Page 29 of Puck the Coach's Son
“Phoenix.”
“Yeah.”
I set the glass down. It clicks against the wood.
“I hear you.”
“That isn't the same as agreeing.”
“No.”
He watches me.
He picks up his empty beer and sets it back down again, a thing he does when he's deciding how hard to push.
“I cannot protect you from this,” he says. “If the owner hears about that scene, I can't protect you. If Paul decides to make it a formal thing, I can't protect you. I'm telling you as a man who has tried. Please. Hear me when I tell you.”
“I hear you.”
“Okay.”
He picks up his beer for real this time.
“I'm leaving,” he says. “Leander is waiting up. Do me the favor of not ruining your life in the forty minutes after I'm out the door.”
“I make no promises.”
“I know you don't.”
He puts a hand on my shoulder briefly. The closest thing to tenderness I've gotten from a man in a year and a half. Then he's gone.
The team thins out.
Magnus yells something at the bartender I don't catch and leaves. The two second-liners whose names I know and don't care about leave in a pair because they do everything in a pair. A couple of the guys I've barely spoken to since I got to Frosthaven hang around at the back and stare at me because I'm the guy who beat up a teammate tonight. I stare back until they leave.
It's me and the bartender and the woman in the green cardigan, who still hasn't looked up from her phone.
I put twenties on the bar.
I go.
The air outside is cold. It's later than I thought. The streetlights are the kind that make everyone look blue. My hands are in my jacket pockets because I don't know what else to do with them.
I walk.
I have the apartment three-quarters of a mile away, a loft the team rents for me that I don't own because I don't own anything. I have keys to it in my pocket. I don't want to be in it. The loft has a bed and a couch and a kitchen I don't cook in. If I go there right now I'll lie on the bed and think about Theo until I can't think anymore. Then I'll do the thing. Then I'll lie in the mess of it and I'll still be thinking about Theo. That's a worse version of the next hour than the one I'm about to pick.
I pick the park.
Riverside Park is four blocks west of Vigil. At eleven on a Thursday, it's empty except for the occasional jogger and the rats. A narrow strip of grass and path along a river I won't look at, because looking at dark water is a thing I refuse to do after midnight. Benches at intervals. The old kind, iron and slats, bolted to concrete, cold through jeans.
I pick the third one from the entrance.
I sit.
I put my head in my hands.
I haven't put my head in my hands since I was nineteen. I have a rule about it. The rule is you don't do it, because it's what men do when they're about to cry, and if you aren't about to cry you're training your body to cry at nothing. I put my head in my hands anyway. I sit like that for a minute. A jogger goes past and doesn't look at me, because in this city at this hour you don't look at men with their heads in their hands.
