Page 38 of Offside

“Water?” I ask.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re always fine.”

“It’s a skill.”

“Their two takes the short restart when their four’s asleep,” I say. “If we press it, I’m in behind.”

“You’ll be offside.”

“I’m never offside.”

“You’re offside four times a season. I keep the tally.”

“Onside four hundred.”

“The tally keeps both columns,” he says, and for a second it’s almost us, the real register, and then he checks the clock and it isn’t.

The clips run. The commentary runs. The meter of air between us runs the whole time at a temperature the laptop can’t explain, and neither of us puts a hand across it, because the schedule said what it said and the schedule is being obeyed.

“You could stay till twelve exactly,” I say, at eleven fifty. Not a question. Questions got me the cold grammar.

“Twelve is the wall, not the target.”

“Noted,” I say, and hear my own voice do to that word what his texts have been doing to it all day.

He looks at me for one second. A second and a half. Then he closes the laptop, and stands, and for four steps toward my door he is a man leaving a tactical meeting, clean, professional, regulation to the core.

At the door it goes wrong.

He turns to say goodnight, and I’m closer than the meter. I don’t know when that happened, and my hand is up and at the back of his neck before any department of me gets a vote. Palm to the nape. Thumb below the ear. The gesture that got loose last night and has been circling the building since.

He doesn’t pull back. Two seconds, my hand on his neck, his forehead tipping half a degree toward mine, a doorway, a wedge of corridor light across us, and the door, which I was holdingwith my other hand, drifting open wider than any protocol on earth allows.

And down the corridor, someone opening their door. A teammate. Or maybe not a teammate. It doesn’t matter though.

Everything stops being motion and becomes photograph.

I don’t take my hand off Šíma’s neck fast. Fast is a confession. I take it off the way you take a hand off a teammate, a beat, a squeeze that could be congratulations for a tactical meeting, and Šíma is already turning through the door at conversational speed, unhurried, professionally bored.

“Corner one, near post,” he says, at full corridor volume, walking. “Even cleared, it pays. Sleep, captain.”

“Sleep,” I say, in the same currency, two men closing a meeting, nothing in the corridor but tactics and ice.

He goes down the corridor the way he goes everywhere, like a man narrating his own highlights, past Kovár, a nod. “Kovár. Ice machine on our floor not working?”

“No. Said out of order.”

Sima nods at that and continues walking down the hallway. Kovár nods back. The bucket is in his hands. The machine has already stopped rattling.

How long has the machine been stopped. That’s the whole question of my life now, compressed. The machine rattles for thirty seconds. He’s standing there with a full bucket and still feet. Thirty seconds of ice plus however long a man stands after, at the exact end of the exact corridor, with a clean line of sight to a doorway and a wedge of light and a hand on a neck.

Or he walked up while the door was drifting. Or he was looking at the bucket. Or the angle ate the details, the light was behind us and this means nothing.

Then he looks at me for a moment. His face does nothing.

“Night, captain,” he says.