He saw me and straightened up. The guard came back. Not all the way, but enough.
"Briggs."
"Volkov. Big Friday night plans, I see. Ice bucket. Very exciting."
"I am icing my shoulder."
"You could've come out with the team, you know. Nashville's fun."
"I have been to Nashville."
"When?"
"We played the Predators tonight."
"That doesn't count. You saw the inside of an arena and a hotel. That's like saying you've been to Paris because your flight had a layover at Charles de Gaulle."
Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile. But the territory adjacent to a smile, the landscape where smiles live before they commit to the journey.
"I do not enjoy crowds," he said.
"It wasn't a crowd. It was your teammates."
"Teammates are a crowd with matching luggage."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. Every time he said something like that, delivered in that flat, dry tone with his face completely neutral, it caught me off guard. Humor from Mikhail Volkov was rare enough to be valuable, like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a coat pocket.
"Fair point," I said. "So what do you do on road trips? Just sit in your room?"
"I read. I watch film. I call my mother."
"That's..." I almost said sad, but stopped myself. It wasn't sad. It was just solitary, and solitary and sad are not the same thing, even if they look similar from the outside. "Quiet."
"I like quiet."
"I know you do." I leaned against the wall. I should have gone to my room. I was standing in a hotel hallway in jeans and a going-out shirt talking to a man in sweatpants about his Friday night plans, and there was absolutely no reason for this conversation to continue except that I didn't want it to stop.
"My sister wants to study in London," he said.
This was unexpected. Volkov didn't volunteer personal information. He parceled it out like a man rationing water in a desert, and the fact that he was offering this without being asked felt significant.
"Yeah? Good school?"
"She wants to study literature. She reads constantly. She is smarter than me, which is not a high bar in my family, but she does not know that."
"I bet the bar is higher than you think."
He looked at me. Direct, unblinking. "Why are you not with your teammates, Briggs?"
"I was. I came back."
"Why?"
Good question. I ran through the possible answers in my head. Because I was tired. Because two beers was enough. Because Jonah's karaoke was literally painful. All true. None of them the real answer.
The real answer was that I had spent the entire bar thinking about the empty chair where Volkov should have been, and at some point the bar stopped being fun because the person I most wanted to talk to wasn't there, and that realization was so startling and so inconvenient that I had to leave before it showed on my face.
"I don't know," I said. "I just felt like coming back."