Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Livia
Then . . .
I’m on the roof earlier than usual.
Creed isn’t here yet.
That should not matter. I tell myself that with the firm tone of a woman who has taken exams on three hours of sleep and survived worse things than waiting for a hockey player on tar paper.
But . . . it matters.
I sit on the parapet and open my book, or I try to. The book is in my hands. The page is in front of me. The words are behaving like a room full of people talking at once. I read the same sentence twice and understand absolutely none of it, which is rude of the sentence and not at all my fault.
The door opens before I can attempt a fifth pass.
I don’t turn my head, but I hear his footsteps cross the tarpaper.
I know his footsteps now.
That is not something I am prepared to discuss with myself.
“You’re early,” he says.
“I’m comparatively early.”
“Comparatively.” His voice carries the shape of a smile.
“It’s a defensible position.”
He moves into my peripheral vision and sits in his chair. Beer on the parapet. Book on his thigh. He doesn’t open it.
I am also not reading. I am maintaining the posture of someone reading while my entire peripheral attention is on the man six feet to my left.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“Long. Chemistry exam on a Friday.” I groan. “My professor has decided we should all be punished for choosing chemistry.”
“That sounds fair.”
“Yours?”
“Long. Training for the away games. My coach has decided we should all be punished for choosing hockey.”
“Also fair,” I remark.
He almost smiles.
It is unfair when he does that. The almost-smile.
The corner of his mouth moves before he stops it, as if joy has to get permission from someone in management.
There is still a boyishness to him when he’s tired, when his hair falls over his forehead, and he forgets to arrange his face into the version people expect from a professional athlete.
Then he shifts, and the rest of him returns.
Broad shoulders. Strong hands. That physical ease that looks casual until I remember it is probably built from years of drills, ice, and men slamming into him on purpose.
I watch the way he sets the beer down. The way his fingers wrap around the bottle. The line of his forearm when he stretches it along the arm of the chair. The way his hair, too long at the front for someone who spends so much of his life in a helmet, falls forward when he leans.
I’ve cataloged these things the way I catalog brushwork in a Caravaggio. With patience. With the quiet attention of a person trying to decide whether the thing in front of her is what she thinks it is.
It is.
A couple of weeks.
That is all it has taken for my brain to become deeply embarrassing.
Of course, I have to ask, “What’s away games?”
He turns his head.
I lift a hand before he can answer. “Listen, I am catching up with the hockey thing. I now know defenseman is not, in fact, a person who defends hockey as a concept.”
He scoffs. “That’s progress.”
“Thank you. I’m academically gifted.”
“Away games are games we play in another team’s arena,” he says. “We travel for them. Sometimes one city, sometimes a few in a row.”
“So you leave.”
“Yeah.”
“For how long?”
“Depends. Three days. A week. Longer if the schedule gets ugly.”
I look back at my book, though the page has become decorative.
A week.
That is not personal. It is a schedule. It is his job. Professional athletes are not ornamental roof fixtures placed in my life for conversational balance.
Still, the thought does something unpleasant in my stomach.
“So you just get on a plane and go be violent in another city?”
He laughs once. “Basically.”
“Very normal profession.”
“Says the person voluntarily taking chemistry.”
I roll my eyes. “I am suffering from intellectual advancement.”
“Well, I’m suffering for more ice time.”
“At least yours comes with applause.”
“Sometimes booing.”
“Still audience participation.”
He looks at me then, and I feel it more than I should. His attention has a temperature. It makes the air between us seem smaller.
“You’ll survive while I’m gone,” he says.
I don't like that he knows what I asked underneath the question.
I don't like that, I asked it.
“I’ve survived many things,” I say, which is supposed to be light and lands a little too close to honest.
His face changes.
Barely.
A softening around the eyes. A pause in his mouth.
Then he gives me the mercy of not following it.
He points toward the bridge. “Look.”
I close my book because I have lost the battle, and everyone knows it. “At what?”
“The lights on the bridge. The middle ones.” He stands and walks closer to the parapet. “One of them blinks about every fifteen seconds. Bulb’s going.”
I slide off the parapet and walk to where he stands.
The air is cooler here, closer to the edge. The city is spread below us in gold and glass and tiny moving lives. The Hudson is dark, cut by reflected light. The bridge holds itself over the river, bright and indifferent.
I look.
He’s right.
One of the middle lights blinks.
“How long have you been watching that?” I ask.
“About a week.”
I turn my head.
“You come up here and watch a single bulb on the GW Bridge fail?”
“Among other things.”
I don’t ask what other things.
Not because I’m not curious.
Because his voice shifts when he says it. Not much. Enough. It sounds like there are whole rooms inside him that he keeps locked with politeness and bad jokes and very good posture.
He is half a step closer than he was a moment ago.
I haven’t noticed him shift. I don’t think he has noticed either. We have both, in the act of looking at the bridge, drifted toward each other the half-inch that strangers don’t drift.
The half-inch is the entire conversation.
His arm isn’t touching mine. It is the width of my sweater sleeve away. His skin is warmer than the air. I can feel that warmth in the narrow space between us.
That is how close we are.
That is what proximity means at the half-inch.
I don’t move.
He doesn’t move.
The bulb blinks.
We watch it fail in intervals.
After what might be fifteen seconds, he says, very quietly, “It’s a nice night.”
“Yes.”
“You cold?”
I shrug.
Which is a lie, but a nonverbal one, so legally I feel there should be a lesser penalty.
