Chapter 34
The thing about playing hurt was that the crowd never knew the difference.
But I wasn't playing hurt tonight.
That was new. Or not new exactly. I'd played healthy before, I knew what it felt like—but different now, different in the way things were different when you'd been through something and come out the other side of it.
When you could feel the difference between before and after in your body and your edges and the way the ice came up to meet you when you'd had enough sleep and your head was a zero and the lights were just lights.
Zero. My head was a zero.
I had been playing hurt for so long I had forgotten this was what the other thing felt like.
The Wardens were up by one in the second period and I was running hot, the particular kind of hot where your body stops asking questions and just goes, where everything sharpens down to the next play, the next angle, and the crowd is doing what it does and the ice is doing me personal favors, and before the puck dropped to start the second period I had done the thing I always did now.
I looked for him.
Section 112 was to the left of center ice, slightly elevated, the kind of view a person chose when they wanted to see the whole surface rather than just their team's end.
I knew this because Nathan had told me, precisely, when he'd bought the seat, along with a brief analysis of sightlines and viewing angles that I had absolutely not listened to and had found completely charming.
He was there.
Dark jacket, no lanyard, no tablet, no coat draped over the back of the chair in preparation for a quick exit. Just Nathan Cross, in a seat he'd chosen for the sightlines, looking at the ice with the focused attention he brought to everything.
He wasn't looking at the ice.
He was looking at me.
I found him and he was already looking and for a second it was just that—the two of us, across the distance of an arena, while fifteen thousand people did their pre-puck thing around us.
Then the ref dropped the puck.
I went.
The Morr Roar came down from the upper bowl in the third period.
I'd scored. Of course I'd scored—I'd been seeing the ice the way I saw it when everything was right, the opportunities arriving like gifts, and I'd taken a shot from a place I had absolutely no business taking it from and it had gone in, the way those shots went in when you were running hot and the ice was doing you favors, and the building had lost its mind.
Section 214 started it. The guy in the red jacket, same as always, and it came down in a wave the way it always did, fifteen thousand people doing their best lion impression, and I had my arms up and I was already turning to point at whoever had fed me when I did the thing I always did now.
I looked for him.
He was in the same seat. Of course he was. Nathan Cross did not move from a position he'd chosen without reason. And he was watching me, same as before, and the Morr Roar was rolling through the building and the crowd was insane around him.
He did not do the Morr Roar.
He was not that person. He would never be that person and I did not want him to be that person. Nathan Cross in section 112 in his own clothes with no lanyard was already something I hadn't known I needed and now couldn't imagine the absence of.
But something happened in his expression when the roar hit.
I was far away. Ice-to-stands far. The kind of distance where you couldn't read a face with any reliability, where you went on general impression and silhouette and the quality of a person's stillness.
Nathan was not still.
Not visibly—he wasn't moving, wasn't doing anything the crowd was doing—but something in the quality of his presence had changed, some shift in the way he was holding himself, and whatever it was, it was significant enough that I could see it from the ice, which meant it was significant.
I put my arms down.
I skated to the bench.
Knox was there, saying something at volume about the shot selection, which he did every time I scored from a ridiculous angle because Knox believed in the correct approach to things and found my approach personally offensive on principle.
Jenkins was losing his mind. Dylan was at the other end of the bench doing the jaw thing, the one that wasn't quite a smile.
I didn't hear any of it.
I was thinking about section 112.
We won.
The locker room was what it always was: loud, gear everywhere, Chappell crying, Jenkins doing the thing. I was at the center of it the way I was always at the center of it, giving the room what it needed, absorbing the contact and sending the energy back at a markup.
Except it was different now.
Not the room. The room was the same. I was different—or the giving was different, the transaction had changed in some way I couldn't fully articulate except that it felt less like a system and more like just being there.
Wanting to be there. The crowd giving me the noise not because I needed it to know I was okay but because it was good, it was a good thing, the noise and the game and the team, and I could enjoy it without it being the only thing that told me I was worth anything.
I showered. I changed. I did the post-game the way I did the post-game.
Dylan found me before I left.
He didn't say anything. Just fell into step beside me the way he'd always been able to, quiet and inevitable, and we walked a stretch of corridor together and he said:
"Good game."
"Thanks," I said.
"The shot in the third was stupid," he said.
"It went in," I said.
"It was still stupid."
"Dylan."
"It went in," he said, conceding, which from Dylan was a standing ovation.
We walked a little further.
"He was there," Dylan said. Not a question.
"Yeah," I said.
Dylan nodded. Once.
We got to the place where the corridor split, his direction and mine, and Dylan stopped.
"Wes," he said.
"Dylan," I said.
He looked at me for a moment. The thing that was older than everything between us, the one I'd first seen on the ice in Toronto when Foster had his arms around him and Dylan had been coming for me anyway.
"Good," he said. Just that. Then he went his direction.
I went mine.
The corridor was quieter than the locker room. Quieter than the ice. The building had been full of noise, but now it was letting it go in stages, the crowd already gone, the facility settling into itself.
Nathan was at the end of it.
Dark jacket, no lanyard, hands in his pockets, standing the way he stood everywhere—like he'd assessed the space and decided where to be and the decision was final.
He'd come down from the stands and through the facility the way people who had the right credentials could, and he was waiting in this corridor the way he'd waited in other corridors, patient and certain and not performing the waiting.
I stopped when I saw him.
"You looked for me," he said.
"I always look for you.”
Something moved through his expression. The real thing, the one under the wall, the one I'd been collecting since the first game and was now seeing every day, close up, in our kitchen, in our bed, in a corridor at the end of a game that I'd played healthy and clean and well.
He crossed to me.
His hand came up to my jaw.
The same grip. The same thumb. The thumb that had moved in training rooms and bars and alleys and hotel corridors and a thousand clinical contexts that hadn't been clinical at all, that had been the most honest thing Nathan Cross had ever done in front of me, over and over, since the beginning.
"Good game," he said.
I looked at him. At the blue eyes and the jaw and the dark hair with the silver at the temples, at the man who had sat in a chair all night and cleaned a floor and reported himself and restructured his career and chosen, repeatedly, without hesitation, to be here.
"Yeah," I said. "It was."
His thumb moved against my jaw.
Just once. Just slightly.
The corridor was quiet.
I put my hand over his, the way I'd done in a Toronto locker room at midnight, the way I'd done in a hotel room while the city was dark outside the window, the way I'd been doing since I understood that Nathan Cross's hands were where things got said that his words couldn't always get to.
He didn't move away.
He never moved away anymore.
"Let's go home," I said.
Nathan looked at me for one more moment. The full version of his smile—not almost, not the corner of his mouth, the real one, the one that had been getting closer to the surface for months and now just—lived there.
"Yes," he said.