Heath:After practice. Your place.
I changed out of practice clothes and into jeans plus a fresh shirt that didn't smell like equipment spray. Checked the pages. Sat on the couch for eleven minutes.
At 6:40, the buzzer sounded.
I let him in without speaking. He came through the door carrying cold air and the chemical residue of the rink that clung to everyone for hours after practice—rubber matting, menthol, the sharp mineral edge of ice that never fully leaves your hair. A bruise on his left forearm had cycled to green-yellow, four days old, collected in a board battle.
His eyes locked on mine. I remained planted in place.
No hug. No contact. Six feet of kitchen between us and seven pages on the table.
"You good?" he asked.
"I don't know."
He looked past me to the pages.
"What's that?"
"Everything."
I pulled out a chair for him. He didn't sit immediately. Instead, he studied the setup, pages squared, and the overhead kitchen light on while the rest of the apartment remained dim.
He sat.
I leaned against the counter across from him. Four feet of tile between us.
"I wrote everything down. Trade calls. Cap math. Grad school timelines. What I knew and when I knew it. What I decided and why." I paused. "You can read it. I won't talk unless you ask me something."
Heath pulled the pages toward him and started reading.
He read without rushing. I watched because I couldn't not watch.
His jaw tensed on page two, the trade section. He stopped on page four. That was the grad school section.
He read slower there. Each line required an extra beat before he could move past it.
"You had already applied," he said.
"Partially. I'd finished the statement of purpose. Letters of recommendation were the outstanding component."
"And the window closed."
"Mid-January. I didn't notice until after I'd signed."
He looked at me.
"You didn't notice."
"I was paying attention to something else."
Heath turned to page five.
It was the most difficult for me. I'd written it at two in the morning after Heath walked past my stall in the locker room and looked at me for the first time in three weeks. The detachment I'd maintained across four careful pages simply quit.
I'd revised it twice. Both times the raw version survived because the raw version was true, and after twenty-three years of polished performance, I owed him at least one document without editorial restraint.
I loved him before I understood what it would cost. I signed because the alternative was watching him disappear from a roster slot he'd earned. I did it without telling him because I was afraid he'd refuse, and I was right to be afraid, and being right didn't make it mine to decide.
