Chapter 14
Here’s what I knew:
Nathan Cross had been in my apartment last night.
Nathan Cross had said fuck it and kissed me against my wall and I had ended up on my knees on my hardwood floor sucking his dick and Nathan Cross had made a sound that I was going to be thinking about for the rest of my natural life.
Here’s what else I knew:
Something had gone wrong afterward. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just quiet in that Nathan Cross way, the way he shut down when something crossed a line that shouldn’t have been crossed.
And yeah. I’d crossed it.
What went wrong was after.
What I’d said.
What I’d tried to fix.
Because of course he hadn’t wanted it to mean anything. Of course he hadn’t. That wasn’t how Nathan Cross did things. Rules. Professional lines. Careers that didn’t survive stupid mistakes made in messy apartments with players who didn’t know when to stop pushing.
So I’d made it easier.
That was the thing that kept looping in my head.
I’d made it easier for him and told him that he didn’t have to worry about me reading into it or making it weird or screwing up his life any more than I already had.
Which had been the right move.
Obviously.
So why did it feel like I’d screwed up something anyway?
But mostly, if I was being honest, I was still thinking about the look on Nathan’s face when he left.
Which was complicated. Given the door. Given I understand. Given the fact that I had texted Nathan this morning—hey—and gotten nothing back, which was not nothing, which was Cross having read it and chosen not to respond, which I was not spiraling about.
I was spiraling about it a little.
But also. The sound. The way his hand had come up to my—
"Morrison?"
I turned around.
The guy from the bar was standing there with a garment bag over one arm and a professional smile that was warmer than professional smiles usually were. For a second my brain did the thing where it tried to place someone out of context and came up slightly slow.
Then it placed him.
Good shoulders. Easy manner. Didn't get to finish that kiss.
Of all the ballrooms in all the hotels in all of Boston. He had to be working with us on our media day.
“Hey,” I said.
"Hey. Small world," he said. Not weird about it.
"Apparently," I said.
His name was Caleb, he told me, again, while he went through the rack with the efficient authority of someone who knew exactly what they were doing. He was a stylist, had worked with three other teams.
He got me into a charcoal jacket that fit correctly in a way my own clothes rarely did and made some adjustments at the shoulders with complete professionalism and zero drama about the bar, about the text, about any of it.
I appreciated that. I told him so.
"You're easy to dress," he said. "Good proportions."
"I've been told."
He smiled. I smiled back. It was genuinely fine. There was nothing there, not on my end, and Caleb seemed to get that without needing it explained. We existed in the wardrobe area with the easy comfort of two people who'd had a moment that hadn't gone anywhere and were both adults about it.
Then I looked up and Cross was in the room.
He looked exactly like Nathan Cross always looked. Coat, tablet, focused. Moving through the room with purpose, the way he moved everywhere, like he'd already assessed it and found it adequately functional. No evidence of last night anywhere on him. No evidence of anything.
Which was fine.
That was fine.
That was what I had asked for. Nobody reading into anything. It doesn't have to mean anything. We're adults. I had said those words with my own mouth and I had meant them, or I had meant to mean them, which was approximately the same thing.
This was me getting exactly what I'd asked for.
Great.
He found me.
His blue eyes moved from my face to Caleb's hands on my shoulders and back to my face.
The whole thing took maybe one second. Left no visible mark, which was how Cross did everything, except that he didn't look away after.
He held it for a beat longer than a man who didn't care would hold it, and then he looked at his tablet like someone who had made a decision about where to look.
Caleb's hands stilled slightly on my shoulders.
I turned to Caleb. He had his eyes on Cross across the room with the mildly curious expression of someone who had just noticed something and was deciding whether it was his business.
"Friend of yours, right?" he asked, low.
"Team doctor," I said.
Caleb turned back to me.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
Then, after a second, casually, like it was an afterthought: "Hey, I actually tried to reach you after that night. Couple times."
"What? Really?"
