Chapter Text
"Either way he was doomed: He did what was wrong, and condemned himself, or he did what was right, and remained a ghost."
Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance, 1978
Scott Hunter was so fucking tired of losing. It was March in New York, and the season was grinding by. He had lost twenty pounds since October and was running on empty, and it didn’t make a bit of difference. The Admirals were in a slump. They were still in playoff contention, barely. The back page of the Post had run Scott’s face the day after their fourth straight loss and a woman at the deli on Vestry Street called his name, heckling him like she’d earned the right to do it.
He’d lived in New York for nearly fifteen years and it was the closest thing to home that he could imagine. It wasn’t exactly home, but was as close as he thought he was ever going to get. Home-home had been Rochester, then a dormitory in a boarding school outside Albany that was drafty every winter, then this. A penthouse in Tribeca that the team’s preferred realtor had found on a high enough floor that he couldn’t hear the street noise. He had not altered the place in any meaningful way. He hired a decorator every few years to update the place. The last one went for black leather and chrome to look modern.
He turned on his sound system, slipping a CD into the tray just to watch the laser mechanism work, and took in the view of the Hudson, the dark shapes of the construction barges down at Battery Park City and the towering monoliths of the World Trade Center casting long, geometric shadows off the water when he couldn’t sleep. It was a place where he could go after the game ended, close the door, and the city would stop.
Sometimes it wasn’t enough. When it wasn’t, Scott indulged in what Carter had told him repeatedly not to do. He walked out alone before sunrise. Carter’s rationale was that the city was dangerous enough without Scott making himself a target. It was mostly true. The neighborhood was still half-industrial, and crack had gutted out the pre-gentrification loft buildings, turning the tenants into ghosts. Scott Hunter alone on the street was a story waiting to happen one way or another, but he went anyway.
So there he was, standing on the street at five forty-five in the morning, trying out a new bodega. He’d had a falling-out with his usual place on Worth two weeks earlier. A regular, already half in the bag, had recognized him and wouldn’t let it go. He had been followed onto the sidewalk. The guy had grabbed his arm and Scott had shoved him off without thinking. Nothing came of it, but there was a way that story could have gone where someone had a camera, or the guy went down wrong on the curb, and it became news. He hadn’t gone back. That was how it usually went. He’d find his place, and it would last a few years if he was lucky until it stopped being an option and he started looking for a new spot, hoping an egg and cheese would break his slump and get him back in fighting shape for the game tonight. This one was only four blocks from the penthouse, just off Hudson. It had a faded yellow handpainted sign that said Maria’s. It seemed quieter than others a little closer to his place. He kind of appreciated that he didn’t have to fight the construction worker crowd, but maybe that meant their rolls were too hard.
The shop was narrow, crammed in between two much larger buildings, one cheap flickering light going on the ceiling. Rows of canned goods, a cooler along the far wall with glass bottles, and a counter near the door with a register, and, behind it, a man sitting on a stool with a paperback tented open over one knee. He was fast asleep, chin slumped onto his chest.
Scott stood in the doorway. The clerk was gorgeous. He had dark hair falling over his forehead, a dense crop of curls falling in his face and catching the light. He was probably twenty-five or twenty-six. His face was striking even in sleep. The line of his jaw, the dark lashes against his cheek, a mouth that even slack carried a suggestion of expression, as though the face was animated even when its owner wasn't. He had on a cheap plastic nametag that said Kip.
Scott stood there for a second longer than he should have. He let the door close behind him and the bell rang. Kip's head came up fast. He blinked, registered Scott, and for one beat something moved through his face before he got it under control. Almost a double-take, his cheeks going slightly red.
"Shit, sorry," he said, voice rough from sleep. He pushed off the stool, running a hand through his hair. "What can I—" He cleared his throat. "Can I get you something?"
“Egg and cheese,” Scott said. “Cup of coffee.”
"Right, yeah." Kip turned to the griddle, cracking an egg with one hand. His ears were still red. "We have, uh—the coffee's from sometime in the night. I can make a fresh pot, it's not—"
"It's fine."
"It's pretty old."
"I'll survive."
Kip glanced at him sideways, reassessing. He poured the coffee, handing over the blue and white paper cup. Scott took a sip. It was genuinely terrible, burnt and gritty, leaving a lingering tang across his tongue. His face must have shown it, because Kip grinned at him.
"Okay, it's bad," Scott said.
"Yeah." Kip pressed the roll. "I did warn you."
"You did."
"I can make a fresh pot. It takes four minutes."
Scott checked the clock on the wall. He had an hour until the car service would pick him up for practice. Nowhere to be. "Sure," he said.
Kip took back the cup and dumped it. He ran water into the machine, measured the grounds. He moved like he’d done this ten thousand times. The egg was already done. He flipped it onto the roll with a piece of cheese, wrapped it in foil, and slid it across the counter. Scott peeled back the foil and bit into it while the coffee percolated. It was a very good egg and cheese.
"Heading to work after this?" Kip said, his back to Scott, rinsing the pot.
"Something like that." Scott appreciated that Kip seemingly did not recognize him at all. “How much do I owe you?”
“Buck seventy-five.” Scott whistled low. “Yeah, I know, a little steep. You’d be surprised how quick the crowd dies off when you crank the price up a quarter.”
Scott put a five on the counter.
Kip turned around, handing over the cup of new coffee. "Sugar's on the counter," he said. “It might need it.”
Kip picked up the five and slid his change back across. “Keep it,” Scott said.
“Seriously?” Kip asked, watching Scott sip the coffee.
“Yeah. We’ll call it a finder’s fee. Best egg and cheese in Manhattan."
Kip smiled back. “Glad you like it. Have a nice day.”
Scott held up the coffee cup. “You too, Kip.” His lips popped on the p.
He walked out and back to the penthouse. He sat in his kitchen and thought about Kip much more than he had any right to. During the season, that was all he had. Fantasies about gorgeous men he saw on the street, at the bar, in a bodega. It wasn’t ideal, but it would hold him over until summer.
The game that night went better than Scott could have ever imagined. They were down a man in the first period and Philly had been pressing in. Scott had been playing like shit for weeks, and then suddenly something shifted. Some recalibration in his spirit he couldn’t quite put a finger on. He put one in despite running the penalty killer at 12:41, and then a second one the next period at 18:03. Then he did it again four minutes later. Madison Square Garden erupted around him, the kind of wall of sound that he hadn’t heard directed at him in months—a hat trick, his first one all season. There were also two assists, and two more goals he had nothing to do with—a wild night, ending seven-one.
