Chapter 8 Nate - January 2018, Philadelphia
He texted late.
Nate: Why would I need that information?
Riley: no reason. I'm a courteous man. I share information. sure is snowing
Riley: oh so you've thought about this
Nate: I've thought about the garage stairs.
Riley: sure you have. very spontaneous. very off the cuff, the garage stairs
He came in with snow in his hair and stood in the middle of my living room and turned in a slow circle exactly the way Angelo had. I stood in the doorway of the kitchen with my arms crossed and let him.
"Oh," he said.
"Don't."
"Oh, this is so much worse than I pictured, and I have pictured it."
"You've pictured my apartment?"
"I've pictured it extensively, Sinclair. I assumed there'd be a chandelier and a portrait of a horse." He walked to the couch and picked up a throw pillow. There was a tag hanging off the corner. "This has a tag on it."
"So?"
"It has a tag on it. It's been here since August. Nobody has ever sat on this couch."
"I sit on that couch."
"You do not sit on that couch. There is no dent. A man leaves a dent." He went to the hallway and crouched. "Why is the art on the floor?"
"They haven't hung it."
"Who's they?"
"The firm."
"The firm," he shouted, into my hallway. "Nate. Buddy. You can hang a picture. It takes twenty minutes and a hammer."
"I don't own a hammer."
He stood up very slowly and looked at me like I'd told him I'd never been outside.
Then he went into the kitchen, and I followed him and leaned on the door frame, and he opened the oven, and looked in it, and closed it.
"This oven has never been on," he said.
"That's not true."
"Nate. There's no smell. Ovens have a smell. This one smells like a box."
"I use the microwave."
He put both hands on the counter and let his head hang for a second, like a man receiving news. "You are a professional athlete in a city with the best sandwiches in America and you live in a display home."
My heart was going the entire time he did that, and not from being insulted.
He was touching my life. He was picking up the pillows in it and opening the doors of it.
He'd been in my apartment a matter of minutes and it was more used than it had been all year, and something about watching him move around in it did something to me that I had not paid an interior firm for and could not have specified in a brief.
So I got a hand in the front of his sweater and pulled him off my counter and kissed him in my own kitchen. Hard, with no preamble, my hand going up the back of his neck into his hair to hold him still, and his back hit the fridge and something magnetic fell off it and neither of us looked.
He made a sound into my mouth that was half a laugh and stopped being a laugh, and got both hands under my shirt with cold fingers on purpose, flat and shocking against my ribs, and I kissed him harder for it and felt him grin against my mouth.
"Your hands are freezing."
And then somebody knocked on my door. We both went completely still.
"Nate!" Angelo, through the door, cheerful, at ten fifty at night. "Nate, open up, it's heavy!"
I’ve never moved so fast in my life. I got Riley off the fridge and across the living room and I had the balcony door open and him through it in about four seconds.
I grabbed the hoodie off the back of a chair and shoved it at him, pulled the door shut, drew the curtain halfway, and went and opened my front door.
Angelo was holding a foil pan in both hands like it was a baby.
"My mother," he said, "made you lasagna."
"Ange."
"Do not argue with me. She heard you live alone and she got very quiet and then she made this. It's got the sausage." He pushed past me and put it on my counter. "You got foil? You gotta cover the top. Where's your foil?"
"I don't have foil. And Angelo, it's eleven o'clock."
"Yeah, and it's snowing, and I was six blocks away, and now you eat for a week." He looked around. "You want a beer? I'll have a beer."
"I've got an early skate."
"There's no skate, it's Wednesday."
"Optional skate. I'm going."
"You're going to the optional skate." He said it flat, like a diagnosis, and got a beer out of my fridge anyway.
"Okay, so, listen. Saturday. Marianna's doing the thing for her birthday, and I said I'd ask you.
I already know you're gonna say no. So I want you to know that I'm asking so I can tell her I asked. "
"Tell her I said happy birthday."
"You're a coward."
"I know."
"She's a chef, Nate."
"Goodnight, Ange."
It took ten minutes, and for all ten of them I was completely, flawlessly normal in my own kitchen with an award-show smile on, in January, while Riley Kowalski stood out on my balcony in my hoodie in the cold, four feet away, on the other side of a glass door with a curtain half over it.
