28. Kieran #2
"Six. Live, and then five times on YouTube. The franchise's communications director put the full video up with no commentary."
"Okay."
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"You called her this morning."
"I did. She picked up. We talked."
"What did she say?"
"I asked her what she wanted me to say about her in the room. She told me. I used her exact words."
She closes her eyes.
She leans against me.
When she lifts her face, she says: "She texted me."
"What did she say?"
"She said I am glad he did it. I am not, yet, glad about any of the rest. But I am glad about this. Then she did not say anything else."
"Okay."
"Kieran?"
"Yes."
"I am going to sleep. I have not slept properly in three days. I want you in bed."
"Take me with you."
She does. We go to the bedroom.
She gets in. I get out of the suit and into a soft cotton tee and slide in behind her with my arm under her ribs and my arm around her.
She breathes out, deep, the way she has not let herself breathe out in two days.
For a few minutes, neither of us moves.
The apartment is quiet around us. The late-April dark at the window. Her breath slowing under my arm. My hand is flat against the front of her, the way it goes there without my deciding anymore, and the curve under my palm is warm.
She has not felt this still in days.
I have been in hotel rooms and arena corridors and a conference room on the fourth floor of the practice facility and a podium this afternoon.
I have held my face still through all of it.
I have answered the questions I agreed to answer and deflected the ones I didn't and driven here at twelve-forty-eight and come up the stairs and found her awake on the couch in the dark, waiting.
She is not asleep yet. Her breathing is slow but not gone.
After a while she reaches back and finds my hand on the front of her and moves it, slowly, down.
I go still.
"Greer."
"Yes."
"You said you wanted to sleep."
"I do." A beat. "After."
I press my mouth to the back of her shoulder. She makes a low sound that is not quite a word. My hand, where she has put it, stays where she put it, and she presses into it once, a clear instruction.
I take my time. I have learned, in the months of her, what she wants when she is tired and what she wants when she is not, and what she wants right now is the slow, unhurried version — the one where I am not asking anything of her, just giving her what her body is asking for.
My fingers find what they're looking for, and I work her steadily, unhurried, with my mouth at the back of her neck and my other arm still under her head.
She comes quietly, with her hand tightening over mine and her whole body going taut for a moment and then releasing. I hold her through it.
When she has stilled, she reaches back again, for me this time. I am hard against the back of her thigh, have been since she moved my hand. She finds me and her palm wraps around me once, slowly.
"Kieran."
"Yes."
"Come here."
I ease into her from behind. The fit at twenty-six weeks requires care, and I am always careful, but she is wet and open, and she makes a sound when I am all the way in that I will think about in hotel rooms for the rest of the season.
I do not move at first.
I stay where I am with my hand back on the curve and my mouth at her shoulder and my chest against her back and the entirety of the last three weeks going somewhere out of me.
Then she moves, just barely, a small shift of her hips, an instruction.
I move slow and deep, with my hand on her stomach and her hand over mine and the apartment quiet around us.
She doesn't say much. I don't say much. We are both, I think, too tired for words and too far past the point where anything needs saying.
I told a room full of reporters today that her name is Greer Callahan and she is carrying my child, and I am not commenting further.
She watched it twice. We are both here. Nothing else requires the floor tonight.
She comes a second time around me, quieter than the first, with a small sound against the pillow and her hand pressing hard on top of mine.
I come shortly after her, not trying to hold back, not trying to make anything of it. Just the deep, unhurried release of a man who has been holding himself together for twenty-three days and is, tonight, allowed to let it go.
I stay where I am.
She says, into the dark: "Goodnight, Kieran."
"Goodnight, Greer."
I close my eyes.
I sleep for what turns out to be six hours, the longest I have slept in any one stretch since the morning the Globe column ran, and when I wake up at the South End sound of garbage trucks coming through the front window of her bedroom, my hand is still where it was on the front of her, where the baby has been turning under my palm all night.
For the first time in three weeks, I open my eyes in a bed in this apartment without bracing for what the day is going to ask of me.
The day, today, is going to ask me to coach Game 6 in eighteen hours.
It is going to ask me, between now and then, to let the woman beside me sleep as long as she needs to, and to eat with her at the kitchen table when she is up, and to wait for whatever the next text from my daughter is going to be.
I am, this morning, ready. For the first time in seven months, there is no one left in my life I have to lie to about it.