Chapter 5 Spark
The Lantern’s Edge sat behind the Crocus Grand lobby, dim enough for bad decisions and expensive enough to make them feel curated.
Theo perched on a stool with cracked leather and the exhausted dignity of a previous decade.
The bar top caught every spill of light from the neon sign in the window, which cycled between pink and a blue that made everyone’s skin look untroubled.
Beside him, Kasimir Varga sat in a posture so straight it might have been prescribed.
He wore a jacket over his usual white, collar zipped to the line of his jaw.
In the reflection behind the bottles, their pairing looked accidental: the American with a scruff he’d stopped managing sometime this week and eyes still stinging from two hours under stadium lights, the Hungarian composed enough to make sitting at a hotel bar look like a formal discipline.
Theo rolled his glass between his palms, watching the swirl of ice and whiskey, and let the silence run longer than usual.
The invitation had been transacted that afternoon with the elegance of a hostage exchange.
Post-loss, post-presser, Theo stood at the locker room door composing and deleting messages for ten minutes before sending the one with no adjectives in it.
Drink tonight? You owe me one.
Kas’s reply felt like an eternity to arrive.
I owe you nothing. The drink was your debt to me. Lantern’s Edge, 21:00. It is quiet.
Theo stared at the precision of it: the counterclaim, the venue, the timestamp. The man had already chosen the bar. Before Theo’s message. Possibly before the match.
Kasimir Varga had done homework on the question of where they would drink, and Theo had no safe category for that.
The dartboard was mounted in the bar’s back corner under a dead neon sign, and after the first drink Theo challenged him to a game purely for the pleasure of watching Kas decline recreational activity.
Kas did not decline.
Kas removed his jacket and folded it over a stool with alarming seriousness. He requested the rules confirmed in full, then threw nine darts that landed in a grouping the size of a coaster.
“Oh no,” Theo said, staring at the board.
“It is a feedback loop,” Kas said. “I had a youth.”
“You had a youth.” Theo retrieved the darts like a man handling evidence. “Where? In a lab? Who let you have projectiles?”
But the game happened anyway, and then a second game, and somewhere in the third, the bar’s handful of off-duty tour staff drifted over to watch.
The room was right there, available and primed, but Theo found himself leaving it alone.
The real contest had become the small, dry lift at the corner of Kas’s mouth every time Theo talked through a miss.
An audience of one had outbid the rest of the room.
Kas won all three games. He bought the next round without being asked, which victory did not require, and set Theo’s glass down without looking at him.
“You played to the room for the first two games,” he said, not quite at conversation volume. “Then you stopped. The third game was your best.”
He returned to his stool, leaving the observation on the bar between them like a dart in the bullseye.
Theo drank and felt the summer tilt.
Kas was not watching the match. He was watching him.
He tried the line, because lines were safer than silence. “Rough match. I kept trying to make it interesting and made it worse instead.”
Kas set his glass down. The click was small and exact. “You played for applause, not for me.”
Theo’s mouth went looking for a smile and came back empty.
The bartender had stopped pretending to polish the same glass and was now very deliberately reorganizing the speed rail.
At the far end, a pair of tennis-tour night owls chewed over the day’s upsets, their laughter doing more work than the joke required.
The TV behind them replayed highlights, muted but insistent.
Theo traced the wet ring on the bar. “Guess I can’t help the showmanship,” he said. “You should see my slow-mo reel. They’ve got that drop shot queued up already. Tasteful angle. Very flattering net.”
Kas watched him with the focus he usually reserved for imperfect tosses. “It is not a failing to want to be seen.”
“Depends what they see,” Theo said, mostly to the empty glass. Neon moved in the whiskey.
“Do you think it matters?” Kas’s words came so evenly paced that Theo sometimes forgot English wasn’t his first language. “To win, or to be seen winning?”
Theo shrugged, looser than he felt. “The fans can’t tell the difference. You know where I rank in Q ratings?”
Kas shook his head.
“Third on tour. For ‘relatability.’” He did the air quotes with both hands, caught himself, and dropped them. “Some days I think that’s all I’m actually good at.”
“Is that what you want?”
Theo’s tongue ran across his teeth. Nothing useful appeared. He wanted to say yes. Instead he said, “Doesn’t matter what I want. If I wanted to disappear, I’d be in real estate by now.”
“Your serve would still be famous,” Kas said, deadpan.
