2. Nolan
Chapter two
Nolan
There was a man asleep in my guest room.
For three and a half years, the mornings had been mine.
There was nobody below me but a retired bond trader who golfed.
Nobody listened during the forty minutes it took to coax my body into functioning.
Now, a bodyguard was down the hall with nothing to do but listen. My entire routine needed to be silent.
The heating pad had been running under me all night. I rolled onto my right side, brought my knees up, and pushed off the mattress with my top arm until I was sitting on the edge with both feet flat. My left hip complained. It was one of those mornings.
The little weather station on the windowsill showed a barometric pressure of 29.71 and falling. That explained the hip. A storm was building somewhere west, and that meant the joint would be a half-step worse by afternoon. Outside, a thick, damp heat had settled into the Central West End overnight.
I climbed down onto the mat beside the bed in stages—hand to the nightstand first for balance, then leading with my good side, letting the bum hip come last. Lying flat on the mat, I pulled my knees to my chest, one at a time, easing the joint into movement.
I had a roller for my quads and the long muscle down the outside of the thigh that did half the hip's job these days.
Next was a lacrosse ball under the glute, rolling my weight onto it slowly against the floor.
A percussion gun sat on the nightstand, but I left it there. Any other morning I'd have run it along the flexor, but the thing sounded like an outboard motor. The sound would carry straight down the hall. I used my hand instead, leaning into the ball.
I'd learned to make the maintenance invisible.
Trainers, teammates, and the entire city needed me to be the guy who played back-to-back games on a bad wheel and never made it a story.
A bodyguard in the guest room was too close, a set of eyes that could see what I kept to myself.
His job was to stand where I pointed; mine was to make him forget I was worth watching.
I worked up against the dresser and stood, testing the hip before I trusted it with weight. The catch was there, deep. I breathed into it, waiting it out until it settled back down into a dull ache I could walk on.
I took the long way around the coffee table to reach the kitchen. The short way meant planting on the left and pivoting over it. My hip didn't pivot anymore—not when cold. The long way let me turn wide, lead with the good side, and never load the joint sideways. Four extra steps.
The espresso machine was half-loaded when I heard water running in the guest bath. Then it stopped, followed by footsteps.
The team had sent a body to watch me during a deep run the way they sent a town car.
The playoffs made the city stupid and the front office cautious.
I needed to be no trouble and get in the car when the car came.
It was two weeks, three if we went the distance.
Then he'd be gone and the condo would go back to being only mine.
He walked up the hall on the balls of his feet, no shuffling. It wasn't the heavy-footed business of a man who'd just been sleeping. He moved like he'd been up for hours and would be up for hours more.
"Good morning," he said, as if he were greeting someone he'd known much longer than one night. He stopped at the end of the island, barefoot, wearing a charcoal t-shirt, while his hair was still arguing with the pillow.
The team usually sent men gone soft in a hard shape. They were ex-cops, ex-military, ex-something and thick through the middle, built to fill a doorway. Elias Ward filled it his own way.
He was tall, taller than me, and long. His shoulders were wide, creating that swimmer's V-shape. He still moved like an athlete. For a second, I saw him doing the butterfly, arms spread, water trailing off his shoulders.
"Morning," I said, and pulled the shot.
"Is that for me?"
"If you drink it." I slid the cup across. "There's a shop up the street that'll fix you a pour-over if you want something that didn't come out of a machine. I don't keep it around."
"No?"
"That machine's the only thing in this kitchen that works for a living." I sipped. "The rest is for show. Pre-packaged meals in the freezer. The team nutritionist set me up with a service. It drops a couple of weeks off at a time. I reheat."
He looked the kitchen over once—the range and the rest of it, gleaming and untouched. "Professional grade."
"For a guy who doesn't cook or have people over." I watched him. "Go ahead and say it."
"I wasn't going to say it."
"You were thinking it loud enough."
"I think most things loud." He lifted the cup but didn't drink, watching me over the rim. "It's a known flaw."
"We've all got our weaknesses." I sipped again, watching a slim finger tap the side of his cup. "Where's home?"
"Minneapolis." He had his own question. "How's the hip this morning?"
He didn't ask how I was feeling. He asked specifically about the hip.
I didn't put the cup down. "Old," I said. "It's part of an old building. Everything in here creaks."
He didn't laugh. He nodded like I'd told him something true and let it sit, drinking his coffee.
