Chapter Four
Shay
We lost by one.
One goal. Fifty,seven seconds left in the third, their winger finding a seam that shouldn't have existed, and the puck was in the net before anyone had time to be sorry about it.
The horn sounded and the visiting team celebrated on our ice and I stood at the blue line with my stick on my knees and felt the loss settle into my body the way bad losses did , not sharp, not loud, just heavy.
A stone dropped into still water, sinking slow.
The locker room afterward had the specific silence of a group of men who were all doing their own private accounting. Coach came in, said the necessary things, said them without cruelty, and left. Nobody argued. Nobody chirped. Even I didn't have anything.
Felix sat two stalls down, still in half his gear, elbows on knees, looking at the floor with the focused expression of a man replaying every decision in the third period and finding each one wanting.
I knew that look. I had catalogued that look.
I wanted, badly, to say something that would make it stop.
I didn't have the right to do that yet.
So I got changed, and I let the silence be, and when Kieran quietly suggested the bar three blocks from the hotel, I said yes before anyone else could.
The bar was warm and undiscriminating and blessedly not full of people who knew us.
We took a corner , me, Kieran, Mivo, Reeves, Felix, Charlie, and Hartley, who appeared like a man who had decided that tonight required solidarity and had adjusted his retirement schedule accordingly.
The first round came and went. The conversation started slow and loosened gradually, the way it always did , loss becoming story becoming something survivable.
I was louder than the loss warranted. I knew it.
I was filling the space with noise because the alternative was sitting in the silence of that fifty,seventh second, and I didn't want to be there anymore.
I ordered a second drink and then a third and let the warmth of the room and the sound of Mivo laughing and the particular amber light of a decent bar do their work.
Felix nursed the same drink for an hour. I tracked this the way I tracked everything about him , peripherally, automatically, the way you track weather when you're trying to decide what to wear.
The table thinned. Hartley went first, with a nod that contained, I thought, a surprising amount of warmth for a man whose face didn't really do warmth.
Reeves followed. Mivo lasted another forty minutes before his eyes went heavy and Kieran shepherded him out with the practiced ease of someone who had done it before.
Kieran looked back at me on his way to the door, looked at Felix, looked back at me, and did an extremely subtle and completely obvious eyebrow thing that I chose to ignore entirely.
Charlie settled his tab. Stood. Looked between us. "Early skate," he said, to both of us, to neither of us, in the tone of a man delivering information he knew was irrelevant.
"Yeah," I said.
"Night," Felix said.
Charlie left.
And then there were two.
The bar noise continued around us , other tables, other people, other losses and wins and ordinary Tuesday nights. Felix turned his glass on the table. I watched him do it and didn't pretend I wasn't watching.
"Talk to me," I said.
He looked up. "About what."
"Whatever's in your head right now. You've been in there since the third period."
His jaw shifted. "It was a coverage breakdown. I should have,"
"Felix."
He stopped.
"Not the game," I said. "What's actually in your head."
He looked at me for a long moment. The bar light caught the line of his face, the careful architecture of him, and underneath it the thing I'd been seeing more of lately , the thing that showed when he was tired of holding everything at the right distance.
"I don't know how to turn it off," he said. Quiet. "The analysis. After a loss. It just," He stopped. "It runs."
"I know."
"It's not useful."
"It's also not a choice," I said. "You can't logic your way out of caring about the game."
He looked at his glass. "You don't do it."
"I do it differently. I get loud instead of quiet. Same thing." I leaned forward, elbows on the table. "You think I was doing all that talking tonight because I was having a great time?"
He looked at me. Something shifted in his expression , understanding landing, quiet and specific. "The loss," he said.
"Yeah."
"You were,"
"Coping badly in a different direction. Yeah." I picked up my drink. "We're both disasters. Yours is just better dressed."
His mouth did the thing. Just barely. In the amber light, with his guard down at the edges the way it only got when it was late and he was tired and there was nobody left to perform for , it was devastating. He was devastating. I had known this for two years and the knowing had not made it easier.
"Shay," he said.
"Yeah."
He looked at me with the look. The one from the dinner table, the one I'd lost the thread for. Not trying to look away.
"We should get back," he said. "Early skate."
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
The hotel was three blocks. The night was cold , the specific, clarifying cold of late season, the kind that made everything feel more precise.
We walked without talking, not because there was nothing to say but because there was too much, and the cold had a quality that asked you to just move through it.
