Chapter 17: The Pill Case

I want to be very clear about something: I did not handle what happened well.

For three days after the pill case, I was, there's no other word for it, difficult. Not openly. I'm too trained for open. But difficult in the smaller ways, the ways that don't leave marks. Short on the ice. Clipped in conversation. I skipped the optional film sessions Jax ran on Thursday evenings. I made myself absent wherever his presence was not technically mandatory.

He noticed. He said nothing.

What I was doing, I understood clearly and hated in myself, was punishing him for it. The pill case had forced something into a category that didn't fit my working theory of who he was and what we were to each other, and my response to category failure was apparently to become unlikeable until the feeling passed.

Reyes, bless his absolutely uncomplicated soul, pulled me aside on Friday.

"Are you and Jax fighting?"

"What? No."

"Because you went from attached at the hip to different planets in like three days and now everyone's weird about it." He tilted his head. "Coach thinks you're not gelling. He mentioned it at the staff meeting."

"How do you know what was said at the staff meeting?"

Reyes smiled the smile of a man with no concept of boundaries. "I know things. Are you guys okay?"

"We're fine," I said. "Mind your business."

He held up both hands and retreated.

I went to the film session that evening. I sat three chairs from Jax, which was, I was not unaware, still notable proximity. He ran the session with his usual precise authority. He paused on a play midway through and said, "Valdez. What do you see here?" and I looked at the screen and answered him honestly, and we went back and forth twice about it, a genuine disagreement, both of us right in different ways, and by the end I felt like I'd had a conversation I didn't know I was starving for.

Afterward, when everyone had filed out, he stayed seated. He didn't look at me. He was reviewing notes on a tablet.

"You done?" he asked.

I didn't pretend not to understand. "Yeah."

He nodded. He kept looking at his tablet. "Good." Then: "You disagreed with me tonight. In the session."

"I was right."

"You were partly right." A pause. "So was I. We were both looking at different parts of the same play." He set the tablet down and looked at me, finally, straight on. "That's useful. Don't stop doing that."

I stood there. The room was empty and the overhead lights were too bright and he was looking at me like I was a problem he was genuinely interested in solving.

"I don't know what to do with you," I admitted. It came out quieter than I meant it to.

"I know," he said. He picked up his tablet again. "You'll figure it out."

He said it like it wasn't in question. Like my figuring it out was simply a matter of time. It was possibly the most infuriating and most stabilizing thing he had ever said to me, and he said it in exactly the same tone he used for power play diagrams.

I left, and i went home. I figured out absolutely nothing, but I felt, for the first time in four days, like the ground was underneath me again.