Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
Varga
Iwas already losing an argument with the day as I walked down the stairs.
”—because a free man, a genuinely free, out, unembarrassed man still wants eggs for breakfast, and we don’t have eggs, because somebody made a frittata Thursday that could have fed a family of nine—“
“You made the frittata,” Rook said from the kitchen.
“I made the frittata under duress. We’d just told a locker room our biggest secret.
This man stress-cooks.” I came around the corner, straightening Rook’s favorite Ironhawks t-shirt on my shoulders.
I stole it so often that I should have kept it in my drawer.
My follow-up to the eggs comment was already loaded.
It was about coffee beans, but then he gave me that look, and the whole thing died in my mouth.
He was at the table with two mugs of coffee already poured, his hands flat on the wood. His phone sat face-up between them, with the screen glowing.
“Who died?” I asked as I sat down. “Was there a fire in my building. Or did the plant finally—“
“Nobody died.” He reached across the table and took both of my hands in his. He held on, and I was quiet.
“You told me a thing in Buffalo,” he said. “In the dark. The night before everything. You called it the dumb one. Home game, late, you score, and you don’t go to the bench. You go to me.”
“You didn’t laugh about it. I remember.”
“No.” He ran his thumbs over my knuckles, like he was reading them. “You’ve wanted that for a long time. You’ve wanted it a lot longer than Buffalo.” He paused for a moment. “I want you to have it, so I want to give it to you. That’s it. That’s what I’m thinking about this morning.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. That only happens about twice a decade.
“I can’t make you score,” he said. “That’s the part we can’t predict, but I can set the room up so nobody’s surprised if it happens.” He let go of one of my hands and turned the phone toward me. “So I set the room up. Read.”
I pulled his phone across the table with two fingers, as if it might be hot. My hand was shaking.
The thread was between Rook and Mark. The first message was sent at eleven the night before. I was asleep on Rook’s arm by then, dead to the world.
Rook: If Varga scores tomorrow night there might be a moment on the ice. Center ice. I don’t want the building caught flat.
The response had come back immediately because Mark sleeps with the phone on his pillow.
Mark: How big a chance?
Rook: I’m telling him tomorrow morning it’s his if he wants it.
Mark: I’ll tell the broadcast to hold the wide shot and not cut to break if Varga scores. Arena ops owes me.
There was an additional message sent two minutes later.
Mark: Rook, I didn’t finish a sentence in the tunnel the other day and it’s been sitting wrong with me.
Congratulations. To both of you. Five years of being that good at a thing nobody knew you were doing is the most impressive work I’ve seen from the team, and I’ve watched Cross do a crossword in pen.
“We rank higher than Cross,” I said, and my voice broke. “Mark put us above Cross, Rook.”
“He did.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever—“ I lost it. I rubbed my eye with three fingers, and it didn’t help. Tears dripped straight down into my mug, and I sat there, crying like a man in a coffee commercial.
I watched Rook’s jaw go slack at one corner. “Don’t you start. Don’t you dare. One of us has to drive.”
“I’m not starting.”
“You’re right there. I can see it. Your eyes are red already.”
“They’re not.”
I got up, walked around the table, and sat right in his lap, pushing my face into the side of his neck. “That was hard for you to do, right? Be honest.”
“A little,” he said into my hair.
“More than that.”
“Yeah,” he agreed, and he wrapped an arm around my back while my shoulders shook.
I wiped one eye. “What if I don’t score?”
“Then we’ll go home, and I’ll cook you eggs.”
“We don’t have eggs.”
“I’ll buy them.”
“You? At the Jewel-Osco? At eleven at night? Actually, I can see that. One big hockey man, with a sad little basket—twelve eggs and a thing of cream—“ I lifted my head and looked at him. “God, I love you. Look at me, Rook. I have a game tonight, and I’m a disaster.”
“You’ll be ready,” he said.
“I’ve got one job tonight.”
“You’ve got a few. Cross likes it when you back-check.”
“One real job.”
“When you score,” he said, “you go to center ice. I’ll meet you there. I’ll leap over the boards if I need to. Meet me. Can you do that?”
“Yeah,” I said, into his collarbone.
***
I tried to be normal in the locker room, and that lasted about ninety seconds.
Nobody warns you about the week after coming out. They don’t tell you it’s mostly just another week. By two days later, we’d slid down everybody’s feed.
