Chapter 31 Wes
The visitor's tunnel smells the same in every building.
Cold concrete, rubber matting, the chemical bite of the ice surface rolling back through the Zamboni doors.
I have walked a hundred of these tunnels across fifteen years and the body does not need to think about the walk anymore.
The legs carry me. The skates are taped. The stick is right.
Atlanta's rink is newer than any other. The glass is clean, the lighting bright and even, the seats still carrying the new-arena smell that fades by year three.
I step onto the ice and the surface is good, fresh cut, the edges biting the way they should.
I take a lap along the boards, slow, letting the legs wake up.
Paulson is behind me. Reeves to the right, already working the puck along the wall.
Except tonight I am looking across the center line.
He comes out of the home tunnel at a jog, stick in one hand, helmet already on. His shoulders are set the way they used to be set in Miami, when his body knew what it wanted and went to get it.
The warm-up drills run for eight minutes. I take shots on our goalie. I stretch my hip against the boards and watch the Atlanta end. He is in the shooting line, taking wristers on the glove side, and the release is close to right. Not perfect but close.
The lines meet at center for the final minute.
Both teams skating easy laps, the ice shared, the convention of warm-up neutrality holding the way it holds in every building.
I drift toward the center line. He drifts toward the center line.
Two professionals in a professional setting and the convention says nothing about what is happening inside my chest when he skates past me at three feet and his eyes find mine for half a second.
"Hey," he says. Low. Under the building noise.
"Hey."
"Nice of you to visit." The grin that I used to get a year ago.
"Schedule helped."
"The schedule. Right." He’s wearing the private grin. "Good to see you."
"You too."
He skates on. I skate on. The half-second is over and the building is loud and neither of us has broken anything the cameras could catch.
A body comes alongside me at the line.
"Mercer."
"Asher."
"Good to see you." He says it simple and plain and the sentence is carrying the weight of a living room where he sat three weeks ago and watched me hold the man he came to check on.
He doesn't say anything else. He taps my shin with his stick, the way players tap each other when the acknowledgment is enough, and skates back toward his end.
I take my position for the anthem. Across the ice, in the home lineup, he is standing with his helmet off and his hand on his chest and I can see his jaw from here, set, steady, ready to play.
The game runs the way games run. I take my shifts.
The puck finds my tape and I put it where it belongs and the body does what fifteen years have taught it to do.
Second period, I win a faceoff clean and drive the puck wide and the play develops and the pass finds Reeves in the slot. Shot goes wide but the play was clean.
Between shifts, I watch him.
He is on tonight. The edges are sharper than the last game I watched on the hotel television a few days ago, sharper than anything since the fall.
He puts a pass on Marchetti's tape in the second period and the play converts and the building shakes and he skates back to the bench and taps his stick on the boards and I can see it from the visitor's bench, the thing I am watching for.
He looks like the man I knew in Miami. Not identical.
Leaner, the face sharper, the eyes carrying what they carry now.
But the man on the ice tonight is playing hockey because his body wants to play hockey.
We lose four-two. I shower and dress and tell Paulson I'm meeting a friend. Paulson says "Tell Berger the grouper index says hi.” I smile and walk out of the visitor's tunnel into the Atlanta night.
The key still works. I turn the deadbolt and the apartment opens and the first thing I register is that it is different. The dishes are in the cabinet, not the sink. The mail is gone from the counter. A jacket on the hook by the door that was not there three weeks ago.
Mouse finds me before I find the kitchen. She comes around the corner at speed, her body low and purposeful, and stops at my feet.
"Hey, Mouse."
She yells at me once, sharp and specific, and walks to the kitchen and sits by her bowl and yells again.
"I fed her when I walked in," he says from the couch. He is in a T-shirt and sweats, his hair damp, his legs pulled up. "She's lying."
"She seems convincing."
"She's a professional liar. It's her best quality."
"That's a high bar. She's got a lot of good qualities."
"Volume. Deception. Surveillance. She's a triple threat." He stands and comes to the kitchen. Leans against the counter two feet from me. "Are you cooking or am I cooking?"
"I'll cook."
"You want help?"
"You can cut limes."
"I can cut limes." He opens the drawer and pulls out the cutting board and the knife and the motion is easy, practiced. The cutting board was not in that drawer three weeks ago. He has reorganized. He sees me watching. "Gwen suggested routines. The kitchen was part of it."
"Gwen suggested you reorganize your kitchen?"
"Gwen suggested structure. I interpreted it as knowing where my own cutting board lives." He sets a lime on the board. "She's good, Wes."
"Yeah?"
"She doesn't let me do the rating thing. I rated her office and she just sat there and waited until I was done and then asked me the actual question."
"What was the actual question?"
"She wanted to know what I do when I'm alone in this apartment at night." He cuts the lime in half. Focused on the lime, and not on me. "I didn't have a good answer."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her the truth. I told her I watch the ceiling and wait for it to be tomorrow."
I don't say anything. His hands are steady on the cutting board.
"That was a couple of weeks ago," he says. "Now I have a better answer."
"What's the better answer?"
"I feed Mouse. I watch film. I read. I go to bed at a time that Gwen and I agreed on instead of whenever the ceiling lets me. It's not exciting. But it's mine."
"That's a good answer."
"It's a true answer."
The chicken goes in the pan with oil and salt. The limes go into wedges. The rice goes on the back burner. Mouse positions herself on a bar stool with the focus of a supervisor evaluating technique.
"She's judging your heat," he says.
"The heat is fine."
"Mouse disagrees. Look at her face."
"It’s a cat face."
"Her face is specifically communicating that you're running the pan too hot."
"The pan is not too hot."
"Wes, the pan is smoking."
