"You've had three off days in a row. Whatever's going on between you two, fix it. I don't care how. Fix it."
Mik said nothing. He hadn't said a word to me in three days, and his silence, which I used to find mysterious and then found endearing and then found fascinating, now just felt like a door slammed in my face.
I tried once. After practice on day two, I'd caught him in the parking lot.
"Mik."
He stopped walking but didn't turn around. His shoulders were rigid under his jacket.
"Can we talk about what happened?"
"There is nothing to talk about."
"There's pretty clearly something to talk about."
"It was a mistake. It will not happen again."
He got in his car and drove away, and I stood in the parking lot with my hands in my pockets and felt something inside me go very still. Not angry. Not hurt, exactly. Just still. The way you get when you realize that the thing you want most is also the thing most likely to destroy you, and you have to decide how much destruction you can afford.
Jonah noticed. Of course Jonah noticed. Jonah Park had the emotional radar of a golden retriever crossed with a therapist, and he cornered me in the weight room on day three with the casual determination of a man who had decided this conversation was happening whether I wanted it or not.
"Talk to me."
"About what?"
"About whatever happened on the road trip that turned you into this." He gestured at me. All of me. I wasn't sure what he meant but I was sure I didn't like it.
"Nothing happened on the road trip."
"Cole."
"Nothing happened."
"You're a terrible liar. You've always been a terrible liar. In fourth grade you told Mrs. Henderson that your dog ate your book report and you didn't even have a dog."
"We had a goldfish."
"Not the point." He sat down on the bench next to me and leaned his elbows on his knees. Jonah in serious mode was a different animal than Jonah in chirping mode. Quieter. More direct. The kind of friend who would sit in silence until you talked because he knew that silence from someone who loves you is harder to resist than questions.
I held out for about forty-five seconds.
"If I tell you something, you can't ask follow-up questions."
"That's not how conversation works."
"It's how this conversation works."
He considered this. "Okay. No follow-ups. Go."
I took a breath. The weight room was empty. The door was closed. It was just us and the dumbbells, which felt appropriate because this whole situation was dumb.
"Something happened with Volkov."
Jonah's face did not change. Not even a flicker. He just waited.
"I don't know how to describe it. We've been... I don't know. Getting to know each other. During the paired drills and the film sessions and on the road trip. And it was good. It was really good. And then something happened in Miami and now he won't look at me and I don't know what to do."
Jonah was quiet for a long time. Then he said, very carefully, "When you say something happened."