"In October I was a coward with a spreadsheet. I've grown."
Coach Bodie comes in and stands in the middle of it with no speech in him at all, just stands there grinning like a man who got away with something clean. The room quiets for the one guy who almost never raises his voice.
"Boys," he says.
We wait.
"That's it. That's the whole thing. Rest tomorrow, round two Thursday. Boys." He walks back out and the room comes apart at the seams, Davis swearing it's the best speech he's ever heard and meaning it.
"Speech, Lundy," Davis starts, and a few of them pick it up. "Speech. Speech."
"No speech."
"You're the calm one. Calm us down. Say one calm thing."
"Drink water. We play Thursday."
"That's the worst calm thing I've ever heard and I'm going to live by it."
"Who do we even get," somebody asks the room. "Round two, who."
"Whoever survives the other series," Berger says. "And no, the model has no read, the model is on a beach. I told you."
"Good," Thompson says, quiet enough that only I catch it. "Now they have to take it from us."
"Frame the spreadsheet," Marchetti calls. "Frame the wrong one. We hang it over the door."
Tikh is leaning against his stall while the room roars around him, watching, and when his eyes cross mine they stop for exactly one beat. A question that isn't really a question. I don't answer it and I don't have to. He tips his chin, once, at nothing, and goes back to the noise. He saw it before I did. He won't make me say it.
Soucy's three stalls down, present in a loud room without being the noise in it. The distance I used to read in those three stalls is just three stalls now. He looks up and finds me already looking, and neither of us does anything about it, because there's nothing to do about it in a room this full and because we both already know we take the same car home.
I moved the bag in Tampa. Squared the bottle without deciding to. Took the rattling stall and felt like I'd won a hand. I've been building a room around a man who never asked me to build one, and the question Tikh left sitting on the table isn't whether I see it. It's whether the building is for him or for me.
We do, eventually, when the room has burned down to the diehards and the trainers and the smell of old champagne. The long way, his place sliding past mine. Same as every night.
"You stood on your head," he says, quiet now, the building gone behind us.
"Marchetti covered that. With a beginning, middle, and end."
"Marchetti doesn't know what he watched. I do." A block goes by. "It was the best game I've seen you play."
"You watch all of them."
"That's how I know. We win round two too."
"You don't say things like that."
"I said it last week and we won. I'm saying it twice now. Write both down."
"What's the cat situation," I ask. "Looking, or looking-looking."
"There's a shelter near Gwen's. I drove past it twice this week."
"That's looking-looking."
"Bug's going to be furious he’s competition."
"Bug bit a vet. Bug can handle competition." He says it to the windshield, and his name for what he's deciding is already a reason that does the talking. I let it. A man keeping his reasons while the want sits plain underneath them.
