She doesn’t bite. She never does, not on the easy stuff.
There’s a silence, the kind you can only have after years of rehearsing the lines and running the play and knowing, without saying, that neither of you is convinced by the script anymore.
She sits across from me, elbows on her knees, fingers woven tight. She looks at me like she’s counting the seconds it takes for me to blink.
“You didn’t come to the game,” she says finally. Not even a question, just a fact on the table, heavy and sharp.
I look at my hands. I’m wearing a watch I don’t remember putting on. “Knee was acting up,” I say. “Didn’t want to risk it before next week.”
It's the first game I've ever missed. In ten years of competitive hockey, travel, college, pro, I have never once called in. The fact that I did it tonight, and lied about why, sits in my chest like a stone.
She lets out a breath, then laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Right. Because you’re so careful.”
I can hear the unsaid, about the concussions, about the dumbass risks I take in net, about the way I can play throughpain but apparently can’t pick up the phone or send a text to my own girlfriend.
But I don’t say anything. I just watch the light flicker through the leaves of the pothos she named for a WNBA point guard.
She leans back, cracks her neck, and for a moment I remember what it felt like to be nineteen and see her do that at a party, the lazy way she’d roll her head and smile at me over someone else’s shoulder.
How it made me want to be the reason she looked up at all.
“You know, you can just tell me if you’re not feeling it,” she says. “I can handle it. I’d rather have the truth than the cold shoulder.”
“I am feeling it,” I say, because that’s what I’m supposed to say, and because I want it to be true. “I’m just—tired. I’m tired, Nia.”
She doesn’t buy it. She never does.
“That’s not tired, D,” she says, and she says my name the way only she does, all breath and zero softness. “That’s avoidance. It’s what you do when you’re about to ghost someone, but you don’t want to be the bad guy.”
I open my mouth, close it. I know the playbook here.
I want to say, No, you’re wrong, you’re overthinking it. But she isn’t. I’m the one overthinking it.
She sits there, silent, and I get this urge to break the lamp, throw it through the wall, just to see if she’d flinch.
But I don’t. I sit, knuckles white, and look for something on the wall to focus on.
There’s a framed photo of us at a Homecoming game, senior year, me in my jersey, her in purple and gold, both of us grinning like we just won the lottery. I barely recognize that guy. I doubt she does either.
My phone buzzes. I don’t reach for it, but she does, picking it up from the coffee table and holding it out to me. The screenflashes a notification: TEAM GROUPME. I take it, thumb the message open like maybe it’ll save me from having to speak.
It’s just Holt posting a meme, a photo of a guy face-down on the ice with the caption “THE STEELHAWKS’ NEWEST RECRUIT.” I almost laugh, but my mouth won’t move.
“You’re not going to tell me what’s actually wrong, are you?” Nia says. She’s not mad, not really. Just disappointed. She’s too used to disappointment to bother with anger anymore.
“There’s nothing wrong,” I say, which even I can hear is a lie. “We lost a tough one last week. Coach is riding us harder. I just… I didn’t want to suck all the air out of your place.”
Nia shakes her head, gets up, walks to the kitchen and comes back with a glass of water for herself and nothing for me.
I deserve that.
She stands, looking down at me, the distance between us suddenly the length of the entire room.
“D, I need you to actually talk to me,” she says, voice low. “Not just nod and say everything’s fine. That’s not a relationship. That’s a fucking performance.”
The word hangs in the air. Performance. She knows me better than anyone.
I nod, because that’s what I do.
