Chapter 3
WES
Luca Moretti was everywhere.
This was, technically, his job. Equipment managers are supposed to be present, moving through the locker room and the bench and the practice facility like a current that keeps everything running.
Sticks taped. Blades sharpened. Helmets adjusted.
The invisible infrastructure of a hockey team maintained by people who never get their names on the scoreboard.
But there is a difference between being present and being inescapable, and Luca Moretti had crossed that line approximately forty-eight hours after the biscotti incident and had not looked back.
He was in the locker room when I arrived at 6:30, already sorting gear.
He was on the bench during practice, handing out water bottles and replacement sticks with an efficiency that bordered on precognitive.
He was in the weight room when I trained, restocking towels and checking equipment that didn't need checking.
He was in the hallway, the parking lot, the training room, the film room.
He was everywhere, and everywhere he was, he was talking.
Not to me specifically. To everyone. Luca Moretti talked the way the ocean produces waves, constantly and without apparent effort.
He talked to the rookies about their stick preferences.
He talked to the veterans about their kids.
He talked to the trainers about protein intake and to the coaches about practice schedules and to the Zamboni driver about a documentary on penguins that he had apparently found life-changing.
He talked and he smiled and he moved through the facility with the particular confidence of a man who believed that every room he entered was better for his presence, and the infuriating thing was that he was right.
The locker room was looser since he'd arrived.
Players lingered longer. The energy was warmer.
Luca had done what three years of team-building exercises and motivational speakers had failed to do.
He had made the Reapers' facility feel like a place people wanted to be.
I did not want to be impressed by this. I was impressed by this.
Two weeks after the biscotti, he reorganized my equipment stall.
I came in on a Monday morning and found my gear arranged with a logic that I had not requested but immediately recognized as superior.
Gloves on the top shelf, easy reach. Helmet on the hook, visor pre-cleaned.
Sticks in the rack, sorted by flex rating, each one labeled with a small piece of white tape showing the date it was last used.
"I didn't ask for this," I said.
Luca was two stalls over, working on a rookie's skates. He looked up with an expression of complete innocence that I did not believe for a second. "Ask for what?"
"The reorganization."
"Oh, that. I noticed your setup wasn't optimized. You were reaching across your body for your gloves, which puts strain on your shoulder, and your sticks were mixed up. The one you used last Tuesday has a hairline crack in the shaft. I pulled it."
"You noticed a hairline crack."
"It's my job to notice hairline cracks."
"In sticks."
"In everything."
He went back to the skates. I stood at my stall and looked at the arrangement and tried to find a reason to be annoyed by it, because being annoyed was easier than being grateful, and being grateful opened doors I wasn't ready to walk through.
I could not find a reason. The arrangement was objectively better. The man had improved my life by approximately twelve percent through the strategic placement of hockey equipment, and I hated him for it in a way that I was beginning to suspect was not hatred at all.
The skate thing happened on a Thursday.
Practice had ended. I was at my stall, unlacing my skates with the methodical slowness of a man whose hands ached and whose fingers didn't want to cooperate.
The laces were tight and my knuckles were swollen from a fight two days earlier that I was pretending hadn't bothered me, and the fine motor control required to thread a lace through an eyelet was proving more difficult than it should have been.
Luca appeared. He did not ask permission. He simply knelt down in front of me and put his hands on my skate and started unlacing it himself.
"I can do it," I said.
"I know you can. Your hands are also the size of catcher's mitts and they're swollen and you've been fumbling with that lace for two minutes. Let me."
His fingers were quick and precise. He worked the laces out with the practiced ease of a man who had done this a thousand times, and I sat there and watched his hands and told myself that the reason my throat was dry was because I hadn't had enough water during practice.
He pulled the first skate off and set it aside. His hand went to the second skate, and in the transition, his fingers brushed the inside of my ankle. Not deliberately. Just the incidental contact of a hand moving from one object to another, passing over skin on the way.
The contact lasted less than a second. A fraction of a fraction. His fingertips against the thin skin above my ankle bone, where the nerve endings are dense and the blood runs close to the surface.
My entire body went still.
Not tense. Not flinched. Still. The way a system goes still when it encounters input it doesn't have a protocol for. A full-body pause, every muscle suspended, my brain running through its database of responses and coming up empty.
Luca didn't notice. Or if he noticed, he didn't acknowledge it, which was either merciful or devastating depending on how you looked at it. He unlaced the second skate, pulled it off, and set it next to the first.
"There," he said. "I'll get these sharpened tonight. Same hollow as usual?"
"Yeah."
"Your left edge is wearing faster than your right. Probably a weight distribution thing. I'll do an extra pass on the left."
"Okay."
"Chen, are you good? You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I'm fine."
"You say that a lot."
"Because it's true a lot."
