Page 156 of Full Contact

“What happens,” I said, “if what I can give you without wearing myself down is never enough?”

“In February you asked me where my feet were,” he said.

I looked at him.

“On the orange route. I kept falling off at the same move, and Felix told me I was hauling. You asked where my feet were when I started the reach. Too low, both of them. I’d been doing it wrong for two weeks.” He opened his hand on his knee. “The first time up anything, every hold’s in the wrong place. That doesn’t make it the wrong route.”

“I don’t want you waiting for me to turn into someone else.”

“I’m not asking you to become someone else. I’m asking you not to decide the hard parts alone at your stall.” He rested his arm along the back of the couch, not quite touching my shoulder. “Some of it will feel awkward while we’re working it out.”

“That’s what Andrew got, a whole lot of awkward.”

“It isn’t only you.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I’ve been protecting my space: Tuesdays at the gym and evenings alone. I expected you to give something up for us, and I treated everything I’d scheduled as finished business.”

The window had gone dark while we talked. Mark reached out without looking and switched on the lamp. Then he turned to face me, his back against the arm. He was wearing the gray socks with the red stripe. I’d fished one of that pair out from under my bed in December, covered in orange hair.

“I’ll say the simple part first,” he said. “I like my life better with you in it. I’d like to keep finding out how much better. Do you want us to keep working toward a life together, even when we can’t promise each other it’ll feel easy? It might not even feel right at first.”

“Yes,” I said.

That wasn’t all I had to say.

“We play Thursday. Then we fly to Dallas, and if we win there, it’s the third round, and that’s two more weeks at least. Every game we play could be Rook’s last one, and I’m not missing a shift of it. I’ve got treatment four days out of seven, and some nights I don’t know how tired I am until the elevator doors close. Some nights I get home and can’t manage anything except Peaches and a shower. If we go deep, it’s June before I—“

Mark didn’t interrupt. I cut myself off.

“I know what May looks like,” he said. “I built the media schedule for it. I know it’s Rook’s last season too. Every time I see him, I try to imagine what the team looks like without him. I haven’t figured that out yet.” He kept his voice even. “I’m asking about a commitment.”

“We could look at it again after the season.”

“Would there be something different then?”

I had summer hours to offer him. In July there’d be strings of evenings open for him. “I’d have more time,” I said.

“Time, yes. Would we be any more willing to change things when there’s a conflict?”

I didn’t have an immediate answer for that part.

“Some nights you could stay at my place if that’s easier,” he said. “And some nights I could stay here without either of us having to make it worth the visit. I could come over to your place after a bad day, go to bed at nine thirty, and you could stay up watching whatever you’re watching—“

“You’d want the flat—“

The flat pillow. I’d put it on his side of the bed in October, the first night he stayed, because he’d mentioned once that he slept better on one. It was still there.

“Or if I’m reading and you need the room to yourself,” he said, “I could take my book down the hall.”

I pictured it. Mark letting himself in at ten after a dinner he hadn’t wanted to go to, kissing me on his way past and heading down the hall while I stayed up with a movie. Or he might be in my armchair in his reading glasses while I watched TV, neither of us making anything of it. I might drive to his place after treatment and fall asleep on his couch with the lake going black outside.

It wasn’t unbearable. I wanted some of it so badly it hurt to picture it.

“I could do that,” I said, “when the schedule allows.”

“Okay.”