his phone wasn't for another twenty minutes and he would use every one of them.
I looked at him for three seconds. Longer than necessary. I noted this and added it to the list of things I was choosing not to examine, which was a list that had grown considerably since approximately eleven,forty last night.
I picked up my carry,on and went down to the hotel gym.
I ran for fifty,five minutes, which was thirty more than scheduled and about forty more than my legs technically wanted after a game the night before, but the legs were not the problem.
I ran until the protocol had something to work with , until the thoughts had less oxygen and the body had more of the conversation. It helped. Marginally.
I showered. Went to breakfast. Got two coffees.
Set Shay's on the table across from mine and sat down with my phone.
Hartley arrived at seven,fifty,four. Looked at the two coffees. Looked at me. Did not say anything. Sat down.
"You look terrible," he said.
"I'm fine."
"Two hours of sleep looks like exactly this."
I looked at my phone. "I got nearly three."
"My mistake," Hartley said, without any indication that it was a mistake. He drank his coffee. Looked at the table. Then, in the way Hartley said important things , sideways, without buildup: "Whatever it is. Don't let it sit too long."
I didn't answer.
Hartley didn't push. He never pushed. He said the thing and let it land and trusted you to do something with it, which was, I had come to understand, his version of caring.
The room filled. Mivo, Reeves, Kieran. Charlie, who caught my eye when he sat down and held it for one second with the particular look of a man who knew something and was deciding whether to deploy it. I looked at my phone. He looked at his coffee. We both let it go.
At eight,oh,four, Shay walked in.
He looked , fine.
Easy. Comfortable. Hair slightly damp from the shower, hoodie with the uneven drawstrings, the walk of a man for whom the world was a reasonable place that generally worked out.
He dropped into the chair across from mine, pulled the coffee toward him, wrapped both hands around it the way he always did, and looked up at the table with a general, amiable warmth.
"Morning," he said. To the room. To everyone.
His eyes landed on mine for exactly the length of a normal glance , friendly, easy, the same as always , and moved on.
"Morning," I said. To my phone.
Kieran immediately launched into something about the loss, about their winger, about the seam in the coverage that I had already identified at two in the morning, and the table moved into its rhythm, and I answered the questions I was asked and made the points I needed to make and functioned at a completely professional level.
Shay laughed at something Mivo said , the real laugh, sudden and bright , and I turned a page on my phone.
He was fine.
He was so convincingly, completely fine that I spent the next twenty minutes conducting a quiet and involuntary study of it , the ease of his shoulders, the warmth in his voice, the way he reached over and stole a piece of Kieran's toast without asking and Kieran pointed at him and he pointed back and neither of them stopped talking.
He was entirely himself. Loud and warm and present and giving nothing away.
And I thought: this is costing him something.
I knew Shay O'Brien. I knew every version of his silence and every frequency of his loud and I knew, with the certainty of four years of close attention, that this particular ease , this specific, calibrated, pitch,perfect fine , was the performance.
The thing underneath it I had seen last night, raw and real in the amber light.
He was protecting me.
The realization landed quietly, without drama, and did significantly more damage than the sleepless night.
I looked at my coffee.
He was fine so I could be fine. He had kissed me and I had said we can't with my hands in his shirt and he had woken up and decided to give me room, and he was doing it by being so exactly himself that I had almost believed it.
Almost.