Chapter 22 Theo
THEO
We went to my apartment because my apartment was closer and because Mars needed to be somewhere warm and because Axel, who had been alone all evening and whose patience for solitude had a shelf life, was probably in the process of systematically destroying something expensive.
Mars was quiet in the car. Not the analytical quiet of the goalie or the sealed quiet of the mask.
A different quiet. The emptied-out quiet of a man who had cried and who was now in the aftermath, the spent, vulnerable, stripped-down state that follows emotional release the way calm follows a storm.
Axel met us at the door with a yowl of reproach that communicated, in feline vocabulary, that my absence had been unconscionable and that restitution in the form of treats was immediately required. Mars picked him up. Axel settled on his shoulder. The cat's purr was the only sound in the apartment.
I made tea. Green tea, the kind my mother sent from Seattle, the kind that tasted like her kitchen and my childhood and the specific warmth of being somewhere safe.
I brought two cups to the couch. Mars sat with Axel on his lap and the tea in his hands and his face, which was usually sealed and angular and controlled, was open.
The mask was on the counter at his apartment.
The metaphorical mask was on the floor of the Decatur rink.
What remained was the face underneath, and the face was younger and softer and more afraid than the NHL's starting goaltender should have been.
"I've never let anyone see me like this," he said.
"Like what?"
"Broken. Failing. Not in control."
"You're not broken. You're having a bad night."
"Five goals, Theo."
"Five goals. Not five fractures. Not five endings. Five data points in a season of data points. Tomorrow you'll go to practice and you'll face shots and you'll stop them because that's what you do. Tonight you're allowed to not be that."
"What am I allowed to be?"
"A person. A person who had a hard day and came to a rink in the dark and cried and got held and is now sitting on a couch with a cat and a man who makes costumes and can't compete in front of people.
You're allowed to be the Mars behind the mask.
The one I see at 5 AM. The one who watches me fly and cries when I land. "
He put the tea down. His hands, which were the largest, most capable hands I had ever held, which stopped pucks that moved faster than most people could think, were trembling.
Not with the panic tremor of my episodes.
With the vulnerability tremor of a man who was allowing himself to be touched by something that his defenses had spent twenty-six years preventing.
I took his hands. The mirror of the lobby. His hands around mine when I was shaking. My hands around his now. The contrast reversed: his shaking, my stillness. My steadiness holding his unsteadiness.
"Mars."
"Yeah."
"I want to take the mask off. All the way. Not the goalie mask. The other one. The one you've been wearing since Miami."
"That mask is load-bearing."
"Then let me hold the weight."
The sentence was the door. He walked through it.
He kissed me. The kiss was not the precise, deliberate kiss of center ice. It was messy and raw and tasted like tea and salt from the crying and the specific, unmistakable flavor of a man who was done protecting himself.
I kissed him back. My hands in his hair, which was thick and dark and slightly damp from the rink. His hands on my waist, pulling me closer with a grip that was strong enough to stop a ninety-mile-per-hour puck and gentle enough to make me feel like something precious.
"Bedroom," I said.
"Are you sure?"
"I have never been more sure of anything in my life, and I say that as a man who was once sure enough to attempt a quad loop in front of 15,000 people."
"That didn't end well."
"This will."
The bedroom. The costume on the dress form, watching from the corner like a witness. The reading lamp on the nightstand, warm and amber, the specific light that I used for sketching and that was now illuminating the most significant physical event of my recent life.
Mars was larger than me. Broader. The goalie's body, built to fill a crease, to cover every angle.
My body was built for the opposite purpose: to be minimal, aerodynamic, to defy the space that Mars was designed to occupy.
The contrast, which we had discussed in theoretical terms over coffee and which we were now exploring in practical terms on my bed, generated its own electricity.
I undressed him with the deliberate, precise attention that I brought to everything physical.
The henley first, revealing the chest that I had been thinking about since the lobby, broad and defined and rising and falling with breathing that was getting faster.
His jeans next, the belt a minor obstacle, and then the boxer briefs, and then all of him, visible and vulnerable and extraordinary.
He lay on my bed and looked at me and the looking was not the goalie's reading. It was not analytical. It was want. Raw, unprocessed, unfiltered want, and the want was directed at me with an intensity that my body responded to immediately, comprehensively, every nerve ending activating at once.