He stood up. We were close. Closer than the stall geometry required, because he'd been kneeling at my feet and now he was standing and I was still sitting, which put his waist at my eye level, which was a piece of spatial information I had absolutely no use for.
"For what it's worth," he said, looking down at me with an expression that I couldn't read because reading Luca's expressions required a literacy I hadn't developed yet, "you don't have to be fine all the time. That's not a job requirement."
He left. He took my skates with him. I sat at my stall and stared at the place where his fingers had touched my ankle and felt the ghost of the contact like a burn mark that the skin remembers long after the heat is gone.
I drove home. I made dinner. Chicken and rice, the same meal I made four nights a week because it was efficient and nutritionally optimal and did not require the kind of creative engagement that my brain could not currently provide.
I ate standing at the counter, which was how I always ate, because sitting at a table alone felt like an admission of something I wasn't willing to admit.
After dinner, I went to the kitchen and started a loaf. Not because I needed bread. Because I needed my hands to do something that wasn't replaying the feeling of Luca Moretti's fingers on my ankle.
The dough was cooperative tonight. Soft, elastic, responding to pressure with the appropriate give. I kneaded it in the rhythm that had become my meditation, push and fold and turn, push and fold and turn. The kitchen was quiet. The apartment was dark beyond the island of light where I worked.
I thought about the skate.
I thought about his hands. Precise and quick.
The hands of a man who had been a hockey player and now used the same skills to take care of hockey players, and there was something in that transition that I understood.
The body remembers what it was built for.
Luca's hands remembered sticks and pucks and the particular geometry of athletic equipment, and they carried that knowledge into every task, and watching them work was like watching a language being spoken by someone who had learned it as a child and would never fully lose the accent.
I thought about the brush of his fingertips on my ankle. The accidental quality of it. The way my body had responded as if the contact was not accidental at all but seismic, a tremor registering on a scale I didn't know I was calibrated to.
I pushed harder into the dough. The gluten tightened. I was overworking it again.
Here is what I knew about myself: I was twenty-eight years old.
I had been attracted to women for the entirety of my adult life.
I had dated women. I had slept with women.
The sex had been fine. Functional. The relationships had been shorter than they should have been because every woman I dated eventually said some version of the same thing, which was "you're not really here," and they were right.
I was not really there. I was in the rink or in the weight room or in my kitchen at 2 AM, and the women were secondary to the structure I had built to keep myself upright.
I had never looked at a man and felt anything other than the neutral assessment of a competitor.
Bigger than me. Faster than me. Better hands.
Worse skating. The clinical inventory of an athlete measuring himself against other athletes.
This was normal. This was the way locker rooms worked.
You evaluated bodies for what they could do, not for what they looked like, and the distinction was clear and uncomplicated and had never once been in question.
Until Luca Moretti knelt at my feet and touched my ankle and my brain forgot the distinction entirely.
I shaped the loaf and put it in the proofing bowl and covered it and washed my hands and stood at the sink and thought about nothing.
I was very good at thinking about nothing.
It was a skill I had developed over years of sitting in penalty boxes and locker rooms and dark apartments, the ability to empty my mind of content and exist in a state of functional blankness.
Coaches called it focus. Teammates called it intensity.
Therapists, the two I had seen briefly in my early twenties before deciding that therapy required a level of verbal self-expression I was not equipped for, called it avoidance.
I was avoiding.
I was avoiding the fact that my ankle still felt warm where his fingers had been.
That the sticky note was still in my pocket, transferred from yesterday's jeans to today's with a deliberateness I was pretending was accidental.
That I had eaten three more biscotti over the past week, each one consumed alone in my stall like contraband, and that the taste of almonds had become associated in my nervous system with a specific smile on a specific face.
None of this meant anything. I was not attracted to Luca Moretti. I was experiencing a series of unrelated physiological responses to a colleague's proximity, which was a perfectly normal occurrence in a professional environment where physical contact was routine and personal space was limited.
This was my position. This was my analysis.
This was the conclusion of a man who baked bread at midnight because his hands wouldn't stop shaking and who kept a sticky note in his pocket that said "For Grumpy" and who had memorized the location of a tattoo on a shoulder he'd seen for less than three seconds.
The analysis was airtight.
The analysis was complete bullshit.
I turned off the kitchen light and went to bed and lay in the dark and pressed my thumb against the inside of my own ankle, right where his fingers had been, and felt nothing.
Which was the problem. When I touched it, I felt nothing. When he touched it, I felt everything.
I pulled my hand away and stared at the ceiling and added this to the growing list of things I was not thinking about.
The list was getting long. The ceiling didn't care.
Neither did the bread, rising in the dark kitchen, expanding slowly into the space I had given it, the way all living things do when the conditions are right.
-e