Scott sat in the car on the way home. He wasn’t the most superstitious, but everyone has their thing. He had the best game of his life, and all of it was after that egg and cheese. Nothing else was different tonight. He needed another.
He was back at Maria’s at the same time the next morning. The bell rang, and Kip's head popped up from the copy of the Post he was reading. A flicker of, dare Scott say, delight went across his face.
“Same as yesterday?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “Please.”
Kip cracked the egg and put on a fresh pot of coffee without being asked.
Kip was blushing again. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Are you Scott Hunter?” Scott looked at him.
“Yeah,” Scott said. “Who told you?”
Kip gestured at the paper. “They ran your picture today.” He smoothed out a page that read Night of the Hunter! in a blocky font next to a story about Ed Koch.
“Ah. That is me, yes.”
“You had a good game last night.”
"We did."
"Hat trick." He said it like a fact he had looked up. "That's—yeah. Good."
"Thanks."
Kip handed over the roll and the coffee, and Scott put ten dollars on the counter. “Keep the change.”
“That’s way too much.”
“Nope.” Scott replied, p popping again. “See you next game day. If we win tonight.”
“Why only if you win?”
“When something goes right with my game, I like to keep as much of my day the same as I can. Call it superstition.”
“This shitty coffee helped you win?”
“I guess we’ll find out tonight.” He headed out the door smirking before he said something a little too forward.
Four days later, Scott was back. They had wrecked New Jersey after his last bodega visit, four to two, Scott with a goal and two assists. He didn’t want to ruin a good thing, and he would have to stop relying on the bodega soon, with a stretch of away games coming up.
To his surprise, Kip wasn’t at the counter. There was a dark-haired woman around Kip’s age, moving around like she had grown up in the place.
She looked at him. “You’re Scott Hunter.”
“Yeah.”
“My dad watches all of your games.” She leaned on the counter. “He was losing his mind.”
“Hockey fan?”
“Huge,” she said. “When the Mets aren't playing anyway, it’s you guys. He still hasn't shut up about the World Series, but he is going to freak when he hears you came in here.”
Kip appeared carrying a crate of oranges from the back. Clearly he had been listening.
"Morning," he said to Scott.
"Morning," Scott said.
The woman was watching this exchange with open satisfaction. She extended a hand across the counter. "Maria," she said.
Scott shook it. “Like the sign.”
“That Maria is my grandmother. This is my dad’s business.”
"Tell him it’s the best egg and cheese in Manhattan."
Maria looked at Kip. Kip was very focused on setting down the crate of oranges.
"So," she said. "Egg and cheese?"
"Kip usually—"
"I know what Kip usually does." She was already at the griddle, cracking the egg with one hand and starting a fresh pot of coffee. "Sit down."
There was one rickety stool in the corner. Scott sat on it. Kip started stacking oranges in the bowl near the register, not quite looking at anyone. His ears were red. Maria made the coffee fresh without asking and handed it across and then leaned on the counter again.
"You come in yesterday?" she said to Scott.
"No, only on game days."
She looked at Kip. "And you didn't tell me."
"I was going to tell you."
"When?"
"When it came up."
"Scott Hunter comes into the shop and it doesn't come up?" She turned back to Scott with exaggerated patience. "He read your box score this morning."
"That's not—I read the whole paper."
"You read the sports section more than once."
Kip put an orange down. "I'm going to go clean up the back."
"You just came from the back."
Scott picked up his coffee. Kip stepped over to the griddle and wrapped up Scott's sandwich for him and slid it across without being asked. Maria continued stacking the oranges Kip left and muttering something under her breath. Scott put down five dollars.
"We have some away games. So I won’t be in for a while," he said.
"You'll win," Maria said confidently.
He looked at Kip, who was not looking at him. "You will," he said.
Scott left before he said something he'd have to think about on the walk home. He thought about it on the walk home anyway.
The road trip was five games in ten days. Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Washington, Boston, back through Hartford, then back home. Scott ate different egg and cheese sandwiches in different cities and they were all fine and none of them were quite right. They won four of the six games anyway, which suggested the superstition had legs beyond that bodega, or that he'd simply gotten his game back and was crediting the wrong cause. He didn’t want to know which it was.
Carter Vaughn said something about it on the bus from Washington to Boston, after the third game into the trip, somewhere on the New Jersey Turnpike at midnight. They were two rows apart and Carter leaned across the aisle and said, "Whatever you're doing, keep doing it."
Scott stared at him. "You're back," Carter said. He'd been Scott's alternate captain for four years and had earned the right to comment on Scott’s play. He settled back in his seat and pulled his cap over his eyes.
Scott looked out the window at the highway going by and said nothing, which was fine with Carter. He didn’t want to tell Carter that what he was doing was ogling a twentysomething who made him eggs on a flat top.
Road trips always had their own texture. Hotel rooms in a string of cities where nobody on the street knew his face, which should have been a relief and mostly was. But the anonymity, the two or three hours in which he could be nobody in particular, felt different now in a way he couldn't name. Scott lay in a room in Pittsburgh one night and thought about the bodega. He came home on a Thursday. He was at Maria's the next morning before his alarm went off.
Kip was already behind the counter, reading, a thermos of his own coffee beside him. He looked up when the bell rang.
"You're back," he said.
"Four and two," Scott said. "On the road."
Kip nodded, assessing this. "Good enough to count as a winning streak?"
"I think so."
"Egg and cheese?" Scott started to say yes. Kip tilted his head slightly. "I could do bacon. If you want. I'd have to cook it fresh. If you don’t think it would bust your winning streak."
Scott considered this for a second. "Yeah," he said. "Okay. I'm willing to risk it."
He sat on the stool. Kip got the bacon out and laid it on the griddle and the smell hit the small space immediately, grease and salt. He cracked the egg on a separate section of the griddle. The radio was on low playing news.
Scott watched him work. He wasn't subtle about it. There was not a lot else to look at in Maria's at six in the morning and Kip didn't seem to mind being watched, or if he minded he'd made a decision not to show it.
"How long are you in town?" Kip said, not looking up from the griddle.
"Ten days, then we go west. Vancouver, then Los Angeles."
"Long season."
"Always."
Kip turned the bacon. A crackle and a shift in the smell. "You do it for—what, how many years now?"
