The film resumes. My phone sits face-down beside my thigh. The 413 has a place on the couch now, sitting inside Cole's silence, beside the laptop and my locked jaw.
On Friday, I go without an excuse. The heat works. My article is filed. I still end up on Dante Voss's couch at 10 p.m. with my laptop on my thighs, his tea in my hands, and the house hushed around us while Cole watches film on the floor.
My apartment has started changing on me. Everything stays where I left it. The locks hold. The door bar sits exactly where I put it. Every night, the scan takes longer, stretching from twoseconds to five to eight while I check the closet twice and count the distance from the window to the fire escape latch.
The breathing count has moved from occasional to nightly.Four in, four hold, four out.The structure Talia taught me on a library floor.
So I come to Elm House, and I leave the reason sealed behind my teeth.
Cole is on the floor with his laptop, cutting game film for a project Addison assigned. His handwriting is terrible. His annotations are surprisingly sharp. He wears a white T-shirt that rides up when he reaches for his notes, exposing a strip of stomach above his waistband, and I look for one second too long before dragging my gaze back to my screen. I have been noticing more since last Friday, when he told me I was the opposite of bothered.
Dante sits in the armchair with a book in his lap, black long-sleeve, bare feet on the hardwood. The book is in Italian. The typeset is visible from here. I have seen this man in full gear on the ice, in pressed black at press conferences, in the composure he wears like body armor. Tonight his bare feet are six inches from the leg of the chair, his ankle crossed over the other, his guard lowered by that much.
All evening, he has been talking to me without using a name. Maddox is gone. Maya never makes it out of his mouth. The gap between those names stays open every time he looks at me. Since the kitchen last Friday, since his jaw tightened on words he would not say, that gap has teeth. He swallowed what he wanted to say, and nobody has asked him to spit it out.
The last time I was alone with him, his mouth was between my legs and his hands were on my hips. I came so hard I could not hear for ten seconds, on my apartment floor, with my body on top of his. Now he reads in Italian with his bare feet on the hardwood and his fingers turning pages that are not my skin.
Cole is six feet away on the floor, but the wall between my room and theirs might as well be standing in the middle of the living room. The memory lives in the silence between Cole's pen strokes and in the way Dante turns a page without looking up. Every time Cole shifts on the carpet, his voice comes back through the plaster. Every time Dante's fingers move over paper, my hips remember the pressure of them. My laptop screen has gone dim. I have not touched the trackpad in four minutes. My pulse is visible in my wrists if either of them looks.
This is the third night this week I have been in this house. Cole asked me to stay. Dante told me I would be back. The Wi-Fi excuse is dead.
I take a sip of the tea. Dante made it. My brand. His kitchen. Cole called itour kitchenlast Friday, and the word still hits the same place in my chest.
"Your forechecking piece," Dante says.
My eyes lift from the screen. He is watching me over the top of his book.
"The one Addison referenced in film," he says. "The pressure metrics on zone entries."
"What about it?"
"The coaching staff implemented your read three weeks after you published it. You identified the pressure pattern from the press box before they adjusted from the bench."
I wait for the qualifier. The but. The caveat that keeps every Dante compliment at arm's length.
"That's—" He stops, and his jaw works around the rest of the sentence. Whatever he was about to say stays behind his teeth. "The piece was strong."
Cole's pen stops moving on the floor. His gaze stays on Dante. He wanted Dante to finish that sentence. He wanted to hear the bigger version.
"I've read the archive," Dante says into the silence Cole left. "The Chronicle's online archive. Your coverage going back to your first byline. Three hundred and twelve articles."
"You counted."
"The system counts. I read." His spine straightens. "Because I should have been reading them all along. And I wasn't."
The admission is smaller than what he almost said. The rest of it sits in his straightened spine, his locked jaw, the careful distance between every word.
"You know," Cole says, stretching his legs out on the carpet, "for a man who couldn't finish that sentence just now, you're being very careful with your words tonight."
Cole names the gap between what Dante said and what Dante meant, then rests his pen against his notebook and waits.
Dante's eyes snap to Cole. Cole holds the gaze from the floor, chin tipped up, the grin playing at the corners of his mouth.
"Cole," Dante says, low and warning.
"An observation," Cole says. "You're great at observations. Maya's great at observations. I'm observing the observers."
"You're stirring."