Theo snorted, a real laugh, and some of the tension went with it. He rolled with it. “You’re good, you know? You don’t talk, but you still win every exchange. How do you do that?”
Kas’s smile, when it came, was infinitesimal but deliberate. “I do not believe in wasting words.”
“You’re right. Words are the worst.” His mouth moved before his brain could file an objection. “But you know what I hate more than words? Questions. Especially the ones I don’t know how to answer.”
Kas leaned in, elbows on the bar, hands folded. “Then why do you always ask them?”
Theo looked up and caught the eyes straight on. Nowhere to look but in. “I guess I like the noise. It keeps the real stuff quiet.”
The bartender materialized with the bottle. Theo shook his head, then changed his mind. “Actually. Yeah.”
Kas declined.
As the new pour landed, Theo asked, “What’s it like, being the control group in every psychology experiment on Tour?”
“I am not the control group,” Kas said. “I am the baseline.”
A grin started up, then faded. “So what am I?”
“The variable,” Kas replied.
The word, in his mouth, sounded less like analysis than warning.
Theo tried again. “Why’d you agree to doubles?”
Kas answered without looking away. “I kept expecting you to cancel.”
Theo’s throat tightened, post-five-setter tight, oxygen abruptly rationed. “Guess I’m nothing if not persistent.”
“You are not nothing,” Kas said, quiet enough to be mistaken for a thought.
The pause that followed wasn’t empty. Theo could feel himself running out of places to put his hands.
He wanted to say, I can’t stop thinking about you when you’re not here, or, I keep losing matches because I want to see if you’ll come talk to me after. What made it out was, “You’re not what I expected.”
Kas set down his glass. “What did you expect?”
Theo gestured with his own, hunting the word. “More… robot? Less…” He cut himself off.
“Less what?”
His hands felt suddenly like evidence. “Less like you were waiting for me to stop talking and do something real.”
Kas’s arms folded across his chest, a wall or a shield. “Maybe I am.”
He said, “I’m not sure I know how.”
The barest nod. “I think you do.”
They sat in it. The other voices in the bar ran on as background, the TV a flicker of other people’s stories. Between their glasses lay the wet ring and the inch of counter neither had crossed.
Kas turned his cup a quarter rotation. “Why did you really ask me here?”
Theo studied the rail of bottles, then turned back. “Because I wanted to see if it was just the court, or if it was…”
Kas waited.
It came out with no lift in it. “Or if it was you.”
Kas let it hang. Then, with the kind of certainty Theo had no idea how to answer, he said, “It is both. But it does not have to stop on the court.”
Something close to panic started under his skin, and for once he got careful. “I don’t actually know what this looks like off a court,” he said, eyes fixed on the slow drift of the ice.
Kas put a hand on the counter, not touching, just anchoring. “That is what you have to decide.”
Theo wondered if he’d ever get used to losing and wanting in the same breath. “What if I mess it up?”
“Then you do,” Kas said. “But you will have done something real.”
Theo couldn’t answer yet.
The moment held. Neither of them blinked first. The bartender’s towel squeaked against a glass, the TV cut to black, and the two guys at the end of the bar finally paid up and left.
Theo looked at Kas and, for the first time all night, let himself be silent.
Kas waited, as if he knew exactly how long it would take.
At last Theo managed a half-smile that did not know what job it was supposed to do.
“You’re relentless,” he said.
* * *
The Crocus Grand’s corridors refused straight lines: only smooth bends, soft carpet, and alcoves deep enough for people to pause in without admitting they had stopped.
After the bar, Kas moved first. Theo gave it half a second, then followed.
The half-second told him something he wasn’t ready to examine.
They reached the wide bank of windows overlooking the dead city, the glass thick enough to mute the city below.
Below, the hotel pool glowed turquoise under the parking-lot lights.
Kas leaned against the window, hands in his pockets, posture at ease enough to belong to a statue.
Theo stood beside him and said nothing, and for once didn’t fight to fill it.
He waited and tried not to hear himself so loudly.
“You are not sleeping tonight,” Kas said. Not a question.
Theo shook his head. “Are you?”
“No.”
The quiet between them belonged to a question neither had asked yet. It didn’t need filling, but instinct rebelled against leaving it raw.
He said, “You ever notice these places never have clocks?” The sort of thing he’d say to a reporter. A throwaway. But Kas was not a reporter.
“They have them,” Kas said. “No one wants to see the time.”
Theo almost smiled, then didn’t. “You really don’t let up, do you?”