I turn the heat down. He grins at me. I’ve missed seeing him like this.
"Seven-point-three for the chicken," he says, tasting the edge of the pan sauce. "The acid is right. You need more salt."
"I just started."
"I'm giving a preliminary rating. The final is pending." He pulls out his phone and types something. "The spreadsheet is back, by the way."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Gwen didn't suggest that one. That was me. I missed it."
We eat at the counter because the table has his laptop and a stack of papers from what looks like a Gwen assignment.
"Eight-point-one," he says. "For the whole meal. The rice is carrying it. The chicken needs work."
"The chicken is fine."
"The chicken is a seven-four. The lime saves it from a seven-flat."
"You're being generous."
"I am being accurate. Generosity is an eight-five."
After dinner the apartment settles. Mouse retires to her spot on the couch arm. The dishes are done and drying in the rack and the kitchen smells like lime and chicken and the counter is wiped clean.
"Shower," he says. He is still carrying the game in his shoulders, the way ice time sits in the body for hours after the final horn. "Come with me."
"Yeah."
The bathroom is small and clean. White tile.
A towel folded on the rack that was not folded two weeks ago.
He turns the water on and pulls his shirt over his head and I see his ribs again, the ridge under the skin where the weight has not come back yet.
I put my hand on his side. My thumb finds the bone.
He breathes in and holds it and I hold my hand there and say nothing because nothing is what the moment needs.
He hooks his thumbs in the waistband of his sweats and pushes them down his hips.
No hesitation. Steps out of them and stands in front of me in the bathroom light and his cock is already thickening against his thigh.
I pull my own shirt off. His eyes track my chest, my stomach, the ink on my arm.
He watches me push my sweats down and his gaze drops and stays and his mouth parts.
"Fuck," he says softly. "I missed you. I missed this." His hand comes out and his fingers trace the line of muscle above my hip, light, deliberate, following the cut down to where it meets my thigh. "All of this."
He steps under the water. I follow him in and pull him in for a kiss, our tongues tangling together.
The spray is hot and the steam fills the room and his hair goes dark and flat against his forehead and he turns to face me.
Water running down his chest, pooling in the hollow of his collarbones, streaming over his stomach.
His cock is hard now, flushed dark. I run my hands over his chest. I have not touched him this way since Aruba and my whole body is tight with it.
His hand finds me first. His fingers wrap around my cock and the grip is firm and sure and the first stroke pulls a groan out of me.
He does it again, slow, his thumb dragging over the head on every pass, smearing the slick that is already leaking from me.
His eyes stay on mine. He knows what he is doing.
He has always known what he is doing with his hands.
I reach between us and take him in my fist. He is hard and hot and thick in my grip and his breath catches when I squeeze.
I stroke him once, slow, root to tip, and his hips push forward into my hand.
The water is running between us, making everything slick, and the sound of my hand on his cock is obscene in the small tiled room and I want more of it.
"Like that," he says. His voice has dropped, low and rough and stripped. "Don't stop."
"I'm not stopping."
I pull him closer with my free hand on the back of his neck.
His forehead comes to rest against my shoulder and his breathing goes ragged against my skin.
I can feel his mouth open, his teeth grazing my collarbone, and his hand tightens on my cock and speeds up and I match him.
His hips are working now, fucking into my fist, and the wet slide of it and the heat of him against me and the sounds he is making against my neck are pulling everything in my body toward a single point.
"Fuck, Wes." His voice cracks. His free hand grabs my hip, nails digging in, pulling me closer so our cocks are pressed together in the tight space between our bodies.
I shift my grip and take us both in my hand, his cock against mine, slick with precome, and he groans against my throat and the sound vibrates through my chest.
"God." He bites down on my shoulder. Not hard. Hard enough. "Your hands. I think about your hands every fucking night."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. In this shower. Alone. Thinking about your hands."
I tighten my grip and stroke us together, and he shudders.
His hand covers mine, adjusting the pressure, and we work each other in the tight heat between our bodies.
His back is against the tile, water pouring over us, and his cock is leaking against mine.
I can feel every ridge and vein of him in my palm.
"Wes." He lifts his head and looks at me. The water on his face. His pupils blown wide and his lips swollen and his jaw tight. "I'm close. I want to watch you."
"Then watch."
His eyes hold mine. His hips stutter and I feel his cock pulse hard against mine.
He comes in my hand with a groan that fills the bathroom, hot and thick between us, his mouth open against my jaw, his whole body shaking.
The feel of it, his cock throbbing against mine, his come slick between my fingers, tips me over.
I follow him with my face in his wet hair and his name in my mouth, quiet, just his name.
The water runs. Both of us breathing. His hand stays on my hip. My hand stays where it is, loosening, holding us both through the last pulses until we are spent and still. His chest rises and falls against mine.
I turn off the shower and towel him off. He lets me. I dry his shoulders, his chest, the ridge of his ribs where my thumb was before. He watches my hands the whole time and says nothing.
The bedroom is dark. The bed is made, clean sheets. A book on the nightstand that is not the book he was reading in Aruba. Mouse's blanket folded at the foot. He pulls me down beside him and presses his face into my shoulder and his body curves into mine.
"Wes?"
"Yeah."
"What time is your flight?"
"Eleven."
"Stay as long as possible."
"I'm not going anywhere tonight."
"Good." His hand goes slack on my chest. His breathing evens. He is asleep in two minutes.
I hold him. Mouse appears in the doorway, considers the situation, and jumps onto the bed and settles at our feet with a purr that fills the dark.
The man asleep on my chest is not fixed but he’s doing the work. It’s showing in the dishes cleaned, groceries stocking the fridge and the reorganized kitchen. He’s not fixed but he’s getting better.
?