Chapter 22: What Marcus Knew

Marcus Webb had been my teammate for four years in Ottawa. He was also, as far as I knew, the only other person in professional hockey who knew exactly what I was.

He called on a Sunday afternoon, his voice carrying the background noise of an airport, which meant he was traveling for an away series.

"I saw the article," he said, when we'd gotten past the opener.

"Yeah."

"The photo was good. You look like yourself."

"What does that mean?"

"It means you look like someone who's playing hockey because they love it instead of because they're surviving it. There's a difference. It's visible." A pause. The airport noise shifted. "How are things with the Ice King?"

Marcus was the only person in my life who knew about the arrangement. He did not know all of it, I'd given him the outline, not the interior. He knew: leverage, secret, deal. He knew because he was Marcus and he had asked me once, directly, if I was in trouble, and I had not been able to lie to him.

"Complicated," I said.

"More complicated than before or differently complicated?"

"The second one."

He was quiet for a moment. "Leo."

"I know."

"I've seen this before," he said, careful. Not unkind. "Men like that, men who hold power over someone and then start to feel something about i, they don't always know how to let the power go. Even when they want to. Especially then. It's the letting go that breaks them."

"He's not—" I stopped.

"Not what?"

"It's different," I said. "He's different from what I expected him to be."

"I believe you," Marcus said, and his voice was sincere, and also careful. "I just want you to be careful about the distance between who someone is and who you need them to be. Sometimes those two things get confused."

I sat with that.

"He put himself between me and a league investigation," I said. "Without telling me. Just, did it."

A long pause. "Okay," Marcus said, slowly. "That is different."

"Yeah."

"Still. Be careful."

"I'm always careful."

"Leo." His voice was dry and affectionate. "You are specifically the least careful person I've ever met about the things that matter to you. It's your one consistent flaw. Own it."

I laughed. It surprised me, short, genuine, the kind that came up before you could manage it.

"Take care of yourself," Marcus said. "Call me when it gets complicated again."

"When, not if?"

"When," he confirmed. "I know you."

He hung up. I sat on my couch in the afternoon light and thought about the distance between who someone is and who you need them to be, and whether those two things were as far apart as they'd once seemed.

[THE FIGHT]

It happened over something that didn't deserve to be the thing.

We had lost. Not badly, not the kind of loss that becomes a story, but enough. Two goals in the third period that shouldn't have happened, a defensive breakdown, a night where the wiring between us went briefly wrong and cost us the game. It happened. Teams lose.

Jax did not accept that narrative with any grace.

I heard him on the phone after the game — outside the locker room, in the corridor, his voice low and controlled in the way that meant the control was costly. I don't know who he was talking to. I don't know what they said. I know that when he came back in, the room recalibrated itself around his silence the way rooms did when he was in the wrong kind of mood.

The rest of the team filed out with the collective speed of people who understood weather.

I stayed because leaving felt like retreat.

"You had the shot in the second," he said. He was at his locker. His voice was flat.

"The angle was wrong—"

"You had the shot. You passed instead. The pass was late and we lost possession." He turned. His eyes were cold in a way they hadn't been in weeks. "That is the kind of decision that costs games."

"I was reading the play. Reyes was in position, "

"Reyes wasn't ready. You knew it and you passed anyway because you, " He stopped. His jaw was set. "Because you've developed some idea that my game plan is optional when you think you have a better read."

"I do have a better read. Half the time I have a better read and you know it."

"Not tonight."

"Tonight was one play."

"Tonight was symptomatic." He turned back to his locker. The dismissal of it, the physical rotation away from me like I was done, like I'd been addressed and could leave, landed somewhere raw.

"Don't do that," I said.

"Do what."

"Turn your back on me like I'm not worth the facing."

He turned around slowly. His expression had shifted, still controlled, but something else underneath it now.

"You want me to face you?" he said.

"I want you to talk to me like I'm a person instead of a mistake you're logging."

Something moved through his face. I couldn't name it. He crossed the room in four steps and stopped two feet from me and I held my ground because backing up was not something I did.

"You are not a mistake," he said, low. "You are the most, complicated thing I have dealt with in fifteen years of professional hockey, and I don't know how to—" He stopped again. The muscle in his jaw. "I don't have language for what you are to me. And that makes me—" He exhaled. "That is the problem."

We looked at each other in the empty locker room, the loss still in the air, and between us the accumulated weight of everything we didn't have words for.

"Jax," I said, quietly.

"Go home, Leo." His voice was rough. "Please."

I went home. I did not feel like I'd won. I did not feel like I'd lost. I felt like something had cracked open that couldn't be uncracked, and that we were going to have to live in the opened thing now whether we were ready or not.