"Just—" I stopped.
"That's probably why he's always up your ass," Dylan said.
I choked on my water.
The undignified, full-body thing. Dylan watched me with the patience of someone who had seen worse, which he had, most of it my fault.
"You good?" he said.
"Fine," I said. "Went down wrong."
The thing was—Dylan knew about something from Cross’s past. Voss knew. Whoever Voss heard it from knew. The Ravens staff knew. There was apparently a whole network of people who had information about Nathan Cross, who had been in rooms with him and watched him work and seen what happened when something went wrong, and I was not in that network.
I knew he drank tea. I knew his cat's name.
I knew what he looked like working out at seven in the morning. I knew the sound he made when I got past his guard.
But I didn't know about Portland. I didn't know about the player. I didn't know what it had cost him or how long he'd been carrying it.
Everyone else seemed to know something about Nathan Cross.
I wanted to know more.
I wanted to be the person who knew things about him. I wanted to sit across from him and ask about Portland, and I wanted him to answer, and I wanted to be the person he answered.
And if he wanted to talk about moving from Portland to Boston?
I knew something about moving. About going somewhere new and building the version of yourself that worked there. About leaving the old version behind in whatever house you'd just moved out of.
The Morrisons had been my twelfth place.
I got up and crossed the bar.
Cross saw me coming. He watched me approach with a slightly-slower-than-usual focus, like he was recalibrating.
"Wesley," he said.
"How many of those have you had?" I asked.
"That’s not your business," he said.
"Oh no," I said.
Cross looked at me. "What."
"You're symptomatic."
"I'm—"
"Follow my finger." I held up my index finger and moved it slowly left to right in front of his face. "How many fingers am I holding up."
"Wesley—"
"What's today's date? What's the name of the Hawks’ starting center. Do you know where you are right now?"
"I know exactly where I am."
"That's what someone who doesn't know where they are would say." I tilted my head. "Do you have a penlight on you?"