"Yeah. I texted. Called once, I think." He was doing something with the lapel, not looking at me. "Never heard back. Figured you weren't interested, which, fair." A small shrug. "Just thought it was a little weird since you seemed"—he paused, choosing the word—"receptive, at the bar."
Across the room, Cross dropped his tablet.
My head came up fast. He had already retrieved it, was already back to whatever he'd been doing before, face giving nothing.
Caleb was still talking. Something about texting, about the number, about never hearing back.
I had not received any texts from Caleb. I had gone through my phone the morning after, thoroughly, in the elevator, with a headache, and there had been nothing from his number. I would have noticed.
There had been nothing from Caleb.
"Huh," I said.
Caleb’s eyes cut to me briefly. Then to Cross across the room toward where he was standing with his tablet, and something moved through his expression.
He turned his attention back at my jacket.
"Anyway," he said pleasantly. "Doesn't matter."
He didn't say anything else about it.
Neither did I.
Across the ballroom Nathan Cross was staring at his tablet. The man who had driven to my apartment last night and said fuck it and was now standing twenty feet away being a complete stranger about it.
I was a professional.
I had a photo shoot to do.
The interview was in a side room off the ballroom: two chairs, a camera, and a woman named Bianca who had a warm-but-focused energy.
I knew the format. I'd done versions of this interview before. You sat in the chair and you were relaxed and you were honest in a way that felt like honesty without actually requiring any.
Bianca smiled at me. I smiled back.
"Let's start with something fun," she said. "The incident in Philadelphia."
I kept my smile. "Which one?"
"The one involving the visiting team's mascot."
"Okay so," I said, "in my defense, I did not know the eagle was real."
"It was listed as a live mascot in the game program."
"I don't read the game program, Bianca. I'm focused on the game."
"You chased it."
"I didn’t—Well. Okay. There was a misunderstanding about personal space, and we both moved in the same direction at the same time."
"For about forty feet."
"The eagle startled me."
"You're almost six feet tall."
"Eagles are unpredictable," I said. "That's a fact about eagles. Ask anyone."
Bianca was definitely smiling now, the professional composure doing its best and losing. "The league fined you four thousand dollars for"—she checked her notes—"conduct detrimental to the in-game experience."
"The eagle was fine," I said. "The eagle and I are fine. We've moved past it."
"Have you?"
"Professionally, yes." I paused. "I still don't trust birds."
Bianca made a note that I was fairly certain said something other than what her notes usually said. Then she smiled, shifted, and the warmth stayed but the angle changed, the way angles changed when an interview moved from the fun part to the real part.
“Let’s talk about last season.”
There it was.
It always came back to this.
"Last season ended in a tough way for you personally," she said. "Being held out of the final two playoff games—how did that feel? And looking back, do you think it was the right call?"
Would there ever come a time when a reporter didn't ask about those two games?
Probably not.
I had the answer ready. I always had the answer ready.
"The medical staff made the right call," I said.
"My health has to come first. That's something I've had to learn, and I'm still learning it if I'm honest. We have an incredible team around us, including our medical team, and those decisions exist to protect the players long-term.
" I smiled. "Do I wish I'd been on the ice? Obviously. But I trust the process."
Bianca nodded. Made a note. "Dr. Cross made that call himself, correct? There was some commentary at the time about whether it was overreach—"
"He made the right call," I said.
Cleaner that time. No smile attached to it, just the words, and I heard them come out of my mouth with a weight that wasn't in the media-trained version. Bianca heard it too, I could tell, but she moved on professionally, and I moved on with her.
The afternoon went the way these things went: different looks, different setups, the same twenty feet of space cycled through fifteen different configurations. I did what I was supposed to do. I stood where they pointed me. I gave the camera what it needed.
Caleb came back between setups with a different jacket, something darker, and did the shoulder thing again, and said something low about the cut, and I laughed at whatever it was because I laugh at things people say, it's reflexive, it doesn't mean anything.
Cross walked past.