I undressed. I stood at the edge of the bed in the amber light and let him look at me the way he had looked at me through the glass, except now there was no glass. No barrier. No distance. Just air and light and the eighteen inches between the mattress and my body.
"You're extraordinary," he said. The same words from the apartment, the same flat delivery, except now the context transformed the words from observation to declaration.
I climbed onto the bed. Over him. The weight of my body on his produced a sound from him that I cataloged and treasured, a low exhalation that was surprise and relief and the specific, physical pleasure of being touched by someone after a long drought.
What followed was slow and thorough and devastating.
Mars's analytical mind, which processed everything as data, was attempting to catalog every sensation and failing beautifully, the failure visible in the way his eyes kept closing and reopening as if his brain couldn't decide whether to observe or experience and was choosing, again and again, to experience.
I guided him the way he had guided me on the ice: with patience and direction and the absolute commitment to making sure the person I was leading felt safe.
His hands on my body were tentative at first, then firmer, the goalie's hands finding their function in a new context. The hands that stopped pucks learned what it felt like to touch without stopping. To explore without preventing. To give instead of block.
I moved my mouth down his body and the sounds he made were the sounds of a mask disintegrating, each one rawer and more exposed than the last. When I took him in my mouth, the sound he made was my name, spoken in a voice I had never heard from him, a voice that was not precise or controlled or analytical.
A voice that was simply, completely, a man's voice saying the name of the person he wanted.
He was close. I could feel it in the tension of his thighs and the grip of his hands in my hair. I pulled back. He made a sound of protest.
"Together," I said.
"Together."
The adjustment was physical and logistical and we navigated it with the specific, trial-and-error intimacy of two people doing this for the first time together, the fumbling and the laughter and the brief, awkward pause for practical considerations that reminded us both that sex between humans was never as smooth as fiction suggested and was better for the imperfection.
We found the rhythm. Face to face. His eyes on mine.
The eye contact during the most vulnerable physical act either of us had ever performed, and the eye contact was the thing.
Not the touching. Not the friction. Not the building.
The eyes. Looking at Mars Santos while he came apart was the most intimate experience of my life because the coming apart was the mask's final dissolution, the complete, total, irreversible removal of every barrier between the person and the world.
He came first. With my name in his mouth and his hands on my hips and his face, in the amber light, cracked open like something that had been sealed too long and was breathing for the first time.
I followed, watching his face, and the watching was not the watching of a judge or an audience.
It was the watching of a witness. The watching that he had taught me was possible.
The watching that saved instead of scored.
Afterward. The bed. The lamp. Axel's distant purring from the living room, where the cat had been diplomatically banished and where he was probably destroying the couch in retaliation.
Mars lay on his back, one arm under my head, the other hand tracing patterns on my shoulder with the absent, tender touch of a man who had just discovered that touching without purpose was more pleasurable than touching with it.
"The mask is off," he said.
"How does it feel?"
"Like the ice after the Zamboni. Clean. Open. No marks."
"No marks?"
"No marks. You resurfaced me."
"That's the most goalie thing anyone has ever said after sex."
"I'm a goalie. This is how I communicate."
I laughed. The laugh vibrated through both our bodies and Mars smiled at the vibration and the smile was the real smile, the full smile, the one without seams.
"The regional is in three weeks," I said.
"I'll be there."
"What if I fall?"
"Then you fall. And I'll still be in the stands when you get up."
"That's the whole thing, isn't it. Getting up."
"That's always been the whole thing. For both of us."
I pressed my face into his chest. His heartbeat was steady. The goalie's heartbeat, trained for calm under pressure. But the rhythm was slightly elevated, and the elevation was for me, and the for-me was the most beautiful data point in the history of measurement.
"Mars?"
"Mm."
"Thank you for letting me see behind the mask."
"Thank you for being the reason I took it off."
The lamp glowed. The cat purred. The man breathed.
And somewhere in Atlanta, in an arena where five goals had gone through, the net was empty and the ice was marked and the game was over.
But the game that mattered, the one that was not played in arenas, the one that was played in dark rinks and lit bedrooms and the space between two people who had found each other in the space between, was just beginning.
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