Page 48 of The Grumpy Defenseman
She stopped too.
We stood in the corridor, separated by concrete, fluorescent light, and everything that had happened but had not been said.
She was wearing the same jacket she had worn to Paramour. I did not know why I noticed that. I noticed everything about her, which had always been the problem, which was the reason I was standing in a hallway at seven in the evening trying to find words I had never been good at finding.
She started to speak.
So did I.
We both stopped.
The silence stretched for three seconds that felt longer than they were.
She exhaled first. A small release of breath I felt in my own chest.
“I didn’t know you were still here,” she said.
“I came back.” My voice was rougher than I wanted it to be. Everything about me was rougher than I wanted it to be. “I’ve been trying to figure out howto say this.”
The sentence was not enough, but it was a start.
I was a man who communicated in puck placement and the geometry of defensive zones. Words were not my surface. They never had been.
But she was standing there, tired, guarded, her eyes carrying the same weight mine did, and silence was not going to fix what silence had broken.
“I shouldn’t have said what I said to you,” I said. “Not there. Not like that.”
Her face did not change much. A slight tightening around her mouth. A blink that came half a second late.
“No,” she said. “You shouldn’t have.”
The sentence was clean because it was true.
I nodded once.
“I know.”
She shifted the strap of her camera bag higher on her shoulder.
“I had to leave,” she said.
Not an apology. Not a defense. Just a fact.
“I know that too.”
We stood there, the building humming around us. Neither of us moved toward the exit, and neither of us moved toward each other.
“I was having a bad day,” I said. “That’s not an excuse. It’s just what happened.”
“Brick told me.”
Of course he had. Brick, who saw everything and could not help trying to keep people from bleeding out in separate corners.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
The question hit me somewhere I did not have armor.
She asked me if I was okay. Not are you sorry. Not what the hell were you thinking. Are you okay? Like my well-being still mattered to her despite what I had done to hers.