"Fifteen." Scott picked up his coffee. "Long time to do anything."
"What do you do with the summers?"
"Vacation, mostly." He paused. "Sleep. Try to put on the weight I lose during the season."
"You need to put on weight?"
“It’s hard to eat enough when I’m playing."
Kip laughed. "Do you want a second roll?
"No, I’m good,” Scott smiled. “What about you?"
"I've been doing the morning shifts here for a little over a year. Probably keep doing it all summer. Can’t wait for September."
"September?"
"Starting my Master's in the fall. History, NYU." He pressed the bacon flat with the spatula. "So I'm saving up. They give you a little, but not enough to actually live on."
"What do you study?"
Kip glanced over his shoulder. "The Vietnam draft. Who got sent and who didn’t. The lottery system was supposed to make it fair." He tilted his head slightly. "It didn't. The data is pretty damning if you know where to look."
"Above my head. I never went to college."
“Not all of us can be pretty boys who skate around for a living.”
Scott looked away. Was that a dig, or was Kip flirting with him? Kip had turned back to the griddle, assembling the sandwich—egg, cheese, bacon on the roll, wrapped in foil—and slid it across the counter.
"Is that why you're doing nights here?" Scott said. "Saving up before you start?"
"Yeah, partly." Kip poured him a fresh coffee without being asked. "I had a situation that didn't work out. He moved in with someone else." Easy, unremarked, the pronoun landing in the space between them. "So I'm back at my dad's place in Queens. I want to live closer to school, but you know rent is insane."
Scott picked up the sandwich. He turned that sentence over. He. Roommate, lover, coworker, something in between? Scott ate a bite of the sandwich. It was better with the bacon. But the air between them had shifted, and he had been in the store for ten minutes already and had not yet moved toward the door and needed to.
He took a cup of coffee from Kip. "I should get going," he said. "Practice. I have to commute all the way to Rye."
Kip looked at the clock on the wall. "Sure." He picked up his book.
Scott put a twenty on the counter.
"That's—" Kip started.
"See you next game day." He was out the door before Kip finished the sentence.
The March air was cold and he stood on the sidewalk outside Maria's with the coffee in his hand and the foil-wrapped sandwich and thought pretty boy. He walked home the long way.
He kept coming back. Not every morning—at first, he limited it to only game days, the logic maintaining the limit. He came in, ordered the usual, now with bacon, paid, tipped far too much and left. He told himself the tip was about helping a student out, and not a single thing more. Scott tried to keep it clean. He didn't sit on the stool or ask a single question about Kip’s life. He answered questions with the polite brevity of having somewhere to be, which was true on game days and less true on the days when he came in anyway and invented a reason on the walk over.
Kip tried a few times. A question about the road trip west, offered across the counter while Scott's coffee was brewing. A comment about a piece in the Post that was sitting between them. Small openings, the kind that might have worked in March. Scott answered them shortly and vaguely and left as soon as the coffee was ready.
He wasn't rude about it. He was never rude about it. Scott said good morning, said the right things on the way out. He just stopped staying. He stopped giving Kip the friendly version of himself. The one that asked genuine questions and listened to the answers and lingered a little too long. He replaced it with the public-facing version of his personality, smooth and functional and impassive. It was the only move he had.
The Admirals were eliminated in the middle of April, just one game short of a playoff spot. Scott’s second wind he got from the bodega mid-season wasn’t enough to turn the standings around. The final loss was at home, just one goal making the difference. Scott skated off the ice to a crowd that had already accepted it and was waiting for next year. He cleaned out his stall in a locker room that held the disappointment of a season ending without ceremony. Carter said the right things. Scott said the right things back. He drove home through lower Manhattan and thought about nothing in particular, which was what he thought about after every season ended.
He didn't go to Maria's the next morning. There was no game that night. There would be no game for months. The superstition had nowhere to attach, and without it the five forty-five alarm had no justification and he let it go off and then silenced it and lay in the penthouse in the silence of an off-season morning and looked at the ceiling.
His willpower held up for four full days. It wasn’t a game day. It wasn’t any day at all. But there he was, walking the four blocks at six on a Thursday morning with a spring chill still in the air and pushed open the door and the bell rang.
Kip was behind the counter. His eyes popped up and the look that crossed his face was quick and confused before it settled into stark professionalism.
"The usual?" he said.
"Yeah," Scott said. "Please."
Kip started on the sandwich. "Season's over," he said. It was closer to a statement than a question.
"Yeah."
"You going somewhere? Off-season?"
"Probably," Scott said. "Not sure yet."
Kip nodded and made the sandwich, and the coffee, and slid them both across. Scott left behind a ten.
"Good luck with school," he said.
Kip looked up. "Thanks, have a good summer." Scott nodded at him and left, determined to stop thinking about Kip this summer.
Scott went to Rochester first. Not because he wanted to. The house on Culver Road needed him. He had grown up in this house. His mother had died in it. He had come back every off-season since he'd gone pro because it was his and because there was no one else to do it. He also knew not coming back felt like an abandonment he wasn't ready to commit to yet, even now, even after all these years of being not quite able to sell it and not quite able to stay.
The previous tenant had moved out, and there wouldn’t be another for a few weeks. It had the usual post-rental shambles. A falling-down gutter, a clogged furnace filter, and a yard that had not yet been tended since the snow melted all required attention. He drove up with a list he'd made on the back of an envelope and spent a week dealing with it. The contractor he'd used for the past six years came by to look at the gutters. The woman two doors down, whose name he always forgot, waved at him from her driveway. He bought groceries at the Wegmans on Monroe and ate at home each night and watched the news and went to bed at ten.
At the end of May he drove out to Long Island. Eric Bennett and his wife Holly had a house in Massapequa, a nice one, modern art and sculptures that looked out of place in the colonial-style home. It was a house that reflected two incomes—Eric's hockey contract and Holly's, which was in finance. Holly didn’t seem to care much for hockey. They had met at Harvard, which Eric mentioned sometimes and Holly never did, and the house felt like it belonged to both of them equally and perhaps to neither of them entirely.
Scott had known Eric since his rookie year on the Admirals, when Eric was already a respected veteran. He was a goalie, five years older than Scott, one of the best and increasingly aware, as goalies become aware after thirty-five, that the generation behind him was closing in. Eric moved with more caution than he used to. He didn't talk about next season like he had talked about the ones before it. He was still good, but he wouldn’t be much longer.
