He didn't know I was watching. Or maybe he did, and it changed nothing.
I held my book open and didn't turn the page.
Heath's body was occupying space for the sole purpose of being alive in it. He danced in his socks because the floor was there.
We went out after 10:00 PM because Heath said Michigan Avenue looked different when the shopping crowds were gone.
He was right.
The Magnificent Mile wore white in December, thousands of tiny lights. Storefronts were dark behind plate glass. What remained was the infrastructure of celebration: wire-framed angels and light-wrapped trees. The sidewalk salt crunched under our shoes, and the wind off the lake had a late-December bite.
We crossed the bridge heading south toward the Loop. Below, the river moved slowly, inky black. The reflection of the Wrigley Building's white terra-cotta rippled in the current.
Heath stopped at the midpoint. Leaned his forearms on the railing. "My mom would love this."
"The bridge?"
"The view. She's never been to Chicago. She's seen pictures, but it's different standing here."
"You should bring her."
"Yeah. When the numbers work."
He saidWhen,notif,betting on the future.
"You stare at water a lot," Heath said.
"Occupational interest."
"You don't have a water occupation."
"A future one, when the ice melts."
He turned his head. Nose red from the cold. The wind flattened his hair against his forehead.
"You really want out," he said.
"I want to choose what I'm in. There's a difference. If I leave because I hate hockey, that's a reaction. If I leave because I've found something I want more, that's a plan."
"So you need the pull to be stronger than the push."
He'd compressed three years of circling into one sentence.
"Yeah. That's it."
Heath nodded. Looked back at the water. "Must be nice. Having something to run toward."
He said it gently, without resentment. Still, there was a gap between a man with graduate school applications and a man whose mortgage depended on whether a GM he'd never met decided to keep him.
On the walk back, he reached for my hand inside my coat pocket. His icy fingers wove together with mine. He didn't slow his pace, and he didn't give any sign he'd just done somethingthat would have ended both our careers if the wrong person had been standing at the next crosswalk.
Nobody was. That was the miracle of the city at 11:00 PM on December 27th. We were two figures in dark coats, anonymous, moving along a sidewalk scraped clean by salt trucks and wind.
Later that night, with the dishes half-done and the TV on mute, we sat on the couch together. Heath was at the far end, and I was in the middle.
I spoke up. "Can I ask you something kind of personal?"
"You already know how much money I have and how bad my cable is. Hard to get more personal than that."
