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He's asleep on his stomach with his face mashed into the pillow and one arm thrown across me like he's keeping me from falling off the bed. His hair's everywhere. His mouth's open. He's breathing slow and deep against my shoulder, and every breath is warm on my skin.

For a moment I just lie there.

Then it all comes back at once, every piece of it. His hands. His mouth. The sound I made. The sound he made. The way he said look at me, Owen, look at me and I did, and I couldn't look away.

My heart starts going like it did in the stairwell.

I lift his arm off me, slowly, and slide out from under it. He makes a small sound and turns his face into the pillow and doesn't wake up. I stand beside the bed in the gray light with nothing on and look down at him and feel like I'm going to be sick.

The ring's on the nightstand where I left it.

I pick it up. I hold it in my palm. It's lighter than I remember. Twelve years on my hand and it weighs almost nothing.

I don't put it back on. I don't know what I'd be putting it on for. I put it in the zip pocket of my toiletry bag, and I get dressed in the dark, and I leave.

Toronto at five-thirty in the morning in November is cold enough to hurt.

I walk down to the lake. There's a path along the water, and a few people running on it in headlamps and tights, and nobody looks at me twice. I'm just a big guy in a hoodie with his hands in his pockets, walking too fast.

I walk until my knee starts to complain. Then I sit down on a bench facing the water and look at it.

It's gray. The sky's gray. The water's gray. Out past the breakwall there's a freighter sitting still on the horizon like it's painted there.

I slept with a man last night.

I say it in my head, slowly, to see what happens. Nothing happens. The freighter doesn't move. A guy runs past with a dog on a leash.

I slept with my twenty-year-old teammate. My rookie. The kid the organization put in my room so I'd keep him out of trouble.

Something happens then. My stomach turns over, hard.

I think about Moretti. About Pruitt, and Nadia from brand, and the youth initiative launching next week. I think about Brandt standing behind Castel in the line at the elevator yesterday, listening to Beth tell me there wasn't a single. I think about the photographers in Santa Monica, and the article about my lonely marriage, and the woman at the deposition with her glasses on a chain asking if there was ever anyone else.

There wasn't. That was true. That was true until last night.

I put my face in my hands.

"Couldn't sleep, Cap?"

It's Brandt. He's in the hotel lobby when I come back in, in running gear, drinking a smoothie from the coffee place next door. He's got that smile on.

"Went for a walk," I say.

"At five in the morning?"

"Knee's stiff. Walking helps."

"Sure." He takes a long sip. "Rook sleep okay? I saw Beth didn't have a single for you."

"He's fine."

"Must be tough. Sharing with him." He shakes his head, sympathetic, like we're two guys complaining about a mutual friend. "All that energy. Guy never shuts up. I'd have asked for a single, too."

"I didn't ask for a single because of him."

"No?"

"I asked because I snore."