Holly made dinner—pasta, salad, bread—a meal that worked for Eric and for everyone else. Eric was a vegetarian, which had been a running joke in the locker room for more than a decade, and he didn't drink, which had never been a joke, just a fact about him that everyone had long since stopped noticing. The dinner was delicious and the three of them sat on the deck afterward while the light sparkled off the water, and the conversation was fine. Scott had a beer. Eric had a glass bottle of Diet Coke. At some point Scott noticed that Eric and Holly hadn’t looked at each other all evening. It wasn't so visible or obvious as a fight. Scott recognized this as the casual avoidance of two people who had decided, consciously or not, to maintain the distance between them rather than close it. He recognized the bones of it without being able to say from the outside what had caused it.
After Holly went inside, Eric handed another beer over to Scott and said, without preamble, "You ever think about settling down?"
Scott took the beer. "Sure."
"Yeah?"
"Never found the right person." The words came out smooth, and they were true, mostly.
Eric nodded. He looked at the water. "Holly wants to get a place in the city," he said. "Closer to her office. It’s an hour by train to the World Trade Center. More when she needs to be uptown." He fiddled with the bottle in his hands. "I want to move farther away. I think we’re too close now." Scott didn't say anything. "She married a hockey player," Eric said. "She knew what that was. Twenty years of it. I don't think she knew what came after."
"What comes after?"
Eric shrugged. "Me. All day. In the house. She wanted a career instead of kids. It’s fine, it was her choice, but I don’t know what to do with myself next," He kept his eyes fixed on the water. "I've been playing since I was five years old. But I’m tired."
Scott looked at him. Eric had a Cup ring from his second season playing, before Scott joined the team, and a Harvard degree and a house on the bay and it was everything Scott could have ever dreamed of. Minus the wife, maybe. But it wasn’t enough.
"When?" he said.
"One more year. Maybe two."
"You could coach."
"Yeah." He didn't sound like he believed it. "I don’t think that’s for me."
They sat a while longer.
"The right person," Eric said. "I don’t know if that exists."
Scott turned away. He thought about the bodega and a face with dark lashes he'd been trying to forget. "Or you haven’t met her yet," he said.
Eric nodded, like Scott had confirmed something he already knew.
He drove home Sunday morning and called Eric from the penthouse to say he'd had a good time, which was true, but not the whole truth either.
Carter Vaughn had been in Los Angeles since the season ended, which was where the woman he was seeing lived. Scott had met her once, briefly, at a charity function the previous fall, the same one Carter had met her during. Gloria. She'd been in something he'd seen on television and had the air of someone who was used to being recognized and had made peace with it, which was not something Scott associated with people he liked but which he found, in her, unexpectedly comfortable. She was completely at ease in her fame in a way that he had never been, not that their levels of celebrity were even remotely comparable. Carter was different around her. Softer, kinder, more willing to let a silence sit without filling it. They were keeping things quiet and staying inside, mostly. No high-profile restaurants or places that would get them in the papers. He had invited Scott out for a few days, which is why Scott found himself in the passenger seat of Carter's rented car on the 405, which was stopped, as the 405 always seemed to be.
"You hate it here," Carter said.
"I don't hate it."
"You've checked your watch three times since we got on the freeway."
"There's a lot of traffic."
"There's always a lot of traffic." Carter looked over at him. "No worries about you trying to get traded to LA, I guess. You know what your problem is?"
"I'm sure you're going to tell me."
"You need to find someone."
Scott looked out the window at the other stopped cars. "I have someone. I have you."
"I mean someone who isn't me. Virgin Mary here needs to get laid."
"I'm fine."
Carter made a sound of disagreement. “It would make you less tense.”
They sat in traffic for another forty minutes. Scott did not check his watch again. He liked the weather, though. The dry LA heat that sat differently against the skin than New York humidity. He loved New York but the stale air and the smell of hot trash wore on him in the summer. It was why he liked spending it elsewhere. He sat by Gloria’s pool in the evenings after she had gone inside, and he drank a beer and watched the lights of the canyon, and it was as close to peace as he usually came. His only worry was that Carter would realize he loved Gloria and he would be the one looking for the trade to LA. Scott was too far gone in his career to think about moving for a lover, but Carter still could. If Eric left, and Carter left, then maybe it was also Scott's time. He waved the thought away. Those were not vacation thoughts.
He flew home at the end of June to find stickers everywhere. SILENCE = DEATH, black triangle on pink, plastered to lampposts and mailboxes and the side of a phone booth on Hudson and the door of the laundromat on Vestry and the back of a stop sign two blocks from the penthouse. He had seen them before, popping up sporadically since spring, the slow spread of them across the neighborhood, but in the weeks he’d been away, they had multiplied. It was like someone had been out with a stack of them while he was gone, systematically working the blocks. He walked from the car to the penthouse and counted six before he realized they were everywhere.
Scott had missed something while he was gone. He could feel it in the air of the neighborhood without being able to name it. The city suddenly denser with a friction he didn't have the context for. The virus wasn’t news but something was different now. The stickers had taken over, a furious pink-and-black grid layered over the city's regular grime. He picked up a discarded copy of the Post from the lobby counter and flicked through it, looking for an explanation for the tension buzzing outside his door. His eyes caught it in a local column near the back—a brief, sharp report on a raucous city hall hearing disrupted by a group called ACT UP like a dispatch from a battleground. He had been tucked away in the Hollywood Hills, disconnected from the world. When the neighborhood crossed this line from subdued dread to active, concentrated fury. He tossed the paper onto the mail table. He had a low-grade, ongoing awareness that this crisis was connected to him in ways he had sealed off, so thoroughly that the connection registered mostly as a cold lump in his chest that he moved past.
Scott met a kind travel agent in Midtown and booked a trip to Ibiza. She seemed to understand the assignment, despite his vague references to wanting vivid nightlife and privacy. He had three entire weeks. They had booked him a room outside Santa Eulalia. He slept late and ate at different places each night and let himself be an attractive, muscular American without the weight of what that meant at home. The sun on the water in the afternoons, the heat of it, the island existing outside of everything Scott Hunter meant anywhere else. It was a clash of color, electric pinks and blues against the whitewashed walls and terracotta roofing tiles.
