Chapter 13
THEO
I WAKE UP feeling like a parade.
Sore in expensive places, delighted with myself before I even remember why, and then I remember why, and the delight requires some actual effort to manage so I don't wake the entire floor.
Beside me, Patrick is answering email.
In bed, at 7:40 in the morning, like a sociopath. The attachment on his screen is called FINAL_VENDOR_COMPARISON_v8.
"There's a v8 now?" I ask into the pillow.
"The florist revised."
He’s unbelievable. "Patrick. The earth moved for three separate people last night and you're versioning documents?"
"The florist doesn't know that."
I surface far enough to look at him. There's a mark on his throat that I'm proud of, and the stubble on his jaw has grown visibly overnight.
I let him have two more minutes with tablecloths. It's a personal record of mine, and I spend it staring at the ceiling, listening to the heating unit hum, while last night reorganizes itself in my head into something that needs a label and doesn't have one.
"Sooo." I walk two fingers across the comforter toward his laptop. "The chair guy."
He gives me a, "Mm?" eyes still glued to the screen.
"The chair guy, Patrick."
"I was there."
"Were you, now? Because a man who was there would not be CC'ing a florist right now.
He'd be lying in the wreckage like me, thinking about how the chair guy thanked us for our hustle—" Patrick's mouth twitches, there and gone "—which I've been quoting in my head since I opened my eyes, by the way. Best post-game review of my career, now that I think about it.”
He types three more words and stops. I watch him decide something, and then he closes the laptop. "Say what you're overthinking."
"I don't overthink."
He waits. I overthink.
"Last night." My hands get involved, describing a shape that includes three people, the chair, the bed, and the general concept of Wisconsin. "Did it feel like we had… You know. Audience?"
Patrick does me the courtesy of actually running the tape in his mind before he answers, eyes somewhere on the dead TV. "No."
"Right? Right? And it should have. That's a whole extra man, Patrick, that's a lot of extra man, and I've had audiences—" his eyebrow moves, and I ride straight past it "—so I know what an audience feels like.
You perform, they receive, everybody goes home.
Last night I looked over at him and it didn't feel like a show having a viewer. It felt..."
I run out of words, which happens to me roughly never. Patrick picks it up off the ground where I dropped it. "He didn't visit," he says. "He fit."
The two words he budgeted knock the air out of me.
"Yeah." My voice comes out small. "That."
The heating unit buzzes. Somewhere down the hall a door closes on somebody's ordinary morning, and I say the next part to the ceiling, because the ceiling doesn't have blue eyes that see everything.
"If we do this… If this ever becomes a thing we're actually doing.
It's not us-plus-guy, Patrick." My heart is moving quicker now.
"I've been the plus-guy. I know what the guest bed feels like.
You get invited to everything and you're on the lease for none of it, and everyone's so nice about it, and then one day you're a great time somebody used to know.
" An old wound puts its hand up. I let it talk.
"I'm not doing that to him. I'd rather stop now, while it would only break me a little. "
Patrick has gone completely still beside me. "No," he says after a long moment. "He's not a guest."
I turn my head. He's already looking at me, and there's nothing managed in his face now. For a second the room feels very full for a place containing two people and a chair.
"Okay," I say. My eyes sting a bit, which is nobody's business. "Good meeting. I'm putting it in the minutes."
"Theo."
"The minutes will reflect that you said something perfect and then looked embarrassed about it." He hooks an arm around my neck and hauls me into his side, and I go, laughing, and we stay like that for a while, his heartbeat under my ear going faster than his face would ever admit.
The correct response to a charged conversation before eight a.m. is pancakes. This is a known fact. Call time for day two of hammer theater isn't until noon, which leaves a pancake-shaped hole in the schedule, and I know a place on 5th that Lindqvist swears by.
I find my phone in the sheets and open Wall's thread.
Me: al's on 5th. 40 min. pancakes are on Patrick. he doesn't know yet.
Beside me, Patrick cranes his neck. I snatch my phone away from his eyes. "What don't I know?"
"Nothing. Wear the blue thing."
My phone buzzes against my palm.
Wall: :thumbs_up_emoji:
That’s it. One yellow thumb, from a man I watched come apart in an armchair eight hours ago. I flop back into the pillows and grin at it like the idiot I am.
***
AL'S ON 5TH has a corner booth and laminated menus older than me.
Patrick and I get there first and I take the side facing the door, so I get the full sequence when Wall walks in at 8:30 exactly: the pause on the door, the sweep of the room, the half-second where his face changes once he spots us.
He crosses the floor and folds himself into the booth across from us, and the table becomes very small, and nobody says anything about any of it.
"You walked?" I ask.
"Six blocks." He picks up the menu and frowns at it, a man conducting due diligence on hash browns.
The waitress arrives with coffee before he's done deciding.
Patrick hands his menu back without opening it and orders for the table.
