Chapter 10 Luca
The Uber drops me two blocks from the building.
The driver doesn't know who I am and doesn't care, which is the point.
The team hotel is miles away and the group chat has gone quiet, which means most of the guys are asleep or close to it.
Marchetti texted me twenty minutes ago to ask if I wanted to get food and I told him I was already in bed, which is the first lie I have told him today and the smallest one.
The lobby is empty and I take the elevator up fourteen floors. The hallway is the same hallway. I let myself in with the key I have had since I first lived here two years ago.
The penthouse is dark except for the kitchen light.
His camera is on the coffee table. The novel on the side chair is one I haven't seen before.
The cracked balcony door lets in the steady ocean breeze, and the apartment smells like garlic, lime, and him.
For five seconds, I stand in the doorway with my bag on my shoulder, and my chest does something I can't describe.
"Wes?" I call out as I take my shoes off by the door.
"In the kitchen."
He is at the counter with a glass of water and his phone. Sweatpants, bare feet, a T-shirt that I used to wear. His hair is damp from the shower.
I cross the kitchen. His hand comes up to the side of my neck and his thumb presses behind my ear and he pulls me in and his mouth is on mine and the taste of him is toothpaste and water and the warm steady thing that is just him.
"Hi," he says against my mouth.
"Hi."
"Good game."
"We beat you."
"You beat us. Barely." He pulls back and looks at me. "Your backcheck in the second period was a seven-nine. The skating was there but you overcommitted on the angle."
"You're scouting me now?"
"I'm watching you. There's a difference."
"You watched me for sixty minutes tonight and the first thing you say is my backcheck was a seven-nine."
"The first thing I said was hi. The second thing I said was good game. The scouting report is the third thing."
"The scouting report is not a thing I am accepting from a man I just beat."
He smiles. I have missed it. Months of phone calls and texts and the screen going dark and this is what I have missed.
"Are you hungry?" he asks.
"Starving."
"I made sofrito. There's rice in the pot."
"You cooked after a game?"
"I cooked before the game because I knew you were coming."
He plates the food. His hands are large on the serving spoon and the motion is the same motion I have watched him make in this kitchen for two years.
Steady and unhurried. He sets two plates on the table and I sit across from him and the table is the same table and the chairs are the same chairs and I am the one who is different.
The visitor now in the apartment that used to be mine.
The sofrito is good. I give it a seven-six.
"Seven-six? The sofrito is at least an eight."
"The peppers are excellent. The seasoning is correct. But the rice is slightly overcooked on the bottom layer, which tells me you reheated it and the texture degraded."
"I reheated it because you got here at midnight."
"Texture degradation is texture degradation regardless of the reason. I don't grade on circumstance."
He shakes his head. His fork moves at a pace that is not slow but is deliberate, the way everything about him is deliberate. I watch him eat, and I didn’t think I would miss such a small moment.
"I looked at the spreadsheet on the plane," I say. "You haven't entered anything in two weeks."
"I haven't been eating out."
"Home meals have their own index."
"I know they have their own index. I just haven't been in the mood."
"Not in the mood to rate food?"
"Maybe I just haven't been thinking about it." He says it simply. The way Wes says things that carry weight, with the same level voice he would use to tell me the time.
I let the sentence sit. Haven't been thinking about it. Wes has been thinking about the spreadsheet since the day we built it.
"How's the team?" I ask.
"Good. Winning more than we should. Paulson is still telling the marlin story."
"The marlin has to be twelve feet by now."
"Fourteen. He added a dorsal fin."
He laughs. He's across from me, looking like he's got all the time in the world for me, and I do not know what to do with that.
We finish eating. I carry the plates to the sink because I know the order they go in the rack and my hands remember. I wash and he dries. Like all the other nights we used to do this together. His shoulder is next to mine and his elbow brushes my arm when he turns.
"Balcony?" he says.
"Yeah."
The railing is cool. November in Miami is not summer but the air still carries salt and weight. Wes leans on the railing with both forearms and I lean next to him. His hip is close to mine. Below us the ocean is dark and flat.
I watched him on the ice tonight. From the visitors' bench, through the glass, across sixty minutes of a game neither of us could acknowledge the other one existed in.
He took a shift in the second period where he drove wide on the forecheck and committed to the lane before the passing option had opened.
Two years ago he would have pulled up. Held position.
Waited for the safe play. Tonight he drove through, and the puck went in, and the bench erupted, and I sat on the visitors' side and watched it happen.
He is playing the best hockey I have seen from him. He started playing it when I left for Atlanta.
His hands are on the railing now. The lines at the corners of his eyes are deeper.
"Wes," I say.
"Yeah?"
"You played a hell of a game tonight."
He is quiet for a second. "You beat us."
"You played a hell of a game. That shift in the second. The lane you took."
"I saw it open."
"Two years ago you wouldn’t take that lane."
"Two years ago I probably wouldn’t."
"What changed?"
His forearms stay flat on the railing. The ocean keeps running underneath us.
"I don't know," he says. "I stopped thinking about it so much. The risk. Whether the safe play was the smarter play. I just started playing."
"And it's working?"
"Yeah. It's working. For now."
The ocean fills the silence between us. His breathing is steady. His weight is settled into the railing like he could stand here for hours.
"I can't play hockey forever, Luca."
He says it the way he says everything. Level. Simple. Like he is telling me what time it is.
"Nobody can," I say.
"No. Nobody can."
The ocean fills the silence between us. His breathing is steady. His weight is settled into the railing like he could stand here for hours. His hand finds mine on the railing. His fingers close around my knuckles. His grip is easy, the way his hands have been easy on everything tonight.
He is playing the best hockey I have seen from him. He started playing it the minute I left. The thought arrives and I do not look at it closely.
We stand on the balcony. The ocean underneath. Neither of us speaks for a long time and the silence is not empty. The silence is full of something I will think about on the plane tomorrow when his hand is not on mine and the thinking is harder to stop.
The apartment is quiet when we go inside. He sits on the couch and I sit next to him, close, his arm along the back of the cushion and my shoulder against his side. His hand comes to the back of my neck and his thumb traces behind my ear and his breathing is steady and slow.
"Luca?"
"Yeah."
"I'm glad you came tonight."
"I'm always going to come."
I press my face against his shoulder and his arm tightens around me and his mouth finds mine.
In four hours I will get up and take an Uber back to the team hotel and be in my room before anyone is awake and the lie I told Marchetti will hold for another day.
But for now the penthouse is quiet and the ocean is steady through the door and the man beside me is holding me the way I am holding him.
?