There was no system.
There was, currently, Shay O'Brien sprawled across sixty percent of his own couch, sock feet up on the armrest, scrolling through something on his phone with the post,practice looseness of a man whose body had been used correctly and was now completely, contentedly done. He had showered at the rink. Hishair was still slightly damp at the back. He had changed into a t,shirt with a small tear near the collar that I had seen before.
I knew the tear. I had been in this apartment enough times that I knew the tear.
I was sitting on the remaining forty percent of the couch with my elbows on my knees and my water bottle on the table and I had been, for approximately eleven minutes, telling myself to say something logical.
I had several logical things to say. I had prepared them in the car. I was going to say them.
Shay looked up from his phone.
"You're thinking very loudly," he said.
"I'm not thinking anything."
He looked at me with the expression of a man in possession of four years of evidence. He didn't say anything. He put his phone down on his chest and looked at the ceiling.
The television was on at low volume , some game, not ours. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a car passed and the light moved briefly across the wall and was gone.
"Rough practice," he said. Not a question.
"Transition coverage was sloppy."
"It was sloppy," he agreed. "Mivo's still,"
"Mivo will be fine. He's adjusting."
"I know." A pause. "You were sharp today."
I looked at the television. "I'm always sharp."
"You were a different kind of sharp." His voice was careful. Calibrated in the way Shay's voice only got when he was paying close attention. "The kind where you're working something out."
I did not answer.
Somewhere, the game on the television switched to commercial. A car advertisement. Someone driving through mountains at a speed that was not legal in any jurisdiction.
"Felix," Shay said.
"Don't."
"I wasn't going to,"
"Whatever you were going to say. Don't."
He was quiet for a moment. I could feel him looking at me in the way I could always feel him looking at me , the specific quality of Shay's attention, which was nothing like anyone else's, which had a weight and a warmth and a focus that I had spent two years categorically not thinking about.
"Okay," he said.
He picked his phone back up. Went back to scrolling.
I sat with that. With the refrigerator and the television and the torn collar of his t,shirt and the dead plant on the windowsill and the eleven minutes of logical things I had not said, and I thought: this is fine. I am in control of this. I am a man with a system and the system is,
He shifted on the couch. Resettled. His shoulder pressed against mine, briefly, the way it always did when the couch was too small and one of us moved, the automatic accommodation of two people who had been sharing spaces for years, thoughtless and familiar and,
I said his name.
"Yeah," he said. Not looking up from his phone. Just ,yeah. Easy. Like he'd been waiting.
