Chapter 73 HE ASKS

Chapter 73 HE ASKS

POV: Reese Calloway

Cole looked at me in the press corridor with the celebration audible through the walls behind him and said: "I want to live in the same city. I want to wake up in the same apartment."

He stopped. Then kept going.

"I know the season is complicated and your work is yours and we figure it out as we go. I just want you to know that's what I want."

The corridor was narrow and the noise from the arena was coming through the walls and a staff member moved past us with equipment and neither of us acknowledged it. Cole stood in front of me still in his full game gear with his hair wet and his eyes on mine and he wasn't pushing anything into the wait, just standing there having said the thing and letting it be said.

He wasn't asking me to give anything up.

I understood that clearly before I finished processing the rest of it. He wasn't asking me to fold myself into a shape that fit around his season or his schedule or the specific geography of his life. He was asking if we could build something that had room for both of us in it.

"You're asking me to move in with you," I said.

"Or I move in with you," he said. "Or we find a third place. I don't care about the logistics."

"You're asking," I said.

"Yes."

I looked at him.

I thought about my apartment. The darkroom, the bathroom I'd sealed the window of and run the drying line across and that smelled like developer and was the place where I processed everything that mattered. The wall with the magazine prints and the documentary work and June's note and Helena's note beside the kitchen doorway. The east window and the specific quality of the light it let in at seven in the morning, the light I'd started building my mornings around, the light I checked when I woke up early enough to catch it moving across the floor.

I thought about Cole's fridge.

One photograph on it, the festival image, the only thing on the surface of a fridge that had had nothing on it for however long he'd lived in that apartment before he texted me I do now.

"Your apartment is bigger," I said.

"Yes," he said.

"I need a darkroom."

"We'll make one."

"We'll need good east light."

He looked at me. "I'll buy whatever east-light apartment you find."

I looked at him standing in the press corridor in his game gear with the Vanguards celebration running at full volume on the other side of the wall and the most important game of his season just finished and him standing here having this conversation instead of being in the locker room where he was supposed to be.

I laughed.

Not the surprised kind or the polite kind. The real one, the kind that came from somewhere that recognized something completely true and couldn't do anything other than laugh at it, at him, at the specificity of I'll buy whatever east-light apartment you find as the thing he'd decided was the right thing to say.

Cole smiled.

The real one. The one I'd photographed on the ice on the first week of filming, completely unguarded, the one that took over his whole face before he remembered to manage it. It was on his face now in the press corridor and he wasn't managing it at all.

"Okay," I said.

He looked at me. "Yeah?"

"Yes, Cole." I looked back at him. "Let's live in the same place."

He stood there for one second with the smile still on his face and then he reached out and pulled me in the way he had on the sidewalk outside my building the morning he left for training camp, not a production, just the fact of it, and I stood in the press corridor of an arena where his team had just won Game 7 and let it be exactly what it was.

Two minutes later the door from the ice opened.

Tommy came through it covered in Gatorade, the specific orange of it across his jersey and in his hair, soaked from somewhere in the celebration I'd missed while we were standing in the corridor. He was already grinning before he fully cleared the door and then he looked at us and stopped walking for exactly one second.

He read the situation in that second.

"Finally," he said.

Then he turned back toward the door he'd come through and raised his voice over the noise.

"They're moving in together!"

Cole said: "Tommy."

Tommy turned around. He was still grinning and completely covered in Gatorade and entirely unbothered by either of those facts.

"What," he said. "It's good news."