Chapter 21 #2
I turn to look at him. He is already looking at me.
Up close, in the gray morning light, without the arena overhead lighting or the film room monitor or the rink glass between us, he is disarmingly real.
Expressive eyes. The sharp jawline. Superstar bracelet still on his wrist, I notice, because he is still wearing it and I have been not-noticing it since he walked into morning skate.
“You’re still wearing it,” I say.
He looks at the neon bracelet. “Christopher will ask.”
“It’s been three days.”
“He will absolutely ask.” No performance in it or grin deployed for effect.
He is stating a fact about a three-year-old and a rubber superstar bracelet with the straightforward certainty of a man who has already decided what his priorities are.
The thing that caused the feelings I had at Piper’s house does it again. I face forward.
“Ask me,” he says.
“Ask you what.”
“Whatever you’ve been not-asking for three weeks.”
I smash my lips together as if it will stop the overflow. The wind picks up off the loading bay. I’m cold and stuck on a plastic armrest and the honest answer is I have approximately fourteen things I have been not-asking, and none of them belong on a service dock next to a dumpster.
“You first,” I say.
He accepts this without comment. Tips his head against the chair.
Exhales once, a breath that fogs in the October air.
“I looked for you,” he says. My spine stiffens.
“After Rockford.” His voice is level. No accusation in it.
No performance. “I had your first name. The name of the company that dispatched the officiating crew. A city of two and a half million people met me on Tuesday morning.” A pause.
“I found four Antonias in the league database. Wrong ages, wrong cities, wrong everything. I revisited the bar, questioning diners plus workers.” He tilts his head toward me.
“I checked your Instagram. Or tried to. You don’t have one. ”
“I have a professional LinkedIn.”
“I found it. Your profile photo is the size of a postage stamp and was taken in a library.”
“It’s a professional photo.”
“It’s a photo taken by someone standing forty feet away.”
I stare at the loading bay gate. “I don’t advertise.”
“No,” he says. “You don’t.” A beat. “Why?”
The honest answer lives in a place I have kept locked for two years.
A careful answer is career, professionalism, the specific rules that were new that season, that my father officiates his games and would have found out, and the fallout would have been professional and personal and catastrophic.
The measured answer is accurate. It is also, as Elena has pointed out on approximately eleven separate occasions, incomplete.
“I told myself it was the rules,” I say.
“And?”
Four inches of space between his arm and mine. The scent of his shampoo wafting around me. I’m caught up and too tired to deflect today. “I would have stayed,” I say. “If I hadn’t left.”
Silence. The alarm still sounds, distantly, a steady pulse against the October morning. “I know,” he says.
I turn. He is already facing me. His eyes are direct and warm, carrying something I've been pretending wasn't mutual. “I knew when I woke up and you were gone,” he says. “Not that you left because it didn’t matter.” He holds my gaze. “The opposite.”
My throat is tight. “Max.”
“You want to know what I remember?”
Don’t. “You don’t have to—”
“The hot tub,” he says. “The Rockford pines and the steam coming off the water. The porch light was on a timer and it clicked off around midnight. The yard went dark all at once, just the light from the water left. And your shoulders were above the waterline and they were cold.” His jaw works once.
“I remember that. Warm underneath, cold above. The specific…” He stops.
Clears his throat and starts again. “There was a moment where you laughed at what I said, and you tipped your head back, and I thought…” He stops.
He presses his lips together. “I thought, I want to make her laugh again. For as long as she’ll let me.
” A pause. It cost him. “And then you were gone. And I spent a year trying to find someone who laughed like that.” The dock is completely noiseless except for the wind and the distant alarm.
My eyes are burning, and I’m a professional, and I’m on a service dock next to a dumpster, and I am not doing this here!
I am absolutely doing this here.
“I left before sunrise. I almost got back into bed." I clear my throat. “I drove fast, thinking only that distance would prevent my return.” His tell is evident more than ever now. “I pulled into the first gas station I saw and parked. Twice, I turned around and drove back.”
“Why didn’t you?”
My father and the rules are the actual answer.
The terror of wanting him so badly, having never allowed myself to want anything so intensely before.
The answer is I was twenty-two and I had once let chemistry override architecture.
It failed miserably. That night had done exactly that again.
It terrified me completely. “I was scared,” I say.
It is the first time I have said it to anyone, including Elena.
The word hangs there. Small. Unprotected.
I don’t take it back.
Max goes completely still beside me. At this moment, nothing else matters.
Not the disheveled hair, towel, skate socks, or the superstar bracelet.
The October cold, and the dumpster, fall away because he reaches over and takes my hand off my folded arms and holds it and says nothing.
His knee shifts, brushing mine for half a second. Not an accident or repeated.
Not ignored.
His hands are warm. Mine is freezing. He turns it over in his.
Studies it. Runs his thumb across my knuckles once, the way he did in the sauna with the steam and the amber light, except here there is a gray sky and a loading dock and he is in a towel and I am in a blazer and none of it is cinematic and every bit is real.
“Okay,” he says calmly.
I frown. “Okay?”
His fingers tighten around mine. Not trapping. Anchoring. His thumb drags slowly across my knuckles, as if he’s confirming I’m real and not a figment of his imagination he got wrong two years ago. “Okay,” he repeats. “I’ve got you now.”
The wind cuts across the dock hard enough to make me shiver. Max notices immediately. Before I understand what he’s doing, he reaches for the towel at his hips.
“Max—”