Cross. Trier. Heath. The kid. Everybody he needed, and my phone never rang.
I hadn’t answered his text. Rook asked me not to that night on the couch, and I’d been a little smug about my discipline ever since. Still, I know reporters. I’ve been feeding them for fifteen years. A reporter who wants you doesn’t take silence for an answer; silence is an appetizer to them.
I’d been certain Kovac would circle back with a follow-up text or a nudge through Mark. I sort of looked forward to it because I had five years of material on Rook. A stranger with a notebook offered me twenty sanctioned minutes to talk about the man I loved, using only facts available to the public. I’d already picked the stories.
There was nothing. Maybe Mark screened it.
I let it go. There was one item on the night’s agenda, and it wasn’t a reporter.
The bus pulled off the highway, and the city appeared close up around us: brick buildings, steam from the grates, and wetsnowflakes in the bus’s headlights. The hotel took shape through the wet windshield, fourteen stories of beige with the name in blue letters, only half of them lit.
The bus hissed and knelt at the curb.
I love the life you built us. I want a bigger one.
I got off the bus into the slushy snow.
***
In the hallway, Rook and I said goodnight from six feet apart, two teammates parting at their respective doors, a performance staged for an audience of carpet and sconces. He went into 914. I went into 911. The locks clicked one after another. It was the Rook and Varga Show’s last performance on the road trip.
I showered and sang my lines into the steamy spray.
“I love the life you’ve built for us. I want a bigger one.”
It sounded fine. I stood dripping in front of the mirror while it unfogged and said it once more. Halfway through, I recognized the voice. It was my bench-mic voice, the one for the reporters. I’d rehearsed the most private thing I’d ever wanted to say so much that it sounded like media boilerplate.
“Okay,” I told the mirror. “Don’t do that.”
The taps on my door came just after eleven. Rook arrived with his shoes in his hand, the same as always. He threw the deadbolt and connected the chain while I sat on the bed, patting the mattress beside me.
Rook stood in the middle of my room like he stands at the blue line in the last minute of a one-goal game. He had his jaw set and hands loose at his sides. He’d shaved off the day’s shadow and was wearing the gray henley. Rook was bracing for a talk.
He thought I’d asked for sixty minutes to lay it all out, and he’d arrived groomed for sentencing.
“Okay,” he said. “You wanted the hour.” He pulled the desk chair out a few inches, then didn’t sit in it. “So talk.”
And my speech disappeared. I couldn’t remember the words.
My brain replaced them with,Not like this. Not in a rented room. Not when he’s already running on fumes.
“Luki,” he said, “Whatever it is, let’s go.”
“I want the hour,” I said. “But not for a meeting.”
He blinked and exhaled—jaw first, then shoulders and hands—visible relief. He let go of the chair.
“You’re sure?”
“I asked for sixty minutes with my boyfriend, and he showed up dressed for arbitration.” I crossed the room. “Look at you. You shaved.”
“It was getting long.”
“It was one day, and it’s always perfect. You mowed it for a conversation we’re not having.” I put my hand flat on his chest, over the henley, and felt his heart pounding hard. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he said, and the last of the blue-line stance went out of him. He was now just my Rook in a hotel room with the chain on the door.
I kissed him first. I almost always kiss him first when we’re alone. He kissed back slow and thorough, one hand coming up to the side of my neck, thumb under my jaw, tilting me where he wanted me.
