Page 60 of Puck You Both

"Dobrze." He doesn’t probe. Patience, the family specialty. "Eat something. And Patryk. You do seem happy. Tak trzymaj."

He hangs up on his own laughter, and I miss it the second he does.

***

THE CAMPAIGN BOOKED both teams into the same hotel for the two-day build, which makes logistical sense for forty-five people and no sense for me, a man whose bed is twenty minutes away. I took the room anyway.

At the front desk this morning, I made one request. The woman behind the counter listened to all of it, looked at me, looked at her screen, then looked at me again.

"That's... an unusual request, sir."

I agreed with her. She typed for a while, glancing up from her monitor every few seconds, as if trying to decide whether this was above her pay grade. Eventually, she told me it would be handled by four.

And it was. I spent six minutes with the result before dinner, evaluating, adjusting, evaluating again, and I'll be explaining that process to exactly nobody, including myself, although I’m sure Theo will ask.

Dinner is both teams in a hotel restaurant that surrendered immediately. Theo sits across from me stealing the crispy parts off my plate, narrating the cat crisis to Lindqvist. Midway through he stops, fork suspended mid-gesture, and squints at me. "You're doing a thing."

"Eating dinner?"

"You have your planning face."

"I have a regular face."

"Patrick." He points the fork at me, eyes narrowed to happy slits. "The last time you had that face, I ended up—" He glances at Lindqvist and recalculates. "—somewhere great."

"Eat your food."

He eats my food instead, watching me the whole time like I'm a gift he's been told not to shake. I hold my regular face and let him wonder. He'll find out at 11:30 and not one minute earlier, out of consideration for the hotel's other guests.

At eleven, I take the ice bucket down the hall, because the machine on my floor is broken, and not at all because I checked which floor the Wolves are on.

The hallway is carpet-quiet, doors closed the whole length of it, twenty-some athletes shut away behind them. The machine hums alone in its alcove. I fill my bucket slowly, in no particular hurry to finish the errand.

The stairwell door opens and the corner of my eye registers a familiar frame. Good. That handles one step of the plan for me. I guess sometimes, if you’re very lucky, things just fall into your lap. Provided you chose the correct floor.

Wall comes through it in a t-shirt and sweatpants, carrying his own bucket, moving quietly for a man his size. He sees me and stops, one hand still holding the door.

For a moment, he seems to wonder whether to move or bolt.

Two days in the same building. Same rooms, same shots, same prop hammer handed back and forth eleven times, and every second of it supervised by grandmothers, headsets, boom mics, a parrot. This hallway is the first unwitnessed air we've shared since Chicago. It takes both of us a beat too long to remember how normal men behave in it.

He lets the door swing shut behind him.

"The drywall went up fast today," I say.

"The mudding was sloppy on the north wall."

"The contractors will skim it Thursday."

"Great."

There. Four sentences of cover, into an empty hallway, for the benefit of nobody. Neither of us says the true thing, which is that there's no camera here, and that we both counted the hours until there wasn't.

Or maybe that's only me. His face, as usual, declines to comment.

He crosses to the machine and fills his bucket beside me, close enough that I can feel the temperature of him over the temperature of the ice. His hair is damp at the ends. Shower, probably. The red has faded toward an ember, and I inspect it at close range without permission.

His jaw ticks once.