"I'm aware."
"I know you're aware. I'm saying it out loud so you have to stand here and not argue with it." He folds his arms across my window. "It's been you and me. We crossed at that pop-up under the bridge, two guys who'd each have sworn on our lives nobody on the team knew, and you looked at me like I'd walked in on you robbing a vault."
"You had robbed a vault. You were holding a glow stick like contraband."
"It was contraband. Glow sticks are deeply uncool and I'll defend mine in court." He doesn't smile. Thompson never smiles. The not-smiling is the entire range of his face and I've learned to read the millimeters of it, and right now the not-smiling is pleased and working hard not to be. "We built the whole apparatus. The cover. The late nights. The rule about never saying it on the group chat. And now you want to hand the key to the goalie."
"I want to hand the key to the goalie."
He looks at me a long moment. "You know I've been pushing this."
"Since camp." I let it land flat, the way the true things leave me. "The seat you keep leaving open on the plane that somehow always resolves to the one beside him. The fish food."
"I don't know anything about fish food."
"Thompson."
"A man is allowed opinions on aquarium nutrition." He cracks a sunflower seed he produced from nowhere. "Fine. Yes. Somebody had to. You two were going to circle the runway until the fuel ran out, and I happen to like you both, and I gottired of watching two grown goalies pretend the other one was furniture."
"He's not subtle either."
"He's the least subtle man I've ever watched try to be subtle. He leaves a room and the room tilts after him." Thompson works the seed. "One thing, though. Before you do it. Then I'm out of your business for good."
"Go."
"Once he's in that room, he's in. You can't un-show somebody the thing." He's not playing now, the dry gone out of it. "The body you could have walked back. People walk that back, it happens, it's just bodies and a bad week. This one doesn't come back down off the shelf once you've put it up there. So if there's any part of you still deciding, decide it here, in the lot, with me, where it's free. Not Friday. Not in the dark with him standing next to you watching your face."
"It's decided."
"Then why has it taken you three days to send a four-word text."
"Because deciding a thing and paying for it are two separate transactions. You of all people know that."
He's quiet at that, and nods, slow, like it's the most honest sentence I've handed him all spring. "Yeah," he says. "I did." A beat, and the not-smile shifts a hair toward something he'd deny under oath. "I was good at holding it. For the record."
"You were."
"Don't get sentimental in a parking lot, you'll frighten the asphalt." He pushes off my door, finally, and lets me have it. "Friday's yours. I'll still be there, I'm not skipping that set for anybody's feelings, including mine. But I'm done being the only one who knows where you go to get quiet. Hand him the key. He'll be careful with it. It's the single most annoying thing about him."
That night I send four words. Friday. Keep it open.
He calls inside the minute, because he's Lundy, because a text that careful from me reads to him like a flare going up over water.
"Everything good?" No alarm in it. Just the question, offered in case I need it.
"Yes. I have a thing Friday. Late. Loud. I want you there."
"Okay." No follow-up interrogation, no trying the other handles on the door I've handed him. That's the thing about him I keep failing to get used to. "Tell me what I need. What to wear. Whether to be nervous."
"Wear black. Eat first, there's no food. Don't be nervous." I sit with it a second, the cat heavy on my chest, the headphones still warm around my neck. "It's the last room, Soren. The one nobody's been in but me and Thompson."
The line goes quiet, and I can hear him arrive at it, the same way he arrived at the tank, the same way he stood in a studio and understood he was being handed something. "Then thank you," he says, careful, "for the key."
"Don't be careful with it. Be in the room."
"I can do both. I'm extremely talented."
I hang up, and the door I've kept bolted since before this team had a name is standing open. Four words and a phone call. The part I'll be turning over for a week is that it doesn't sit in me like exposure. It sits like the opposite of the thing I do from the moment my eyes open every morning. For once I'm not folding something down to a size a room can stand to be near. I'm letting one true thing be exactly as big as it is, in front of one person, on purpose, and the relief of that's so total it feels, lying here in the dark with the bass still going and a cat rising and falling on my chest, a great deal like being quiet.
