“Hey.” His voice is even. “Couldn’t sleep. Went for a walk.”
“Yeah.” I shift the shirt on my shoulders. “PT had a late opening. Shoulder’s been tight.”
The excuse sounds worse out loud than it did in my head. PT at one in the morning. On a road trip. Fontenot’s eyes move across my face, unhurried, and whatever he’s reading there he keeps to himself.
“You’ve been doing those careful circles between shifts since December,” he says. “Glad the PT is working on it.”
“Getting there.” I roll the shoulder once, the half-rotation that stops where it always stops. “Better than Nonna’s heating pad remedy, anyway. You know how it is, Fonty.”
“Yeah.” He looks at me for one more second. His expression doesn’t change, exactly. It holds. Like he’s choosing not to ask the next question. “I know how it is.”
“See you at breakfast.”
“Yeah. Get some sleep.”
I walk past him. His footsteps are soft behind me heading the opposite direction. My room is dark. I drop onto the bed and look at the ceiling. My shoulder doesn’t hurt but my heart is racing.
I replay it. Fontenot’s face in the hallway. The way his eyes moved and the way they stopped moving. He didn’t ask. Maybe I’m reading too much into a two-minute hallway conversation with a tired teammate. Maybe. But the hallway felt different when he walked away than it did when the elevator doors opened, and I don’t know what to do with that except lie here.
My head lands on everything from the last few hours. Zay. His mouth everywhere on me. The sound of his breathing when I was against his shoulder. Fonty’s bare feet on hotel carpet. Theway a secret you thought was yours turns out to live in the same building as forty other people. Eventually I fall asleep and dream of warm skin under my hands, gold-flecked brown eyes, and a mouth whispering my name so close I can feel his breath.
***
The morning is gray and soft. I sleep well. Shower. Pack. Eat breakfast in the hotel restaurant with Berger and Thompson, and Berger is walking me through a theoretical restructuring of the player ranking system that would account for what he calls “intangible leadership metrics.” Thompson is eating scrambled eggs with the expression of a man who has decided this is not his fight.
“Volkov’s assist-to-penalty ratio alone justifies the revision,” Berger says, holding up one finger. The Berger finger. The one that means a point is incoming and will arrive fully formed and there is no force that can stop it.
“I think the system is fine,” Thompson says.
“The system is adequate. Adequacy is the enemy of precision.”
I pour more coffee. The restaurant hums with road-trip morning energy. Guys in sweats drifting through, bags stacking near the lobby doors. Brooks is across the room with two strength coaches. Navy polo. Clipboard on the chair beside him. Eating oatmeal, talking with his hands in the measured way he talks about everything at work, and from here he looks like exactly what his badge says. The man who handles my shoulder, door open, every touch accounted for.
He catches my eye across the room. Holds it for half a second. Returns to his oatmeal.
Half a second, and this morning it’s enough. I drink the rest of my coffee and listen to Berger explain why plus-minus is a morally bankrupt statistic. The only thought I keep circling backto: two people who want each other and are adults and can figure this out.
“Team dinner Saturday. You bringing anyone?” It’s an innocent question from Davis, while he’s eating his eggs and sausage.
“Nope. Solo.”
“No girlfriend drama for Marchetti?” He’s grinning. “I figured you’d have half of Atlanta lined up by now.”
“Just me and my winning personality.”
He laughs and keeps eating. He means it as a joke. It is a joke. It’s also the fifteenth time someone on this team has assumed I have a girlfriend I’m hiding rather than a man I’m protecting.
The lobby fills before checkout. Fontenot walks through with his bag over his shoulder and his shoes on and nods at me, and I nod back. Normal. The encounter at one in the morning already folded into the morning version of us, the version where he slept fine and I got PT for my shoulder and nothing worth mentioning happened in a hallway between floors.
The team funnels from the hotel to the bus to the plane. Zay is four rows behind me. Thompson across the aisle, unconscious before cruising altitude because the man has a gift for sleeping anywhere and I will never stop envying it. Ten feet of cabin air between me and Zay. A distance that didn’t exist last night. Back this morning like it never left.
I put on my headphones. The playlist from last week, built half from songs he sent me in December and half from mine. His taste runs heavier, more bass, music that settles into your chest. Mine is warmer, louder, more alternative rock. The blend shouldn’t work but it does. I like what our music sounds like together. I like a lot of things about us together.
Berger asks the flight attendant about the water brand and makes a note in his phone. An hour and change, Charlotte to Atlanta, and everything on this plane is exactly as routine asevery other flight home except that four rows back is the only part that doesn’t fit the pattern.
I don’t turn around. I want to walk back there and put my hand on his neck the way I did last night when his face was against my shoulder and his breathing was the only sound in the room. I want him to close his eyes and let the work face drop for one second and just be the man underneath it, the one who said my name with his mouth on my skin like it was the last word he remembered.
I watch the clouds instead. Four rows back, Brooks is on his laptop, hands precise on the keys. I have been paying close attention to this man for so long I know the sound of his typing.
