Chapter 23
Sleeping with Nathan Cross turned out to be less of a one-time catastrophic life event and more of a recurring scheduling issue.
Not every night. We were not animals.
But enough nights that it had quietly become a thing we did—doors knocking, lights low, figuring out how to be near each other without blowing up our entire professional lives.
We had gotten good at the corridor check.
At the careful distance during practice.
At Nathan's face giving nothing and my face giving nothing and both of us being extremely professional in every context that required it.
I was fairly certain we were being very discreet.
Which was how we ended up in Toronto for an away game, in the same hotel, with my doctor three doors down and my brain refusing to shut off.
Nathan was three doors down and I had been staring at a hotel ceiling in Toronto for forty minutes, which meant the math was pretty simple.
So I knocked on his door.
He opened it.
Nathan looked down the hall in both directions, then he grabbed the front of my shirt and pulled me inside.
The door clicked shut behind me. Nathan let go of my shirt, and then he stepped back, which was as close to fine, come in as Nathan Cross got.
Nathan had already unpacked, which I had not done, and his toiletries were organized on the bathroom counter in a row, which I could see through the open door, and his jacket was hung rather than dropped, because of course it was.
I flopped on the bed, flat on my back.
"You have press tomorrow. You are supposed to be asleep," he said.
"I tried."
"For how long?"
"Forty minutes."
"That's not trying," he said. "That's lying down."
"Same thing. I was horizontal and everything. Who's watching Leo?" I asked.
A pause. "My cat?"
"Yes, Nathan. Your cat. Who's watching him?"
"He's a cat," Nathan said. "He doesn't need watching."
"He's alone."
"He's fine." Nathan sat on the edge of the bed. "He sleeps the whole time I'm gone. Sleeps on my bed, eats his food, waits for me to come back."
I stretched my arms above my head.
"Just curled up in the middle of it? Waiting for you? Very relatable behavior actually."
Something happened at the corner of Nathan's mouth that was pretty damn close to a smile.
"Leo," he said, "doesn't have a game tomorrow."
"Leo," I said, "also doesn't have to put up with you being responsible at eleven p.m. in Toronto."
"Fair," Nathan said, which was the most ground he'd ever conceded in a single word.
"My parents are coming to the game," I said. To the ceiling.
Nathan made a noise that sounded like a question.
"My dad’s been to every home game this season. This is his first away game."
"Toronto's not close," Nathan said.
"No," I said. "It's not."
Nathan was quiet for a moment. "Every time?"
"Since I was eight," I said. "Four hours each way sometimes, when I was in juniors. He'd drive up Friday night, watch the game Saturday, drive back Sunday morning for work." I looked at the ceiling. "Linda—my mom—she couldn't always come. Work. But Rob came."
He missed Dylan's playoff games three years in a row to do it.
Dylan's third year, his team made the finals.
Dylan was captain. Rob wasn't there; he was four hours away watching me play a regular season game in a February snowstorm.
That was the deal, that was the system, and Dylan had built his entire junior career around being the kind of player his dad would be proud of and his dad hadn't been there to see the part where it worked.
Dylan never said a word about it.
I found out from Mom when I was twenty. She mentioned it like it was already resolved, something that had happened and been processed and put away. I had never known what to do with the fact that it hadn't been.
"Every game?" Nathan asked.
"Almost." I paused. "He missed one. His was sick. He called me from the hospital to apologize."
Nathan was very still beside me.
"He apologized," I said. "For missing a hockey game. Because his dad was dying."
In the eleven placements before the Morrisons, nobody had shown up for anything.
I had never told Dad that. I didn't know how to tell Dad that without it becoming a thing, and Dad wasn't a thing person. Rob Morrison was a showing-up person. So was I, now. I think I had learned it from him.
The hotel room was quiet.
"Anyway," I said. "They're both going to be at the game tomorrow.”
I didn't say the rest of it. The rest of it was the thing that lived under everything, the thing I didn't take out and look at directly.
That Rob and Linda Morrison were going to be in section 112 of the arena tomorrow night watching their two sons, and the weight of that was its own kind of pressure that I had been carrying since I was three years old and hadn't found the bottom of yet.
Nathan's hand found mine on the bed.
Not reaching. Just moving, finding it, holding it.
"They'll see a good game," he said.
"Yeah," I said.
I looked at him sitting on the edge of the bed.
Nathan looked different here. I had been in close proximity to this man for two years and had somehow still not fully prepared myself for Nathan Cross in a hotel room at eleven p.m. looking like that.
"Hey," I said.
"You said that already," he said.
"I know," I said. "I'm saying it again."
I closed the distance.
Kissed him.
Easy, the way it had been getting easier—not the corridor desperate, not the first time urgent, just—easy, my hand at his jaw and his hand coming up to my face the way it always did, the thumb, the same thumb, and the hotel room was quiet and Toronto was outside the window and Nathan Cross was kissing me back on his bed like it was a thing we did.
Because it was.
Because we did this now.
His hand slid to the back of my neck and I made a noise I wasn't going to examine and shifted closer, and Nathan pulled back just enough to look at me, those blue eyes very close, and something in his expression that was open in a way I was still learning to read.
"You have press tomorrow," he said.
"I know," I said.
Neither of us moved.
"You should sleep," he said.
"Probably," I said.
His thumb moved at the back of my neck. Just once. Just slightly.
"Nathan," I said.
"Mm."
"Stop being responsible."
"One of us has to be," he said.
"It doesn't have to be you tonight."
He looked at me for a moment. Something moving through his expression—the calculation, the wall checking itself, finding the wall was not particularly load-bearing at this exact moment in this exact hotel room.
He kissed me again.
