Page 32 of Offside

“Ninety minutes. A professional nap. It’s a technique, not sleep.” His thumb moves once against my wrist, absent, a man checking a watch that isn’t there. “In Sevilla, I watch the ceiling. I could draw that ceiling from memory. Brno, my bedroom ceiling. Hotel ceilings all over. Everywhere on this earth, I lie down and take a series of professional naps until the sun comes up.” A breath. “With you, I sleep like the dead. I have to set an alarm to make sure I wake up before it’s too late. I’ve never said that out loud.”

The arrangement has a box for everything. Logistics, cover, exits, code. I go looking for the box that sentence goes in. I come back with nothing. There’s no box for this.

“Since when?” I ask. The room is dark enough to ask in.

“Bucharest.” Already going under, half a breath from gone, the truest thing said in this bed. “Since Bucharest.”

“Then sleep,” I say.

“Training at ten,” he says, eyes already closed. “Bus at nine forty.”

“I know. I set the times.”

“I know you know.” The words are coming slower now, spacing out like footsteps at the end of a run. “I like the sound of the schedule.”

“Go to sleep, Šíma.”

He sleeps.

Šíma, who has a washbag packed for exits, who has never in five years been unconscious in my presence longer than a cooldown, goes to sleep in my bed with my hand still warm on his neck, between one breath and the next, like a switch thrown.

And I lie there in the lamplight and do the audit. It’s not easy. It has never been easy. The arrangement is the one thing in mylife that cannot be lost, and things get lost when you name them. This has survived five years precisely because nobody ever said it out loud. It runs because it’s unnamed. You don’t repaint a moving engine.

Conclusion: Say nothing. Change nothing. Guard it harder, quieter, better. Keep the label wrong on purpose, forever if the engine asks for it, because a wrong label on a full folder beats a right label on an empty one.

I fall asleep with his breathing in my ear teaching my breathing what to do.

Five twenty. I wake the way I always wake, all at once, on schedule, no alarm.

Šíma is asleep in my bed.

Face down, arms under the pillow, taking up space like a man who has never once shared anything. The light through the curtain seam is the gray before the gold. He sleeps like the dead, just like he said. I sit there for one minute and look at him, the wrecked hair, the slack hand. Nobody alive has seen this.

The rules say nobody stays. He stayed.

I get up without waking him and dress in the dark, running kit. I fill a water bottle and set it on the nightstand where he’ll find it, because my hands do that whether I authorize it or not. At the door, I stop and look back once, one breath past protocol, old habit from a peephole I’m not thinking about.

Then I go running. Rules-perfect. Gone before morning can happen to us. Out the lobby door, into the gray. The first kilometer is the coldest thing I’ve done all summer.

Say nothing. Change nothing. Guard it harder.

I run the decision until it sounds like discipline instead of fear. Somewhere around kilometer four, with the sky going gold over the skyline, it almost does.

I run faster.

?

Chapter 11: Šíma

Iwake at seven in a bed that isn’t mine, in a room that was never supposed to hold me this late, and the first thing I see is a water bottle on the nightstand that I didn’t put there.

He’s gone. Trainers missing, the schedule on the mirror hanging there like a witness. In a silent room and me in the middle of it, unconscious for six unauthorized hours in the one location the rules exist to keep me out of after dawn.

The water bottle has been placed at hand height. I drink it, because I’m a professional.

I slept here.

I slept. Here.