Chapter 14: Room 412

The room had two queen beds and a single window overlooking the hotel parking lot. Not romantic by anyone's definition. Jax took the bed closer to the door without asking, another territorial habit so ingrained he probably didn't notice he did it anymore. I took the window bed and sat on the edge of it with my phone and the pretense of checking messages.

He showered first. The water ran for exactly seven minutes. He came out in a t-shirt and track pants, his hair damp, and sat on his bed with the play diagrams from the bus. The red marker came out again.

The silence was the particular kind that comes from two people who have done intimate things together and have mutually, wordlessly agreed not to speak about them. It had its own texture. It pressed against the inside of the room like a third presence.

I watched him work from the corner of my eye. He circled something on the diagram, crossed something out, wrote a note in the margin in his small tight hand. He had three pages going at once, the way some people think, nonlinearly, moving between threads. He chewed the cap of the marker when he was stuck on something. It was a bad habit, unconscious, and seeing it made something happen in my chest that I immediately suppressed.

"Reyes is getting predictable," he said, without looking up.

I hadn't expected him to speak. "What do you mean?"

"His cutting angle. He always goes backhand to the far post. Defensive teams are starting to game-plan for it. Someone needs to talk to him." He paused. "You should do it."

I looked at him. "Why me?"

"Because he listens to you." He made another mark on the paper. "He's been watching you since you got here. Trying to pattern himself on you."

I hadn't noticed. "He's going to pattern himself into a very inconvenient set of bad habits."

The corner of Jax's mouth moved. Almost. "Probably. Talk to him anyway."

I pulled my own legs up onto the bed, leaning against the headboard. The shoulder ached, and I thought about the muscle rub still sitting in my bag, and about the fact that Jax had known where it would hurt before I did.

"Why do you care if Reyes improves?" I asked. "He's not your leverage."

It was a sharper thing to say than I intended. The word 'leverage' landed in the room with weight.

Jax set down the marker. He looked at me, and his expression was unreadable in the particular way that meant he was choosing how to answer.

"Every player on this team is my responsibility," he said, finally. "Whether I like them or not. Whether they're useful to me or not. When they fail, I fail. That's what a captain is."

It was a real answer. Not a deflection, not a power play. A real thing he believed.

I didn't know what to do with that.

"Go to sleep, Valdez," he said, picking up his marker. "You've got two goals and a bruised shoulder. Both of those things have consequences for tomorrow."

I turned off my bedside light. I lay in the dark, listening to the scratch of his marker, the occasional rustle of paper. I thought about the bus. About the weight of him against my shoulder in the dark somewhere outside Toledo. About the fact that he had pressed muscle rub into my hand in a crowded locker room and said nothing about it.

I thought about how much simpler this would all be if I could just hate him cleanly.

His light went out around midnight. The room settled into the particular silence of two people pretending to sleep.

In the morning, my shoulder hurt exactly where he said it would.