Page 157 of Full Contact

“Unless it’s back-to-back games. I can’t on back-to-backs.”

“Right.”

“And provided we don’t—“

I heard myself and stopped. Every answer I’d given him had a qualifier attached. I was building a contract for our relationship.

Mark didn’t point it out. He didn’t need to.

“I may not be able to offer more than this,” I said.

His hand had been resting on the cushion between us, close enough that I could feel its warmth. He drew it back into his lap. I started to reach for him and stopped.

“Do you mean you can’t offer more right now?” he asked. “Or that you don’t know whether you ever could?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

We were both quiet while the refrigerator kicked on.

“I have to take that seriously,” Mark said.

That hurt worse than anything Dallas had done to me on the ice.

I’d told him the truth so I wouldn’t be lying to him. And he believed me.

“New York,” I said.

Mark lifted his head.

“You’ve had the second conversation. There’ll be a third.” I’d been waiting for a week to bring it up. “You shouldn’t have to go through all of that without knowing where things stand with us.”

“I’m not asking us to settle my career tonight,” Mark said.

I should have stopped there. He was giving me a place to stop.

“But if we’ve decided on us, New York is easier for you,” I said. “You can look at the job for what it is. You won’t have to wonder what I can manage in July, or September, or whenever they want an answer.”

“Trier.”

“I don’t want to be the reason you turn anything down. You deserve to go through it without anything hanging over you.”

He’d never called us something hanging over him.

Neither of us spoke. From the window bed came the tick of Peaches’s tags as she stood, climbed down, and walked over to her water bowl.

I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to say stay, tonight and any other night. Let the hard parts be hard without ending us. I loved him. I’d known it since the October afternoon I came home from Boston and found him asleep on the couch with my cat, his palm turned up to catch her. I had never said it out loud.

I also saw Andrew in my head, telling me about a dock he’d fixed without me. I imagined Mark three years from now, polite about one more weekend I’d missed. At some point he would stop asking.

If that was inevitable, it was better to end it now, while he could still pursue a big career move without looking back.

“I think we should pump the brakes,” I said.

He didn’t move. Then he took a breath, and when he spoke, he sounded calm.

“All right,” Mark said. “I understand what you’re saying. We can step back.”

He picked up the coffee and sipped. “We both tried,” he said. “I don’t think either of us has been careless with this.”