AllFreeNovel Stories worth discovering

Payback On The Ice

Page 26

by Ellis Rhodes

"Dane Josip Kovač."

"Yes."

"That's a good name. That's a real name. That's an old-country name. You should use that one more."

"Bed," he says.

I get off his bed. A deal's a deal. I go over and sit on the edge of mine, facing him across the gap.

"What's your brother's middle name?"

It comes out before I can stop it.

He goes still. All the way still.

I can't take it back. My heart's going like I just got hit. I know Nico's middle name. It's Anton. He told me in a text in August at three in the morning when neither of us could sleep, in a long string of messages about how he was named after an uncle who used to smuggle cigarettes over the Slovenian border in a fishing boat, and I laughed so hard I had to put my face in my pillow.

I can't know that. I'm not supposed to know anything about him at all.

"Sorry," I say. "That was—I shouldn't have asked that."

Dane looks at me across the gap between the beds.

"No," he says. "You shouldn't have."

He gets up and turns off the light.

It's very dark. The window's still open. The curtains move and the sodium light from the parking lot slides across the ceiling and then goes away again. Somewhere down the hall, the ice machine dumps a load of ice with a crash.

I can't sleep.

I lie on my back and listen to him breathe. He's not asleep either. I can tell.

"Hey," I say.

Nothing.

"I know you're awake."

"Go to sleep, Lindqvist."

"You looked away first."

I don't know why I say it. It just comes out of my mouth, into the dark, like the question about Nico. Everything's coming out of my mouth tonight.

The breathing on the other bed stops. Then starts again. Slower. Careful. Like a guy holding his breath on purpose so you won't hear him do it.

"Monday," I say. "In the room. You told me to stand there and I stood there. And you looked at me." I swallow. "And you looked away first."

"Go to sleep."

"Why'd you do it?"

"Because you said fuck on my ice."

"No. Why'd you look away?"

He doesn't answer.