Creed turns his head and gives me a look.
“What?” I say.
“You’re freezing.”
“I’m perfectly fine.”
“You’re doing that thing where you lie with grammar.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means you’re freezing.”
Before I can argue, he pulls his sweatshirt over his head.
This is a terrible development.
His T-shirt lifts with it for half a second, and I see a narrow strip of skin at his waist, the carved line of his stomach, the casual unfairness of an athletic body existing without apology. I look away so fast I nearly give myself a moral injury.
He holds the sweatshirt out to me.
“Here.”
“I don’t need—”
“Livia.”
Just my name.
I take it because I am cold and because refusing it would be pretending this is not exactly what I want.
The sweatshirt is warm from him.
That is the first problem.
The second problem is that when I pull it over my head, the world goes dark for half a second, and all I can smell is him.
Clean laundry. Cold air. Soap from a locker room shower.
Something warmer underneath, like cedar and skin and the inside of a boy’s bedroom if the boy had grown into a man who knew how to keep his hands to himself.
I get my head through the collar and try to look normal.
I don't feel normal.
The sleeves cover my hands. The hem falls almost to my thighs. It should make me look ridiculous.
It probably does.
Creed looks at me anyway.
Not in a way that makes me feel ridiculous.
In a way that makes my face heat up so fast, I want to walk directly off the roof and into traffic, except that would be dramatic and inconvenient for everyone.
“What?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Nothing.”
“That was not a ‘nothing’ face.”
“I don’t have a ‘nothing’ face?”
“You have several. That was not one.”
His mouth moves again. The almost-smile.
“You look warm,” he says.
“That is a very careful answer.”
“I’m a careful man.”
I look down at myself in his sweatshirt.
It smells like him. It feels like him. It is too much fabric and not enough distance.
“This is a dangerous garment,” I say.
His eyes come back to mine.
For a second, the air changes.
Not sweet.
Not simple.
Just honest enough to scare me.
“Yeah?” he asks.
I swallow. “It has persuasive qualities.”
His gaze drops to the sleeves covering my hands, then returns to my face. Slow enough that I notice. Fast enough that he can deny it.
“Keep it for tonight,” he says.
“For tonight?”
He shrugs. “Or until I’m back.”
The words sit between us, harmless if someone else heard them.
They are not harmless here.
The bridge light blinks again.
I wrap my arms around myself inside his sweatshirt and look back toward the river because looking at him has become a decision, and I'm not ready to know what I would choose.
Beside me, Creed stays close.
He tells me about the away games. Toronto, Montreal, Chicago. Five days.
Then, I ask if Chicago is cold this time of the year.
He glances over. “You’ve never been?”
“Not in October,” I responded. “We’ve visited twice during St. Patrick’s Day, because my father likes to pretend he’s Irish for exactly one weekend a year.”
Creed’s mouth moves. “Is he Irish?”
“Not even emotionally.”
That gets me the almost-smile again.
We stay on the roof for hours.
The city cools around us. The tar paper gives off the last of the day’s stored warmth, and the sweatshirt keeps what it took from Creed.
I ask him about Toronto. He tells me the ice there is good, the press is nicer than most cities, and one of the locker room showers makes a sound like it is reconsidering its life choices.
I ask about Montreal, and his face changes in a way I file away before I can stop myself.
Softer. Familiar. Family-adjacent. Then, Chicago, where he says the wind comes at you like it has a personal vendetta.
Around midnight, we take the back stairs.
He goes first, then slows after two steps, as if he realizes I am behind him and doesn’t want to make me feel chased. I follow with my hand on the rail, his sweatshirt swallowing my wrists, his warmth still caught in the fabric.
The stairwell smells like old paint, dust, and rain trapped in brick.
Neither of us says much.
On my landing, at my door, I stop.
Creed stops two steps below me, which puts his face almost level with mine.
That feels unfair.
He looks up at me, and the hallway light catches the tired boyishness in his face, the part he probably doesn't know he still has. The part beneath the hockey player, beneath the confidence, beneath the careful man who gives people space and pretends it costs him nothing.
“I should give this back,” I say, touching the sweatshirt.
“You should keep it tonight.”
“You said that already.”
“I’m consistent.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a flaw.”
“Most virtues do, if you look at them wrong.”
He reaches into his pocket, then stops. His eyes come back to mine.
“We should exchange numbers,” he says.
My pulse does something humiliating.
“For roof custody negotiations?” I ask.
“For that.” His mouth tips. “And in case it’s eleven o’clock and I need an update on whatever you’re currently reading—or your day.”
I look at him.
He holds my gaze like he knows better than to move first.
For one second, I think about lifting onto my toes and kissing his cheek.
I don’t.
I take his phone instead.
Our fingers brush when he hands it to me.
It is barely anything.
It is enough.
I type in my number with great dignity, meaning I only almost drop the phone once. I hand it back, and he looks down at the screen.
He sends me a text before I can say anything else.
My phone buzzes inside the pocket of my pajama pants.
Creed: roof custody co-chair
I stare at it.
Then I look at him. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Good night, Livia.”
“Good night, Creed.”
I open my door.
I step inside before I can change my mind.
After I close it, I stand with my back against the wood.
I hold onto his sweatshirt with both hands, gripping the fabric the same way I would have wanted to hold onto him.
On the other side of the door, his footsteps linger for one second.
Then they move away, and it makes me wonder where this will lead us.