Chapter Eleven
Shay
We won by four.
Four goals, clean and decisive, the kind of win that didn't leave room for argument or asterisk , the kind where you came off the ice and the locker room had a specific frequency, higher and brighter than the usual, the sound of men who had done something correctly and knew it.
Coach Denny said three sentences and they were all good ones.
Hartley almost smiled. Mivo did smile, fully, with teeth, which happened approximately twice a season and which Kieran immediately photographed for reasons that were entirely Kieran's own.
I sat in my stall and felt it , the win settling into my body the right way, clean and warm, the way the good ones did. A stone dropped into still water and instead of sinking, floating.
I was going to let myself have tonight.
I had decided this somewhere in the third period, somewhere between the second goal and the third, with the crowd loud and the ice fast and the particular feeling of a line clicking the way our line clicked when we were right , when the read was there before the play, when the pass was where it needed to be before you'd asked for it, when four years of knowing someone's game became something you could feel in your feet.
Felix had threaded a pass through a seam that shouldn't have existed and I had been exactly where he'd put it, and the puck was in the net, and for thirty seconds on the ice there had been nothing between us but something working correctly.
I was going to let myself have tonight.
I had been careful for weeks. I had been quiet, giving Felix the distance he needed and telling Mivo his positioning was good and meaning it. I had been a version of myself that was correct and functional and sustainable and it had cost me something I was going to stop counting.
Tonight: no counting.
Reeves had a place. He had always had a place , a contact, a friend, a cousin, some configuration of people who reliably had a large apartment available whenever a significant win required a location.
The details were never entirely clear and nobody asked because Reeves' logistics had never failed, and the apartment existed, and by nine,thirty it was full of the right people and the right noise and the kind of ease that came from a group of men who had spent the last three hours doing something hard together and come out the other side.
I was in the middle of it and I was on.
Not performing. That was the thing , the distinction I had been living inside for weeks, the difference between the two that I understood now with a precision I hadn't had before.
Performing was maintenance. Performing was the load,bearing walls and the regular checks for cracks.
This was different. This was the frequency from the locker room, the one I'd described in my head a hundred times , the beautiful specific pitch of a room full of people who were happy and loud and alive , and I was inside it and part of it and not managing it from behind glass.
I had the room and I knew I had the room and I let myself have it.
The story I was telling was about Reeves, specifically, and a rental car from the Vancouver road trip two seasons ago, and it had Mivo laughing so hard he had to put his drink down, and Kieran was beside me adding details he had no business still remembering, and Reeves was shaking his head in the specific way of a man who knew the story was accurate and resented it deeply and was also laughing.
"and at this point," I said, "the car is making a sound. Not a warning sound. An opinion sound. Like the car has developed feelings about the situation,"
"It had a warning light," Reeves said.
"Reeves. The light had been on for forty minutes. It had graduated from warning to statement."
"You told me it was fine,"
"I told you it was probably fine, which is a different,"
"You said definitely fine,"
"I said it with confidence, which I think you'll agree I delivered on,"
The room erupted. I rode it the way I used to ride it, easy and whole, not watching myself ride it, not monitoring the frequency for signs of structural failure. Just , in it. Present. Real.
I was laughing.
I had forgotten, in the weeks of careful fine, what it felt like to laugh without checking first whether it was the right volume.
It felt like the win. Clean and warm and exactly correct.
Kieran was beside me. He had been beside me for most of the night in the easy, gravitational way that Kieran existed in spaces , he moved toward noise and I was noise and so we had been in the same orbit for hours.
He was a good person to be in orbit with.
He had good instincts and a quick read and he laughed at the right moments, which was its own skill.
He leaned over at some point between stories and said, close enough to be heard over the room: "This is better."
I looked at him.
"You," he clarified. "This week. Better than last week."
"Last week I was fine."
"Last week you told Mivo his positioning was good."
"It was good."
"Shay." He gave me the look. "You told him it was good with your whole mouth. Like a normal human. I've been weirded out for days."
I laughed. Genuine, easy, the kind that didn't need to be checked. "I'm fine."
"You're better than fine right now." He said it simply. Not loaded. Just , observational, the way Kieran occasionally was when he wasn't performing his own thing. "It's good to see."
I looked at him for a half,second. Kieran, who was good at rooms, who paid attention without making you feel attended to, who had given me a protein bar on a Wednesday with the energy of a man performing a small ritual he didn't know the name of.
"Yeah," I said. "It is."
I touched his arm briefly , the way you did, in a loud room, when you meant something and words were insufficient and physical was just the easiest language. A second. Nothing.
I was already turning back to the room when I felt it.
Not a sound. Not a movement. A quality , the specific, particular quality of a frequency shifting, of something in the room going a different temperature.
I turned.
Felix was across the room.
He had been across the room for most of the night.
I knew this the way I always knew it , peripherally, automatically, the way you know where the walls are in a room you've lived in.
