Turned around.
Cross was in the corridor, coat on. The hallway was empty. The building noise was distant, muffled, somewhere else entirely.
We looked at each other.
The wall was up. Fully, completely up, load-bearing the way it had been before the bar, before the alley, before any of it. And I looked at it and felt tired in a way that had nothing to do with the shoot.
I said the thing I hadn't planned to say.
"I hated you for it," I said. "Last season. The playoff benching." I wasn't angry about it, that was the thing, I was just saying it, finally, out loud, in a corridor in the Langham while the lighting rigs went dark in the ballroom behind us. "I hated you for the whole summer. I want you to know that."
Cross looked at me.
Something moved across his face. Not the wall. Under the wall. The thing I'd been collecting in fragments for months.
"I know," he said.
NotI'm sorry.Notit was the right call.JustI know,quiet and direct and carrying something in it that wasn't just an acknowledgment.
He knew. He'd known all summer. He'd made the call and held it and let me hate him for it and hadn't explained himself or defended himself or done anything except stay.
I looked at him.
"Caleb's a stylist," I said. "That's his job. The shoulder thing. That's just—it's his job."
Why was I explaining this? Cross hadn't asked. Cross hadn't said a single thing about Caleb, hadn't reacted, hadn't given me anything to defend against, and I was standing in a service corridor of the Langham explaining a stylist's job to my team doctor like I owed him something.
Like he had any right to know.
Like I wanted him to.
Cross's expression didn't change. Not visibly. But something shifted in the quality of the nothing, something so small I'd have missed it a month ago.
"I know," he said again.
Two differentI knows.Same words, different weight.
"Cross—"
"I have to go," he said.
“Nathan.”
He didn't move immediately. He stood in the corridor for one more second, looking at me in the low light of the service hallway, and his face did the thing—the real thing, briefly visible, the thing under everything—and then he nodded once and walked away.
I stood in the corridor until I couldn't hear his footsteps anymore.
Then I pushed through the service exit into the cold afternoon air and stood on the sidewalk and breathed.
I took out my phone.
I didn't text anyone. There were a thousand numbers in my phone, but only one I wanted to text.
And I knew there was no point in sending that message right now.
I put my phone back in my pocket.
15
