Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Creed
Then . . .
After my rookie year with the Night Hawks, I bought an apartment.
I need something to call mine.
It isn’t glamorous.
It’s a one-bedroom in a pre-war building on Sixty-Ninth Street. Eleventh floor. Two windows facing the park. One window facing the side of another building twenty feet away, close enough that if the neighbor across the gap sneezes, somehow I feel involved in his recovery.
The kitchen was redone, probably in the late eighties, by someone who loves oak more than any person should.
Bobby, my real estate agent, hates it with a sincerity I respect.
He’s been showing me apartments in Midtown all month.
Doormen who shake his hand. Buildings with gyms. Penthouses with views he can photograph for the team’s website.
Places with white stone counters, glass walls, and a general personality of ‘please remove your shoes and your childhood before entering.’
I walk through six of them and feel nothing.
Then I walk into a Sixty-Ninth Street pre-war apartment, and I feel something.
I don’t have a word for it. Twenty-two-year-olds usually don’t have words for ‘this is home.’ We have words for contracts, ice time, hangovers, bad takeout, and the particular horror of realizing our mothers were right about laundry.
Not this.
Three weeks later, I find the roof.
The back stairs go up past the eleventh floor. I assume they lead to a maintenance level and stop. One night, I climb past my floor instead of stopping.
The stairs keep going.
At the top, there is a door, which, surprisingly, is never locked.
The roof is probably a thousand square feet, give or take, of tar paper, four chimneys, a low brick parapet, and a view of the Hudson, the park, and the lit grid of the Upper West Side that no one built for tourists.
There is a folding chair against the wall by the door, left by someone decades ago who had the same idea and better boundaries than me.
I have been going up there most nights since.
Tonight is slightly different from the others.
Maybe because it’s late September. Maybe because New York has finally given up pretending summer is still in charge.
The air is cool enough to make the beer sweat slower in my hand, and the sky is clear enough to show four stars over the river instead of the one I usually get.
I come back from a long late skate at the facility. Shower. Make a sandwich with ham that might go bad by the end of the week. Or yesterday. Hard to say. I eat it standing at the counter like a man with a pension plan and absolutely no respect for deli meat.
Then I read fifteen pages of a novel my brother, Luther, sent me with a note that says, try this one, it’s bad for you.
The novel is Cloud Atlas.
Luther is twenty. He’s a hockey player like me. But he’s reading David Mitchell on purpose, which tells me either he is going to be insufferable when he reaches real adulthood, or he is going to be the most interesting person at the family table by Christmas.
Both are possible.
Both are, frankly, on brand for him.
The book is bad for me in the way books are bad for me, which is that I think about it when I should be thinking about defensive coverage.
I like it.
Around eleven, I take the book and a beer up the back stairs.
When I push the door open, I see her.
She is standing in the small flat space between the door and the parapet, wearing what might be pajama pants and a sweater too big for her, with her dark hair pulled into a loose knot at the back of her head.
She is small. Five-three, maybe. Curvy in a way that makes the too-large sweater look like a choice and a defense at the same time.
Soft face. Dark brows. Wide eyes made darker by the night, by mascara she probably meant to remove and didn’t.
Her mouth is full, almost smiling despite her best efforts, and there is an attitude sitting right at the corner of it, waiting for permission to become a joke.
Fuck.
Beautiful is the first word.
Gorgeous is the second.
Trouble is the smarter one.
She turns at the sound of the door.
She doesn’t look startled. She looks caught. The difference is a category of facial expression I’ve spent several years cataloging on the faces of my youngest sister, the occasional girlfriend or boyfriend, and anyone who has ever had to decide, in real time, how much truth I deserve.
She decides on none.
“Oh,” she says. “You know about the roof.”
I don’t know what to do with the sentence, so I do the thing I do when I don’t know what to do. I stay where I am and let the other person commit to whatever they’re committing to.
“I do know about the roof,” I say.
“For how long?”
“Three weeks.”
“Oh, that’s longer than me.” She bites her lower lip for a second. “Are you possessive about it?”
“I haven’t had the chance to find out.”
“Because I just got here, and I’d like to know if I’m trespassing or if this is a shared situation.”
There is something about the way she says ‘shared situation’ that makes me understand, in the small calibrated way a man understands things at eleven at night on a rooftop, that I'm not going to tell her she is trespassing.
“I believe this could be a shared situation,” I say.
