Page 63 of Offside

“You’re sorry.”

“I’m sorry the way I do everything. Completely, and five years late.”

“Five years early,” he says, “for the rest of it. Keep going.”

He’s quiet. The party thumps below. I have one item left and it’s the one I’ve never carried before, and it weighs exactly what I always feared it would, which is everything, which is why I know it’s real.

“So here’s the push,” I say. “Mine. For myself. Not a door left open. Not a hallway kept warm. Not geographically convenient. I’m asking. All of it. The mornings. The daylight. Brno. A table that’s ours, and a door that stays where we leave it. Said out loud, to each other first, and to the rest of the world when it’s ours to give and not before.” Breathe. “I know what I refused two days ago. I know exactly what it cost you to ask, because it’s costingme everything to ask it now. You had the courage first. That’s on the record too.”

“Say the last part,” he says. “The asking. I want to hear it land.”

“Tomáš. I’m asking.”

He doesn’t answer.

He pushes off the door instead, slow, and stops an arm’s length away, and when he speaks it’s the register from the pool, level and clipped, the one Tobík is too kind to name.

“First the pool,” he says. “Then the answer.”

“All right.”

“You know what I do with words. Everyone alive knows what I do with words. I take them at face value. It’s not a system I chose. It’s the wiring, and you knew the wiring better than anyone breathing, and you stood at that rail and put a lie into it. Plainly. Twice. I asked you straight and you held my eyes and did it twice.”

“I know.”

“Don’t file it. Hear it. For two days I believed five years of my own life was a convenience with good logistics. I ran your sentence at face value, because the one man who never lies to me said it plainly, and it took the record itself being amended in front of sixty thousand people before I could trust my own inventory again.” His voice stays level the whole way, which is the frightening part. “You didn’t just lie about us, Šíma. You spent the one currency I can’t audit.”

“I know what I spent.” My hands stay out of my pockets. He should see them. “Say the term.”

“Plain truth never gets used as a weapon again. Ever. ‘Ask me something easier’ is legal. Silence is legal. A built lie, delivered plainly, is not, no matter what you’ve decided you’re protecting me from. If the truth is expensive, I pay it with you. That’s the term. Answer it directly.”

“Granted,” I say. “On the record, at volume. You’ll have the truth or you’ll have ‘ask me something easier,’ and there will never be a third thing out of me as long as I live.”

He looks at me the way he looked at the near-post clip, a long time, both columns open. Then he nods, once, a man initialing a page.

“Now ask it again,” he says. “It’ll hold the weight this time.”

“Tomáš. I’m asking.”

The word he says next, he says the way he said semifinal all week. Like an announcement. Plainly. Once. Slightly too loud for the room.

“Yes.”

That’s it. That’s the whole verdict. No speech, no conditions read into the record, one syllable at captain’s volume, and my knees do something I’ll deny to my grave.

“Yes,” he says again, quieter, closing what’s left of the distance. “Obviously. Idiot. Five years.”

“You should know what you’re signing. The rules are dead, but the man who wrote them is still the man who wrote them.”

“The man I’m signing,” he says. “I’ve read the full file. Ten years of it. I know your clauses better than you do.”

“Terms,” I say, because I’m still me. “Real.”

“Real.” He’s crossing the room.

“Exclusive.”

“There was never anyone else. Not for five years. You know my calendar better than that.” He stops in front of me. “Yours?”