7. Nolan
NOLAN
January, and I have been coming to the film room for two months.
I have not examined this fact. Examining facts that might require changes to the way I have organized my life has never been a strength of mine.
The film room is professional. The film room is where I go after practice to review breakouts and neutral-zone play with the team's analytics department.
The analytics department happens to be one person who happens to be Caleb Wren who happens to make my chest do things that are not covered in the team's medical file.
Professional. Entirely professional.
It is 11 PM. The building is empty. The custodial staff finished an hour ago. Gerald left at ten. Tonight the last two people in a building that holds eighteen thousand during games and two during whatever this is.
We're watching defensive breakouts from the Columbus game.
Again. Caleb has identified a weak-side rotation issue that he's been tracking across seven games, and the data is compelling, and the data is also the excuse I'm using to sit in a dark room at 11 PM with a man whose rolled-up sleeves are making it difficult for me to concentrate on weak-side rotations.
He reaches past me to rewind a clip.
His arm crosses my space. The reach puts his forearm six inches from my chest. He smells like coffee and soap and something underneath both that is just him, the plain chemical fact of another person's body in proximity to mine, and the proximity is an accident and the accident is the most honest thing that has happened in this room.
He doesn't pull back immediately. His hand is on the console. The clip is rewinding. The screen flickers with reversed motion: players skating backward, the puck returning to a stick, time undoing itself.
I am aware of the following things simultaneously: his forearm, the screen, the empty building, the fact that I have been coming to this room for two months and telling myself it was about the hockey, and the fact that I have been lying to myself for significantly longer than two months.
The clip reaches the timestamp. His hand is still on the console. He has not moved his arm.
I turn toward him.
The turning is the decision. Not the kiss. The turning. The moment my body rotates in the chair and I am facing him instead of the screen, that is the moment where fourteen seasons of looking away becomes looking at.
He is close. His face is six inches from mine. His glasses reflect the paused screen. His eyes behind the glasses are dark and steady and slightly wider than they were a second ago.
I stop.
I let the stop exist. The stop is the space I am giving him to leave. I can build it with distance: six inches. Enough for him to pull back. Enough for him to say no.
He does not pull back.
"Tell me no," I say.
Two words. Not enough. But I have built a life on two words at a time. Good morning to Gerald. I'm fine to the trainers. Good talk to everyone. Two words is my maximum vocabulary for the things that matter.
Caleb does not tell me no.
I close the six inches.
The kiss is five seconds long. Maybe less. My mouth on his mouth and his mouth is warm and his breath catches at the contact and the catch is the sound of a man who was not expecting this and who is not pulling away.
Five seconds.
I pull back. The room is still dark. The screen is still frozen on a defensive breakout from the Columbus game. The console light blinks green. Everything in the room is the same as it was six seconds ago and nothing is the same.
I don't wait for his face to finish processing. I pick up my bag. I stand. I walk to the door.
I do not look back.
The parking deck. The truck. The same spot.
I drive home with both hands on the wheel and my mouth still carrying the warmth.
Five seconds of warmth. The first honest thing I have done in fourteen seasons.
Not the first time I've kissed a man. I've done that.
In hotel rooms in cities where nobody knew my name, with men whose names I chose not to learn, in arrangements that lasted exactly as long as the act and not one second longer.
This was not that.
This was five seconds in a room where he knows my name and I know his and the knowing makes everything more dangerous and more real.
The apartment. Dark. One light. Kitchen. I stand at the counter with my hands flat on the granite and I breathe.
Fourteen seasons of silence. Five seconds of sound.
I do not sleep. I lie in bed with the undisturbed pillow beside me and I stare at the ceiling.
Five seconds. That is all it took to undo fourteen seasons of careful, disciplined, deliberate quiet.
I close my eyes.
The file is open. It is not going to close.