"It's an accurate one." Henry picked up his glass again. Looked back at the city. "The question isn't whether he'd fall. It's whether you'd catch him."
The door from the kitchen opened briefly , a burst of Mivo's voice, a sound effect, laughter , and closed again. The balcony went quiet.
"I don't know how to do this," Felix said. Very quiet. Not asking for an answer. Just , putting it somewhere outside himself.
"No one does," Henry said. "The first time." He looked at Felix once, direct, the way Henry looked at things when he was done being indirect. "I spent six weeks after our first dinner convincing myself I could walk away from Charlie. Six weeks where he was right there, and I kept choosing the version of myself that didn't need anything." He looked back at the city. "I got lucky. He waited." A beat. "Not everyone does."
Felix stood with that. The city turned below them.
"He's not going to wait forever," Felix said.
"No," Henry agreed. "He's not."
The door opened and Charlie appeared with the wine bottle, looked between them, read the room in approximately one second, and said: "Mivo is attempting a reenactment and it's either going to be very funny or someone's going to need ice. Come assess."
Henry went inside.
Felix stayed for one more moment, alone on the balcony, looking at the city.
Then he followed.
Chapter Four
Shay
We lost by one.
One goal. Fifty,seven seconds left in the third, their winger finding a seam that shouldn't have existed, and the puck was in the net before anyone had time to be sorry about it. The horn sounded and the visiting team celebrated on our ice and I stood at the blue line with my stick on my knees and felt the loss settle into my body the way bad losses did , not sharp, not loud, just heavy. A stone dropped into still water, sinking slow.
The locker room afterward had the specific silence of a group of men who were all doing their own private accounting. Coach came in, said the necessary things, said them without cruelty, and left. Nobody argued. Nobody chirped. Even I didn't have anything.
Felix sat two stalls down, still in half his gear, elbows on knees, looking at the floor with the focused expression of a man replaying every decision in the third period and finding each one wanting. I knew that look. I had catalogued that look. I wanted, badly, to say something that would make it stop.
I didn't have the right to do that yet.
So I got changed, and I let the silence be, and when Kieran quietly suggested the bar three blocks from the hotel, I said yes before anyone else could.
The bar was warm and undiscriminating and blessedly not full of people who knew us. We took a corner , me, Kieran, Mivo, Reeves, Felix, Charlie, and Hartley, who appeared like a man who had decided that tonight required solidarity and had adjusted his retirement schedule accordingly. The first round came and went. The conversation started slow and loosened gradually, the way it always did , loss becoming story becoming something survivable.
I was louder than the loss warranted. I knew it. I was filling the space with noise because the alternative was sitting in the silence of that fifty,seventh second, and I didn't want to be there anymore. I ordered a second drink and then a third and let the warmth of the room and the sound of Mivo laughing and the particular amber light of a decent bar do their work.
Felix nursed the same drink for an hour. I tracked this the way I tracked everything about him , peripherally, automatically, the way you track weather when you're trying to decide what to wear.
The table thinned. Hartley went first, with a nod that contained, I thought, a surprising amount of warmth for a man whose face didn't really do warmth. Reeves followed. Mivo lasted another forty minutes before his eyes went heavy and Kieran shepherded him out with the practiced ease of someone who had done it before. Kieran looked back at me on his way to the door, looked at Felix, looked back at me, and did an extremely subtle and completely obvious eyebrow thing that I chose to ignore entirely.
Charlie settled his tab. Stood. Looked between us. "Early skate," he said, to both of us, to neither of us, in the tone of a man delivering information he knew was irrelevant.
"Yeah," I said.
"Night," Felix said.
Charlie left.
And then there were two.
The bar noise continued around us , other tables, other people, other losses and wins and ordinary Tuesday nights. Felix turned his glass on the table. I watched him do it and didn't pretend I wasn't watching.
"Talk to me," I said.
