“Look, Lourdes,” David starts, doesn’t know how to finish. Lourdes is smiling, but it looks wrong. He looks more like he did when David walked out the door in Las Vegas than like he does when he actually smiles, wide enough to crinkle his eyes, the sort of smile that overtakes his entire face. He smiles a lot. It’s hard not to notice.

“You know you can actually call me by my name,” Lourdes says.

“Jacob?” David asks.

Lourdes laughs. David doesn’t bother to tell him he wasn’t trying to be funny.

“Team,” Lourdes says. “Real or not, I don’t care, it’s still team. I’m Lourdy or I’m Jake.”

“You still can’t call me Chaps,” David says.

“Okay,” Jake says. “David, then.”

“I’m not going to call you Lourdy,” David says. “That’s stupid.”

Jake laughs again. David thinks it might be a condition.

Caldwell sighs at them when, ten minutes later, David is unable to name five facts about Jake. He could, of course, but they’re not things he’s personally been told, or anything the room should know, so he just mumbles about Jake winning Gold with Team USA in U18s and being first draft pick and winning the Calder, and tries to ignore the feeling of twenty-two pairs of eyes on him as he recites his own failures.

Thankfully, once they’re past the pointless exercises, they get onto things that actually make sense. They don’t have ice-time until the next day, but they do hit the gym. Caldwell and his assistants measure their fitness levels, and David’s submitted to a bunch of questions on what he wants to improve on — again, everything — presumably so that they all have appropriate individual plans. That’s the rest of the day, and it’s tedious but at least David sees the point in it, so it doesn’t feel like a day wasted when he waits at the curb for the taxi he called.

He doesn’t pay attention when a nondescript car pulls up in front of him until the window rolls down and Jake looks out at him from beneath a pair of sunglasses. “You need a ride?” Jake asks.

“I have a cab coming,” David says. “But thank you for asking,” he adds belatedly, because it’s best to be polite when someone offers you a ride, even though David can’t begin to imagine why Jake is, considering. Perhaps because they’re teammates now.

Jake flips his sunglasses up. “Get in the car,” he says, and David pauses until someone behind Jake beeps.

“You’re starting a traffic jam, David,” Jake says.

“I think that’s you,” David says, not moving, but whoever’s in the car behind them beeps again, and David bites his lip, pulling the passenger door open and getting in.

Jake finally pulls away from the curb, and David does up his seatbelt. He squints uncomfortably into the afternoon light until Jake speaks, and thankfully it’s just to ask where he’s going, which is easy enough to answer. They don’t really make conversation. Jake’s fiddling with the radio, his split attention making David nervous, not that he says anything, and it’s less painful than David would have expected, the experience, when Jake drops him off outside his hotel.