Chapter 14
NICO
I woke up in a bed for the first time in seven weeks. The ceiling was wrong.
Not wrong-bad. Just wrong-different. The guest room ceiling had a hairline crack near the light fixture that I'd traced with my eyes every night since arriving. This ceiling was smooth. This ceiling belonged to a room that smelled like Kieran.
I was in Kieran's bed. The sheets were tangled around my waist. Morning light came through the window in pale stripes. Beside me, the mattress was still warm but empty. The kettle hissed in the kitchen. He hadn't wanted to disturb me.
I lay there and waited for the panic.
It didn't come. Or rather, it came in a muted form, not the full-body alarm of danger, you're somewhere you shouldn't be, but something softer, a quiet voice in the back of my head that said this is temporary, don't get comfortable.
The good thing always ends. The voice sounded like my father. It usually did.
I got up, pulled on my shorts, and walked to the kitchen.
Kieran stood at the counter in sweatpants and a T-shirt, pouring tea into two mugs.
He glanced up when I appeared. His expression was blank, the goalie's mask—the one that gave nothing away—but his eyes moved over me.
Down, then up. A half-second inventory of the body he'd spent last night memorizing.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning."
He slid my mug across the counter. Green tea. The perfect temperature because he'd poured the water two minutes ago and let it cool, because he knew I didn't like it scalding.
We drank in silence. It should have felt different, more complicated, weighted with the significance of what had changed. Instead, it felt like every other morning we'd shared in this kitchen. The mugs in their row. The pale light on the counter. Two men drinking tea.
Except that my toothbrush was in his bathroom now.
Over the next week, other things migrated.
My phone charger appeared on his nightstand, the left side, because I'd discovered he preferred the right.
A Storm hoodie that was mine ended up on the back of his desk chair, and when I went to retrieve it, he said "Leave it" without looking up from his book.
My copy of The Kalevala moved from the guest room nightstand to his, and when I saw it there, sitting beside his thriller and his glass of water, occupying space in his most private room, my throat closed with an emotion I didn't have a Finnish or English word for.
The duffel bag stayed in the corner of the guest room, half-packed.
I couldn't bring myself to unpack it. The toothbrush could migrate.
The hoodie could migrate. But the bag was a boundary I wasn't ready to cross, because unpacking meant believing this was permanent, and I'd learned, through months and years of mounting evidence, that nothing in my life qualified.
Tuesday evening at the apartment. Kieran was at the stove, sleeves pushed up, the knife in his hand working through asparagus.
The salmon was resting on cedar planks. I sat on the counter beside him, which was new.
Before, I'd sat at the counter, across from him.
The shift from across to beside had happened the morning after that first night, and neither of us had commented on it.
I had the Kalevala open in my lap. I was reading the passage about Lemmink?inen, the reckless hero, the one who kept getting killed and resurrected by his mother's love.
The Finnish words moved through my mouth in a whisper, the vowels soft and round, the consonants doubled in ways that made English speakers' eyes cross.
"You're doing it again," Kieran said.
"Doing what?"
"The Finnish. You mouth the words when you read."
"I've always done that. Mummu used to tease me about it. She said I read like a fish."
"I like it." He said it simply. A statement of fact, delivered with the same certainty he brought to post-game analysis. The angle was wrong. The rebound was controlled. I like it when you read in Finnish.
I looked at him. He was concentrating on the asparagus, his jaw set, a faint flush climbing the back of his neck.
The flush told me what the words hadn't, that the admission had cost him something, that the careful, controlled Kieran Walsh who never said more than he meant had just said exactly what he meant and was slightly terrified by it.
"You're staring," I said.
"Observing. There's a difference."
"What are you observing?"
He set the knife down and turned to face me. The stove light caught his eyes. He was standing between my knees now. His hands rested on the marble on either side of my thighs.
"You," he said. "I'm observing you. I've been doing it since the night you rearranged my mugs, and I haven't stopped, and I'm starting to think I'm not going to."
My heart was doing something inadvisable. I set the Kalevala aside and placed both hands flat on his chest, fingers spread, the same anchor I'd used the night I woke up in his bed and nearly bolted.
"Everyone who's watched me for the last year has been looking for evidence," I said. "You're the first person who's looked at me like—"
"Like what?"
"Like you're trying to see me instead of solve me."
His hands came up and covered mine.
"I see you," he said.
The facility was a different universe.
At the rink, we were Walsh and Varis. Six feet of distance in the hallway.
Separate tables in the cafeteria. The neutral nod when we passed each other between drills, the same nod he gave Hayes, Eriksson, anyone.
If our eyes met during practice, it was the brief, professional acknowledgment of a goalie tracking a forward, nothing more.
Nothing that a teammate, a coach, or a reporter with a telephoto lens could interpret as anything other than two professionals coexisting.
The performance was exhausting. Not because it was difficult.
I'd spent a year making myself invisible, and the skill hadn't atrophied.
But the contrast between public and private had become so sharp that the transition felt physical, like walking through a door between two climates.
Cold at the facility. Warm at home. His hands on my skin behind a locked door.
One afternoon, we passed each other in the corridor outside the weight room.
A group of guys was twenty feet behind us.
Garrett, Morrison, and a couple of the younger forwards.
Kieran's hand brushed mine as we walked.
Not a grab, not a hold. Just the backs of his fingers trailing across my knuckles, a contact so brief and light that no one behind us could have caught it.
But I felt it. I felt it like a current through my whole arm, and I carried the ghost of that touch through the next two hours of practice and film session and cool-down.
When we got home and the apartment door closed behind us, I turned and pushed him against it and kissed him until neither of us could breathe.
"What was that for?" he asked, his voice wrecked.
"The hallway."
"I barely touched you."
"I know."
He looked at me, those grey-blue eyes, the sharp features, the mouth that was swollen from mine, and wonder moved across his face. The specific wonder of a man who'd lived alone for eleven years discovering that another person's presence didn't diminish his space but expanded it.
In the guest room, the duffel bag sat in the corner, half-packed, still waiting.