He brought different clothes than he owned as Scott Hunter, Captain of the New York Admirals. Linen shirts, jeans cut differently from anything in his regular rotation, nothing with a logo or a name on it. He had learned, years ago, that the clothes mattered. In New York he was always recognizable, and a lot of that was due to the costume he put on. If he put on a different costume on the island, he was just a man in a bar, which was the point of going there.
He knew the geography by now. The narrow cobblestone streets off the port, the open-air bars along Calle de la Virgen where men stood in doorways in the warm evenings. The beach in the long afternoons, the dunes behind it where the crowd thinned and nobody was paying attention. He carried condoms in the inside pocket of his jacket, bought at a pharmacy in midtown before he left, because he had read every GMHC pamphlet he could get his hands on. Scott Hunter had staked his career on his body and was not going to be careless with it.
He didn't need them. The calculus was what it was. Mouths, hands, the ceiling he'd set and enforced for four years now. He had heard stories of people in New York who had drawn the lines differently and some of them were sick. He played the percentages professionally and wasn't going to stop here.
Scott missed what it was like before, when the summers he spent in tropical party cities were allowed to feel freer. Not in New York, never in New York, but in places like this, that were far enough from the back page of the Post. Anonymous hotel rooms, men whose names he remembered and some he didn’t. He had been twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six back then. Worried about how embarrassing it would be to tell the team doctor you thought you picked up chlamydia, not finding out you were going to die. He hadn’t had sex the way he wanted to in years, and he had not understood until that option was off the table how much he had taken for granted. The pamphlets had arrived in 1983 and 1984 and he had read them with the uncanny dread of finding his own life described in warning language, and he had recalculated. More information came out every year, but it still wasn’t enough to feel safe cruising, even here, where no one knew a single thing about hockey. He wanted more and had made peace, more or less, with not allowing himself more.
He missed it. He was not always good at admitting this even to himself, but in July in Ibiza, he could admit it. He missed it.
The cocaine was the same logic. It wasn’t his first time, feeling his blood begin to hum, the release of a night where none of the usual accounting applied. A bar near the port, someone passing a mirror down the counter. He did it a few times over the weeks and left it there, the same way he left everything else that only worked here. Vacation rules were different. Then you went home.
He met a man on the second night. It was a club with music he could feel through the walls. Jordi—dark-haired, maybe thirty, with a dry sense of humor that Scott caught even through the language gap.
"American," Jordi said.
"Yeah."
"Athletic." He said, grabbing Scott’s arm and giving it a firm feel. His eyes moved briefly, taking stock. "What do you do?"
"Construction," Scott said. It was the answer he always gave. Plausible, explained the build.
They went to the beach. It was late, the crowd thinned to nothing, the dunes dark behind them. Jordi pulled him in and they kissed for a while with the sound of the water and the freedom of a place where nobody was watching, and then Jordi said, a little breathless, "Your hotel is close? Or somewhere quiet here?"
"Here is fine," Scott said. "The beach is quiet enough." He pulled back an inch, his hand resting on Jordi's chest. "Listen."
"What is it?"
"It has to be safe." He held Jordi's eyes.
Jordi shrugged slightly. "Ah. It is okay, no? You look healthy, I am healthy. Look at you—like a machine."
This was the line. Scott had heard versions of it before, in different voices, different accents, and it always landed the same way—a clarity, the thing he'd been afraid someone would say.
"I have condoms," he said. He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, but did not pass them over. He hadn’t intended to use them, but they were a way to tell how the night was going to be, how much of his risk really was a risk. Scott wanted Jordi to look at them with relief. He wanted Jordi to be afraid too.
Instead, Jordi just rolled his eyes at Scott's hand before looking back at his face. An eyebrow went up. "Okay, okay. Relax. You are very careful for a guy on holiday."
"Habit," Scott said.
But now he was afraid. This man was too careless. It wasn’t enough to stop entirely, but it was enough to proceed with caution. From his pocket, Jordi pulled a glass bottle, the label long peeled off by the humidity. With a quick twist of his wrist, he unscrewed the plastic cap, the distinct, sweet-chemical tang of the vapor instantly cutting through the salt air. He held it to one nostril, and inhaled deeply, his chest expanding under his shirt.
He offered the open bottle to Scott. "Here."
Scott shook his head, shifting his weight back slightly on the sand. "We don't need that,” he said.
Jordi let out a short, breathy laugh, his eyes half-lidded as his heart rate spiked from the vapor. "It is not just for that, American. It makes everything better. Try."
"No," Scott said. He needed his head exactly where it was.
Jordi shrugged, taking one more shallow breath of the fumes before tucking the bottle back into a pocket. "You miss the best parts of the night," he murmured, but he didn't argue.
What followed was good, sure. It was a familiar map of hands grasping on hot skin and mouths clumsily searching for each other in the dark. The routine of it grated on Scott. This was his vacation. He needed to get out of his head and enjoy it. When Jordi finally went down on him, the pleasure was sharp, nearly too much to bear. Scott flinched back, pulling back before he broke, like clockwork, like he was supposed to. Jordi made a disgruntled sound at his retreat, but Scott brought him to a messy release with his hand a few short strokes later. Scott scrubbed a hand over his face. It felt good. He liked that he could give Jordi that, and to find his own release, but he felt the tension turning into a hollow ache low in his stomach. It was good. But god, he wanted to feel this man in him. That stretch that burned just right. But not today. Not ever.
He saw Jordi twice more. The final time, Jordi lay in the dark afterward on the sand with a cigarette and said, "You are very tense for a man on vacation."
"I'm always tense."
"In America, you are like this?"
"More."
Jordi exhaled a trail of smoke. "This is a waste," he said. "A man like you."
Scott didn't answer. Later, back in his room, he watched the ceiling fan going around and thought about what a man like you meant, and whether Jordi meant the same thing by it that Scott meant, which was a man who has learned to want less than he wants, and has become good enough at it that sometimes he forgets the original want was there.
There were three others over three weeks. Same protocol each time, the same limits, the clean exit. He did not take anyone back to his room, or invited them to stay for breakfast. He showed up and then he left, and nothing followed him home, which had always been the arrangement. It would be safer, he thought, to find someone consistent.
Years ago, in the hotel rooms that had been the outer limit of what he permitted himself, there had been more. Men who knew what they were doing and took their time and didn't require the vigilance he now carried into everything. He knew why things were different, but he still felt that he was allowed to miss it. Maybe someday, long into the future, he could find a place where no one knew his name. Meet a long-term person, maybe one he even could love, and get that same satisfaction. Someone usual, who was willing to play by his set of rules. But that would mean a different set of issues. But until then, there was a calculated risk and there was summer.