Not through. Past. Along the edge of the room, coat on, tablet in hand, going somewhere with purpose, and he didn't stop and he didn't look and I tracked him across the room the way I always tracked him across rooms and watched him not look at me and felt the wrongness of it settle somewhere in my chest.
Whatever he was going to call it—lapse in judgment, professional mistake, one more item on the Morrison liability ledger—he hadn't said it yet.
But I could feel it coming, had been feeling it coming since the corridor, and watching him walk past without looking was just more evidence for the case he was building.
Caleb stepped back. "Perfect. That's the one."
I looked at the camera and smiled.
The shoot wrapped at four.
The ballroom went from controlled chaos to the quiet aftermath of a space that had been full of people and wasn't anymore: equipment being broken down, lanyards disappearing, the lighting rigs going dark one by one.
I was back in my own clothes, which felt slightly wrong after a day of things that fit correctly, and I was looking for my jacket when Caleb found me near the exit.
"Good working with you," he said. Easy, genuine, professional. He held out his hand.
I shook it. "You too."
"If you ever need—" he started, and then stopped himself, and smiled instead, and it was a good smile, and it meant exactly nothing to me, and I think he knew that, and we were both fine about it.
"Take care of yourself, Morrison," he said.
"Working on it.”
He paused, hand still extended from the shake, like he was deciding something. Then he said, easy and without agenda: "For what it's worth? The way that doctor looks at you when he thinks no one's watching?" He picked up his bag. "That's not nothing.”
He left before I could say anything.
I stood there for a second.
That’s not nothing.
I picked up my jacket.
I found the corridor that led to the service exit the team had been using to avoid the hotel lobby, and I was almost at the door when I heard someone behind me.
"Morrison."
I stopped.
Turned around.
Cross was in the corridor, coat on. The hallway was empty. The building noise was distant, muffled, somewhere else entirely.
We looked at each other.
The wall was up. Fully, completely up, load-bearing the way it had been before the bar, before the alley, before any of it. And I looked at it and felt tired in a way that had nothing to do with the shoot.
I said the thing I hadn't planned to say.
"I hated you for it," I said. "Last season.
The playoff benching." I wasn't angry about it, that was the thing, I was just saying it, finally, out loud, in a corridor in the Langham while the lighting rigs went dark in the ballroom behind us.
"I hated you for the whole summer. I want you to know that. "
Cross looked at me.
Something moved across his face. Not the wall. Under the wall. The thing I'd been collecting in fragments for months.
"I know," he said.
Not I'm sorry. Not it was the right call. Just I know, quiet and direct and carrying something in it that wasn't just an acknowledgment.
He knew. He'd known all summer. He'd made the call and held it and let me hate him for it and hadn't explained himself or defended himself or done anything except stay.
I looked at him.
"Caleb's a stylist," I said. "That's his job. The shoulder thing. That's just—it's his job."
Why was I explaining this? Cross hadn't asked. Cross hadn't said a single thing about Caleb, hadn't reacted, hadn't given me anything to defend against, and I was standing in a service corridor of the Langham explaining a stylist's job to my team doctor like I owed him something.
Like he had any right to know.
Like I wanted him to.
Cross's expression didn't change. Not visibly. But something shifted in the quality of the nothing, something so small I'd have missed it a month ago.
"I know," he said again.
Two different I knows. Same words, different weight.
"Cross—"
"I have to go," he said.
“Nathan.”
He didn't move immediately. He stood in the corridor for one more second, looking at me in the low light of the service hallway, and his face did the thing—the real thing, briefly visible, the thing under everything—and then he nodded once and walked away.
I stood in the corridor until I couldn't hear his footsteps anymore.
Then I pushed through the service exit into the cold afternoon air and stood on the sidewalk and breathed.
I took out my phone.
I didn't text anyone. There were a thousand numbers in my phone, but only one I wanted to text.
And I knew there was no point in sending that message right now.
I put my phone back in my pocket.