Page 22 of Blind Side
"Is that a compliment or a criticism?"
"It's an observation." He looked at me. "You build things. That's what you do. You build the team's social infrastructure the way Luca builds its competitive infrastructure. The team wouldn't be what it is without both of you."
Nobody had ever said that to me before. Not in those terms, not framing what I did as a structural contribution equal to the captain's. People appreciated me, but nobody had seen the architecture of it—the deliberate and skilled construction of what the Storm had become, and credited me as a builder.
Abbott had. Because Abbott saw things.
Because Abbott had been watching.
At some point his knee touched mine. It wasn't deliberate. It happened when two people were close enough that the boundaries between their bodies blurred.
We stayed like that, talking, until 1 AM, and when we finally turned off the light and lay down, the space between us felt smaller.
"Goodnight, Hayes."
"Goodnight, Abbott."
I lay in the dark and felt his warmth across the space between us. I thought about his answer,I watch you because you're worth watching.
And I knew, with a certainty I had never allowed myself before, that something was going to happen between us tomorrow. The air had too much weight. The room had too much charge. We had been circling each other for years. The orbit was decaying, pulling us inward, and tomorrow was the last night ofthe road trip. Whatever we'd been managing was running out of road.
11
Abbott
It was our last stop on the road. The last game was tomorrow, and after that, the buses and the planes would take us back to Chicago. We'd return to a world where the old status quo would assert itself.
But tonight, the hotel room was comfortable and warm. We were sitting on the bed with the TV on mute and the remains of room service on the desk. Jamie was telling me a story about his sister's wedding—something about a best man speech and a fire extinguisher and his brother-in-law's face. I was laughing, the quiet kind that started low and built. Jamie Hayes was the only person alive who could reliably break through my composure.
"He grabbed the wrong end," Jamie said, leaning back against the headboard, his shoulder three inches from mine. "The wrong end, Abbott. Of the fire extinguisher. And instead of putting out the tablecloth he sprayed the wedding cake. Straight on, from four feet away."
"How do you grab the wrong end of a fire extinguisher?"
"Under pressure, people do incredible things." He was grinning. It made his whole face come alive. It turned him from handsome into something nearly impossible to look away from. "The cake was a total loss. My sister still has the photo."
"Your family sounds chaotic."
"My family is wonderful and completely insane. They would love you." He said it like it was obvious that Clay Abbott would fit into the Hayes family the way he fit into Jamie's life. "You'd sit in the corner and observe and my mom would try to feed you. My dad would ask you about hockey and you'd say the perfect thing and they'd want to adopt you."
I didn't say anything at first. The image he'd painted, me at his family's table, being folded into the warmth that Jamie carried with him everywhere, felt so easy my throat tightened.
"Maybe someday," I said.
"Maybe someday." He looked at me. The grin softened. The expression underneath was pure Jamie—the Jamie who existed when he stopped managing the rest of the world and just sat next to someone he trusted.
I thought about my cousin Marcus again. The version of himself he'd shown the world for so long, optimized for acceptability, until the real Marcus emerged at thirty. He'd told me once, a few months after coming out, that the hardest part wasn't how people reacted. The hardest part was realizing how much energy he'd spent on hiding.You don't know how heavy it is until you put it down.
I hadn't put anything down yet. I was still holding it.
The TV flickered. Blue light moved across the walls. The room was quiet, the way hotels got quiet late at night.
We'd stopped talking. Not because we'd run out of things to say, the conversation had simply reached the place where words were no longer necessary. The silence was doing the work now.Jamie was close enough that I could smell his soap and the scent of his skin. I'd spent this entire road trip trying to ignore it.
His hand was on the blanket between us, resting palm down, fingers loose. I looked at his hand. I'd looked at his hand every night of this trip. I had memorized it—the calluses from his stick, the width of his knuckles, the way his fingers curled when he was relaxed. I had done nothing for nine nights, and it was more stifling by the hour.
"Abbott."
His voice was quiet, stripped raw.