While he was gone, Scott thought about Kip twice, against his better judgment. Once when he saw a similarly compact man with dark curls and felt the urge to press their bodies together, and once on the plane home, wondering if Kip would be at the bodega the next time he walked in, which didn't count.
He landed at JFK on a Monday in August, took a cab to Tribeca, stood in the penthouse looking at the Hudson and the skyline and understood that in six weeks training camp would start. Then the whole machine would engage again and carry him forward into a slightly different version of the exact same year he had just had, which was the same as the one before it, and the one before that.
The season, the games, the locker room, the city. The occasional women he brought as dates to charity functions and took out once or twice to maintain appearances and then never again. He stood on the terrace for a long time. In the morning he walked to Maria's.
The bell rang. Kip was behind the counter with a different book—thicker, hardback, a library stamp on the spine. He looked up. He did the thing where something akin to excitement moved in his face and then didn't.
And he was wearing a button. It matched the stickers that had covered the city. Small, on the strap of his apron near the shoulder. SILENCE = DEATH in the pink triangle. It was just there, like he’d put it on without thinking, because it was part of who he was. Scott clocked it and tucked away that piece of information where he hid away all the things he knew about Kip.
"You're back," Kip said.
"Season starts again soon," Scott said. "Got in yesterday."
Scott walked closer, his eyes dropping to the library book on the counter. "What are you reading?"
Kip glanced down, turning the spine toward Scott. It was Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran. “Just some fiction. It’s about the downtown scene in the seventies, before things changed.” Kip's gaze was steady, his fingers tapping the cover.
“Never heard of it.”
“No, I wouldn’t think so. What about you? What do you read on those long road trips?”
Scott shifted his weight, suddenly feeling very large and conspicuous in the narrow aisle. “Stephen King, mostly.”
Kip’s eyebrows shot up. A slow, wicked grin spread across his face. “Stephen King?”
“He’s good,” Scott defended, a rare prickle of competitiveness hitting him. “Keeps your brain occupied.”
“Right, right. It’s just—” Kip leaned his forearms on the counter, the grin turning teasing. “This isn’t a trap, is it? You’re not going to keep me captive in a cabin and tie me up until I love you, right? Because I have a thesis to write.”
Scott stared at him, his throat going completely dry. The joke was light, but the phrase tie me up hung in the muggy, late-summer air like live electricity. Kip was blushing, his cheeks matching the pink of his button, but he didn't look away.
“I’m more of a The Shining guy,” Scott managed to say, his voice a little lower than intended. “Less ropes. More ghosts.”
“Good to know,” Kip murmured. The tension stretched for a little too long before Kip stood and went to the griddle. “Usual?"
"Yeah." Scott cleared his throat. "Is Maria here?"
"No, her cousin's visiting from Santo Domingo."
"Ah." He accepted the coffee when it came. "She doesn't make it the same anyway."
Kip glanced at him over his shoulder. "The coffee or the sandwich?"
"Both."
"She makes it exactly the same."
"Nope," Scott said.
Kip turned back to the griddle. Scott could see the corner of his mouth from the side, the beginnings of a smile. He pressed the egg flat and said nothing.
Scott drank his coffee while he waited. The bodega was quiet. August light through the door.
"How was your trip?" Kip said, not turning around.
"Good." Scott picked up his coffee. "Restful."
"Where'd you go?"
"Spain."
Kip slid the sandwich across. "I've never been."
"You should go," Scott said. Then, before he could not say it, "It would suit you." Kip on a beach. Golden skin in the sun.
Kip looked at him. It was a beat too long for the comment, and they both knew it. He put his money on the counter.
"Training camp in six weeks," he said. "I'll be back."
“Next week I switch to evenings. No more mornings.”
“Oh?”
“Class.”
“Did you find a place? Closer to school?”
Kip smiled sadly. “No, unfortunately, not everyone tips like a superstar hockey player. I’ll be commuting from Queens, except for when I can convince Maria to let me sleep on her couch.”
“Too bad.”
"See you around, Scott."
Scott left. He walked home through the August morning and stood on the terrace with the last of the coffee and watched the Hudson and thought another season. And then—what? He didn't finish the thought. He went inside and closed the door.
Summer came to an end faster than Scott had anticipated with the Canada Cup. The tournament ran through Hamilton and Montreal, Team USA against the best the rest of the world had. It did not go as well as he hoped. Canada had a hotshot group of young players, led by Shane Hollander, and took them apart in the semis in a way that felt inevitable by the second period. Scott sat in the locker room afterward with his gear still on and thought, not entirely seriously but not entirely unseriously either, that an egg and cheese from Maria's before the game might have made the difference. He had been to three cities in ten days and eaten badly in all of them and the thought of the bodega and the smell of the griddle at six in the morning had the force of something that might have let him go home a champion. He categorized that as only superstition and went to bed.
Scott wasn’t quite sure how he found himself at the charity event in the middle of September. His agent, Carolyn, would drop these things into his schedule. It was an auction, art for youth sports scholarships, the kind of thing she committed him to without asking because his name on the attendee list was worth something to the organizers and she was sure he would go along with it. Scholarships had saved his life, and he was happy to pass it along. He wore a new suit from Hugo Boss that he had picked up from Barney’s that week and took a car on a Friday evening in the last real heat of summer, the light going gold over the buildings.
The venue was a gallery. A white cube on West Broadway that smelled of cigarette smoke and cheap wine. It was not the uptown charity-benefit world where people bought paintings to be seen buying them. This was more intimate. He understood within thirty seconds of walking in that it was queer-adjacent, feeling the familiar prickling awareness of being too exposed. He scanned the room, located the exits, assessed who was here and whether anyone had a camera. Logically, it was unnecessary. Carolyn was here. She was his shield, as she so often unknowingly was. But the assessment still ran. He couldn’t stop it.
Someone nearby accepted an offer on a painting. Twenty-five percent pledged towards summer camps for foster kids. Someone else drifted past. Scott stood in front of a large canvas and looked at that instead.
The work was by Basquiat, the name that was everywhere that year, the galleries, the conversations Scott half-heard at functions like this one. He knew the name how things worm their way into your consciousness without having sought them out. Part of the known culture. The canvas was enormous and layered and furious in a way that made him feel both drawn toward it and out of his depth. Text and figures and a visual syntax he couldn't parse, working on him in ways he could feel but not articulate, like a valuable piece of art should.
