Chapter 4
LUCA
Ihad seen a lot of hockey fights. Four years as a college player.
Three years working in equipment rooms at various levels.
Hundreds of fights, maybe thousands, the choreographed violence that the sport treats as both a necessary evil and a crowd-pleasing spectacle.
I understood fighting in hockey the way I understood checking and boarding and all the other ways the game allowed men to hurt each other within a framework of rules.
It was part of the sport. It was part of the culture.
It was, for certain players, part of the job description.
Knowing all of this did not prepare me for watching Wes Chen get hurt.
Decker ran Jonah Park into the boards from behind in the neutral zone.
It was borderline dirty, the kind of hit that lived in the grey area between legal and suspendable, and the arena erupted.
Jonah got up slowly. He was fine, but the intent was clear, and the intent was what Wes Chen responded to.
Wes didn't wait for a signal from the bench. He didn't check with Coach Callahan or look for permission. He simply skated to center ice on his next shift and found Decker and the conversation that followed lasted approximately four seconds before the gloves came off.
I was standing in the tunnel, which was my position during games.
Close enough to see, far enough to be out of the way.
I had a clear view of the fight, and the fight was efficient and brutal and over in thirty seconds.
Wes got inside Decker's reach, landed three shots to the body, took a shot to the helmet that snapped his head back, and then landed a right hand to Decker's jaw that dropped the bigger man to the ice.
The crowd roared. Wes's teammates banged their sticks on the boards. The refs escorted both men to the penalty box. Standard procedure. The enforcer had done his job. Order was restored. The system worked.
I watched Wes skate to the penalty box and I watched his hands and I watched his face.
His hands were shaking. The fine tremor that I had noticed before, the one that started after every fight and persisted for hours.
His right hand was gripping his left side, just below the ribs, in a way that was not casual.
And his face, visible for a moment through the penalty box glass, was blank in the specific way that meant everything underneath was in chaos.
Something was wrong.
He came out of the penalty box and played the rest of the second period.
I watched him on every shift. His skating was slightly off.
Favoring his left side. Not dramatically, not enough for the casual observer, but enough for someone who had spent three weeks memorizing the way Wes Chen moved on ice.
Between the second and third period, I went to the training room. The team doctors were there, attending to the usual collection of minor injuries that accumulate during a hockey game. I found Dr. Okafor, the team physician, and asked if anyone had looked at Chen.
"He hasn't come in," she said.
"He's favoring his left side. Took an elbow to the ribs during the fight."
"I'll check him at intermission."
"He won't come voluntarily."
Dr. Okafor looked at me with the particular expression of a woman who had been managing professional athletes for fifteen years and understood their relationship with medical attention. "Then I'll go to him."
She went to him. He resisted. She insisted.
The exam took three minutes and the diagnosis was bruised ribs, left side, which was not serious in the way that broken ribs were serious but was painful in the way that breathing and skating and existing were painful when every inhale reminded you that your body had been used as a weapon and the weapon had taken damage.
Coach scratched him for the third period. Wes sat on the bench in his gear and watched his teammates play the final twenty minutes without him, and the expression on his face was the same one I had seen in the penalty box. Blank. Controlled. A fortress with the drawbridge up and the moat full.
We won 3-2. The locker room was muted because winning while a teammate is hurt doesn't feel like winning.
Guys checked on Wes. Quick, efficient check-ins that respected the unspoken protocol of the locker room, which was: acknowledge the injury, don't linger, don't make it a thing.
Jonah Park, whose hit had started the chain of events, sat next to Wes for a few minutes and said something quiet that I couldn't hear.
Wes nodded. Jonah squeezed his shoulder and moved on.
I stayed late. This was not unusual. Equipment managers always stayed late after games, dealing with the aftermath of thirty men's gear.
Sorting, cleaning, repairing, inventorying.
The work was meditative and I usually enjoyed it, but tonight I was doing it with one eye on the locker room door, waiting to see if Wes had left.
He hadn't. He was at his stall, still in his base layers, moving slowly through the process of changing with the careful deliberation of a man for whom every movement hurt.
His shirt was half on and half off and he was stuck, his left arm unable to complete the motion of pulling the fabric over his head without engaging the muscles along his bruised ribs.
I should have let him be. He was a grown man.
A professional athlete. He could figure out a shirt.
The training staff was available. There were protocols for this kind of thing, chains of command that existed specifically so that the equipment manager did not become personally responsible for a player's physical wellbeing.
I walked over.
"Let me help," I said.
"I'm fine."
"You're stuck in a shirt."
"I'm working through it."
"You've been working through it for two minutes. At this rate, you'll be dressed by Thursday."
He looked at me. The murder face was absent, replaced by something rawer. Pain will do that. It strips the performance away and leaves the person underneath, and the person underneath Wes Chen's enforcer persona was tired and hurting and not fine, regardless of how many times he said the word.
"I don't need help," he said.
"I know. But I'm offering it anyway, because watching you suffer when I can do something about it makes me feel like garbage, and I'm not interested in feeling like garbage tonight. So let me help you with the shirt. Then I'll leave you alone."
