Chapter 8 Luca
LUCA
The Crease on a Friday night was the closest thing I'd found to church since moving to Atlanta.
Not in the spiritual sense. In the community sense.
The sense of a place where you belonged by default, where the people around you shared a language and a purpose and the particular bond of having survived something together, even if the something was just a Tuesday practice that Coach Callahan had designed to make grown men question their life choices.
I was three beers deep and feeling good.
The Reapers had won their fourth straight, the team energy was electric, and I was sitting in a booth with Jonah Park and two rookies who were telling a story about their billet family in juniors that involved a pet goat and a Thanksgiving turkey and was getting progressively more unhinged.
Wes was there. This alone was noteworthy because Wes Chen did not typically attend team outings.
He existed in the corner booth like a gargoyle who had been assigned to protect the establishment, nursing a single beer with the same grim focus he brought to penalty kills.
Occasionally he nodded at something someone said.
Occasionally he made eye contact with me across the room, brief and unreadable, and I felt the contact in my sternum like a finger tapping glass.
The ribs were healed. He'd been cleared to play three days ago.
Our daily routine of tea and gear and the slow, careful intimacy of dressing and undressing was over, and its absence had left a space in my mornings that I hadn't figured out how to fill.
I still brought him tea. He still drank it.
But the physical proximity, the hands-on-body closeness that the injury had necessitated, was gone, and I missed it with an intensity that was not professional and was becoming increasingly difficult to categorize as anything else.
I was on my way to the bar for another round when I saw him.
Ryan Keller. Standing at the bar. Ordering a drink.
Looking exactly the way he'd looked three years ago, which was handsome and confident and completely at ease in any room he entered, because Ryan Keller moved through the world with the frictionless certainty of a man who had never been told no and couldn't conceive of a reason why anyone would start.
My body recognized him before my brain did.
A full-system response. Stomach dropping.
Shoulders tightening. The specific, involuntary brace that your body performs when it encounters a source of past damage, the way a hand flinches from a stove it was burned on years ago even when the burner is cold.
He saw me at the same moment I saw him. His face did the thing that charming people's faces do when they encounter someone they've wronged and want to re-engage.
The surprise. The softened eyes. The smile that was calibrated to communicate remorse and warmth and the particular brand of disarming vulnerability that had gotten me into bed with him in the first place.
"Luca." He said my name like a man tasting something he'd missed. "Holy shit. What are you doing in Atlanta?"
"I live here. What are you doing in Atlanta?"
"Conference. Sports medicine thing at the convention center.
" He was a physical therapist now, which made sense because Ryan had always been good with his hands in every context and had parlayed the hockey career that had outlasted mine into a adjacent profession.
"I can't believe you're here. You look amazing. "
"Thanks." The word came out flat. I was not going to give him warmth. My warmth was not his to receive anymore. He had forfeited his access to my warmth in a dorm room at Northeastern when he'd chosen a different defenseman over me and let me find out through a punchline at a party.
"Can I buy you a drink?" he said. "Catch up? It's been years. I'd love to hear what you've been up to."
"I'm here with my team."
"Just one drink. For old time's sake." The smile again. The weaponized charm. "I owe you that, at least."
"You owe me a lot more than a drink, Ryan."
Something flickered behind his eyes. The charm dimmed by a watt. "I know. I know I do. That's why I'd like to talk. I've been meaning to reach out. I handled things badly and I never properly apologized."
"You cheated on me with my teammate and I found out from a joke at a party. 'Badly' is doing a lot of work in that sentence."
"You're right. You're absolutely right." He put his hands up in surrender, the gesture of a man performing accountability. "I was an asshole. I was young and stupid and I hurt the best person I'd ever been with, and I've regretted it every day since."
Every day since. This was a lie, or at best an exaggeration, and I knew it was a lie because Ryan Keller had not contacted me once in three years.
Not an email, not a text, not a carrier pigeon.