He was thinking he should have invited Eric to come with him, who actually knew shit about art when liquid splashed over his shoulder without warning.
"Oh god—I'm so sorry—"
Scott turned around. Kip was holding an empty wine glass and looking at his blazer with total horror. His cheeks, Scott noticed, had gone the same color they'd gone on the morning in late March when the bell above the door had given Scott away. He was wearing a dark shirt with the sleeves pushed up and no jacket and he looked like himself in a way the bodega had not prepared Scott for.
"It's fine," Scott said. “Don’t worry about it.”
"It's really not, I just—"
"It's fine." Scott meant it. He didn't care about the jacket. He was looking at Kip's face, which he had seen focused and distracted and amused and briefly asleep, and had not seen flustered until now. "Hi."
Kip blinked. The horror shifted into something else. "Hi," he said. "I didn't know you—I mean. Hi. Scott."
"Hi," Scott said again.
Kip laughed. The sound of it in a room with music and strangers and cigarette smoke was different from the sound of it across a counter and Scott stood there without being able to do anything sensible with it. Someone brought Scott a napkin. He blotted the shoulder of the blazer without looking at it.
"You know this work?" Kip said, nodding toward the Basquiat.
"Uh, no," Scott said. "I know he worked with Warhol. That's about it."
Kip's expression morphed to surprised delight. "That's actually a reasonable place to start," he said. "It drives Basquiat fans insane, but it's true. Warhol spotted him early." He looked at the canvas. "Warhol died in February—you probably saw it in the news."
"I read about it, yeah."
"So that collaboration is done. And now this—" Kip gestured at the room, the auction paddles, the wine, the crowd—"is what's left. Someone in this room is about to spend significant money on a canvas by a twenty-six-year-old Black kid from Brooklyn, partly because Warhol told the art world to pay attention." A pause. "There’s a whole argument about the commodification of art there."
"Tell me about it," Scott said.
So Kip told him. Neo-expressionism. The text as image. How the work metabolized pop culture and art history simultaneously. He talked about what it meant that this canvas was here in this room being sold for what it would sell for, and what Basquiat thought about that, and what Warhol's dealer thought about it, and where those two things diverged.
Scott asked questions. His interest was genuine, and Kip was not looking at him as people usually looked at him when he asked questions about things he didn't know. Usually once people knew Scott was a hockey player, they talked to him like he was stupid. Just a big dumb jock. To be fair, Scott didn't often correct the assumption. It led to fewer questions. Kip didn't make him feel like a dumb jock at all.
Two other people who had been in the orbit of the conversation detached over the next hour. Scott didn't track it. The wine dried on his shoulder, the dark fabric hiding the stain well, and the room went on around them. Eventually, the auction wound down. The Basquiat went for thirty thousand dollars. Scott bought a smaller piece, something by someone he hadn't heard of, because Kip had stood in front of it briefly and said he liked it. He gave it to Carolyn to figure out what to do with. At some point, she materialized at his elbow. Scott made the introduction. She said she had to get going. Scott said he'd follow in a few minutes and she left.
Kip picked up his glass from the cocktail table where he'd set it and found it empty and set it down again.
"There's a place on Grand," Scott said. "If you’re hungry. Good slice. We could walk, or I can call my car."
Kip looked at him. "It's a nice night."
They walked. Heat off the sidewalk, restaurants spilling out, the city dense. The line outside the pizza place was out the door and down the block. Scott stood on the sidewalk and looked at it. He could say his name. It would work, it almost always worked in the right kind of place on a Friday night, and the calculation was already forming before he stopped it. Not in front of Kip. Not like that.
"How long do you think?" Kip said.
"Half hour. Maybe more."
Kip looked at the line and back at him. "Is there somewhere else?"
"Yeah." Scott hesitated. He wasn’t sure what possessed him at that moment, but he went for it. "My place is eight blocks from here. If you want."
Kip looked at him. The look lasted long enough for Scott to hear how he'd said it. I'm eight blocks from here. He could have said there's another place nearby, but he didn't. His apartment. On a Friday night. Kip knew perfectly well what eight blocks from here meant after the evening they were having.
"Yeah," Kip said. "Okay."
The line outside the pizza place was still in Scott's head when he unlocked the door—the decision not to pull any strings, to stay a normal guy for a minute—and then the door was open and he watched Kip walk in ahead of him and stop.
"Oh," Kip said. He looked at the Hudson through the wall of windows. He looked at the ceiling, the furniture, the view again. "Holy shit."
"Yeah."
"I mean." Kip turned around, still taking it in. "I figured you'd have a nice place."
"But."
"This is insane." He said it without judgment, just fact. He walked to the window and stood there. The city was doing what it did at night, and Kip was standing in Scott's apartment looking at it like it was something to look at, which it was, but Scott had mostly stopped noticing. "Do you want to order some dinner, or—"
"Or," Scott said.
Kip turned from the window. He looked at Scott across the room.
"Okay," he said.
Scott crossed the room. Kip kissed him first, or Scott moved first, or both at once. He would never be able to remember which it was. No counter between them, Kip's hands at the back of Scott's neck and Scott's hands finding his waist, the fabric of the dark shirt, the heat of his body underneath. Kip kissed like he was pouring every ounce of his attention into it, and Scott had nowhere to put his hands that didn't make him want more.
They reached the bedroom without a decision being made about it. Kip's shirt came off and Scott looked at him in the low light from the window. The line of his throat, his collarbones, the dark chest hair narrowing down, and felt a vertigo. He should not be doing this. He should not be allowed to have what he wanted. He needed to stop this right now before it went too far.
"Hey," Kip said, his hand along Scott’s face. The doubts vanished.
"Yeah," Scott breathed in reply.
Kip pulled him down, flipping them until he was on top, unbuttoning Scott’s shirt. What Scott knew how to do was disappear. Make the body into a transaction, be present in the minimum necessary sense and absent in every sense that he could, leave nothing that could be traced. He had forgotten that it was a skill. He had forgotten there was an alternative.
Scott tried to stay present. This was only going to happen once. There wouldn’t be another time like this, probably until he retired and could fade away. His hands on Kip's back, Kip's mouth was on his neck, his collarbone, lower. When Kip's mouth moved down to his hip bone, Scott made a sound he did not try to suppress.
