Page 34 of Crash Out
He was giving it back.
Obviously he was giving it back. It was my shirt. That was the correct and normal thing to do with someone else's shirt.
And he was giving it back.
I didn't know why that made me want to put my fist through the wall.
I pulled off my gear while he waited, not caring how sweaty I was or what happened to my gear or how long it was taking while Cross stood there. I pulled on the shirt, and it smelled like his apartment, and I hated that I noticed.
Then, without appearing to think about it, he reached out and straightened my collar where it had gone crooked. One brief precise movement. His knuckle caught the back of my neck.
He pulled his hand back.
"Go home," he said.
I looked at the counter where my shirt hadn't been a minute ago.
"Sleep. Eat something real. Don't look at your phone."
"This is a lot of instructions."
"You're done for today, Wesley."
I picked up my helmet and walked out. The door swung shut behind me.
I stood in the corridor.
The facility noise came back in stages—skates, music, ventilation—and I stood in the middle of all of it and ran aninventory of my own body the way Cross had just done, except my findings were different from his.
My pulse was up. Not from the fall. From the knuckle on my neck and the shirt in my hands and the irrational anger of receiving my own property back in perfect condition.
He washed it,I thought again, and didn't know what to do with that either — the fact that he'd washed it, the fact that he'd folded it, the fact that it smelled like his apartment and he'd given it back anyway, and somewhere in the logic of all of that was something I couldn't locate clearly enough to argue with.
The back of my neck was warm. One small precise line of warm where his knuckle had been, which my nervous system was apparently going to keep reporting indefinitely.
I pressed the back of my own hand against it. Different. Not even in the same category.
I put my hand down.
You're done for today, Wesley.
The way he said my name. I had a whole system for not thinking about the way he said my name. The system was not currently operational and hadn't been for some time.
I started walking.
By the time I hit the parking lot I had it mostly managed, filed underphysical response to sustained tension, perfectly explainable, not interesting.
My shirt still smelled like his apartment.
12
I'd been off the ice for four days.
Four days of rest protocol and no screens and Cross's voice in my head every time I reached for my phone, which was ironic, because Cross himself had apparently had nothing to say to me since he handed me my laundered shirt and told me to go home.
Nothing.
Not a text. Not a check-in. Not even the clinical kind, thehow's the headache, scale of one to tenkind that I would have deflected and complained about.
