Page 37 of Puck You Both

Washington skates away without answering, which Petrov takes hard, and the rink he leaves behind converts instantly into a betting floor. Becker has his phone out taking odds. New jerseys. Secret award. Leila's pregnant. Washington is running for office. Snooze puts ten dollars on "new patio".

I don’t place my bet. I just carry the draft under my ribs into the shower, out to my car, and all the way home, where I stand in my kitchen portioning a double batch of the good orzo into a container, because the man said bring your people, and this is what I've got.

***

LEILA WASHINGTON OPENS the door before I knock, and looks at the container in my hands for exactly as long as it takes to read the label, which states, WALLACE. RETURN AFTER USE.

Her mouth does the same thing her husband's does when he's decided not to laugh. "Your dish has terms and conditions."

"The container has been through a lot."

"Kitchen. And thank you, honey." She steps back to let me duck under the doorframe, and as I pass she gives me one more look, quick, up and down, the full triage scan. She's been running this team's family wing since before I made the roster, and she reads bodies faster than I do. I keep mine boring. Her eyes narrow anyway, one degree, filing something.

The house is already loud. Half the roster's cars are outside and all of the roster's volume is inside, and the first thing I see from the hallway is Becker at the kitchen island with his chin parked on Kane's shoulder, arms around his waist, stealing cut vegetables from directly under the knife.

Kane holds down our blue line, and has held down Becker since the last training camp. He slices peppers into strips so uniform they look artificial, catches Becker's next theft by the wrist without looking, eats the pepper himself, and turns his head just enough for the kiss Becker was going to extract anyway.

"Hostile work environment," Becker tells me over Kane's shoulder.

"You don't work here."

"I'm doing surveillance. Twenty bucks says intervention, and the target is you, big man. You've been weird for two weeks and now there's a mandatory dinner? Do the math."

I set my orzo on the counter, and Kane slides it away from Becker's reach with the flat of the knife. No wonder the room works better with him on it.

"Ignore him," Kane says. "He's been building theories all day. There are slides."

"There are contingency decks," Becker corrects. "Preparedness is love."

Through the kitchen doorway, the living room is staging its own event. Ace is attempting to set a bakery box down on the coffee table, and Devon, who arrived attached to Ace and immediately annexed the rest of the team, is directing the landing with one finger, air-traffic style, until the box sits level. Then he hooks the same finger into Ace's collar and pulls all of him down into a kiss that a bakery box should not have earned.

He spots me next, and his eyebrows conduct a brief ceremony. "There he is. The tomato's really more of a rosé now. I support the journey."

"Thanks."

"That was a review, not a compliment."

Deeper in, by the fireplace, Groover's boyfriend has the floor. Mateo talks the way I organize a crease: thoroughly, and with citations. "—because an unexplained compulsory summons is a textbook authority display. He's manufacturing informational asymmetry. Classic. There are papers on this."

Groover kisses him.

"I wasn't finished," Mateo says.

"You're never finished. I was buying the room time."

"That was paragraph two of six."

"See, this is why I love you. You provide an outline."

Petrov sits in the corner armchair with a liquor bottle across his knees like a customs officer. When Hammer reaches for it, Petrov moves it out of range without a word. "This is Boris," he says. "Boris is for correct occasion. We do not know yet what occasion is. Boris waits."

Snooze is horizontal on the loveseat, asleep from the shins up. Nobody wakes him. It's understood he'll surface when the food does.

And through all of it, Washington moves plate to plate, hand to shoulder, filling drinks and answering absolutely nothing, while the theories climb over each other in his living room. Devon asks Leila, point blank, if anyone in the house is pregnant. Leila says "no" with a serenity that ends that market. Becker's odds board updates in real time. Jinx wants to know why there are four candles on the mantel and whether that number was chosen or accidental.

I watch Washington work the room, and the draft under my ribs picks up.

He touches everyone. That's the tell nobody else is reading. Washington's a hand-on-the-shoulder guy on game days, but tonight he's making rounds like he's counting us, and when he passes Leila in the kitchen doorway she catches his sleeve for half a second, just fabric, just two fingers, then lets go.