Chapter Eight
Shay
The thing about being fine was that it required maintenance.
This was not something I had previously understood.
I had spent the better part of my adult life being fine in the natural, effortless way , the way you're warm in summer, the way you're loud in a room full of people who want noise, the way you tell a story and feel it land and ride the landing all the way home.
Fine had never been work. Fine had just been the weather.
This was different.
This fine had architecture. Load,bearing walls. A foundation I was actively monitoring for cracks every time Felix Wren skated within fifteen feet of me, which at practice was, conservatively, every forty,five seconds.
I was doing well. I wanted it noted, by whoever was keeping score, that I was doing spectacularly well.
Monday practice: clean. Focused. I ran every drill at the right pace, hit my marks, said nothing that wasn't useful. Coach Denny looked at me twice during the neutral zone work with the expression of a man recalibrating something, which I chose to interpret as professional admiration.
Tuesday: same. Possibly better. I blocked out a shot in the corner that I had no business getting to and didn't celebrate it at all, just turned and went back to position like a man who did this constantly, like a man who was not running on the specific energy of someone who had spent the previous evening lying on his own ceiling thinking about an okay that had no bottom to it.
Wednesday, Kieran fell into step beside me on the way off the ice and said, in the tone of a man approaching something unstable: "Are you sick?"
"I'm fine."
"You haven't said anything in three practices."
"I say things."
"Useful things," Kieran said. "Tactical things. Things Felix says." He paused. "Shay. You told Mivo his positioning was good."
"It was good."
"You told him it was good. Not 'good for a man who skates like he's apologizing for something' or 'good if we're grading on the curve of people who learned to skate from a YouTube tutorial.' Just. Good."
I looked at him. "Mivo's positioning has improved."
Kieran stared at me for a long moment. "I'm going to need you to say something mean to someone in the next twenty,four hours or I'm going to assume you've been replaced by a very convincing robot."
"I'll see what I can do."
He didn't look reassured.
Reeves, passing us in the corridor, glanced between us and then at me with the particular expression of a man who had been watching and had thoughts. "You good?"
"Fantastic," I said.
"Right," Reeves said, in a tone that meant sure, and kept walking.
I was fine. I was a robot apparently.
The thing about watching Felix at practice was that it had always been involuntary.
I had made my peace with that a long time ago , the way your eye found him on the ice, the efficiency of him, the way he knew where the play was going three seconds before it got there and was already there, already waiting, already right.
I had watched him the way you watch something that works exactly as it should, with the helpless appreciation of a person who notices when things are correct.
This was still happening. The watching. The noticing.
What was new was the second layer underneath it: watching him not look at me.
Felix, I had learned over four years, was a man who looked at things.
Specifically, directly, without the social performance of pretending he wasn't. He assessed.
He catalogued. He was, in Hartley's words once and only once, economical with his attention, which meant that when he gave it you knew you had it.
He was not giving it to me.
He was giving me the peripheral version , the skate,past, the shoulder acknowledgment, the functional eye contact of two people running a drill together. Professional. Correct. Exactly what two linemates who had not been on a couch together twice in two weeks should look like.
It was the most attention he'd ever paid to not paying attention, and I could feel every degree of it like weather.
I ran my drills. I hit my marks. I did not say anything mean to anyone, which Kieran was clearly tracking, because at the end of Wednesday's session he handed me a protein bar with the energy of a man offering tribute to something he didn't fully understand.
"What's this for," I said.
"Preventative," he said.
I ate the protein bar.
Thursday practice ended late. Ice time ran over, Coach kept the defensive line for an extra twenty minutes of zone coverage work, and by the time the room had cleared most of the team had already cycled through showers and filtered out in ones and twos.
I had stayed to work on something in my shot that had felt off for a week , a thing in my release, a half,second hesitation I could feel but not name, the kind of problem that responded to repetition and not to thinking about it.
I was not thinking about other things.
I was exclusively, professionally thinking about my shot.
The equipment room was on the way to the exit. I had my bag. I needed tape , I'd been meaning to grab a new roll for two days and had forgotten twice, which was unlike me but which I was choosing not to examine. I pushed the door open.
Felix was there.
Of course he was. Felix was always the last one in , or the first one out, depending on the day, depending on what the system required , and today the system apparently required something from the equipment room at the same time my shot required tape, and there we were.
He looked up when I came in.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," he said.
