Chapter 11 #2
Not the glare. The glare holds, because years of practice can survive anything.
The sentence just ends, mid-air, with nowhere to go, because every available ending is wrong.
Boyfriend is a word we've never used, but denying it feels like lying in the wrong direction.
Teammate is a demotion I don't have the heart to issue.
Whatever it is, doesn't come in a form I can say next to a stranger's phone.
Wall's eyes flick to mine briefly, and the photo ends and the family moves on, thrilled, and I stand there having lost a fight with my own vocabulary.
My hand goes to the mic pack on my belt. Dead since morning. The relief that goes through me is disproportionate and has an aftertaste, because a dead battery is not a plan, and the sentence is still sitting there, unfinished, waiting for me somewhere down the calendar.
He's not my.
I carry the missing word around for the rest of the day like a stone in my shoe.
***
MY FATHER CALLS at five, while the crew resets lighting for the last segment and I've stepped out onto the loading dock for air. "Patryk!"
"Cze??, tato."
"Ola sent me a video." There’s delight in his voice, and behind it, the kitchen radio plays at full volume, the same one he’s had since before I was born.
"From your bar event. You looked happy." There’s a pause, and I can hear him holding the phone closer, the way he does when he wants a real answer.
"I watched it four times. It's good for the animals, this campaign? "
"It's good for the animals. We're back in Milwaukee today. They gave me a hammer as a prop."
He laughs, big and unguarded, and switches to Polish to tell me about the neighbor's fence, and a recipe he's fighting with, and how Ola's youngest made the junior team in Gdańsk, and I stand on a loading dock with my eyes closed, letting home arrive the way only his voice can bring.
"You sound lighter," he says, in English again, which is what he does when he wants me to hear something precisely.
"The season's going well."
"I didn't ask about the season."
The loading dock is quiet. Inside, muffled through the wall, somebody's power drill runs and a grandmother laughs, and I stand holding the phone with the afternoon's unfinished sentence right there behind my teeth.
He's not my—. My father would take the ending of that sentence and put it somewhere warm, I know it.
I have thirty years of evidence about exactly who he is, and for two full seconds I'm going to say it. All of it.
"Tato—"
"Mm?"
The sentence doesn't come. It's not ready.
"I'll call Sunday," I say instead.
"Dobrze." He doesn’t probe. Patience, the family specialty. "Eat something. And Patryk. You do seem happy. Tak trzymaj."
He hangs up on his own laughter, and I miss it the second he does.
***
THE CAMPAIGN BOOKED both teams into the same hotel for the two-day build, which makes logistical sense for forty-five people and no sense for me, a man whose bed is twenty minutes away. I took the room anyway.
At the front desk this morning, I made one request. The woman behind the counter listened to all of it, looked at me, looked at her screen, then looked at me again.
"That's... an unusual request, sir."
I agreed with her. She typed for a while, glancing up from her monitor every few seconds, as if trying to decide whether this was above her pay grade. Eventually, she told me it would be handled by four.
And it was. I spent six minutes with the result before dinner, evaluating, adjusting, evaluating again, and I'll be explaining that process to exactly nobody, including myself, although I’m sure Theo will ask.
Dinner is both teams in a hotel restaurant that surrendered immediately. Theo sits across from me stealing the crispy parts off my plate, narrating the cat crisis to Lindqvist. Midway through he stops, fork suspended mid-gesture, and squints at me. "You're doing a thing."
"Eating dinner?"
"You have your planning face."
"I have a regular face."
"Patrick." He points the fork at me, eyes narrowed to happy slits. "The last time you had that face, I ended up—" He glances at Lindqvist and recalculates. "—somewhere great."
"Eat your food."
He eats my food instead, watching me the whole time like I'm a gift he's been told not to shake. I hold my regular face and let him wonder. He'll find out at 11:30 and not one minute earlier, out of consideration for the hotel's other guests.
At eleven, I take the ice bucket down the hall, because the machine on my floor is broken, and not at all because I checked which floor the Wolves are on.
The hallway is carpet-quiet, doors closed the whole length of it, twenty-some athletes shut away behind them. The machine hums alone in its alcove. I fill my bucket slowly, in no particular hurry to finish the errand.
The stairwell door opens and the corner of my eye registers a familiar frame. Good. That handles one step of the plan for me. I guess sometimes, if you’re very lucky, things just fall into your lap. Provided you chose the correct floor.
Wall comes through it in a t-shirt and sweatpants, carrying his own bucket, moving quietly for a man his size. He sees me and stops, one hand still holding the door.
For a moment, he seems to wonder whether to move or bolt.
Two days in the same building. Same rooms, same shots, same prop hammer handed back and forth eleven times, and every second of it supervised by grandmothers, headsets, boom mics, a parrot.
This hallway is the first unwitnessed air we've shared since Chicago.
It takes both of us a beat too long to remember how normal men behave in it.
He lets the door swing shut behind him.
"The drywall went up fast today," I say.
"The mudding was sloppy on the north wall."
"The contractors will skim it Thursday."
"Great."
There. Four sentences of cover, into an empty hallway, for the benefit of nobody. Neither of us says the true thing, which is that there's no camera here, and that we both counted the hours until there wasn't.
Or maybe that's only me. His face, as usual, declines to comment.
He crosses to the machine and fills his bucket beside me, close enough that I can feel the temperature of him over the temperature of the ice. His hair is damp at the ends. Shower, probably. The red has faded toward an ember, and I inspect it at close range without permission.
His jaw ticks once.
The machine grinds, dumps, and goes quiet. The silence it leaves behind is louder than the hum was.
His bucket is full. Mine is full. No reason exists for either of us to still be standing here.
We're both still standing here.
His eyes come up to mine, game-day flat, giving me nothing, and underneath the nothing, something moving fast. This close, I can hear his breathing. It's not as even as his face.
My own pulse is behaving in ways I'd bench a rookie for.
The key card has been burning a hole in my pocket since my four p.m. inspection, room number written on the sleeve in hotel pen. I take it out and hold it between two fingers, in the narrow space between us.
Wall looks at it. Ice machine light, humming quiet. Then he looks at me, and his throat moves.
"Midnight," I say. "There's a chair."
His hand closes around the card. His brows pull together, and for once the question actually makes it out of him. "A… chair?"
"I plan." I pick up my bucket and walk.