Chapter 19 #3
I hold on. His back, his shoulders. I get my legs up around him and my nails in him and I say his name into his neck until it stops being a name and turns into a sound. He gets a hand between us and takes my cock in his fist and works me in time, and I’m gone. I’m making promises to a ceiling.
“I have you,” he says. “Let go.”
So I let go. I go with his name in my mouth and my whole body pulling tight around him, and I feel the exact second it takes him with me, the stutter in his rhythm, the sound he’d never make in daylight for any money on earth.
He spills into me deep and drops his forehead onto my shoulder and stays down there, breathing like a man who came up off a bottom.
After, we lie in the dark in a room where everything is square except us.
He doesn’t talk. I do. That’s the arrangement. That’s always been the arrangement.
“You know what you are?” I say to the ceiling, with the weight of him down one whole side of me. “You’re the best thing that ever.”
And I stop. Right there. Calisse.
I get all the way to the edge of it and I pull up. Whole net open, the thing sitting right there in front of me, findable, mine to take. Same coward. Different rink.
So I finish it the safe way, because I’m me. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to my save percentage.”
“That is not what you were going to say.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
He doesn’t ask me for the rest. That’s the mercy and the tragedy of this man in one move.
He lies there in the dark and lets half a true sentence sit in the room with us and never reaches for it, and I lie there and don’t hand it over, and the two of us are so good at this, crisse. They should hang a banner.
What I do say, later, into the dark, when I think he might be asleep and I’m hoping he is:
“I’m not scouting you. In case that’s a thing you’re doing math about over there. I quit a while back. I’d have quit sooner if anybody had shown me how.”
He doesn’t answer. Not a word.
But his hand comes over in the dark and finds mine where it’s sitting flat on his chest, and closes around it, and holds. And I take it the way I take everything. Greedy. Both hands. No questions about the bill.
I sleep like a man with nothing on him.
When I wake up the room is gray and the bed is cold beside me and the lamp is squared to the corner of the desk. His bag is gone. He’s at the barn. Of course he’s at the barn. He’s been at the barn before the sun since before I got here.
I lie in a made-by-hand room with every single thing back in its place, and I put my palm flat on the cold side of the sheet, and then I get up and go find my own skates.
* * *
He starts the next game. I sit.
I sit on the bench in my ball cap with my blocker hand doing nothing, and I watch him.
He isn’t right. I’m the only person in the building who knows the whole reason why, and it isn’t just the leg.
The leg is half of it. The other half is that he went out there carrying a broken order, a night at his own door, a kid on the bench who wouldn’t put him out of his misery.
A man can’t seal the gap when the gap isn’t really in his pads.
It’s in his chest. He gives up a soft one in the first. He gives up a worse one in the second.
Not his fault exactly. All his fault too, in the way a season is nobody’s fault and everybody’s.
And up in the seats there’s a man with a notebook. Same seat, same little book. He came all this way for the senior. The senior is wobbling. I’m on the bench in a ball cap, benched by my own good week, close enough to fix it and too far away to reach.
I can’t do anything from here. Backup misery, all of it, the thing I signed up for and forgot I signed up for. You know what the backup gets? You dress for the party. You don’t get to eat.
I’ve made peace with that sentence a hundred times.
I un-make it tonight, watching him. He goes down on the first one a half-beat late, and the puck finds the seam I wouldn’t shoot.
The barn makes the low let-down sound, the whole building sighing at once.
He doesn’t chase it forward after. He goes back to the top.
Glove up. Blocker square. The exact reset he handed me in a hotel room before my first start.
Go back to the top, run it clean. That’s what I do, and that’s what I watch him run from the bench.
I know it isn’t landing. I know the settled thing isn’t coming home for him.
I’ve spent a year learning what his face looks like when the order holds, and this isn’t that face.
This is the other one, the one from the film room, the one I never found a number for.
He’s doing it in front of a scout, in a net full of a whole season.
I’m the nearest person alive who could reach him. Somehow the farthest, too.
The one scout in the building watching the one man I love come apart, in a net I could steady with two fingers on the boards, if he’d let me. And he won’t. Because I wouldn’t shoot, and because I wouldn’t shoot he’d hear the two fingers as pity too.
I’ve wanted a lot of things in a lot of buildings. Tonight, on this bench, I hate this net more than I’ve ever wanted anything.