This was the full extent of what we'd had, the last four days. Hey. Yeah. The neutral zone drill. Pass and position and professional eye contact and two people who were very, very good at the thing.
I went to the tape wall. Found the right roll. I was very focused on the tape.
He was doing something with his gear bag , a strap, something stuck. I heard the small sound of it, the quiet efficient noise of Felix handling equipment, and I looked at the tape and thought about my shot and did not turn around.
"Got it," he said, to no one. Just , noting it. The way he narrated small victories to himself sometimes, quietly, when he thought no one was listening.
I knew he did that.
I had zero business knowing that.
"Good," I said, to the tape.
I heard him pick up the bag. Heard him take two steps toward the door.
I was already turning , we were going to pass each other in the narrow space between the equipment shelves and the gear racks, the way we did approximately twice a week with no incident because we were professionals and the space was navigable and there was nothing,
My hair had been bothering me all practice.
I'd meant to cut it two weeks ago and I hadn't and it kept falling forward, this one piece at the front, getting into my peripheral vision in a way that was distracting and annoying and had made me push it back off my face no fewer than seven times during drills today.
It fell forward now.
Felix stopped walking.
I registered this in my peripheral vision , the pause, the stillness, the particular quality of Felix going motionless that I had catalogued across four years and could identify the same way I could identify a change in ice conditions.
The kind of still that meant something had arrived in him before he'd given it permission.
His hand came up.
It was not a decision. I understood that immediately, the way you understand something that happens before the brain engages , purely mechanical, purely reflex, the same kind of movement as catching a dropped glass or steadying someone who'd stumbled.
His hand came up and his fingers pushed the piece of hair back from my face, tucking it back, gentle and certain and completely, entirely automatic.
The world was very quiet.
Then he froze.
I felt it , the arrest of motion, the fraction of a second where his hand was still at my temple and the touch had already happened and couldn't be taken back and we both knew it. His fingers were still. Not moving. Just , there.
Then he took his hand back.
Not slowly. Not the way he'd let go of my shirt in the hotel room, reluctant, gradual, the way you put down something you don't want to put down.
This was the other kind , sharp, immediate, the reflex after contact with something hot, the instinctive pull,back of a man who had touched a surface that had burned him.
He looked at his own hand.
Not at me. At his hand, as if it had done something without his authorization, which it had, which it absolutely had, and he was now engaged in a silent and intense reckoning with it.
I stood in the equipment room with a roll of tape and the memory of his hand at my temple and I thought, with a clarity that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with four years of distance and two couches and one okay that I was still carrying around like a stone in my chest ,
I can’t keep doing this.
Not the next practice. Not the next drill.
Not the next Tuesday on the next couch with the next version of it can't become a bigger thing.
I could not do another four days of being structurally fine and hitting my marks and telling Mivo his positioning was good while Felix catalogued exactly where I was in the room and spent enormous, meticulous energy not looking at me.
I could not keep accepting we can't from a man who touched my face without thinking.
I looked at him.
He was still looking at his hand. The hand that had done the unauthorized thing. The hand that had been at my temple thirty seconds ago like it belonged there, like it had been there before, like it was simply returning to a place it already knew.
"Felix," I said.
He looked up. His expression was doing the thing , the controlled thing, the architecture of a man reassembling the structure mid,scene, the careful rebuild I had watched happen in hotel rooms and on balconies and across bar tables.
The Felix face coming back down over whatever had been there before it.
I watched it happen.
I let it.
"See you tomorrow," I said.
He looked at me for one long second. Something moved in his face , gratitude, maybe, or its complicated cousin, the relief of a man who had been braced for a conversation and been given a door instead.
And under it, quieter, the thing that was always underneath with Felix , the thing I had been watching for two years, the look from the dinner table, the look from the hotel room, the look he was very bad at not having.
"Yeah," he said. "Tomorrow."
He walked out.
I stood in the equipment room with my tape and listened to his footsteps down the corridor and the distant sound of the rink door and then silence, the particular silence of a building that was done for the day, emptied out, just ice and cold air and the hum of the refrigeration units keeping the surface perfect for tomorrow.
I looked at the tape in my hand.
My shot had a half,second hesitation in the release. A thing I could feel but not name. I had been trying to fix it with repetition, with drilling, with showing up and doing the work and not thinking about it.
I was starting to think that was not going to work.
I put the tape in my bag.
I turned off the equipment room light.
I walked out.