Chapter 34 Luca
The key works. It has always worked. The deadbolt turns and the door opens to the kitchen, the balcony, and the ocean through the glass.
We lost five-two. I played nineteen minutes and had an assist and the loss was a team issue and I showered in the visitor's room and told Marchetti I would see him at the hotel in the morning.
Wes turns from the counter. He’s in a T-shirt and shorts and his hair is damp from his own shower and he has cooked.
Lime and garlic and the low sweetness of chicken that has been sitting in a pan with the heat turned down.
The ocean air comes through the balcony door, warm and salt-heavy the way it came through every night I lived here.
Two years of that air moving through this apartment, and the sound of the water is the sound I used to fall asleep to before I learned how to fall asleep to traffic in Atlanta.
I drop my bag by the door. I come to the kitchen. He has plated the chicken with rice and lime wedges and the cutting board is still on the counter with the remnants of the prep.
"Seven-point-eight for presentation," I say.
"You haven't tasted it." He smiles back at me.
"Presentation is a separate category. You know this."
We eat at the table because we have always eaten at the table. The rice is the rice he makes when I am here, the one with cilantro and the pinch of sugar he has been denying for two years.
"Eight-point-one," I tell him.
"For the chicken?"
"For the meal. The chicken is an eight-three. The rice loses a point for the sugar you pretend isn't in it."
"There's no sugar in the rice."
"Wes. There is sugar in the rice. There has been sugar in the rice since the first time you made it for me. I have the spreadsheet."
He puts his fork down. He looks at me. The almost-smile is gone and his hands are still on the counter and I know this look. I have known this look since the first night on the couch when he said my name into my hair and meant it.
"Luca, I want to talk with you about something."
"Okay," I say, confused by how he said that.
"I talked to Kyle this week. About my contract. The buyout clause."
"The buyout clause?"
"The one that says I can end my contract early. Kyle wrote it that way." His hands haven't moved. "I'm going to retire, Luca. At the end of the season."
The sentence arrives and my chest does the thing my chest does.
"No," I say. "You can't do that."
"I can."
"Wes, You're having the best season of your career. You can't retire now, that's insane."
"Well, I think I can retire whenever I want." He smiling when he says this
"You are not retiring for me." My voice is louder than I want it to be. "I will not be the reason you walk away from the ice. I am not going to be the thing you sacrificed your career for. That is not what this is."
"That's not what this is, Luca."
"Then why? Why now, why this year, why when I'm the one who fell apart and you're the one who's playing the best hockey of your life?"
"Because I have been wanting this." He says it plain and steady. "I just hadn't said it yet."
I stop. My mouth is open and the next argument is lined up and the sentence he just said is sitting in the kitchen between us and it does not sound like a sacrifice. It sounds like a man who has been holding something for a long time and has finally set it down.
"I don't believe you," I say. But my voice is quieter.
"I know you don't. That's why I'm going to say it again.
" He turns his hand over on the counter, palm up.
"I have been wanting to retire since the day you got on the plane to Atlanta.
Before that, maybe. Since Aruba. Since the morning I watched you walk ahead of me on the beach and something in my chest told me what I wanted, and it wasn't the ice, and it wasn't the career, and it wasn't the wall I have spent fifteen years holding. "
"Wes..."
"It's you. It has been you. The career is real but it’s not what I want. What I want is to be where you are."
He stops. His hand is still palm-up on the granite. His jaw works once, the way it does when the next sentence costs him something to say.
"I brought you into this," he says. "The closet was mine. I built it before you were in it and I asked you to live under rules I'd been carrying. I should have given you more choice what that looked like."
The sentence is plain and spare and it is not an apology. It is a man looking at the life he built and naming what it cost the person who lived inside it.
"I told Gwen," I say. My voice is rough. "I told her I don't think I know how to be a person who isn't useful. That when the function stopped working there was nobody underneath."
"You told me. On the phone."
"I think I believed that if you gave something up for me it would prove that was right. That the only way I get to be loved is by being inside what someone else built for me. And if you retire for me then I am inside what you gave up and that's not love."
"It's not for you," he says. "It's for me but also for us."
The sentence sits in the kitchen. It sits in the salt air from the balcony and the scratch on the granite and the half-eaten plate of chicken and the sound of the water through the open door.
I put my hand in his.
"I'm not happy like this," I say. "The distance. The phone calls that aren't enough. Being in Atlanta while you're here. I have been doing the work and I am not the same person I was in February. But I am not happy like this and I didn't think I was allowed to say that."
"You're allowed."
"I know. I'm learning that." I press my thumb into his palm. "I have been wanting this too, but I need to know you’re doing this for you.”
“I can’t say that you had no influence on the decision at all, but I can say I am doing this for me.” He closes his hand around mine, just holding.
"When do will you tell people about the retirement?" I say.
"We’ll announce it after the season. Kyle handles the front office and PR stuff. The rest, we figure out together. On our terms."
"Our terms." The words are new in my mouth and they taste right.
“If you want to be open about our relationship, then we can do that. If you want to announce it, that’s fine too. Whatever you want this to look like, I want that.”
I am quiet for a second. The words sit in the kitchen and underneath them is something I have not let myself feel yet, something larger than Wes or the retirement or the plan.
No more scanning a room before I speak. No more calibrating the distance between us in public so the math of it reads as teammates and nothing more.
No more being half a person in every room that is not this one.
It is just a man sitting in a kitchen deciding he is allowed to have a life that is not split in half.
He lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles. The gesture is small and warm and so Wes.
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