Chocolate chip pancakes, egg whites, oatmeal, wheat toast dry, and a double side of bacon for me, because I'll steal his otherwise and he's done pretending that's not an issue.
Wall's mouth was already open to order. It closes. He looks at Patrick, suspicious and grudgingly impressed.
"I know what I’m doing," Patrick says, and hands over the last menu.
The waitress squints at him on her way through collecting them. She's got reading glasses on a chain, a Vipers pin on her apron, and I watch recognition arrive in stages. "You're the goalie." A finger comes up. "Patrick Grez... Grzesh..." The glasses come down. She commits. "Patrick Gravity."
"Close enough," Patrick says, pleasant.
"It suits you," Wall says, without looking up from his coffee.
I choke on nothing. The waitress leaves happy. Patrick looks out the window like he’s storing retaliation for later. Under the table, his knee presses against mine and stays.
What happens over the next forty minutes is nothing special, and I want to keep all of it.
Wall says something about the Vipers' penalty kill that's fifty percent compliment and fifty percent insult, and Patrick, instead of absorbing it with his usual diplomatic nothing, takes a napkin out of the dispenser and starts drawing.
A rectangle for the net. A syrup bottle relocated to serve as the strong-side post. Two jam packets become shooters, and within three minutes there are four napkins on the table and two goalies are having a full technical disagreement about pad-stacking on wraparounds, complete with arrows.
"You're giving up the far post," Wall says, tapping the napkin.
"I'm taking away the pass."
"The pass isn't there. I watched you do this in November. The pass was never there."
"The pass was there in November." Patrick rotates the napkin without surrendering it. "Groover fanned on it."
Wall takes the pen and starts drawing his own rebuttal net, and I sit there with my chin in my hand, watching two of the best goaltenders alive litigate geometry on napkins at a diner where the coffee costs two dollars.
Here's what I know about after. I'm the after guy.
I've had a lot of breakfasts where the other person checks their phone in a specific way.
Where the conversation is a rental car you're both returning, and you're so nice to each other because niceness is the clean exit.
I know that meal in every city in this league.
This is not that meal.
Nobody’s checking their phone and nobody's leaving.
Wall eats his egg whites in systematic quadrants.
When I weigh in on the napkin war ("As the person who actually scores, you're both wrong.
Shooters aim for whatever's twitching") they turn on me as one unit, two full technical rebuttals colliding, and I laugh from somewhere so deep in my chest it startles me.
I catch myself melting inside, mid-laugh, elbow in the syrup. The napkins, the bacon I steal and Patrick pretends not to notice, Wall relaxing progressively until he's taking up the whole bench. My body's having a great time. Inside it, there's a small stunned creature taking notes.
So this is what it's like when nobody's leaving.
Somewhere amidst all of that, two booths down, a girl lifts her phone at the angle people think is subtle. It's a diner, we're three large recognizable men, and I'm currently too happy to do the math on it.
The math does itself some half hour later, when we're standing at the register, in the form of three phones going off. Mine first, then Patrick's, one buzz after another after another, in that peculiar rhythm that means trouble. I check mine first.
The photo's already got numbers on it. It's the three of us mid-napkin-war—Wall gesturing with the pen, Patrick mid-rebuttal, me laughing with my head tilted back. Underneath, the caption reads:
RIVALS brEAK brEAD?? :eyes_emoji:
The replies are split between people being normal ("charity co-chairs, calm down, they run a campaign") and fan accounts experiencing rapture. And then, forty followers strong, one reply-guy verbally squinting at the thing nobody else sees.
idk. the vibes are: dating.
I cackle, out loud, at the register, because he's right. The vibes are dating. The vibes have a chair with sight lines, and also it's a genuinely good photo, by which I mean I look hot as fuck.
Then I look up. I'm the only one laughing.
Wall has gone still.
Patrick's gone very still in the other direction. The deeper one, the one where his face stays pleasant and everything behind it goes to work. He pays, thanks the waitress, and steers us out onto the sidewalk with a hand that touches nobody.
Milwaukee's doing its gray morning thing. Patrick scans the street once and then puts his voice in its managing register.
"It's fine. Co-chairs. It's cover." A car passes. He watches it go. "It's actually perfect cover."
He's right. Strategically, it's the best possible cover. The campaign explains everything. We could eat breakfast in that diner every Sunday until the gala and the caption would stay a caption.
But I'm not looking at Patrick when the word lands.
I'm looking at Wall. Something crosses his face. Half a second, maybe less, gone before it finishes landing, and I only catch because I've made his face my second job. It's not panic. Panic I'd know. It's the look of a man who got handed the correct answer and found it was still wrong somehow.
He nods, because it's the right call and he knows it, and Patrick nods, because the plan is sound, and I stand between them on a cold sidewalk, evaluating.
Maybe he doesn't want to be cover.
Neither do I, pal. Neither do I.