He had been talking to Hartley, then to Reeves, then standing near the window with his drink doing the Felix thing of being present without being loud, the closed door in a hallway full of open windows.
He was very still.
Not tense. Not aggressive. Just , the specific stillness of a man who had stopped everything he was doing with the focused precision of someone who has seen something and is now processing it with the full attention he usually reserved for film review and defensive zone breakdowns.
He was looking at me.
Or at Kieran and me. At my hand on Kieran's arm, which I had already removed, which was already over, which had been nothing , a second, a touch, the ordinary physical language of a loud room. Nothing.
Felix knew it was nothing. Felix, who had watched me navigate rooms for four years, who understood my registers and my frequency, who had catalogued everything about me with the thoroughness of a man who noticed patterns , Felix knew.
He was still very still.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
Across the room. Through the noise and the people and the particular amber warmth of Reeves' inexplicably well,lit borrowed apartment. Across all of it.
And I thought: I am so tired.
I thought about the hotel room and the couch on a Tuesday and the equipment room and the parking lot and every version of we can't and every exit I had handed him and every door I had held open for him to walk through and the okay that still had no bottom and the weeks of careful fine and the load,bearing walls and the cracks I had been monitoring since September.
I thought about two years.
I thought: ask me. Please. Just ask me.
He didn't.
He stood across the room and was very still and looked at me with the look , the one from the dinner table, the one I'd been losing threads over since October, the look of a man who wasn't trying to look away , and he did not ask me anything and he did not move and he did not give me the thing I had been waiting two years for and I was so tired.
I held his gaze for one second.
Just one.
Then I turned to Kieran.
It was brief. That is the first thing. Brief and simple and over before it had properly started , Kieran, surprised, present, making a small questioning sound, and then the warm uncomplicated press of a mouth that meant nothing, nothing, nothing.
Kieran kissed back the way friendly, slightly drunk people kissed at parties , easy, light, already smiling, no weight to it.
It lasted maybe four seconds.
I pulled back. Kieran was grinning in a slightly baffled, entirely unbothered way, the face of a man who has been kissed at a party and is fine with it. "Okay," he said. Not a question. Just , acknowledging a data point.
"Sorry," I said.
"I'm not," he said, easily, and turned back to the room, because Kieran was a person who moved through the world without accumulating drama, which I respected enormously.
I turned back.
Felix was gone.
Not across the room. Not near the window. Not anywhere in the warm amber noise of Reeves' apartment. The door to the hallway was closed. The space where Felix had been standing was just , space.
I stood in the middle of the party.
The room continued around me, Mivo laughing, music, someone telling a story I had heard before. Warm and loud and alive in the way I had been alive in it twenty minutes ago, before.
I picked up my jacket from the back of the chair.
"Shay," Kieran, behind me.
"I'm good," I said. "I'll text you."
I went to find my coat.
The hallway outside was quiet. The building hallway , fluorescent, impersonal, the corridor outside someone's borrowed apartment at ten,thirty on a Friday. The door to the stairwell was just closing.
I didn't run. I walked quickly, with purpose, the way you walked when you were not running but also not walking, and I hit the stairwell door and went down two flights and came out into the lobby and through the glass I could see the parking lot and Felix's coat.
The cold hit me when the door opened.
It was the late,season cold , the specific kind, clarifying, the kind that made everything feel more precise. I had stood in this cold before, outside a bar three blocks from a hotel, walking with our shoulders close and too much unsaid.
Felix was at his car. Coat half on , one arm in, the other hanging, the specific configuration of a man who had left before he'd finished leaving. His keys were in his hand. His jaw was tight in the way it got when he was holding something at a controlled distance and the distance was narrowing.
He heard the door.
He turned.
We looked at each other across the parking lot.
The cold was very clear. The lot was quiet , just the ambient noise of the city, a few cars, the distant sound of the party two floors up, muffled now to something almost unrecognizable.
I crossed the lot.
I stopped a few feet away.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing the thing , the look, the one he was bad at not having, but underneath it something new, something that wasn't the dinner table look or the hotel room look. Something that had more edges.
"You should go back in," he said. His voice was even. Extremely, effortfully even.
"Okay," I said. I didn't move.
He looked at his keys.
"Felix," I said.
"Shay,"
"That was nothing."
"I know."
"It meant nothing."
"I know that." The words came out with the slight excess pressure of someone saying a thing they knew was true and found no comfort in. He looked up. Looked at me with the look and the edges. "I know."
"Then why did you leave."
He didn't answer.
The cold moved through the parking lot. Somewhere above us, the party continued , muffled laughter, the bass frequency of music, the ordinary noise of people having a good time in a warm room.
"Felix," I said. Quiet now. Not pushing , just asking. The same question I had been asking, in one form or another, since a hotel room in October. "Why did you leave."
He was looking at his keys again.
The parking lot was very still.
I waited.