Chapter 24: Before the Game

We won that night. We won the next three games after it. The streak had a quality of inevitability about it, not arrogance, but the surer feeling of a team that has located something true about itself and is operating from that location.

I was playing the best hockey of my life.

I understood, now, why that was. Not just the system, not just the synergy with Jax on the ice, though those things were real and significant. It was the absence of the constant low-level drain of performance, the performance of being fine, of being unremarkable, of never standing out in the wrong way. Something had shifted in the last two months. Not security, exactly. The secret was still the secret. The arrangement was still whatever the arrangement was. But I was carrying it differently. With less of my weight.

Some of that weight was somewhere else now.

I was in the equipment room before game five of the streak, retaping my stick, which is the thing I did when I needed to think. There is something about the repetition of it, the clean pull of the tape, the pressure of each wrap, that creates a quiet space that passes for useful.

Jax found me there.

He didn't say anything immediately. He leaned against the shelving opposite me and watched me tape. I kept going.

"Marcus Webb called me," he said.

My hands stopped.

"He called you," I said.

"He did." No inflection. "He wanted to know, his words, 'what my intentions were.' Toward you." A pause. "He was extremely polite about it, which I suspect was the most threatening version of that conversation available to him."

I set down the stick. I looked at him. "What did you say?"

"I told him that was a fair question." He held my gaze. "And that I was still working on the answer."

The equipment room was small and smelled like adhesive and rubber and the faint ghost of every game that gear had ever been part of. It was not a romantic location. It had no particular significance.

"Jax," I said.

"I know," he said.

"I need you to—"

"I know." His voice was quiet. "I'm working on it. Some things take me longer." He pushed off the shelving and stood straight. "I wanted you to know that he called. Because you should know the things people do on your behalf."

He meant: the same way you should have known what I was doing on yours, before you found out secondhand.

"Okay," I said.

"Go get dressed," he said. "We have a game."

He left. I picked up my stick. I finished the tape job, the rhythm of it doing its work.

Marcus had called him. I would need to speak to Marcus about that, in the language of two men who expressed care primarily through pointed interference. I would call him names and he would be unapologetic and nothing would be different and everything would be.

I went and got dressed. We won by three.

[THE FIRST REAL CRACK]

The thing that broke open, when it finally broke, did not announce itself.

It was after practice, late. The facility was empty, everyone gone, lights on standby in the corridors, the building settling into its after-hours quiet. I had stayed to work on something specific, a technical problem with my backhand release that had been costing me a half-second on fast plays. Jax had stayed too, for reasons he hadn't offered and I hadn't asked.

We had been on the ice alone for twenty minutes when the overhead lighting cycled into its nighttime reduction, dropping two-thirds of the rink into a blue-gray dimness. It was not dark. But it was close enough that the edges of things went soft.

We stopped skating at the same time.

He was at center ice. I was at the blue line. The distance between us was manageable. Everything was technically fine.

"Come here," he said.

It was so quiet that I heard it clearly from thirty feet away. He said it the way he said most things, without question marks, without performance, but underneath the usual certainty was something different. Something that asked without asking.

I skated toward him.

I stopped two feet away and looked at him and he looked at me in the reduced light, and we stayed like that for a moment in the specific silence of the empty rink, which was the closest thing to a held breath that a building could manage.

"I don't know how to do this," he said.

Not hockey. Not the game. Not the arrangement. This.

"I know," I said.

"I spent eleven years making sure I didn't feel things I couldn't manage." His voice was even, which made the content of it land harder. "It was efficient. It worked. And then you—" He stopped. He looked down at the ice, and then back up at me. "You were supposed to be a problem I was solving. You became something else and I don't—" A breath. "I don't have a plan for this, Leo."

"I don't have a plan either," I said.

"You're not afraid of that."

"I'm terrified of it." I said it simply, because it was true. "I've been terrified since probably the second week. I just decided to be terrified and do it anyway."

Something shifted in his face. Something gave way, slow and tectonic, in the specific way of a man who has been holding a shape for a very long time and has finally, on one particular night, decided to put it down.

He reached out and put his hand on the side of my face. He held it there. His glove was cold, but his palm was warm.

"I handled everything wrong," he said. "The beginning. All of it. I know that."

"Yes," I said, because pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of wrong.

"I can't undo it."

"No."

"But I can—" He stopped. He looked at me. His thumb moved against my cheek, a small motion. "I want to try. Something that isn't, that doesn't look like before. If you're willing."

The ice was quiet. The building was quiet. Somewhere in the rafters a ventilation system moved and the sound of it was the only sound in the world.

"I'm willing," I said.

He kissed me. Not like the parking lot, which had been soft and brief and deniable. Not like the beginning, which had been punishment. This was the third thing, the underneath-everything thing, careful and certain, his hand at my face and my gloves at his chest and the ice under both of us like a foundation.

When he pulled back, he rested his forehead against mine.

"I meant what I said," he said, low. "About wanting you to stay."

"Among other reasons," I said.

"Among other reasons." His eyes, close like this, were not ice-blue the way everyone described them. They were complicated. They were the color of something that had been cold for a long time and was deciding, carefully, what warmth was going to cost.

"Don't read into it," I said, quietly.

He laughed. A short, real sound, surprised out of him, unwilled. The first genuine laugh I had ever heard from him in eleven weeks of proximity.

It was, I decided, the most I'd ever wanted anything.

"Go home," he said, his voice different now. Warmer. "I'll see you tomorrow."

I went home. I lay in my bed and the ceiling was the same ceiling and the city was the same city and everything was, technically, the same.

Nothing was the same.