Our shoulders were close. Not touching. Close.
The lobby was quiet. The elevator was quiet. The hallway was quiet in the way hotel hallways always were , that suspended, in,between hush of a place that existed only for transition.
I used my key card. The door opened.
The room was dark except for the city light coming through the gap in the curtains , a thin strip of amber crossing the floor between our beds.
Felix set his jacket on the chair. I dropped my bag.
The sounds were the same as always: the particular thud of gear hitting carpet, the hum of the air conditioning, the muffled distance of the city outside.
I sat on the edge of my bed.
Felix stood in the middle of the room, still in his coat, not quite moving toward anything. He was doing it again , the running, the analysis, the version of himself that stood at the blue line after a loss and couldn't put the game down. I could see it. I always could.
"Hey," I said.
He looked at me.
"Stop," I said. "Just , stop for a second. You're allowed to stop."
He looked at me for a long time. The amber light crossed the floor between us.
Then something in him , just a fraction, just enough , let go.
He sat on his bed, facing me. The room was very quiet. The city murmured somewhere far below. His elbows went to his knees, head dropping slightly, and he dragged one hand through his hair in the gesture I had maybe three times ever seen from him , unguarded, unplanned, just tired.
I was across the room. Then I wasn't.
I didn't decide it. I crossed the strip of light between the beds and I sat down beside him on his bed and I was close enough to feel the warmth of him in the cold room and I thought: I'm so tired of the distance.
Four years of managing distance, calculating it, maintaining it like a line on the ice that you weren't allowed to cross , and I was tired. I was just tired.
I kissed him.
Not gently. Not with a question in it. I turned and closed the gap and kissed him the way I had been not,kissing him for two years, like I already knew what it felt like and was finally, finally allowed to confirm it.
For one half,second he was completely still.
Then his hands came up and gripped the front of my shirt and he kissed me back.
Hard and certain and immediate, both hands , one fisted in my collar and one coming up to the back of my neck , and the noise of the city dissolved into white static and I thought with the last coherent part of my brain: oh.
There it is. There you are. Sixty seconds.
Maybe more. Maybe less. Time was doing something unreliable and I didn't care.
His mouth was warm and sure and everything I had been not,thinking about for two years confirmed in one long devastating breath.
Then Felix pulled back.
Not away , his hands were still there, still in my shirt, still at my neck , but back enough to breathe.
His eyes were open. Looking at me with an expression I had never seen on him before, something cracked open behind the control, almost relief, almost terror, the look of a man who had just done something he couldn't put back in the box it came from.
"We can't do this," he said.
His hands were still in my shirt when he said it.
I looked at him. At his hands. Back at his face.
"You just did, though," I said.
His jaw worked. Something moved behind his eyes.
He let go of my shirt , slowly, the way you let go of something you don't want to put down , and sat back.
Looked at the floor. Looked at the wall.
Looked anywhere but at me with the focused desperation of a man rebuilding a structure that had just taken a direct hit.
"Shay,"
"It's okay," I said.
He looked at me.
"I mean it," I said. "We don't have to , I'm not pushing. It's okay." I stood up. Crossed back over the strip of light. Sat on my bed. Looked at him across the dark room. "But for the record. You kissed me back."
He didn't say anything.
"That's all," I said. "Just , for the record."
The silence had a shape now, specific and full. Felix sat on his bed with his hands on his knees and looked at the floor between us and breathed.
"Go to sleep, Shay," he said. Very quiet.
I lay back on my pillow. Looked at the ceiling , smooth, hotel,bland, no cracks, nothing to study.
"Yeah," I said. "Okay."
I turned off the lamp on my side. The room went to just the city light, the thin amber strip between us on the floor.
From his bed, after a long time, Felix reached over and turned off his lamp too.
The dark settled. The city murmured. I lay on my back with my hands on my chest and listened to him breathe and thought about his hands in my shirt and the look on his face and the two words he hadn't been able to say.
I don't want to.
He hadn't said it. I hadn't imagined that. He had said we can't , and I had been paying attention to Felix Wren for four years, long enough to know the difference between a man who didn't want something and a man who wanted it badly enough to be terrified of it.
From across the dark room: "Shay."
I waited.
A long silence. Long enough that I thought he'd changed his mind.
"Good game tonight," he said. Quiet. Like an apology. Like something else entirely.
I closed my eyes.
"Yeah," I said. "Good game."