Chapter 9 — TEO
The door clicks behind me and the hallway is quiet.
My shirt is draped over my shoulders, not pulled on.
The shoulder is warm and loose and I didn’t feel like working it through the sleeves.
The air out here is cooler than Zay’s room and the carpet swallows my footsteps and the hotel is doing that late-night thing where every small sound exists just to remind you everyone else is asleep.
I press the elevator button and wait. His hands are still with me. Across my ribs, one by one. The base of my spine. My jaw when he said my name and it sounded different in his mouth than it has in anyone else’s.
The elevator opens. I lean against the back wall and close my eyes for the ride up two floors.
The doors open into the wider section near the elevator bank and Fontenot is twenty feet away.
Barefoot. Nothing in his hands. Just Fontenot walking towards me at an hour when this hallway should be empty.
His eyes find mine and we both stop. I’m in training shoes and a shirt draped over my shoulder.
He’s barefoot on hotel carpet at one in the morning.
Neither of us has a good reason to be here.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hey.” His voice is even. “Couldn’t sleep. Went for a walk.”
“Yeah.” I shift the shirt on my shoulders. “PT had a late opening. Shoulder’s been tight.”
The excuse sounds worse out loud than it did in my head. PT at one in the morning. On a road trip. Fontenot’s eyes move across my face, unhurried, and whatever he’s reading there he keeps to himself.
“You’ve been doing those careful circles between shifts since December,” he says. “Glad the PT is working on it.”
“Getting there.” I roll the shoulder once, the half-rotation that stops where it always stops. “Better than Nonna’s heating pad remedy, anyway. You know how it is, Fonty.”
“Yeah.” He looks at me for one more second. His expression doesn’t change, exactly. It holds. Like he’s choosing not to ask the next question. “I know how it is.”
“See you at breakfast.”
“Yeah. Get some sleep.”
I walk past him. His footsteps are soft behind me heading the opposite direction. My room is dark. I drop onto the bed and look at the ceiling. My shoulder doesn’t hurt but my heart is racing.
I replay it. Fontenot’s face in the hallway.
The way his eyes moved and the way they stopped moving.
He didn’t ask. Maybe I’m reading too much into a two-minute hallway conversation with a tired teammate.
Maybe. But the hallway felt different when he walked away than it did when the elevator doors opened, and I don’t know what to do with that except lie here.
My head lands on everything from the last few hours.
Zay. His mouth everywhere on me. The sound of his breathing when I was against his shoulder.
Fonty’s bare feet on hotel carpet. The way a secret you thought was yours turns out to live in the same building as forty other people.
Eventually I fall asleep and dream of warm skin under my hands, gold-flecked brown eyes, and a mouth whispering my name so close I can feel his breath.
***
The morning is gray and soft. I sleep well.
Shower. Pack. Eat breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Berger and Thompson, and Berger is walking me through a theoretical restructuring of the player ranking system that would account for what he calls “intangible leadership metrics.” Thompson is eating scrambled eggs with the expression of a man who has decided this is not his fight.
“Volkov’s assist-to-penalty ratio alone justifies the revision,” Berger says, holding up one finger. The Berger finger. The one that means a point is incoming and will arrive fully formed and there is no force that can stop it.
“I think the system is fine,” Thompson says.
“The system is adequate. Adequacy is the enemy of precision.”
I pour more coffee. The restaurant hums with road-trip morning energy.
Guys in sweats drifting through, bags stacking near the lobby doors.
Brooks is across the room with two strength coaches.
Navy polo. Clipboard on the chair beside him.
Eating oatmeal, talking with his hands in the measured way he talks about everything at work, and from here he looks like exactly what his badge says.
The man who handles my shoulder, door open, every touch accounted for.
He catches my eye across the room. Holds it for half a second. Returns to his oatmeal.
Half a second, and this morning it’s enough. I drink the rest of my coffee and listen to Berger explain why plus-minus is a morally bankrupt statistic. The only thought I keep circling back to: two people who want each other and are adults and can figure this out.
“Team dinner Saturday. You bringing anyone?” It’s an innocent question from Davis, while he’s eating his eggs and sausage.
“Nope. Solo.”
“No girlfriend drama for Marchetti?” He’s grinning. “I figured you’d have half of Atlanta lined up by now.”
“Just me and my winning personality.”
He laughs and keeps eating. He means it as a joke. It is a joke. It’s also the fifteenth time someone on this team has assumed I have a girlfriend I’m hiding rather than a man I’m protecting.
The lobby fills before checkout. Fontenot walks through with his bag over his shoulder and his shoes on and nods at me, and I nod back.
Normal. The encounter at one in the morning already folded into the morning version of us, the version where he slept fine and I got PT for my shoulder and nothing worth mentioning happened in a hallway between floors.
The team funnels from the hotel to the bus to the plane.
Zay is four rows behind me. Thompson across the aisle, unconscious before cruising altitude because the man has a gift for sleeping anywhere and I will never stop envying it.
Ten feet of cabin air between me and Zay.
A distance that didn’t exist last night. Back this morning like it never left.
I put on my headphones. The playlist from last week, built half from songs he sent me in December and half from mine.
His taste runs heavier, more bass, music that settles into your chest. Mine is warmer, louder, more alternative rock.
The blend shouldn’t work but it does. I like what our music sounds like together.
I like a lot of things about us together.
Berger asks the flight attendant about the water brand and makes a note in his phone. An hour and change, Charlotte to Atlanta, and everything on this plane is exactly as routine as every other flight home except that four rows back is the only part that doesn’t fit the pattern.
I don’t turn around. I want to walk back there and put my hand on his neck the way I did last night when his face was against my shoulder and his breathing was the only sound in the room.
I want him to close his eyes and let the work face drop for one second and just be the man underneath it, the one who said my name with his mouth on my skin like it was the last word he remembered.
I watch the clouds instead. Four rows back, Brooks is on his laptop, hands precise on the keys. I have been paying close attention to this man for so long I know the sound of his typing.
Atlanta unfolds below, highways and winter green and the skyline catching pale January light.
My city. The one I chose after it was chosen for me.
My apartment. My coffee shop on Peachtree.
My adopted kitten. The facility where Brooks puts his hands on my shoulder three times a week, door open, charts noted, and last night his hands were everywhere and neither of us was thinking about range of motion.
Back at the facility parking lot, the team disperses in its usual pattern, bags shouldered, half-waves exchanged.
Brooks walks to his car. I walk to mine.
Forty feet of asphalt between us. I raise a hand, casual, forgettable.
He raises his back. Holds it for a beat.
Gets in, and the car door closes, and the forty feet stays forty feet.
The drive home is twelve minutes and Parker appears from the bedroom before I’ve set down my bag. The small orange tabby trots toward me with her tail up. Fonty hooked me up with his friend who cat sits, and she sent pictures of Parker the whole time I was away.
But a cat-sitter doesn’t stay with Parker full-time so she needs the extra love now. I pick her up. She pushes her head under my chin and the warm weight of her asks nothing except that I hold still.
I walk over to the couch and stretch out.
She migrates from my arm to my chest, kneads once, then drops into the hollow between my collarbone and the good shoulder.
I pull out my phone and open the thread with Zay.
The last message is a song link from a few days ago, a track I saved and haven’t played yet. I press play.
The bass fills the apartment, low and steady, settling into the walls and the furniture and the empty half of the couch where his feet would be on my coffee table and the kitten would already be abandoning me for his lap, because I can already tell she has no loyalty and excellent taste.
I sit with the song and the quiet of a room that fits two people but only holds one.
The track plays to the end and I start it again.