Page 35 of Cross Check
Kieran appeared in the hallway. He watched me carry the charger past him.
"Nico, I didn't ask you to—"
"You didn't have to."
I closed the guest room door. I heard him stand there, on the other side of the door, for a long time. Then his footsteps retreated down the hall, and the apartment settled into silence.
I looked at the room. The bed, pristine. The blanket, folded. The floor between the bed and the wall, the six feet of thin carpet I'd claimed as my territory the night I arrived. The position I'd slept in for seven weeks before Kieran Walsh sat down beside me.
I pulled the blanket off the bed. I took the pillow. I arranged them in their old configuration, back against the wall, clear sight line to the door, and lay down.
The carpet was thin. My back would ache. These were facts I'd learned to accept the way I'd learned to accept the investigation, the silence, the duffel bag in the corner. You didn't fight the floor. You adapted to it. You let the discomfort become a rhythm, and the rhythm became a routine.
That routine became the shape of your life—until someone came along and showed you that you'd been sleeping on the floor by choice, not necessity.
Kieran had shown me that. And now I was choosing the floor again, because choosing the floor was safer than lying in his bed and waiting for the morning when he'd realize the cost of keeping me exceeded the value.
We moved through the apartment on parallel tracks—the same rooms, the same schedules, the same kitchen counter—without touching, without lingering, without the 3 AM conversations that had been the foundation of everything we'd built. Kieran made tea for two every morning. I drank mine in the guest room, sitting on the floor with my back against the bed, the mug warming my hands. He cooked dinner. Tuesday salmon, the routine we'd built together, and I ate at the counter and washed my plate and disappeared before the silence could sharpen into something that required words.
At the facility, I turned the frustration into something physical.
I took hits I could have avoided. During board battles, I stayed in the contact zone a half-second longer than necessary, absorbing elbows and shoulders that smarter positioning would have deflected. I finished every check and started a few. In a one-on-one drill against Hayes, I drove through his check instead of around it, my shoulder absorbing the contact in a way that made my recently bruised deltoid scream. Hayes looked at me with concern, not anger.
That was worse.
During a special-teams drill on the second day, Garrett caught me with a high stick. The tape caught the skin above my eyebrow and opened a cut that bled immediately, a bright, warm line running down the side of my face, dripping onto the white ofmy practice jersey. The trainer skated out with gauze and a concerned expression.
"I'm fine."
"You need stitches."
"Butterfly it. I'll get it looked at after."
"Nico—"
"I said I'm fine."
I could feel Kieran's gaze from sixty feet away. The weight of it, a goalie's attention locked on the one variable on the ice that mattered to him more than the puck. I didn't look at him. I pressed the gauze to my eyebrow and went back out for the next drill. I played through it the way I'd played through everything, by refusing to stop.
"You're trying to get yourself killed," Theo said afterward, cornering me in the training room while I iced my ribs.
"I'm playing hockey."
"You're playing hockey like you want someone to put you through the boards." His dimples were gone. His face was serious in a way I'd rarely seen from Theo Callahan. "What happened?"
"Nothing."
"Walsh looks like someone shot his dog, and you look like you're the dog. Don't tell me nothing."
I pressed the ice pack harder against my ribs. The cold burned. "He asked for distance. I'm giving him distance."
Theo sat down beside me. "Distance at the rink, or distance everywhere?"
"What's the difference?"
"The difference is everything." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "Luca asked me for space once. During the playoffs, when the media was everywhere and the pressure was insane. He said we needed to be careful. I heardI'm ashamed of us,and I spent four days convinced he was going to leave me."He paused. "He wasn't. He was terrified of losing me, and he handled it badly. Sound familiar?"
I didn't answer.
