Chapter 5
Abbott
The road trip announcement came on Tuesday.
Five games, three cities, ten days. Coach Reeves posted the schedule in the locker room.
The team responded the way it always responded to long road trips—groans from the guys with families, grins from the guys who liked hotel room service, and one long theatrical sigh from Volkov that was mostly for show.
I read the schedule. City one, two games. City two, one game with a day off. City three, two games. Ten days of buses and hotels with nowhere to hide from each other.
Nowhere to hide from Jamie.
I sat with that thought.
Marty called during lunch. I took it in the hallway outside the cafeteria, leaning against the wall and watching facility staff push a cart of laundry toward the equipment room.
"Denver's getting impatient," he said. "Their backup situation is not working. They need an answer before the deadline. They'd ideally like to start the conversation with Chicago's front office sooner rather than later."
"How soon is sooner?"
"Before you leave on that road trip would be ideal."
"That's four days."
"I know. I'm not asking you to decide in four days. I'm asking you to let me have a preliminary conversation with Park. It won't be binding. It just opens the door."
Just opening a door. I stood in the hallway and thought about doors—the ones you opened, the ones you kept closed, the ones you'd decided weren't yours to walk through.
"Give me the road trip," I said. "Tell Denver I'm interested enough to keep talking but I need two weeks."
Marty was quiet for a moment. He was a good agent. He understood that silence sometimes meant more than words. "Two weeks. I'll tell them."
"Thank you."
"Clay." He paused. "This is a real opportunity. Starter money. A contender. I want to make sure you're giving it the consideration it deserves."
"I am."
"Okay. Two weeks."
I hung up and stood in the hallway for another minute. The cafeteria noise filtered through the door, the low murmur of athletes eating and someone laughing too loud.
Hayes. That was Hayes's laugh, filtering through a closed door.
Kieran and I were in the equipment room the day before departure.
We had our own rhythm in here, the shorthand of two goalies who shared a position and all the weird intimacy that came with it.
We taped sticks in adjacent stalls. We talked about pads and angles and the way a glove needed to be broken in before it felt right.
We didn't talk about much else—not because we weren't close, but because goalies operated on a different frequency.
We understood each other the way soldiers understood each other—through shared experience, not shared conversation.
He was re-taping his stick, that methodical process that was half preparation, half meditation, and I was checking my chest protector straps when he spoke.
"You've been thinking."
It wasn't a question. Kieran Walsh didn't bother with questions when statements were more efficient.
"I'm always thinking."
"More than usual." He kept his eyes on the tape.
His hands were steady, each wrap overlapping the previous one by the same amount.
He had goalkeeper's hands, enlarged knuckles and the tape-calloused fingers that had caught ten thousand pucks.
"And you're doing that thing where you go still when you don't want people to notice you processing. "
"I wasn't aware I had a thing."
"You have several things." He paused, still focused on the tape. "Whatever you're deciding… Don't decide it for the wrong reasons."
The equipment room was quiet. It smelled like tape adhesive and old leather. Down the hall, a compressor cycled on.
"What would be the wrong reasons?" I asked.
Kieran finished the wrap and pressed the end down, examining his work with the critical eye of a man who found imperfection intolerable. Then he looked at me with the same expression he wore when he was reading a two-on-one and had already decided where to commit.
"You know what the wrong reasons are." He stood up and put the tape down. "You've always known."
He walked out.
That was the entire conversation—Kieran Walsh in his purest form. A single comment, delivered without excess, and then he was gone.
I sat in the equipment room and thought about what the wrong reasons might be. Staying for safety. Leaving for safety. Deciding based on fear rather than want. Deciding based on a door you hadn't tried because you'd convinced yourself it was locked.
I thought about my cousin Marcus. Thirty years old, sitting across from me at a bar in Portland three months after coming out, he told me that the hardest part wasn't other people's reactions.
"The hardest part," he'd said, holding his beer with both hands, "was the years I spent thinking it made sense, Clay.
Silence was efficient. Then one day I was thirty and I realized I'd built my entire life around a variable I'd never questioned. "
In the years since, I'd thought about that a lot.
The thing was, the calculation I'd been running—the same one Marcus had run—had produced consistently manageable results. Date women. Be the uncomplicated, reliable presence in every room. Don't make it complicated. Don't make it visible.
