Page 64 of Knottingley Ever After
“Why did you leave.”
He looks at me.
He looks at me for a long, dense beat in which I have to actively decide not to break it first, because I have learned the hard way that silence with Coach Declan is a game, and I have never, not once in my whole life, been the one to lose at it.
And then he says, in the same low, even voice he uses to call a line change:
“I had my reasons.”
That is it.
That is the whole answer. Five words, predictable as the weather, the exact bureaucratic placeholder I have rehearsed in my head every single time I have allowed myself to imagine this moment, the response that is not a response, the door that is also a wall.
All right.
All right then, Declan.
I look him dead in the eye. I do not break the contact. I do not blink. I reach back, with my right hand, for the strawberry shake I set so carefully on the counter, and I bring it up, and — in one clean, slow, full-body arc that is, on the inside, the most satisfying motion I have made in five years — I empty the entire bottle directly down the front of his jacket.
Time does the dilation thing.
Pink. So much pink. The shake hits the lapel of his black jacket and blooms outward in a slow gorgeous splash, climbs the collar, catches the V at his throat where the jacket falls open, drips in a fat strawberry rivulet down to the dark denim of his jeans. A single pearl-pink drop reaches his jaw and rolls down it and disappears into the line of his throat. The kitchen fills, instantly, with the wholesome breakfast smell of artificial strawberry and powdered protein, which is, frankly, an unholy chord against the cedar of his cologne.
He does not move.
He does not flinch. He does not curse. He does not lift a single muscle of that immaculate granite face, and the strawberry slides down his lapel in slow, obscene rivulets, and his green eyes hold mine through the whole event without breaking, and the back of my neck goes hot with the realization that this is the most reaction I have gotten out of him in five years of imagining the conversation, and the most reaction is, somehow, no reaction at all.
You magnificent immovable bastard.
The door at the back of the kitchen opens.
Rémi steps in from the cold porch, skates tied together by their laces and slung over his shoulder, hair damp at the temples from the rink, the sharp scorched-mineral bite of fresh ice and the deep clean pine of him following him through the door on a small wave of below-zero air.
He stops. His pale eyes go from me, with the empty shaker dripping in my hand, to Coach Declan, currently wearing the entirety of my breakfast, and back again.
His expression does, approximately, nothing.
Which, on Rémi, is itself an entire commentary.
I huff. I walk. Past Declan, past the dripping silence of him, past the strawberry tide pooling at his boots, until I am standing in front of Rémi at the back door, and I look up at him from the depths of someone else’s crimson hoodie, and I keep my voice perfectly level.
“Good morning.”
Rémi blinks once.
“… good morning,” he whispers back, with the careful neutrality of a man who has decided that whatever he just walked in on is none of his business, possibly forever.
Behind me, I hear the small, controlled sound of Declan finally moving. The slow drag of a paper towel from the holder. The wet, deliberate wipe of strawberry off his own jaw. He doesnot say anything. He does not look at Rémi. He simply finishes blotting his face, sets the ruined towel on the counter, and walks out of the kitchen the way he walked into my life and out of it both times: in his own time, on his own terms, leaving the room rearranged behind him.
The back door at the front of the house clicks shut.
The kitchen exhales.
I become aware of the empty shaker in my hand.
Of the wet smear on the floor.
Of the fact that I have not eaten anything yet and need to be on the ice in eighty minutes and have just hurled my entire breakfast at the head coach of my new program.
