Page 25 of Blind Side
I stood in the kitchen for ten minutes.
I didn't do anything. I didn't make food. I didn't check my phone. I didn't reach for the routines that usually carried me from one part of the day to the next. I just stood in my kitchen, looking at the drying rack by the sink.
The blue mug with the chipped handle was sitting there, right where I'd left it before the road trip. I'd washed it the day before we left. Abbott hadn't been over. There was no reason to wash it, but I'd washed it anyway because that's what I did. I washed the mug and put it on the rack to dry.
I picked it up.
It was heavy in my hand. It was solid ceramic, the kind that held heat for a long time. You wanted to wrap both hands around it on cold mornings. Abbott's hands. Abbott wrapped his long goalkeeper's fingers around this mug in my kitchen and we talked about nothing and everything. The silence between us had always been my most comfortable place.
I opened the cupboard and put the mug on the shelf—in the back behind the others, where it wouldn't be the first thing I saw every morning.
I closed the cupboard.
I stood there for thirty seconds.
I opened the cupboard and took the mug back out. I put it back on the shelf in its usual spot, handle angled right.
That was better.
I couldn't put the mug away. Putting it away felt like conceding something, admitting that the space it occupied on the shelf was optional. It wasn't optional. It represented Clay Abbott in my daily existence, and removing it meant something I wasn't ready to face.
I made dinner and ate it standing up. I watched an episode of something—I don't remember what. I went to bed in a one-person bed and I lay on the left side. The right side was empty—which it had always been. It was fine.
I was fine.
At 2 AM I got up and wandered into the kitchen. I stood in front of the shelf with his mug. I was going to be fine.
Abbott was going to take the Denver offer. He deserved to be a starter and a contender, not the backup. Not a contingency.
He was going to leave and the mug was going to sit on this shelf. I would wash it and put it back. It would mean less over time, because that's how things worked. The importance of objects faded as the person they represented became more distant.
I picked up the mug and held it with both hands. I stood in my kitchen at 2 AM and held a mug that belonged to a man who was probably, at this exact moment, lying in his own apartment weighing the value of everything he'd built here against the value of everything he'd been offered.
I put the mug back, handle to the right, in its normal spot.
13
Abbott
The facility looked different after the road trip. Not physically—the glass walls were the same, the brushed steel the same. But I moved through it carrying a formal offer in one pocket and the memory of Jamie Hayes's face in the other.
Neither was getting lighter.
At practice two days after we got back, the locker room noise had returned to its normal volume—loud and profane, the way professional hockey teams sounded. Jamie and I were fine. It was a flawless act, the polite nod in the hallway and the separate conversations, our orbits overlapping where they always did, but not where it would put us in the same small space.
I watched him from across the locker room. He was talking to Mikkola, leaning against his stall with his arms crossed. It was the easy posture and attention he gave to everyone he talked to.
I didn't see any visible cracks, but I had seen his face. Those two seconds in the hotel room before I answered the phone, I saw what was underneath. It was pure want, directed at me.
And the man behind it was going to support my trade and wish me well because that's what Jamie Hayes did. He took care of people. He didn't ask them to take care of him.
Between the morning skate and the afternoon session, I walked past the training room. The door was half open. Bishop was in the corner station, his shoulder being worked on by Declan, the PT with steady hands and professional focus. Declan had Bishop's arm rotated out, thumbs pressing into the trapezius, and Bishop's attention was scattered. Bishop's attention was never scattered.
He was holding his breath.
"You're holding tension in your trap," Declan said matter-of-factly. "Breathe."
Bishop took a deep breath, his jaw tight. His eyes were fixed on a point on the far wall. He was working very hard not to look at the person touching him.
