Page 18 of The Grumpy Defenseman
“I meant it.”
He sat across from me. The table was small. Paramour was not designed for distance. Our knees were close enough that I could feel the warmth of him through the air between us.
I kept my hands around my glass because hands, apparently, could not be trusted with their own decisions tonight.
The server appeared. Evan ordered a bourbon, neat. No elaboration. No menu consultation. The man ordered a drink the way he played defense: committed, precise, no wasted motion.
We sat in the glow of the lights, the city spread out beneath us, anddid not talk.
Not in an awkward way. Not in a loaded way. In the way two people did not talk when the silence between them had weight but not pressure. Like the air was already full enough without words crowding it.
He looked at the skyline. I looked at him looking at the skyline. His reflection ghosted in the window glass, softer than the original, his face less severe. I preferred the reflection in that moment. It was closer to the version of him I had seen on the ice.
“You’re different outside the rink,” I said.
“So are you.”
“I’m always like this.”
“I know.”
The simple delivery was exactly why it hit. He had been paying attention. Not to the woman with the camera, but to me. The version that existed when the performance was over, and all that was left was a woman in a black top sipping a Pappy Van Winkle on a rooftop with too much atmosphere and not enough emotional cover.
We talked. Not about the campaign. Not about anything that required us to be the versions of ourselves with job titles. He asked me when I had started shooting, and I told him: a borrowed Nikon and a roll of film I had wasted entirely on a cat that would not hold still.
His mouth nearly gave him away.
Almost.
I asked him about the early-morning ice time. He told me about his father and the Zamboni. Not the version he would share in an interview, the cleaned-up bullet points about humble beginnings. The real version. The one where his dad smelled like engine grease and his mom was asleep before he got home. The rink was the safest place in the world because nobody expected anything from a four-year-old on skates except that he would not fall down.
I listened. Not with a photographer’s ear, looking for the story. I just listened.
When our glasses were empty, I stood.
“Come on,” I said.
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
He hesitated. I could see it happen in his body: the instinct to control, to choose the known quantity. His guard tightening by inches.
Then he stood.
And followed me into the night.
The walk from Paramour to Jazz, TX, took us along the Museum Reach toward the Pearl. I counted the blocks without meaning to, a photographer’s habit, measuring the world in distances and intervals.
San Antonio at night was a different city from the one that existed during the day. The river lights softened the edges of everything. Music drifted from patios and open doors. The sidewalks held the last of the heat, and the air smelled like grilled meat and the faint mineral damp of the river.
Evan walked beside me. Not behind. Beside. Matching my pace without trying, the way his body seemed to calibrate itself to whatever space it occupied.
Our hands brushed once near my hip. Neither of us mentioned it. Both of us adjusted our stride like not doing it again required strategy.
He did not talk. I did not make him. The city filled the silence for us: laughter, traffic, someone arguing passionately about breakfast tacos through an open window. San Antonio is San Antonio. Real. The kind of place that did not perform for tourists because it was too busy being itself.
I led him to Jazz, TX, and when the door opened, the music swallowed us whole.
