I told myself:enough.
I closed my eyes.
Chapter Sixteen
Shay
Kieran texted me at seven,forty,three in the morning.
Not a call. A text, which from Kieran meant he wasn't sure how to say it out loud yet , Kieran, who had excellent instincts and who communicated in jokes and eyebrow things and the easy physical language of a man comfortable in his own skin, defaulting to text meant the thing he was sending didn't have a register he trusted himself to perform correctly.
hey. heard something last night. from someone in management. don't know if it's real but you should know.
I looked at my phone.
I was standing in my kitchen. Coffee made, mug on the counter, the early morning quiet of a Saturday that was not a Saturday , a practice day, a scheduled day, the system of a season that did not stop because of things that happened in apartments or parking lots or stairwells in the administrative wing.
I texted back:tell me.
What followed was three messages, shorter than Kieran usually sent, stripped of the usual architecture of his communication , no jokes, no asides, no Kieran,specific commentary. Just the information, delivered with the careful brevity of someone who understood that some things didn't benefit from packaging.
Trade rumors. My name. Management. The phrasestable, focused roster image.
I read it twice.
I put my phone face,down on the counter.
I picked up my coffee.
I stood in my kitchen and drank it and looked at the dead plant on the windowsill and thought about nothing with the focused, deliberate emptiness of a man applying effort to the task of not thinking yet.
The plant was still dead.
I finished the coffee.
I got dressed.
I drove to practice.
The locker room had its usual pre,practice frequency , the noise of men arriving in ones and twos, gear going on, the ambient conversation of a group that had been together long enough to have a shared language of small talk and chirps and the easy, overlapping noise of people who were comfortable with each other.
I came in. I found my stall. I sat down.
I started putting on my gear.
Mivo arrived and said something to Reeves , something about the road trip schedule, the hotel, something normal. Reeves responded. The conversation continued. I heard it the way you heard background noise , present, registered, not landed.
Kieran came in. He looked at me from across the room.
I looked back.
He nodded once. Small. The nod of a man who had sent the message and was now reading the receipt.
I nodded back.
I went back to my gear.
The room filled. The noise built to its usual pitch. Someone's phone played something briefly. Reeves made a sound at something Mivo said. The ordinary, specific, beautiful frequency of twenty,something men in a tiled room that smelled like ambition and Kieran's body spray.