"So what do you do?" I asked. "When you're not standing in strangers' kitchens. Do guys like you have a hobby?"
"Guys like me."
"Unnaturally calm. There's got to be a release valve."
He considered his answer. "I row in the early morning on the river. There's a club back home."
"Not the pool."
He nodded, and his voice was flat. "Not the pool."
"I should get dressed," I said.
"Sure."
"Skate's at eight. We leave at seven-fifteen."
"I'll be ready."
He continued to sip the espresso while I headed for the shower.
I ran the water hot and stood in it longer than I needed to, letting it work the hip while the rest of the morning caught up with me.
He wasn't just a face seventeen years ago. Speedos didn't leave much to the imagination. The news piece showed him standing on the blocks, windmilling those long arms, strong, smooth pecs and slim waist.
The entire image came back in high definition. The body in my kitchen was the same one: older, dressed, and drinking my coffee.
I could feel it in my cock. I let out a breath that was half a laugh. He would be the one man I had no business wanting.
It was annoying, but it had also been a long time. Nice to know something in my creaky body still worked.
I shut the water off before it could turn into anything else, and stood dripping while rubbing a towel against my hair. I told myself it didn't matter.
We took the back way down at seven-fifteen.
"Car's coming around the back," he said, thumbing his phone as the elevator dropped. "Called the team last night and had them drive around to the delivery street. Front of this building's a fishbowl at game time."
It was. It had been for three years, and not one of the polite men with earpieces the team had sent before had ever thought to do anything about it. They let me walk out the front into whatever was waiting.
The elevator let us out near the trash room and the cleaners' carts. It was the gray concrete guts of the building.
We exited the building onto the rear loading dock. The day's heat was already rising out of the pavement.
As I walked through the door, Elias's hand pressed flat against the small of my back. He was steering, but then the fingers pressed, curling slightly inward. It had to mean nothing, and it was over in two seconds.
The car was at the curb, a black SUV idling. Elias opened the rear door and stood beside it, waiting.
"All set," he said.
I got into the car. He settled in beside me, and the driver eased us away from the curb.
The SUV turned onto a side street, and Elias watched the building slide past his window, then looked back at me.
"Five tonight," he said. "Series even."
So he'd done his reading. Most of the men the team sent couldn't have told you who'd won last night.
"Even," I said.
"Win it, you can close on the road. Lose it, the next one ends your year." He said it flat, like he was reading the weather forecast. "How's that sit?"
"It sits like a Tuesday," I said. "You play the game in front of you. Tonight's a game. Tomorrow there's another one."
"That's the media answer. Is there more?"
"It's the only answer there is." I watched the medical buildings go by, the early shift in scrubs bunched at the crosswalk waiting for the light as we rolled to a stop.
"If you start doing math on a series, you stop playing.
I've got one job tonight, and it's the same one I had in October.
Be good for every shift they give me and don't cost us anything. "
"See, that I don't buy." He said it easy, almost warm, like we were two guys killing time.
"Not the philosophy, the philosophy's airtight.
I mean you believing it's just a Tuesday.
You're thirty-four, and what, fourteen seasons in?
You've done the math, whether or not you wanted to.
Everybody's told you the window. You know exactly how many of these you've got left. "
I looked at him. He looked back, open and interested, no edge to it at all.
"How many've you got left?" I asked. "Whatever it is you do."
"Fair." He smiled, conceding the point. "I'll tell you mine if you tell me yours."
"Nobody's told me a window."
"Somebody always tells you the window."
I didn't answer that. The traffic light changed, and the scrubs moved off the curb in a loose pack, holding coffee cups while somebody laughed at something. The SUV rolled forward.
"You always do this?" I asked.
"Do what?"
"Talk. Before eight in the morning."
"Pretty much." He didn't sound sorry about it. "You'd rather I didn't?"
"I'd rather most people didn't."
"Noted." He settled back against the seat.
The bodyguards the team sent before never talked to me like that. They watched the doors and called me Mr. Mercer, and counted the hours until the next break. None of them ever gave me a hard time about being old.
The cathedral's dome broke over the rooftops, gray-green, as the car turned toward downtown.
"One thing," he said.
"Yeah?"
"The heating pad's dangerous."
I looked at him.
"Never leave something like that on all night. It could start a fire."
I hadn't told him about the pad. He hadn't been in my bedroom. Had he?