“Generous of you.”
I can’t help it. I wink before I say, “I’m a generous man.”
“On three weeks of squatter’s rights.”
“Don’t tell anyone about the squatter’s rights. I’m cultivating a reputation.”
She almost smiles.
Not fully.
She does the thing where a woman keeps the smile from happening because letting it happen would mean conceding the round and she has not, to her own satisfaction, conceded anything yet.
I like her.
Probably more than I should.
And I shouldn’t like anyone right now. Not even a cute neighbor on a roof with a mouth made for arguing and a sweater that looks like it belongs to a memory.
It’s a rule. Not mine exactly, my father’s.
The first few years of my career are supposed to belong to the game. So there can’t be a girlfriend or a boyfriend or anyone who will distract me. Dad is afraid I’m going to fall in love and throw everything down the drain, when he knows I have potential.
That means no beautiful distraction with a quick mouth, dark eyes, and a face I’m already having trouble not looking at.
Dad isn’t afraid of who I’ll love. He has never made me feel ashamed of that. When I told my parents I’m bisexual, my mother hugged me so hard I lost air, and my father looked me in the eye and said, ‘Good. Then whoever loves you better be worth your time.’
That is my father. Practical.
His fear isn’t me loving a man. It isn’t me loving a woman.
It’s me loving anyone before I know how to protect what I’ve worked for.
He thinks potential is a fragile thing. He thinks the league, the press, the schedule, the noise, the hungry machinery around a young player can take a soft part of you and sell tickets with it.
Maybe he’s right.
The talk he gave me about love and the game was worse than the sex talk. The sex talk was at sixteen and pretty simple: consent, condoms, respect your partner, respect yourself, don't be an idiot in a hotel room because your mother will somehow know.
The love talk was harder.
There’ll be a woman or a man who falls for you when you’re ready, he told me. You don’t have to rush toward the first person who makes the room change.
Which is deeply inconvenient advice right now.
Because the roof has changed.
She has changed it.
So this . . . a cute neighbor is not ideal.
I glance toward the chair and say, “You want to use it?”
She tilts her head toward my beer and says, “You could share that.”
I snort. “Are you even old enough to be on a roof on your own?”
Her brows lift, but she doesn’t respond.
After a beat, she walks over to the parapet about ten feet from me and sits on the concrete edge with her back to the city and her feet flat on the tar paper. She doesn’t sit facing me. She sits at an angle, which might be a roof-shared-situation diplomatic seating, and I respect it.
“I’m eighteen,” she says. “I’ll be nineteen in November.”
She says it as if the beer is not that far from her age. As if I am the unreasonable one for noticing arithmetic.
I hold up the bottle. “Then this remains mine.”
“Tragic.”
“For the beer, maybe.”
That gets me another almost-smile. Closer this time.
Then she glances at my book.
Her expression changes.
“Oh, no.”
I look down, then back up. “What?”
She points at the cover. “Cloud Atlas.”
“I’m enjoying it.”
“That’s not the question.” She says.
“There was a question?”
“The question is whether you are going to be one of those people about it.”
I close the book on my finger. “What’s one of those people?”
“The person who reads Cloud Atlas and then mentions, in the next conversation, that they recently read Cloud Atlas. And the conversation after that. And the conversation after that. Eventually, you are the friend who has read Cloud Atlas, and that is your entire personality.”
“That is an extremely specific warning.”
She holds up two fingers. “I have lived through it. Twice.”
I cock an eyebrow. “Did you read it?”
She grins. “Of course I read it.”
“How was it?”
“It was wonderful, and now I won’t shut up about it.”
There it is.
A real smile.
Not huge. Not careless. But real enough to change her whole face. It warms her eyes first, then pulls at her mouth, then vanishes as if she catches herself giving too much away.
I feel it behind my ribs.
A small warning.
Ignore that, I tell myself.
I don't ignore it.
“So, what else have you read?” I ask.
She tilts her head. “Are we doing this?”
I nod. “It seems like we’re doing this.”
“Fine. I just finished The Kite Runner.”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve read it.” She frowns.
“Twice.”
She narrows her eyes. “Twice?”
“My brother read it first. He kept asking me questions I couldn’t answer because I’d only read it once. I read it again so I could keep up.”
“That is a thing a person says when he wants to sound good.”
“It’s also a thing a person says when it’s true.”
“Prove it.”