Page 8 of Nowhere to Hide
We’re two guys who’ve been through a few seasons’ worth of shit together. He isn’t asking me to do anything, but he’s telling me because he knows I will. He still lives at Ironwood House — the team share house — so he hears things I don’t.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods, relieved, and heads to the rack. Halfway there he stops and half-turns. “Also…”
“Mm.” I brace for impact.
“Can you cover the Shelton paper?” he says. “I picked up an extra shift at the pro shop…”
The Shelton paper is a day-one, week-one group assignment that a particularly sadistic professor emails his students before the first class. It’s non-negotiable — worth 20 percent of the grade — and something not a single person in the class wants to do.
Seb reads my silence as reluctance. “I need it. I’ll owe you.”
“You don’t owe me,” I say. “I’ll do it.”
“Appreciate you.” He says it to the floor.
“Go lift.”
He goes, we both start lifting, and the others come in over the next twenty minutes.
Luca comes in first, talking on the phone: “—and then she goes, my name isn’t Madison, it’s Madeline, and I had to pull out of her andscramble…”
He drops his bag and kills the call, then swings straight into the weekend postmortem without checking whether anyone asked. Within ninety seconds he has proposed a party, organized a coffee catch-up, and relocated Thursday’s team dinner.
Nikolai arrives next. “Good morning,” he says.
Two words, which is basically a sermon from him, spoken in a Russian accent that makes every phrase sound like a small formal event. He’s wearing black everything, an expensivewatch, and the expression of a man who has accepted he’ll need to get sweaty this morning but isn’t too happy about it.
“Morning,” I say.
He nods at me, then takes the bench farthest from the noise.
It’s just the four of us for a few minutes, then Mason strolls in with an iced coffee he absolutely shouldnothave in here. He clocks the NO FOOD OR DRINK sign, clocks me clocking him, and sets the cup down directly beneath it with a small, pleased smile.
I roll my eyes and go back to my lift.
The others filter in, and soon the room is full and noisy. But even as I’m mourning the loss of my tranquility, I smile when Theo cracks a joke at Luca that actually gets a laugh, then spends the next sixty seconds visibly cataloging where everyone else is in their warm-up. He’s trying too hard to fit in, which explains the transfer angst.
The last to arrive is Gavin — the captain — with headphones in, hood up, and a total refusal to make eye contact as he heads to the bench on the far side of the room. A year ago he’d have walked in first with coffee for everyone in the room and a joke ready to fire.
“Good morning, Captain,” Luca calls out, not looking over.
Gavin doesn’t look up.
“He’s meditating,” Mason says, to the room. “Give the man space.”
“He’s been meditating since April,” Luca says. “Okay, Saturday, we are doing a thing.”
“We always do a thing,” Mason says.
“This is athemedthing,” Luca says.
“No,” Niko says, from the cable machine.
“Niko. I haven’t said what it is yet.”
Niko sighs. “I am saving us time.”
