He shakes his head. “You weren’t, though, right?”
I shake my head. “I was a week late, and ––”
He breathes, “I panicked. I know, and I’m sorry, Aspen.” He stares at his coffee.
I don’t say anything more. I don’t owe him this. I could leave him with that look on his face for the rest of our lives and let the apology go unanswered, and I would, frankly, sleep just fine.
But the apology is good. It’s the apology I didn’t know, until I heard it, I’d been waiting for. And refusing to take it would be a small cruelty I don’t, currently, want to choose. I can move on from it.
“Thank you,” I whisper, “for apologizing.”
He nods and doesn’t look up. “Yeah.”
I pick up my coffee and drink from it. Stanley, somewhere down the hall, is on the phone with his dad and is taking his time about coming back, and I think, briefly, that he might have heard the first sentence of this and stepped further away on purpose.
Stanley comes back down the hall a minute after that, phone going into his pocket, like a man who timed his return.
Gavin checks his watch and stands. He rinses his mug at the sink and sets it in the rack. He lifts his jacket off the back of a chair.
“All right. I’m out. Stan, thanks for the couch.”
“Anytime, Gav.”
“Aspen.” Gavin pauses in the kitchen doorway, looking straight into my eyes. “Take care of yourself.”
I blink. “You, too.”
He nods. He goes. The front door closes.
And it’s just the two of us in the kitchen.
I look up, and Stanley’s watching me. He doesn’t say anything or mention the call with his dad. Then he glances at the microwave clock above the stove.
“Linwood, there are eleven minutes left of your hour.”
I glance at the time.
He looks at me, and he grins. “Eleven minutes. You wanna play FIFA?”
I stare at him. “FIFA?”
“Ten-minute match. You pick the team.”
“I don’t play FIFA.”
“You write reports on professional hockey for a living. I think you can crack FIFA.”
“I don’t have time for this, Ermington.”
“You’ve got, by your own clock, eleven minutes.”
I cross my arms, and he’s already walking into the living room.
I stand in the kitchen for one second. I look around, feeling lighter. Then I walk into the living room and sit down next to him on the couch.
He hands me a controller without looking at me, already clicking through menus, already humming something under his breath, and he is, somehow, more relaxed than I’ve seen him since this whole thing started.
“I’m taking PSG,” he says.
