Chapter 21: The Morning After the Night Before

He texted at six-fourteen in the morning.

*Don't read into it.*

I stared at this message for a long time. I was already awake ,I had not, in point of fact, slept more than two consecutive hours, lying in my bed in the gray morning light, doing exactly what he was apparently aware I was doing.

I typed and deleted four responses. The responses I deleted were, in order: *too late*, *a little late for that*, *you kissed me*, and a single question mark, which I deleted not because it wasn't accurate but because it felt like the kind of punctuation that didn't leave anyone a dignified exit.

What I sent was: *Practice at nine.*

He replied: *Good.*

I put my phone face-down on the nightstand and stared at the ceiling and thought about a man who had just told me not to read into a kiss he had initiated, in a parking lot, in the cold, after sitting beside me in an empty locker room in the particular quiet that comes after something real.

Don't read into it.

I was reading into everything. I had been reading into everything for weeks, every locker moved, every pill case placed, every medical flag quietly buried, every brush of a hand, every muscle rub pressed without ceremony into my palm in a crowded room. I was the most fluent reader of subtext I had ever met in my own life, and what I was reading had been building its argument for two months and the conclusion was not one I was permitted to state aloud.

I got up. I made coffee. I ran four miles in the cold morning air because the alternative was thinking, and thinking had become a thing I could no longer afford to do freely.

Practice was crisp and professional. He ran the session with his usual authority. He corrected my edge work once, standing two feet away with his arms crossed and his voice technical and impersonal, and I adjusted and he nodded and moved on to the next player and that was all.

It was the most normal interaction we'd had in weeks.

I hated how much I missed the other thing. The weighted silences. The shoulder on the bus. The real answers to real questions, said to the wall.

Reyes fell into step beside me heading off the ice. "You look terrible," he offered.

"Thanks."

"Not bad terrible. Just—" He considered. "Like you're working something out and it's winning."

"Sharp observation."

"My sister's an Omega," he said, easy and without weight, the way people said things that were offered as context rather than claims. "She gets that face when she's stuck between what she knows and what she wants." He paused. "She says the answer's usually obvious and the problem is it's inconvenient."

He peeled off toward the tunnel, unhelmeted, already having forgotten he said it.

I stood at the boards with my stick and the specific feeling of someone who has had a truth placed gently in front of them by a twenty-two-year-old who meant it as small talk.

The answer was obvious.

The problem was it was inconvenient.

[WHAT HE DOES WITH PRESS]

There was a press conference after the Thursday game. Mandatory, milestone win, the kind the league liked to mark with quotes and availability. I had done enough of these to know how they worked: the table, the microphones, the predictable geometry of softballs and the occasional thing with teeth.

What I had not done was sit beside Jax for one.

It was a scheduling thing, Coach told me. Two players required. You and Thorne. Forty minutes. Don't swear.

We sat at the table in the media room with a foot of space between our chairs and the cameras going and Jax took the first question with the ease of a man who had been doing this for a decade and a half and had fully mastered the performance of accessibility.

He was extraordinary at it. That was the thing I hadn't fully understood from the outside: Jax, in public, was warm. He was funny in the dry, self-aware way that worked on cameras. He said things that sounded spontaneous and had clearly been prepared. He was entirely present and entirely constructed and I watched him do it with a kind of professional respect that complicated everything.

"Leo." A reporter near the front. "The piece in Athletic last week called you the engine of the Vipers' offensive resurgence. How do you respond to that?"

I had expected this question. I had prepared an answer that was accurate without being divisive.

"I think that's generous," I said. "The offense works because of the system. The system exists because of this man." I didn't look at Jax. "Anything I'm doing is made possible by how he structures the play. I'm fast because he creates the space."

There was a beat.

Then Jax said, his voice easy, "He's being modest. He sees the ice in ways I don't. That's why it works."

There was a small ripple through the room, not dramatic, just the quality of attention sharpening when something unexpected occurs.

I turned my head. He was looking at the cameras. His expression was pleasant and professional.

He had just credited me, publicly, without qualification, with something real. In the same room where his authority was supposed to be singular and uncontested. He had done it without drama, without fanfare, in a tone that suggested it was obvious.

The questions moved on. I answered three more, Jax fielded the rest, and the forty minutes finished and we walked out and down the corridor, and I was silent the whole way, and so was he.

At the end of the hall he said, without looking at me, "You don't have to give me credit every time someone asks."

"You've been giving me cover for months," I said. "It costs me nothing."

"It might cost you," he said. "If you keep doing it, people will wonder why."

I thought about this. "Let them wonder."

He stopped walking. He turned to look at me and his face was doing the unreadable thing again, the thing behind the surface.

"Leo—"

"Jax." I met his eyes. "I know you said not to read into it. I'm not. I'm just, being accurate. About what's true."

A long beat. He looked at me. I looked back.

"Okay," he said, finally.

He walked on. I walked beside him. The space between our shoulders was exactly the same as it always was, and entirely different from how it had been in September, and I thought: *this is what it looks like when things move*.