I pulled off the jersey and held it out to him. He looked at it for a second, then back at me, and made no move to take it.
“Keep it,” he said.
“Rook—”
“Keep it, Soren.”
I looked down at the jersey in my hands and didn't argue. Our fingers had brushed in the exchange, just barely, and the contact had sent a jolt through me that I was still trying to outrun. From the set of his jaw, he'd felt it too.
“Thanks,” I said. “For letting me skate. For the jersey. For all of it.”
“Anytime.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
the house he built
ROOK
Itold myself I was in the neighbourhood.
It wasn't entirely a lie. I'd had a meeting with Leroy that had ended twenty minutes earlier and left me sitting in my truck outside a diner trying to shake the weight of what I'd set in motion, and Soren's building was six blocks north. That counted as the neighbourhood. Technically.
What I didn't tell myself was that I'd been thinking about him all day.
So I drove six blocks north and parked badly and sat there for another three minutes arguing with myself about whether showing up unannounced at a man's apartment was reasonable behaviour for a person who had their life together.
I got out of the truck.
The building was three stories, worn brick, the kind of place that had been built to last and then mostly forgotten about. The buzzer panel had a few labels missing and the lobby smelled likeold carpet and somebody's dinner. I took the stairs to the third floor and stood outside apartment 307 and knocked before I could think my way out of it.
Footsteps. A pause — probably the peephole. Then the door swung open and Soren stood there in a t-shirt and sweats with flour on his forearm and a dish towel over his shoulder, holding a grocery bag he was clearly in the process of unpacking.
He looked at me for a second. Then at the hallway behind me like he was checking I hadn't brought anyone with me.
“Rook.”
“Hey.”
He looked at the groceries, then back at me. “I didn't know you were coming.”
“I didn't know either until about ten minutes ago.” I kept my hands in my pockets because they were apparently the part of me most likely to do something stupid. “I can go.”
“I didn't say that.” He stepped back from the door and tilted his head toward the inside. “Come in. It's chaos, fair warning.”
It was chaos.
The apartment was small and warm and every surface in the kitchen was occupied by something. Two pizza boxes on the counter, still warm — I could smell them from the doorway. A box of donuts next to those, the good kind from the place on College Street with the long lineup. A bag of the expensive dark chocolate with sea salt sitting next to what looked like a stack of textbooks.
From somewhere deeper in the apartment came the sound of two people arguing in the affectionate way that meant it wasn't a real argument, and a TV I couldn't see playing something with a laugh track.
Soren dropped the grocery bag onto the counter and turned to look at me with his arms crossed and one eyebrow up. “You want coffee?”
“If you're making it anyway.”
“I'm always making it.” He was already pulling the pot out. “Micah! Poppy! Come here a minute.”
A pause from the back of the apartment.