Longer this time. His hand still at my neck, mine at his jaw, and we were horizontal at some point without deciding to be, which was fine, which was more than fine.
Then Nathan's phone went off.
His hand stilled in my hair, then he reached over and looked at the screen.
Something changed in his face. Not much. But I could tell.
"I have to take this," he said.
He sat up. Moved to the window. Half-turned, which put his back mostly to me, and answered.
"Mother."
Oh.
Not hi or hey or any of the things I said when I was glad my mom called.
I tried to imagine what Nathan’s mother looked like. Was she tall like him? Did she have the same ice-blue eyes?
I stayed on the bed. I wasn't trying to listen. But the room was small and the call was happening and I was there, and those were the facts of the situation.
“Yes.” A pause. “I know.” Another pause, longer. “I said I know.”
His shoulder moved slightly.
“Work is fine. The team is—” He paused. “Yes, we're away. Toronto.” Another pause. “I'll be back Thursday.”
I looked at the ceiling. The Toronto ceiling, same as my Toronto ceiling, generic and beige and doing nothing for anyone.
“I know about the dinner.” His voice dropped slightly. “I appreciate it but I'm— I'm busy. The team’s schedule is—” He stopped. Whatever was on the other end of the phone had interrupted him, and Nathan Cross being interrupted was its own category of information.
“She sounds lovely,” he said, each word clipped. “That's not—I'm not saying that. I'm saying the timing isn't—”
Another pause. Longer.
His voice, quieter: “There's no one. I'm fine. I'll come for dinner when I'm back.”
He said a few more things. “Yes.” And “I know.” And “I'll call Thursday.” And then the silence of a call ending.
He came back to the bed. Sat on the edge of it, which was where he'd been before, but different now. Something in his posture that was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
I didn't say anything. I was getting better at that.
After a while: "My mother," he said. "She calls when I travel."
"Okay," I said.
"She worries."
"As moms do."
He looked at his hands. "She's been—" He stopped. Started differently. "She has a friend. With a daughter. She's been mentioning it."
I looked at the ceiling for a second.
"A setup," I said.
"Yes."
I considered that. "Does she know?" I asked.
Nathan was quiet for a long moment. The Toronto skyline behind him, faint through the glass.
"No," he said.
I didn't push.
There were things you didn’t push on. I was learning which ones were Nathan’s.
I lay there and thought about there's no one said into a phone while I was three feet away, and what it cost him to say it, and how long he'd been saying versions of it.
"Do yours?" Nathan said.
"Yeah," I said. "My mom cried a little. My dad shook my hand, which was very him." I paused. "Dylan already knew. He said he'd known since I was sixteen and I was apparently the last to figure it out."
"How old were you?"
"Nineteen," I said. "First year of juniors." I moved my hand slightly on the bed. "It wasn't a big thing. I told them and then we had dinner and that was it."
Dylan had gotten a speech about responsibility when he got a B in chemistry sophomore year.
I had come out to my parents at nineteen and cried a little and then we had pasta.
The same pasta they always made, nobody made it a thing.
I think mom had been more worried about getting it right than about the thing itself.
That was how it always went with me. They were always slightly afraid of getting it wrong.
With Dylan they just expected him to be fine.
He usually was.
I wasn't sure if that was better or worse.
“You told them; you had dinner,” Nathan said. "Just like that?"
"Just like that," I said.
He was quiet for a moment. Then: "You were nineteen."
"Yeah."
"I'm thirty-five." Said like a fact about the situation. Not self-pity—just Nathan noting data that he's been sitting with. "You've been out for four years and I've been—" He stopped.
"Nathan."
"I'm not saying it as a complaint," he said. "I'm just—" His jaw moved slightly. "You're twenty-three. I keep thinking about that."
"Does it bother you?"
A pause. The longer kind. "I keep waiting for it to bother you," he said.
"You date people your age. People who go to Broderick's and—" He stopped again.
"I have a fountain pen and a cat and a very particular relationship with tea.
That's not—" He moved his hand. The gesture covering: me, this, the whole situation. "That's not a pitch."
"Nathan," I said.
"Yes."
"I knocked on your door tonight," I said. "In Toronto. At midnight. With no excuse."
He was quiet.
"I have been knocking on your door," I said, "for a while now.”
"I know," he said.
"So the fountain pen is fine," I said. "The cat is great."
"You're developing a palate for the tea," he said.
"That’s pushing it.”
Something shifted in the quality of the quiet around us. Not resolved—too much for resolved—but settled.
"She means well," Nathan said after a moment. "My mother. They both do." His hand found mine on the bed between us, which was not reaching, just moving, finding it. "They have a picture of what things are supposed to look like."
"Do you?” I asked. "Do you have a picture?"
He didn't answer.
But his hand was in mine, and that was its own answer, the one he had available right now in a hotel room in Toronto the night before a game.
I turned my hand over. Let him hold it.
We sat there for a while. The city outside. The quiet room. His hand in mine, which was not nothing, which was Nathan Cross choosing something over the picture, even just here, even just tonight, even just in a room where nobody was watching.
"You have press tomorrow," he said eventually.
"I know," I said.
"You should sleep."
"In a minute," I said.
He looked at me. Something in his expression that I was still learning to read — grateful and scared and something else underneath both of those, something that had been getting closer to the surface for months.
"Okay," he said.
I stayed for more than a minute.
I stayed for a while, actually, longer than I should have, until Nathan said go to sleep, Wesley in the voice that made me comply before my brain weighed in, and I went back to my own room and lay in my own hotel bed and looked at my own generic Toronto ceiling.
There's no one, I thought. And his hand finding mine. And okay.
I fell asleep faster than I had in months.