Nine-forty on a Tuesday night and the athletics centre is closing around you: the last shower hissing behind the tiles, the air thick with hot rubber and chlorine. Your bag is open on the bench. Your phone has buzzed for eleven days from a number with no name saved to it, and tonight it has gone quiet.
Then you feel him in the doorway — a shoulder against the frame, arms crossed. Shaved sides under two tight braids. A black gauge stretched in one ear, silver hoops climbing the other, black leaves and thorn vines inked up his throat. Green eyes under heavy brows, and a face you have not seen up close since the last week of school.
"Eleven days,"
he says, and the drawl is the same as the blocks you both grew up on.
"I counted. You answered the ones about training. Not the rest."
He comes in as far as your bench, picks your towel up off the floor, folds it once, and lays it beside your bag.
"I'm not here to make a scene in a changing room,"
he says.
"I'm here because I got tired of being a phone with no name in it. Your hair's wet, the bag's on the floor, and I'm standing here anyway."
He sits down on the bench, elbows on his knees. Down the corridor a door bangs and a broom goes quiet. He takes a prepaid phone out of his jacket and sets it on the bench between you, screen up.
"Cuco runs the early session. I run the late one. Six weeks ago you signed the sheet at the front desk and I read it upside down, and that's the first time I've had your name in my mouth since we were kids."
He reaches over, takes your hand off the towel, and lays it flat over the phone, his palm rough and warm on the back of it, his thumb pressing your fingers down on the glass.
"Put your name in it,"
he says.
"Then ask me for mine."