Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Evan
I woke up to an empty bed and the smell of coffee.
He hadn’t been gone long.
I pulled on a T-shirt and sweatpants and walked to the kitchen. A full pot of coffee waited, still hot. Next to it, propped against a mug, was a folded piece of paper torn from the notepad I kept in a kitchen drawer.
I picked it up.
Had to go home before morning skate. Didn’t want to wake you. Last night meant something to me—all of it. I’ll text you after practice.
—N
I stood in my kitchen in the early morning quiet and read it twice. Then I folded it carefully, took it to my office, and put it in the top drawer of my desk, under the notebook where I kept my client notes.
Ryan had never left a note. Not once.
I poured my coffee, stood at the window, and let myself enjoy it.
Danny arrived at six that evening with a six-pack and the energy of someone who’d waited exactly thirty-nine hours for our conversation and was done waiting.
“Okay,” he said, dropping onto the couch and cracking a beer before I’d even closed the door. “Tell me everything. And I mean everything, not the two a.m. highlights reel.”
“You already know most of it.”
“I know you were a disaster at two in the morning and that you texted him the next day. I don’t know what happened when he came over.” He pointed at me. “Sit. Talk.”
I sat. I talked.
I told him everything. The dinner, the couch, telling Nico the full Ryan story from sixteen onward. Danny already knew that history—he’d heard it in the early San Jose days when I’d been raw enough to tell it without editing. He listened now the way he had then, without interrupting.
When I got to the name change, he nodded slowly. “And Nico understood.”
“Immediately.”
“Good.” Simple and certain. “What did he say about Ryan?”
“He said he’d never watch one of his films again.” I paused. “He was going to tell his captain. Start a thing.”
Danny stared at me for a moment. Then he laughed, loud and genuine. “I already like him more.”
“I told him not to start a thing.”
“Obviously the thing is happening.” He took a sip of his beer. “And then?”
I told Danny most of it. The bedroom was Nico’s and mine, and Danny knew without being told that some things weren’t his to ask about.
“You seem different,” he said finally.
“Different how?”
He considered it. “Less like you’re waiting for something to go wrong.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Mostly because he wasn’t wrong.
“Okay.” He grabbed the remote. “I’ve seen the Instagram. Now show me what he actually does.”
The Lasers were playing Anaheim, and Danny knew enough about hockey to explain what I was looking at while it was happening, which turned out to be necessary.
The game was faster than I’d expected, faster and more physical, the players moving at a speed that made it hard to track who had the puck and why everyone kept stopping.
“There,” Danny said, pointing. “Number seventeen. Left side.”
I found him.
He was different on the ice. I’d known, intellectually, that he would be.
The Wikipedia page had said one of the premier power forwards of his generation in the dry tone of someone stating established fact, but knowing it and watching it were not the same thing.
He moved with a certainty that I recognized—the same deliberate confidence he brought into my apartment, but amplified and directed and frightening in a way that made me grip my beer a little tighter.
“He’s fast,” I said.
“He’s one of the fastest in the league.” Danny glanced at me. “You didn’t know that?”
“I didn’t know anything. I don’t follow hockey.”
“You follow one hockey player.”
“Shut up.”
He grinned and let it go, but I was already watching the ice again.
The goal happened in the second period. A play I didn’t fully understand—something with the puck moving between players too quickly for me to track—and then Nico was in front of the net, the puck was in it, and the arena exploded.
He raised both arms, his teammates crashed into him, and his face was open in a way I recognized from a photo I’d seen online. Pure joy.
That was him. In front of eighteen thousand people, with his arms in the air, he was still just Nico.
Something settled in my chest that had been unsettled since Thursday night.
“You’ve got it bad,” Danny said pleasantly.
“I’m watching the game.”
“You’re watching him.”
“He just scored.”
“You were watching him before he scored.” Danny took a sip of his beer. “I’ve explained the same rule four times tonight and you haven’t retained any of it. But you knew exactly where he was every second of that first period.”
“He’s easy to spot. He’s the biggest one out there.”
“Evan.”
“Danny.”
He smiled into his beer and let it go, which was the other thing I valued about him.
I knew the comments were out there—the same ones I’d read at 2 a.m., multiplying in real time with every goal, every close-up, every replay.
I made a deliberate decision not to look.
Not tonight. Tonight I was watching a hockey game with my friend.
Number seventeen had just scored, and that was enough.
The Lasers won 4–2. My phone chimed eighteen minutes after the final buzzer.
Nico
Did you watch?
I smiled at the screen.
Evan
I watched. Danny had to explain most of it.
Nico
What did you think?
I looked at the question for a moment. There were a lot of honest answers. I picked the one that was most honest.
Evan
You’re remarkable at what you do. I didn’t understand half of it, and I still couldn’t look away.
The three dots appeared immediately.
Nico
That might be the best thing anyone’s ever said to me after a game.
Nico
Can I see you tomorrow?
Evan
Yes.
Nico showed up at noon with two coffees and held one out. “I guessed. Tell me if it’s wrong.”
It wasn’t wrong.
We did nothing in particular. I worked at my desk for a while, the comfortable kind of working where someone else is in the space and it doesn’t feel like an intrusion.
He sat on my couch with his iPad, watching what he told me was game film—footage from last night—occasionally making a quiet sound of either satisfaction or frustration that I learned to distinguish within the first hour.
Around one, I made lunch—sandwiches, nothing elaborate—and we ate at the kitchen island and talked about small things.
“André, my captain, keeps telling us to stop watching so much game film.” He caught my expression. “He thinks we obsess over it instead of sleeping.”
“Does he have a point?”
“Probably.” Nico shrugged. “I watch it anyway.”
We talked about a book I’d started that I couldn’t decide if I liked. About the plant on my coffee table that he’d been eyeing since his first visit and had finally asked about.
“It’s a pothos,” I said. “They’re hard to kill.”
“Is that why you got it?”
“That’s exactly why I got it.”
He smiled. “Practical.”
“Always.”
After lunch, he grew quieter in a way I’d learned to read—not withdrawal, just something on his mind working its way to the surface. I waited.
“I leave Tuesday morning,” he said eventually. We’d moved to the couch, his feet on the coffee table, mine tucked under me. “Portland Tuesday night, Seattle Wednesday, back Thursday afternoon.”
“Okay.” I kept my voice easy.
“I’ll text you when we land, even if it’s late. Afternoons are mine both days—rest period. I’ll have my phone.” He turned to look at me. “I know what I put you through. The vagueness, the waiting. I’m not doing that again.”
Ryan had never once given me a schedule. I’d learned his whereabouts from his publicist’s Instagram.
And here was Nico, handing me his itinerary on my couch like he’d decided this was how it was going to be.
He reached over and traced the line of my jaw. “Two days. Two games. Then I’m back.”
Portland. Seattle. Thursday.
I could do Thursday.