Chapter 166 The Night Before the Competition

Chapter 166 The Night Before the Competition

POV: Riley

I closed the notes at seven and did not open them again. Kai was already in the kitchen when I came through, moving between the counter and the stove with the focused ease of someone who cooked the way he played hockey, efficiently and without wasted movement. The music was low, something instrumental, and the kitchen was warm in the particular way of a small space with something on the stove.
“Sit down,” he said without turning around. “You’ve been standing at desks all day.”
I sat at the kitchen table.
“What are we making?” I asked.
“Pasta. The only thing I can make reliably without it becoming a situation.”
“That tracks,” I said.
“It does track.” He glanced over his shoulder. “How do you feel?”
“Done,” I said. “I feel done. Like there’s nothing left to prepare and anything I look at now would just be noise.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s what done is supposed to feel like.”
“Is it the same with hockey?” I asked. “The night before a big game?”
He thought about it for a moment, stirring something.
“It’s similar,” he said. “There’s a point where more preparation is actually subtraction. Where you start undoing the work you’ve already done by second-guessing it.” He paused. “The best thing you can do after a certain point is stop and trust what’s already in you.”
“Easy to say,” I said.
“Impossible to do,” he agreed. “But you’ve already done it. You closed the notes.”
“You noticed.”
“I notice everything you do,” he said simply, without making a thing of it. “It’s a condition I appear to have developed.”
I smiled at the table.
We ate at the kitchen table with the music still low and neither of us mentioned the competition or the contracts or Voss or the investigation or any of the things that had constituted most of our conversations for the better part of a year. Not because we were avoiding them. Because they did not need to be in the room tonight. Everything that needed to be done had been done. Everything that needed to be said had been said. Tonight was just dinner.
At some point Kai looked up from his plate and across the table at me.
“I’m going to come to every round tomorrow,” he said. “Every session. I’m going to be in the stands the entire time.”
“I know,” I said.
“I just wanted to say it out loud.”
I looked at him. “Why?”
“Because things I don’t say out loud have a habit of not feeling fully real,” he said. “And I want it to feel real. I want you to know it’s a decision I made, not something I’m doing because it seemed expected.”
“I know the difference,” I said.
“I know you do,” he said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”
After dinner we moved to the living room floor, sitting with our backs against the couch the way we sometimes did when neither of us wanted the formality of sitting across from each other at a table or the heaviness of lying down. The lamp was on. The music had changed to something quieter.
“Can I tell you something?” Kai said.
“Always,” I said.
“When you walked into that classroom on the first day,” he said, “I thought you were the most self-possessed person I had ever seen. Like you had arrived at yourself years earlier than most people and were just waiting for everyone else to catch up.”
I looked at him. “That is not what I felt like on the inside.”
“I know that now,” he said. “I didn’t then. Then I just thought: whoever that is, she’s going to make things complicated.”
“Was I right?” I asked.
“Extremely,” he said. “In the best way that exists.”
I laughed properly, the full kind, the one that came from somewhere unguarded.
“Your turn,” he said.
“My turn what?”
“Tell me something you haven’t said.”
I thought about it honestly.
“The night of the fake relationship dinner,” I said. “When you walked me into the cafeteria and introduced me to the team. I spent the whole meal trying to convince myself I was performing it. That none of it was real and I was just doing a job.” I paused. “By the end of the meal I had completely failed to convince myself.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“When did you know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“That it was real.”
“The garden,” I said. “The first time we sat in the campus garden at night. You were talking about something completely ordinary, I don’t even remember what, and I looked at you and thought: this is the version of a person I have been waiting to meet without knowing I was waiting.” I paused. “I filed it away immediately and refused to look at it directly for another month.”
“Smart,” he said.
“Terrifying,” I corrected.
He leaned his head back against the couch and looked at the ceiling.
“I was afraid of you for a long time,” he said. “Not of you specifically. Of what caring about you meant. Of how much room you had already taken up in me without asking permission.”
“Did you want to ask me to leave?” I said.
“Never,” he said immediately. “Not for a second. I just wanted to understand the size of it before it got any larger.” He paused. “It got larger anyway.”
“It tends to do that,” I said.
We talked for a long time after that. Small things and large things, memories from the year and things that predated the year entirely, questions neither of us had thought to ask before and answers that kept producing new questions. The kind of conversation that had no agenda and no endpoint and existed purely because both people in it were reluctant to let the evening finish.
The lamp was the only light left in the apartment when I finally looked at the time.
“I should sleep,” I said. “Tomorrow is important.”
Kai looked at me for a moment.
“You’ve already won it,” he said. “Tomorrow is just the ceremony.”
I looked at him. “That is the most Kai Rossi thing you have ever said.”
He smiled. The full one, the real one, the one that reached everything.
“Get some sleep, Riley.”