Until Jamie Hayes started leaving a mug on the shelf for me and I noticed the handle orientation.
Kieran hadn't specified the wrong reasons. He didn't need to.
The question was the answer.
I was at Jamie's apartment later that night.
This was our established pattern. We ordered food or one of us cooked—or, most often, Jamie had already made something. His kitchen was always stocked and his instinct was always to feed people. His apartment reflected him. It was warm and slightly cluttered, built for comfort rather than display.
There were books on the coffee table and a blanket on the couch that had been there since last winter. Photos hung on the fridge—team pictures, a family photo with his four siblings, a candid from last year's Cup parade where he was mid-laugh.
The kitchen was at the heart of the space. Jamie moved through it, opening cabinets without looking. He handed me a beer and then, without asking, reached for the shelf above the stove and pulled down the blue mug with the chipped handle.
My mug.
He filled it with coffee from the pot he'd already made. He knew I preferred coffee to beer after seven PM. He set it on the counter in front of me, the handle facing toward my hand.
I wrapped both hands around the ceramic and felt the warmth seep into my palms. The mug was heavy and substantial.
Jamie had at least six other mugs in that cabinet, but this was the one he always gave me.
It always sat in the same spot on the shelf, always waiting—as if the space accounted for me even when I wasn't there.
I was here in other ways too. The fridge had my favorite foods, the Greek yogurt I preferred and the sparkling water I drank. The couch had a throw pillow on my side.
I let myself consider what that meant. Jamie Hayes had, without ever discussing it, without ever naming what he was doing, built a space that included me. He had learned my habits and preferences and integrated them into his daily life.
He was doing it now, the sizzle of a pan cutting through the apartment's comfortable quiet.
He'd changed out of practice clothes into a worn t-shirt and sweatpants, his bare feet on the kitchen tile.
He talked about the road trip schedule, his whole body gesturing with the spatula, turning to face me when he made a point.
"Apparently there was a booking issue," he said, adjusting the burner. "They're doubling up some rooms. Volkov and Bishop, which should be entertaining—and probably us."
"Probably us?" I said.
"I mean, that's the obvious pairing, right?
" He said it casually, sliding the food from the pan to our plates.
His forearms were tanned from summer. His hands were always doing something, cooking now, but the motion was constant.
It never stopped, the physical manifestation of a man who was built to tend things.
"Unless you want to room with Mikkola. Mikkola snores. "
"How do you know Mikkola snores?"
"Because I know everything about everyone on this team." He glanced over his shoulder and gave me a real grin. It transformed his face. "It's my job."
"It's not your job."
"It's my calling." He turned back to the cutting board. "We've roomed together before. It's not weird."
It wasn't weird. We'd shared hotel rooms on road trips before. The team doubled up to save costs, and the pairing of Hayes and Abbott was routine enough that nobody questioned it.
"It's not weird," I agreed.
He kept cooking. I drank my coffee, marveling that Jamie Hayes had, without knowing he was doing it, built a life that had a space in it shaped exactly like me.
I filed that away. I had two weeks and a road trip—and a decision that was getting less simple by the hour. The man standing four feet away from me, humming off-key while he cooked dinner for both of us, was the variable that no amount of backup goalie math could solve.
"Hey, Abbott."
"Yeah."
"Pass me the salt? It's behind you."
I turned and handed it to him. Our fingers touched on the shaker, a quarter-second of contact.
His hand was warm from the stove.
"Thanks," he said, turning back to the food.
The kitchen was warm. The apartment was warm.
Jamie Hayes's entire existence was warm, and I was standing in it holding a mug he'd chosen for me.
I thought about Denver, and the difference between wanting something for ten years and letting yourself want something infinitely bigger for a fraction of that time.
The fraction was winning.
Quietly and without announcement. It was the way important things always won, not by force but by accumulation, the steady accrual of small moments that individually mean nothing and collectively mean everything.
A mug. A car ride. A laugh in a parking lot.
A shoulder pressed against yours at a Korean barbecue.
I'd been sitting on this for years, waiting for the moment to resolve into clarity.
Kieran had asked me what I was deciding.
The reality was that I'd already decided.
The question was whether I had the courage to say it—to myself and to the man four feet away who had no idea what he was offering when he made me coffee and left space on his shelf.
Two weeks.
A road trip.
One hotel room.
The math was about to stop working entirely.