A beat. Two. The locker room was empty now except for us. The lights hummed. The air smelled like tape adhesive and industrial soap and the particular post-game musk of a room that had recently contained thirty sweating men.
"Fine," he said.
I stepped close. Closer than I had ever been to Wes Chen, close enough that I could feel the heat radiating off his skin and see the individual hairs on his forearms and count the scars on his knuckles, which I did not do, because counting them would have been the kind of detail that meant something, and I was already carrying too many details that meant something.
I took the hem of his shirt in both hands and lifted it gently over his head, guiding his left arm through the sleeve with the specific care of a man who understood how fabric interacted with injured bodies, because I had been that injured body once, after my shoulder surgery, when I couldn't dress myself for three weeks and my mother had done it with the same focused tenderness that I was now applying to Wes Chen's shirt.
His torso was bare for the three seconds it took to transition from base layer to clean shirt.
Three seconds. Enough to see the bruise spreading across his left side like a storm front, purple and green at the edges.
Enough to see the density of his core, the muscles layered and functional, a body trained for impact.
Enough to see the scar along his lower right ribcage, thin and white and old, the origin of which I did not know and wanted to.
Three seconds. I saw everything. I filed it alongside the sticky notes and the biscotti and the bread confession and the way his body had gone still when my fingers brushed his ankle.
I pulled the clean shirt down over his head and smoothed it across his shoulders.
My hands lingered for a fraction of a second at the base of his neck, where the fabric met skin, and I felt the warmth of him under my palms and I thought about Nonna's instruction to be the warm thing and recognized that in this moment I was not the warm thing. He was.
"There," I said. My voice was steady. I was proud of this. "Clean shirt. You're welcome."
"I didn't say thank you."
"You were going to."
"I wasn't."
"Your eyes said it. Your mouth is just slower than the rest of you."
Something flickered across his face. Not the wall. Something softer, glimpsed through a crack so briefly that if I hadn't been looking directly at him I would have missed it entirely.
Then it was gone. The wall came back. He pulled his bag over his right shoulder and stood.
"Moretti."
"Yeah?"
"I don't need a babysitter."
"Good, because I'm not qualified. I'm more of a pasta-and-emotional-support kind of guy."
There it was again. The flicker. Faster this time, but I caught it. A movement at the corner of his mouth, the architecture of a smile being assembled and then dismantled before it could be completed. He was fighting it. Fighting the impulse to respond to me with something other than resistance.
"Goodnight, Moretti."
"Goodnight, Chen. Ice those ribs. Twenty minutes on, twenty minutes off."
"I know how to ice ribs."
"I know you know. I'm saying it anyway because it makes me feel useful."
He walked out. I stood in the empty locker room and listened to his footsteps fade down the corridor and into the parking garage and then into silence.
I sat down on the bench. The bench was cold.
The locker room was enormous and empty and full of the residual energy of the game, the victory, the fight, the injury, the shirt.
I could still feel the warmth of his skin on my palms. The smoothness of his shoulders under the cotton.
The tension in his body as I dressed him, every muscle coiled and resisting and simultaneously allowing, which was the most Wes Chen thing imaginable.
Resisting and allowing at the same time.
Fighting and yielding in the same breath.
I pulled out my phone. I did not text Sofia. I did not text anyone. I just sat there, in the quiet, and let the warmth settle.
Dr. Okafor had said two to three weeks for the ribs.
Two to three weeks where Wes couldn't play, couldn't fight, couldn't do the one thing that gave him a defined role on this team.
Two to three weeks where he would need help with gear, with training modifications, with the daily logistics of being a hockey player in a body that was temporarily refusing to cooperate.
Two to three weeks of proximity that neither of us had asked for and both of us were going to have to navigate.
I thought about my nonna. About lemons and limoncello and being the warm thing. About the way Wes had said "fine" like a man hammering a nail into a door he desperately wanted to open.
I thought about his ribs, bruised and darkening under a clean shirt that I had put on his body with my own hands.
I thought about the fact that for three seconds, while his torso was bare and his guard was down and the locker room was empty, he had let me be close.
He had not flinched. He had not pulled away.
He had stood there and let me dress him with the bewildered stillness of a man who could not remember the last time someone had been gentle with him and was not sure what to do with it now that it was happening.
I turned off the locker room lights and locked the equipment room and walked to my car in the parking garage and sat behind the wheel and said, out loud, to no one: "You are in so much trouble, Moretti."
The car did not respond. The car was smarter than me.
The car knew that trouble was not something you talked yourself out of.
Trouble was something you drove into with your headlights on and your seatbelt fastened and your nonna's voice in your head saying "Luciano, the world is cold. Be the warm thing."
I started the engine and drove home.
The warm thing. Right.
The problem with being the warm thing is that warmth travels in both directions. You give it out and it comes back, and what was coming back from Wes Chen, in his grudging silences and his almost-smiles and the way he had stood still while I touched him, was enough heat to melt permafrost.
I was in so much trouble.
-e