"Every home game."
I drank again. "How'd that start?"
"Second season," he said. "We had a six-game winning streak in February. My mattress was in storage. I'd sublet my apartment over the break and hadn't moved back in yet. I ended up sleeping on the floor. We won six straight, and I traced it back to that change."
"Six games," I said.
"It was enough to notice."
"And it created a pattern that's stuck for years."
He turned the bottle in his hand once, a single rotation. "I know it causes nothing. The correlation isn't meaningful, but it stuck."
I sat with the info for a moment. "What's the floor part, specifically?" I asked. "Why not just — a sleeping bag or a different mattress, some other variable from that run?"
"The floor is the lowest point. You can't fall from the lowest point."
The room went very still. I didn't laugh and didn't race for a joke.
"That sounds lonely," I said.
Quiet. Not soft exactly — just true, the way his thing had been true.
Pratt was quiet. He looked at me.
Many people looked at me every night at Carver's. That was the nature of the work. People always had their eyes on the bar.
This was different.
"Yes," he said.
Neither of us spoke for a while.
I stood because I had to. It wasn't an emergency, but the room was tense. Standing interrupted. It was the responsible choice.
"I should let you do your thing—that pre-game sequence. Don't want to throw off the system."
"It's not a game night."
"Right," I said. "Of course it's not."
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. Then I picked up both bottles from the coffee table, walked them to the kitchen, and set them by the sink.
Pratt followed. He was in the entry when I turned around. A small square of packing foam still clung stubbornly to his shoulder. I reached out to brush it off.
He didn't step back, and my hand stayed. I took another step forward, and kissed him.
It wasn't frantic. It also wasn't what I'd imagined two nights earlier while staring at my ceiling at four am. That had involved more dramatic circumstances and less packing foam.
This was just—Pratt. His mouth was careful at first, and then he was kissing me back with full attention, his hands on my shoulders, gripping. He wasn't half-assing it.
We broke after a second beat. Nothing failed. Success needed room. I stepped back a few inches.
"Well," I said. "That happened. I give it a 9.5."
"Not perfect?"
That was funnier than if he'd tried to be funny, and I laughed, short and real. I pulled on my coat. "Goodnight, Pratt."