Scott looked up at him, all of him, the dark chest hair, the lines of him, looking back without flinching, and felt the vertigo of six months of wanting finally in the room with him.
Kip moved agonizingly slowly, relishing Scott’s impatience. It always moved so fast, when he was travelling. Quick and efficient and then over. Here they could take their time. Scott didn’t know how to do that.
Kip took him in his mouth and Scott put a hand in his hair and held on, not guiding. It had been so long since he'd been present for anything like this that the sensation was almost secondary to the fact of it. The fact of Kip's hands on his hips and Kip's mouth doing what it was doing and Scott not going anywhere, not squashing down a single thought, just there. He pulled Kip up before the end because he needed to and Kip came back up and they finished with their hands, Kip's face close to his, both of them breathing hard.
When it was over, Scott lay on his back looking at the ceiling with his heart going and his body wrung out and Kip beside him, breathing.
Neither of them said anything for a while. Kip shifted onto his side, facing the ceiling. "Okay," he said. "I have to tell you something."
Scott waited.
"I thought you were homophobic," he said. Scott stared at him. "After the first time you got bacon," Kip said. "You just—shut down. I figured I'd said something wrong, or I made you uncomfortable." He tilted his head slightly. "I was pretty sure that was what it was."
"It wasn't that," Scott said.
"No?"
"No."
Kip waited. Scott didn't offer anything more, and after a beat, Kip nodded slowly, accepted the non-answer. "Okay," he said. "I've been trying to figure out if I was reading it wrong since March."
"You weren't reading it wrong."
"Yeah." Kip's mouth quirked. "Okay. Good."
Kip rose and went to the bathroom. Scott heard the water running and lay there until he realized he should probably do something about his state as well. He stood, found a towel, cleaned himself up, and pulled on a pair of shorts. He sat with his back against the headboard and the sheet pulled up and waited.
Kip came back in and started collecting his clothes from the floor. His pants in one hand, his shirt in the other. He looked at the suit jacket draped over the chair with the wine still on the shoulder.
"I am sorry about the jacket," he said. "I can cover the dry cleaning."
"Don’t worry about it. You're leaving?"
Kip stopped. He looked at Scott across the room.
"Yeah, I mean—"
"You don't have to," Scott said. He heard how it came out and didn't take it back. "You can stay. I'd like you to stay. If you want."
Kip looked at him. Scott didn't have a word for it. Readable. He hadn't been readable to anyone in a very long time and it was uncomfortable and he didn't look away. Kip dropped his clothes on the floor.
"Don't gotta twist my arm," he said, and came back to the bed, and sprawled across the width of it with his head on Scott's thigh, on his back, looking up at the ceiling. Scott looked down at him. It was the most unselfconscious thing he'd ever seen anyone do in this apartment, which was not a high bar because no one was ever in this apartment, but still. Scott put his hand in Kip's hair.
"Tell me something," Kip said. He was looking at the ceiling. "I want to know about you. I can't think of the right questions."
Scott thought about it. "I grew up poor," he said. "Rochester. My mother and I. She was—she was really something." He hesitated. This part was always difficult. "She died when I was fifteen."
Kip was quiet. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Thank you."
"Only child?"
"Yeah. It was just the two of us." Scott cleared his throat. "I got a scholarship to a boarding school with a hockey program at fourteen. Then I started playing pro and that was that." He smiled. "I know how lucky that is. How unlucky I could have been."
"Not luck," Kip said. "You worked for it."
"I had a lot of help. What about you?"
Kip turned his head slightly and looked up at him. Scott kept his hand moving in his hair, slow.
"My real name is Christopher. Grady," Kip said, to the ceiling. "Almost nobody calls me that. I'm twenty-five. I live with my dad in Queens."
"I know," Scott said. "You mentioned it."
Kip smiled at the ceiling. "Right. The bacon conversation."
"The bacon conversation."
He should sleep. He was supposed to see the new rookies tomorrow and it would be long and he had not slept yet and it was—he looked at the window, the dark outside—not early. His eyes closed. Kip's breathing slowed. Scott kept his hand in his hair.
In the morning, Scott woke to the smell of eggs. He lay there not placing it, because the penthouse did not smell of eggs. The penthouse did not smell of anything.
Kip was in the kitchen. He'd found the eggs—Scott had eggs, apparently, though he couldn't have said when he'd bought them—and a pan, and he was standing at the stove in his underwear, doing something that from the bedroom doorway looked like an egg sandwich coming together out of pure improvisation. No griddle. No good roll. Whatever bread was in Scott's kitchen, which was probably not the right bread. Scott stood in the doorway and watched him.
"Morning," Kip said, without turning around. He'd heard him. "I found eggs. I hope that's okay."
"It's fine."
"You don't have a proper griddle." He said it without judgment, an observation. "Or any rolls. I used the bread that was in the bag."
"That's sourdough."
"I know." He slid the egg onto the bread with the efficiency that came from having made ten thousand of these. "It'll be fine. Sit down."
Scott sat on a stool at the counter. Kip set a plate in front of him—egg, a slice of cheese that had come from somewhere, the sourdough—and then turned back to make his own. The coffee was already done. Kip had found that too. Scott picked up the sandwich and ate it.
It was not the egg and cheese from Maria's. The bread was wrong and the cheese was much firmer than the cheap American slices Kip usually threw on and there was no griddle-press to the roll. But it was made by Kip Grady, and it was the best thing he'd eaten in weeks. He didn't say this. He drank his coffee instead.
Kip sat across the counter with his own sandwich and a slim paperback book, which had migrated from his jacket pocket to the counter. He ate and read. He didn't ask what this was. Then he closed the book and looked at Scott.
"I should go. But this was nice. And you don’t need to worry about me talking to anyone. I know how the world works for men like you." Men like you.
"Wait." Scott hadn't planned to say it. "I want to—" He stopped. Kip waited. "I'm going to say a bunch of things. Okay? And I know it's a lot. But." He held Kip's eyes. "Can I say them?"
Kip's expression shifted. "Yeah," he said. "Go ahead."
"My life is complicated," he said. "There are things I can't do right now. Maybe not for a while." He heard how that landed and kept going. "But I really like you. And I want you to stay."
Kip looked at him. He was quiet long enough that Scott felt the full weight of what he'd just said sitting in the room between them.
"Okay," Kip said. "I'll stay."