Page 91 of Crash Out
"That’s pushing it.”
Something shifted in the quality of the quiet around us. Not resolved—too much for resolved—but settled.
"She means well," Nathan said after a moment. "My mother. They both do." His hand found mine on the bed between us, which was not reaching, just moving, finding it. "They have a picture of what things are supposed to look like."
"Do you?” I asked. "Do you have a picture?"
He didn't answer.
But his hand was in mine, and that was its own answer, the one he had available right now in a hotel room in Toronto the night before a game.
I turned my hand over. Let him hold it.
We sat there for a while. The city outside. The quiet room. His hand in mine, which was not nothing, which was Nathan Cross choosing something over the picture, even just here, even just tonight, even just in a room where nobody was watching.
"You have press tomorrow," he said eventually.
"I know," I said.
"You should sleep."
"In a minute," I said.
He looked at me. Something in his expression that I was still learning to read — grateful and scared and something elseunderneath both of those, something that had been getting closer to the surface for months.
"Okay," he said.
I stayed for more than a minute.
I stayed for a while, actually, longer than I should have, until Nathan saidgo to sleep, Wesleyin the voice that made me comply before my brain weighed in, and I went back to my own room and lay in my own hotel bed and looked at my own generic Toronto ceiling.
There's no one,I thought. And his hand finding mine. Andokay.
I fell asleep faster than I had in months.
24
It was game day in Toronto, and Matthew had a laptop.
This was not unusual. Matthew Quinn always had a laptop, Matthew was the kind of person who had brought a laptop to Knox's birthday party once, and Knox had taken it away from him. Matthew had spent the next hour looking like he'd lost a limb.
Matthew had a laptop, expecting us to pay attention, but all I could think about was last night, sleeping in Nathan’s arms.
"Brodeur Holt," Matthew said, to the table, to his laptop. "Thirty-four goals this season. Leads the league in faceoff percentage. Physical on the puck, hard to move once he's established position."
Someone across the table made a noise. Searcy, probably.
"Casimir Vrek on the blue line," Matthew continued, with the calm of a man who found this interesting rather than alarming. "Plus twenty-eight. Seventeen hits in the last five games. He pinches high—"
"That's a thing we can use," Dylan said, from somewhere to my left, without looking up from his own breakfast.
"That's exactly what I was going to say," Matthew said.
"I know," Dylan said.
"Tomas Selig in goal," Matthew said. "Point-nine-two-four save percentage away from home. Two hundred and eighty-seven shots faced in the last ten games—"
"Twenty-two goals against," Searcy said, like he was reporting a death.
