Page 48 of Rookie Mistake
Eli accepts the lie. Eli accepts the lie because Eli trusts me, and the trust is the thing I earned and the thing I am now failing to deserve.
Later. The bedroom. The amber lamp.
The sex tonight is different and I cannot name the difference from inside it. From inside, the sex is good. The sex is us. The hands and the mouths and the learned choreography of two bodies that have been studying each other for three months.
But the difference is there. The difference is in my hands, which are holding Eli the way I used to hold the mug in the kitchen: tight enough to keep, loose enough to set down. The holding is the hedging, and the hedging is the model running beneath the surface, calculating the risk, assessing the probability that the thing I have will be taken.
Eli is on top of me and his face is above mine and his eyes are open and the eyes see everything and the eyes see the difference.
"Where are you?" he asks.
"I am here."
"Your body is here. Where is the rest of you?"
The question is precise. The question identifies the gap between the physical presence and the emotional presence, the gap that Eli has not experienced since the early weeks when the gap was the control and the control was the default. The gap has been closed for months. The gap is open tonight.
"I am here," I say again, and I kiss him, and the kissing is the deflection, and Eli lets the deflection work because Eli loves me and the loving includes the allowance of one bad night.
Afterward, he falls asleep. His head on my chest. His breathing slow.
I lie in the dark with Alexei's name on my phone and Eli's weight on my body and the two facts in the same bed and the two facts are incompatible and the incompatibility is the crisis.
The model says: protect. The model says: manage the information. The model says: the last time someone had access during a threat, the access was weaponized.
Eli is not Alexei. I know this. Mars said this. Mik said this. My mother said this in her Russian-accented, 6 AM way. Eli is not Alexei.
But the model does not care about the distinction. The model cares about the pattern. The pattern says: threat detected, access open, close the access. The model is old. The model is wrong. The model is running anyway.
I close my eyes. Eli breathes on my chest. The breathing is the trust, and the trust is what I am betraying by not telling him.
The not-telling is the wall going back up. The wall that Mik said comes down from the inside. The wall that Mars said is optimized for a threat that is not present. The wall that my mother said was not meant to be a prison.
The wall is going up anyway. The wall does not listen to Mik or Mars or Irina. The wall listens to Alexei. The wall listens to three years of silence and the permanent, body-level memory of a man who said "too intense, too much" and who made the private into ammunition.
The wall is going up and I cannot stop it and the not-stopping is the failure and the failure is mine.
ELI
Ifind out about Alexei from Jonah.
Not from Nikolai. From Jonah, who mentions it over lunch the way Jonah mentions everything: mid-sentence, embedded in a larger story about something else, delivered with the casual obliviousness of a man who does not know the information is a grenade.
"...and Carolina picked up Petrov in that trade, which is interesting because he's a decent middle-six forward but his numbers have been trending down and I don't know if he fixes their power play issue, but anyway, the point is the restaurant in Raleigh..."
I stop chewing.
Petrov. Alexei Petrov. The name Nikolai said in the dark with his voice flat and his sentences short and the telling costing him something with every word. The name that I held gently because the holding was the trust and the trust was the thing Nikolai gave me when he opened the door.
Petrov is in the Eastern Conference. Petrov is in the same division.
Nikolai did not tell me.
The not-telling hits harder than the news. The news is external: a man from Nikolai's past signed a contract with a team we will play six times a season. Manageable. The not-telling is internal. Nikolai received this information (when? yesterday? three days ago?) and decided to manage it alone. The wall going back up. The old model running.
I finish lunch. I smile at Jonah. I contribute to the conversation about the restaurant in Raleigh. The grin is operational. The grin has been back since the article and the grin is available for deployment and the deployment is automatic now, the muscle memory of a lifetime of performing through pain.
After practice, in the apartment, I wait.