His regret, if it existed, had been comfortably silent until it was convenient, which was a type of regret I recognized because I had been the recipient of it before and had learned to identify its particular flavor.
It tasted like charm with nothing underneath.
"I appreciate that," I said. "But I'm going to pass on the drink."
"Luca. Come on. Five minutes."
"I said no, Ryan."
The charm dropped. Just for a second. A flash of something harder underneath, the irritation of a man who was not accustomed to his smile failing.
Then the mask resealed and the charm returned and he said, "Okay.
I understand. But if you change your mind, I'm at the Marriott downtown through Sunday. Room 412."
He said the room number the way he used to say "my place after practice," with the implication embedded in the tone, and the fact that he thought this approach would work, that he believed the same charm that had gotten me three years ago would get me again, made me feel something I hadn't expected. Not anger. Not hurt.
Pity. I felt pity for a man who was thirty years old and still running the same play, expecting different coverage, not realizing that the defense had adjusted.
"Have a good conference, Ryan."
I turned and walked back toward the booth. My hands were steady. My voice had been steady. The interaction had been handled with the kind of grace that I was proud of, the kind of grace that came from three years of processing and therapy and the particular clarity that distance provides.
But somewhere between the bar and the booth, the grace ran out.
It hit me in the hallway near the bathrooms. A wave.
Not of sadness, exactly, and not of anger.
Something more complicated. The residual vibration of an old wound being touched by the hand that made it.
Ryan standing there with his smile and his room number, reducing what we'd had to something transactional, as if the year and a half I'd spent loving him was a line item he could settle with a drink and an apology.
I pushed through the back door of the bar and stepped into the alley.
The night air was cold and sharp and smelled like dumpster and cigarettes and the back end of a restaurant's exhaust fan.
Not glamorous. Not cinematic. Just a man standing in an alley behind a bar trying to remember how to breathe.
I leaned against the wall and pressed my palms flat against the brick and took three breaths.
Four. Five. The breathing technique my therapist had taught me for moments when the past arrived uninvited.
Inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for six.
The extended exhale activates the vagus nerve, which tells your nervous system to stand down, which tells your body that the threat is not current even though your body is responding as if it is.
The door opened behind me.
I did not need to turn around to know who it was.
Some presences announce themselves through sound or scent or the particular displacement of air that a specific body creates when it moves through space.
Wes Chen's presence announced itself through silence.
A heavy, deliberate silence that was different from the silence of an empty alley.
The silence of a person who had followed you outside and was standing three feet behind you and was not going to speak first because speaking first was not something Wes Chen did.
"I'm fine," I said to the wall.
He did not respond. I heard him move closer. Not touching. Not speaking. Just closer. The warmth of another body in the cold alley, present and steady and offering nothing except the fact of itself.
"That was my ex," I said. "Ryan. The one I told you about."
Nothing.
"He's in town for a conference. He wanted to buy me a drink and catch up, which is Ryan-speak for 'I'd like to revisit the thing I destroyed because I'm bored and you were always easy.' I handled it. I'm fine."
Still nothing. But the silence had shifted. It was no longer the neutral silence of a man who happened to be present. It was the charged silence of a man who was choosing not to speak because what he wanted to say would not be appropriate and he knew it.
"You can talk," I said. "I know you have a limited supply but I won't judge."
"I want to break his face."
Six words, delivered in a voice I had never heard from Wes Chen.
Not the flat monotone of the locker room.
Not the careful, measured tone of the kitchen.
Something lower. Darker. The voice of a man whose hands were built for violence and who was currently directing the full force of that capacity at a specific target.
I turned around. Wes was standing in the alley with his hands at his sides and his jaw set and his eyes focused on the back door of the bar as if Ryan Keller might walk through it at any moment and Wes wanted to be ready.
"You are not going to break his face," I said.
"I know."
"He's not worth the suspension."
"I know that too."
"Then why do you look like you're about to go full enforcer in a bar alley?"