From his bed, after a long time, Felix reached over and turned off his lamp too.
The dark settled. The city murmured. I lay on my back with my hands on my chest and listened to him breathe and thought about his hands in my shirt and the look on his face and the two words he hadn't been able to say.
I don't want to.
He hadn't said it. I hadn't imagined that. He had said we can't , and I had been paying attention to Felix Wren for four years, long enough to know the difference between a man who didn't want something and a man who wanted it badly enough to be terrified of it.
From across the dark room: "Shay."
I waited.
A long silence. Long enough that I thought he'd changed his mind.
"Good game tonight," he said. Quiet. Like an apology. Like something else entirely.
I closed my eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "Good game."
Chapter five
Felix
The room was dark. The amber strip from the curtains crossed the floor between the beds, the same as always. From the other side of the room, Shay's breathing had evened out within twenty minutes , deep and slow and completely, infuriatingly untroubled, the breathing of a man who had said what he needed to say and put it down and gone to sleep.
I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling and ran every version of this forward.
Version one: it was a mistake. One bad night, one bad loss, one moment of weakness on both sides. We agreed it was a mistake. We moved forward. The line chemistry held. Everything was fine.
I had kissed him back with both hands.
Version one was not credible.
Version two: it was not a mistake but it was a single incident. An anomaly. We were adults. We were professionals. We had four years of friendship that was worth more than one moment in a dark hotel room, and we were both capable of making a rational decision about,
His hands had been warm. His mouth had been , I pressed two fingers to my eyes. His mouth had been exactly what I had not been thinking about for two years, confirmed in one long breath that had rearranged several things I had been keeping in careful order.
Version two was also not credible.
Version three.
Version three was where it went wrong, where it always went wrong, where my brain took every good thing and ran it forward until it broke. Version three was: this becomes real, and the team is already under a microscope, and management has made their position clear, and Henry and Charlie still get photographed outside their own building two years later, and there is a word for what Shay and I are on the ice together and that word is essential and essential things, when they break, break everything around them.
I thought about the GM's speech. No distractions. No headlines.
I thought about Charlie's face when the photo ran. The way he'd held himself together in press, the way it had cost him something that took weeks to come back.
I thought about Shay's dad on the phone. You're always one bad decision away from a headline.
I thought about Shay's face when he'd said it , the practiced shrug, the thing underneath the shrug that he didn't show many people and had shown me, specifically, because he trusted me with it.
The strip of amber light crossed the floor between the beds.
I had said we can't.
He had said: you just did, though.
He was right. I had. And the worst part , the part I was lying awake at twelve,forty,seven unable to argue with , was that I would again. I knew it with the same certainty I knew my own plus,minus, my own recovery protocol, the crack in my own ceiling at home. If Shay kissed me again tomorrow I would kiss him back. If he kissed me in a week I would kiss him back. The variable that my system had never accounted for was not going away because I had said two words with my hands in his shirt.
