Page 24 of Blind Side
In the moment before I answered the phone, in that suspended second where we were both in the same space, I had seen his face. Jamie, raw and exposed, and it was so clear and unmistakable that nothing could make me unsee it.
"We should sleep," Jamie said. "Big game tomorrow."
"Yeah."
He turned off the lamp. We lay down, him on his side, me on mine. This shared bed had become, over the course of this trip, the most honest space in our lives.
Neither of us slept.
I lay in the dark and listened to Jamie's breathing.
It wasn't the even rhythm of sleep but the controlled measure of a man who was awake and working very hard to sound like he wasn't.
I thought about his face. I thought about Denver. I thought about Kieran's question.What are you waiting for him to do?
I was waiting for him to ask. But Jamie was never going to ask. Jamie Hayes had spent his entire life making sure everyone else was okay. Asking for something would mean admitting that he wasn't.
Tomorrow we would go home, and I would have to decide what to do with the fact that Jamie Hayes loved me, and I loved him, and neither of us had said it.
And the phone call that had arrived at the moment when we might have.
I didn't sleep.
At 4 AM, I heard Jamie turn toward me. His breathing was uneven, the sound of a man who'd given up on pretending.
I lay still and let him think I was sleeping.
12
Jamie
I was fine.
On the bus from the airport, the guys were scattered across the seats in various states of exhaustion. Theo was asleep on Luca's shoulder, Bishop had headphones on the size of dinner plates. Mikkola was staring out the window at the Chicago skyline through the overcast.
I sat in my usual spot in the middle of the bus. Abbott was four rows ahead, his head leaned against the window. We hadn't spoken about the phone call.
We hadn't spoken about anything that mattered. We'd played the last game of the trip, an unremarkable 2–1 loss, and boarded the bus with a respectful nod and wrenching distance.
I was fine.
I was supportive. The thing is, I meant it. I did want good things for Abbott. A person who loved someone wanted good things for them. That was how love worked. You held the dooropen even when the person walking through it was walking away from you.
The bus pulled into the facility lot. I did what I always did, checked in with Mikkola, made sure Morrison had a ride, and confirmed the practice schedule. The work of maintaining a team, the thing I was good at, kept me busy enough to ignore what had happened—or didn't—between me and Abbott.
He walked past me in the parking lot, close enough that our shoulders would normally have touched. There was a new distance now though, that hadn't been there before the road trip, and it was the loudest space in the world.
"See you tomorrow," he said.
"See you tomorrow." I parroted his words back to him.
He got in his car. I watched him pull out of the lot, which I'd been doing for years. But tonight, it felt like watching the end of something.
Home.
My apartment was the same.
Of course it was. Apartments didn't change because their occupants spent ten days discovering their emotional lives were built on a fault line.
