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I considered finding a more literary way to explain that.

There isn’t one.

I miss your voice. I miss it enough that hearing it inside a dream made waking without you feel cruel.

You told me you would tell me when you are ready. I believe you, and I won’t turn getting closer into permission you haven’t given me.

I need an honest answer to one thing, though.

If I become weak one night, the mezcal gets heavy, and I call you before caution can stop me, would you answer?

Ryan

I mail the letter before practice.

Four days later, Briggs decides grief requires bottle service. He drags me into a club three blocks from our building with two Inferno defensemen, a bartender who knows him by name, and enough people packed beneath flashing blue lights to make me reconsider every decision that led me to professional hockey.

Briggs is halfway through an argument with a woman wearing silver boots about whether goalies are naturally more intelligent than everyone else on the ice. She thinks he is flirting. He thinks he is defending science.

I finish my mezcal and check the time.

“You’ve done that six times,” Briggs says without looking at me.

“I’m waiting for this night to end.”

“It ends when the bar closes.”

“It ends when I leave.”

“You aren’t leaving.”

I slide from the booth.

Briggs looks at me, then at the empty glass in my hand. “Sit your miserable ass down.”

“I’ve been here two hours.”

“Ninety-three minutes.”

“That’s longer than two hours in this fucking place.”

The woman in the silver boots laughs. Briggs points toward her as though she has supported his argument.

“You used to be fun,” he tells me.

“No, I didn’t.”

“You were fun before Charm.”

I look at him. “You were fun before Lyric.”

His smile shifts, but it doesn’t disappear. “I have always been fun.”

The memory reaches me before I can stop it. Briggs on my floor beside the windows, too drunk to sit upright and too broken to keep pretending. His fingers twisted into my shirt while he told me about the names Lyric called him, the apologies she demanded after hurting him, and every time she put her hands on him before convincing him it wasn’t abuse because she never left him wounded.

He had been crying so hard he could barely breathe when he asked how someone with his education missed every fucking sign.

I could remind him, but I let him have the lie instead. “You’ve always been exhausting.”