"I'm good," I insisted.
Knox took my drink out of my hand, examined it, and handed it back. "You should be drinking water."
"You're not my doctor."
"You’re fucking right I’m not," Knox said. "Your doctor is—" He stopped. “Well, who would have guessed? Looks like your actual doctor decided to go out for once.”
I followed his eyeline.
Who would have guessed, indeed?
Dr. Cross was standing near the entrance.
White button-down, collar open, sleeves rolled to the elbow. No white coat, no tablet, no penlight. Just the Ice Doc himself, standing there, in a bar, like a person who went to bars, which I had genuinely never once considered a possibility. He looked slightly too formal for the environment, which tracked, because Dr. Cross looked slightly too formal for every environment, including, I suspected, his own home.
Cross didn't look at me.
I watched the doc scan the room, say something to someone from the training staff, and accept a drink I assumed he wouldn't finish. It looked like he was already calculating how soon he could leave.
Right.
Fine.
Obviouslyhe was here. Dr. Cross was part of the team. He came to things occasionally. This was not interesting or notable, and I was not going to make it either of those things.
I turned back to Matthew and Knox and said something, I don't even remember what, something funny probably, something that made Matthew laugh, and got another drink. I let someone pull me toward the dance floor and I wasfine,I was great, I was having an excellent time.
I was completely aware of where Cross was standing at all times.
It was like—okay, it was like having a splinter. Not painful exactly, not the kind of thing you'd tell anyone about, just this constant low-level awareness that something was there, something that wasn't supposed to be, and you kept finding it with the same finger over and over even when you told yourself to stop.
And once, just once, between drinks, when I looked over without meaning to, Cross was already looking at me. Not the room. Not the team.
Me, specifically.
I mean, of course he was. I was sure he was running his assessment from across the bar, cataloguing my drink count, checking my pupils from thirty feet away, deciding what he was going to report back to Coach in the morning. Probably had a whole section in his tablet for it.Morrison: present, ambulatory, making questionable decisions as per usual.He'd come all the way to Broderick's to keep track of the franchise investment so he could document my evening for whoever needed documenting.
Asset management. Same as always.
I got another drink.
Two drinks later, someone was flirting with me—a guy with good shoulders and a very straightforward approach, which I appreciated—and I was flirting back because I always flirted back. It was basically a reflex at this point. Somewhere in the middle of it, I looked up and Cross was looking at me.
He wanted to see if the team’s asset was okay?
I’d show himokay.
He wanted something to report back to Coach?
I’d give him that, too.
So I kissed the guy.
It was a perfectly good kiss, I guess. The guy was into it, and I was performing it, and there was nothing wrong with it except that I was doing it primarily because I wanted to see what Cross would do.
But Cross did nothing.
Nothing.
