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Me: Can I come by?

I look at it after I send it. Can I. Asking.

Tessa: I’ll meet you at Corvin in 10.

She’s there in eight. She comes into my room with her laptop under her arm, her coat unzipped and looks at my face. She puts the laptop down on my desk without saying anything.

I sit on the edge of my bed and tell her about Berwyn, the three teams, and my father asking for the film first so he could look it over. She stands in the middle of my room in her coat and listens to all of it without interrupting once.

She doesn’t tell me what to do. She doesn’t say that’s awful or he can’t do that or you should call him and tell him. She doesn’t try to fix it.

She sits down next to me on the bed.

“What do you want?” she says.

I look at her.

She waits.

“To play,” I say.

“Then play.”

“For who?”

It comes out of me before I know it’s there. Not for which team. That’s not what I mean. I don’t know what I mean. For me, for him, or for the guy on the stage in June with my name on the back of a jersey somebody else picked.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Okay,” she says.

I wait for the rest of it. There isn’t any.

“You don’t have to know everything in January,” she says.

She says it simple like it’s a fact.

And I sit there with it. You don’t have to know everything in January. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. My dad is difficult. Berwyn wants me to decide for myself. The teams want to know. Everybody wants the answer, now, today, so they can do something with it. She doesn’t. She just sits next to me.

“Your practice clothes smell terrible,” she says.

I look at her. “You better get used to it.”

Her eyes flick down my shirt. “Right.”

Something about the way she says it gets me.

I hook an arm around her waist and pull her into me. She laughs, surprised, and lets me drag her down until we’re lying sideways across her bed. She turns onto her side and puts her face against my neck, and her nose is freezing against my skin.

She laughs harder. “It’s really bad.”

I pull the shirt over my head and throw it across the room.

Her eyes drop to my chest, stomach, lower, then back up.

“Okay,” she says.

I stare at her.