Four days out, a beat writer asked me about a power play instead of my boyfriend, and I knew we were old news.
”—because people think Rook’s quiet,“ I told Trier while he was lacing a skate. “That’s the costume. At home, the man delivers speeches. He composed a pre-eulogy for the basil in October. He said the world was shedding tears because it wouldn’t survive.
When it lived, he apologized to it. He’s the most talkative man in North America, and he’s hidden it from all of you for a decade—“
“Varga, you’ve been with him for five years.”
I ignored the attempt at correction. ”—and the coffee thing, the coffee thing kills me. He has a drip machine that cost as much as a snowmobile.”
Trier tossed a roll of tape at my chest. “You’re boring now,” he said fondly. “It’s like a Hallmark movie. I liked you better when you two fought about the thermostat.”
“You’re just jealous that your cat doesn’t cuddle as well as Rook does.”
“My cat is extremely affectionate.”
“Your cat tolerates you for food. My man builds me a runway to my dreams and makes chowder from scratch. There’s a difference, Trier.”
Two stalls down, Rafe had his head bent over his laces, and the corner of his mouth was doing the silent-laugh. Across the room, Heath grinned into his elbow pad.
Cross, taping his stick, said without looking up, “If you score tonight, I will personally clear the ice for you. Now sit down.”
I sat. He knew.
I had one job.
I didn’t score in the first period. Didn’t score in the second either, but Rafe did. My failure was eating me alive.
“It’s coming,” Rook said to me, just before the third period.
“What is?”
“Yours.” He didn’t look at me. He looked at the ice. “You’re pressing too hard. You’re trying to score every time you get the puck. Let the right one come.” He went over the wall for the face-off. We were down 3-2.
We tied the score halfway through the period. Rafe won a race to a dead puck in the corner. He cleared it to the front of their net. I got a stick on it, and it bounced off Heath’s skate into their goal. He’d planted himself where nobody could move him, as always.
We only had two minutes left. The two teams traded the puck up and down the sheet like neither one could afford to be the team that blinked.
Rook retrieved a puck in our corner and sent it back down the ice. I was almost a full minute into my shift. My lungs were begging for a rest, but Markel didn’t pull me off. He knew what was supposed to happen, too.
Their d-man tried to flip the puck out of their zone, and Cross knocked it down with his stick. That kept it near their goal, and the entire building sounded as if it were holding its breath.
Cross took one step to drag a winger toward him, and the instant the lane bent, he sent the puck down to me on the half-wall, flat and hard, tape to tape.
I caught it with a defenseman flying at me. I held it half a second past comfortable, till the guy committed his hips, and then I dropped it low to Heath behind the goal line and went to the net.
He didn’t even look for me. He knew and sent it back into the middle of the ice onto my tape with the goalie sprawled the wrong way. The entire top right corner of the net sat open for me.
I didn’t shoot the puck. I placed it.
The lamp came on, the horn went off, and nineteen thousand people rose out of their seats at once. The noise rattled the walls.
I did what I’d been told to do. Instead of looking for Rook, I headed straight for center ice.
He was already on the way. I heard his skates approaching, and we met where the big crest is painted into the ice.
I dropped my gloves and ripped my helmet off, letting it bounce on the ice. He already had his off, carrying it under his arm. I placed my hands on either side of his face. The building was roaring.
With no further thought, I kissed Rook at center ice.
He kissed me back. His hand came up to the back of my neck, and he held me there in front of our team and the entire hockey world.
I started talking. “I did it. Here we are. Did you see the goalie? I placed it. I didn’t even have to—“
Rook kissed me again. He leaned back in and stopped the words with his lips. When he pulled back, he smiled and said, “Hi,” as he would on any weekday afternoon.
Before I could answer, I turned my head to see the entire team coming, and behind them, still at the boards, was Rafe.
He had one glove off, with his hand white-knuckled on the top of the dasher.
He was crying. It wasn’t a soft sob. He had tears running all the way down his twenty-year-old face.
His cheeks were red, and he didn’t try to wipe the tears away.
Rafe wasn’t hiding, and he stared at the two of us standing there with our helmets on the ground between us.
He could have been me at twenty, in a room full of men I was studying for evidence that I could survive when they found out the one thing about me I was hiding.
All season I’d been teaching him to be unmissable in front so nobody looked in the back, and I’d not really thought about what the kid might be keeping in the back.