I experienced it as a cardiac event. My hands did not stop shaking for a long time after the door closed.
Neither of us said one word about it that night. We didn't debrief it and we didn't joke about it, and we both walked away from it changed, and the thing that changed was not about wanting.
It was about competence.
Wanting each other was not what nearly ended two careers in my kitchen. Sloppiness was. Amateurs get caught. Professionals don't.
So four days later I did something I had never done in my life, which was book my own travel.
Not once, ever. My flights, my hotels, my cars all got arranged the way weather gets arranged, by institutions.
I sat at the kitchen island at nine in the morning with my laptop open on a Marriott outside Pittsburgh, a real one, a Courtyard with a parking lot and a Chili's next door, and I filled in the form.
First name. Last name.
I sat there with my hands on the keys and thought about typing Ellis.
I didn't. There was a card involved and the card had my name on it, and a fake name on a real card is the kind of thing that becomes a story. So I typed my own name into a hotel form, and my hands were wet and my heart was going like I was in the last minute of a one goal game.
The confirmation email came back immediately. It sat in my inbox for three weeks with all the energy of a subpoena. I opened it over and over.
February, the Marriott. The return game, which we lost, which put the season series at two to one Pittsburgh with one to play.
Room service made a mistake, is what happened. Two entrées, one crème br?lée. The kitchen shorted us.
He looked at the tray, and then at me.
"Don't," I said.
"There's one dessert, Sinclair. It's a resource allocation problem and I'm the only economist in the room."
"There's one dessert because you ordered at eleven forty at night."
He picked it up and held it and cracked the top with the back of the spoon, exactly the way he had at a rubber chicken banquet in Chicago in April with a whole ballroom watching, without one flicker of shame.
And I sat there on the end of the bed in my undershirt and watched him eat my dessert for the second time in my life.
"That's my mother's recipe."
He stopped with the spoon halfway. "What?"
"Crème br?lée. It's hers. Not literally that one. But she makes it." I looked at the carpet. "My father had a nutritionist when I was a kid. Not for him. For me. From when I was nine. There was a list on the fridge and sugar was on the list."
"Okay."
"So she'd make it on report card nights. In secret. And she didn't have a torch, so she'd borrow one from the guy next door, Mr. Pryor, who did metalwork in his garage, and she'd do it late, after my dad went to bed, and we'd eat it standing up in the kitchen with the light off over the sink."
Riley put the spoon down. "How old were you?"
"Nine. Ten. Through high school."
"With the light off?"
"Yes," I said. "So the smell of burnt sugar just kind of… means somebody cares about you and they're not allowed to say so out loud."
I have no idea why I said it. Nobody bet me. There was no wager on the table and no coin had been flipped and I just handed it to him for free.
He sat there holding a ramekin and I watched him try four different faces and land on none of them.
"Okay," he said. "No, you can't do that."
"Do what?"
"You can't just give me that." He put the dish down on the nightstand hard enough to rattle it. "There's no wager. There's nothing riding. You handed me a whole entire thing about your mother, for free, and now I'm holding it and I can't put it down and I can't give it back."
"That's not…"
"Best of five. Right now. Tonight. Bets, real ones, and my December debt rides on it. I win, it's voided, we're square." He was already up and pacing in his shorts. "I'm not walking around owing you an honest answer for the rest of my life like a mortgage, Nate."
I said yes immediately. It's because a best of five is a structure, and a structure is manageable, and what had just happened in that room was not. Scale felt safer than intimacy. It always has.
He lost all five.
He lost the coin toss, the arm wrestle, naming Vezina winners, and a thing with the ice bucket. The last one he lost on purpose or he didn't, and I've never worked out which.
We turned the lights off. We were flat on our backs about eight inches apart, both of us still breathing hard, staring at a ceiling neither of us could see.
I let it get quiet.
"Riley," I said. "I'm collecting."
He didn't say anything. I heard him swallow.
"Okay," he said.
I took my time with it, because I knew exactly what I was doing, and I was as careful with it as I've ever been with anything in my life.
"If nobody on earth could ever hear the answer," I said. "Not me. Not anybody. If it went straight up into the air and disappeared… what would you call yourself?"
The room did nothing for a long moment.