Put the camera down without shooting.
Aurora appears beside me with two coffees like she materialized out of the Florida air. She’s been doing this — showing up when I need her without me saying I need her. I don’t know if Jax told her something or if she just pays attention or if this is what it looks like when someone actually gives a damn about you on a consistent basis.
I’m still learning to recognize that.
She holds one out.
“You didn’t shoot,” she says.
“I know.”
“That’s new.”
“Is it.”
“You always shoot warmups. First thing. Camera up before you even have coffee.”
I take the coffee. Look at the ice. At him in the crease running rotations. “Maybe I just wanted to watch.”
Aurora is quiet for a second.
“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe.”
We stand there drinking our coffee and neither of us says anything else and that’s the thing about Aurora — she knows when to push and when to just stand next to you with coffee and let you figure it out yourself.
I figure nothing out.
But I feel slightly less like I’m doing it alone.
They win it in regulation.
Conference Final bound.
The locker room is insane — I can hear it from the hall, that specific quality of loud that means something has shifted, something has become real in a way it wasn’t before.
I stand outside the door and hear Liam’s voice through it.
Five sentences.
I don’t write them down. Once, I would have. I would have reached for my notebook, captured the shape of it, turned it into something useful.
Now I just stand there and listen.
Some things aren’t for the page. I know that now. Maybe I had to come here with my backup pen and my backup backup pen and my system for every room to learn the difference.
The system still works.
It just doesn’t get everything anymore.
The door swings open and it’s chaos and I’m back to being a journalist.
Brody finds me first. Of course he does. He’s still going — voice hoarse, eyes bright, completely unable to contain any of it — and I get my recorder up and let him talk because Brody talking is always good material and also because it gives me something to do with my hands that isn’t thinking about the blank document.
Sebastian and Caleb are doing something inadvisable in the corner that I photograph from three angles because I am thorough and also because I need to look like I know what I’m doing in this room right now.
Liam gives me one sentence.
It’s better than everything else combined.
