Chapter 5 Cole
COLE
Road trips in the NHL are their own universe.
You spend half your life in airports and hotel lobbies and team buses, eating the same catered chicken and rice, sleeping in beds that are never quite the right firmness, and existing in a bubble with thirty guys who are simultaneously your brothers and your coworkers and occasionally the people you want to strangle most in the world.
I loved every second of it.
The charter flight to Nashville was loud.
Music playing from someone's speaker, card games in the back, rookies trying to look casual while secretly being thrilled that they were on an actual NHL road trip.
I was in my usual seat, window side, four rows from the front, with Jonah next to me doing a crossword puzzle on his phone like the seventy-year-old man he was on the inside.
"Six letters," he said. "Stubborn and unyielding."
"Volkov."
"It starts with an O."
"Ornery."
"That's seven."
"Then I don't care."
Jonah filled in the answer without me and I looked out the window at the clouds. Below us, the Southeast was a quilt of green and brown, and somewhere down there, people were living lives that didn't revolve around puck possession and defensive zone starts. Must be nice.
"You've been weird lately," Jonah said without looking up from his puzzle.
"I'm always weird."
"Weirder than usual. You've been quiet. You, Cole Briggs, have been quiet. Do you understand how alarming that is? The last time you were quiet was when you had food poisoning in Buffalo and you were literally unable to speak."
"I'm fine. Just focused."
"On what?"
"Hockey."
"Liar."
I didn't respond because he was right and we both knew it.
I had been weird. I'd been distracted in a way I couldn't fully explain, or more accurately, in a way I could explain but didn't want to.
Because the explanation involved a Russian defenseman who read Dostoevsky on the team bus and made jokes about moths and had grey eyes with flecks of something lighter in them that I kept trying to identify from across the locker room like some kind of unhinged birdwatcher.
It had been two weeks since Coach paired us. Two weeks of daily drills and film sessions and the occasional conversation that lasted longer than either of us planned. Two weeks of Volkov being quietly, infuriatingly interesting in a way that contradicted everything I'd assumed about him.
He wasn't cold. He was careful. There's a difference, and I was only just starting to understand it.
Cold people don't make jokes about vodka.
Cold people don't stay late in the film room to help a rookie understand defensive positioning.
Cold people don't nod at you across the locker room with the faintest suggestion of acknowledgment, as if to say I see you, which shouldn't have meant anything but somehow meant everything.
"Earth to Briggs." Jonah was staring at me. "You just zoned out for a full minute. Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere."
"You were looking at Volkov."
My head snapped toward him. "I was looking out the window."
"The window is to your left. You were looking right. Volkov is three rows back and to the right." Jonah's expression was annoyingly neutral. "I'm just saying."
"You're saying nothing. There's nothing to say."
"Okay."
"Okay."
"Okay." He went back to his crossword and I went back to the window, and the conversation died the way conversations die when both people know the truth is sitting between them and neither wants to pick it up.
We landed in Nashville and bused to the hotel.
I loved Nashville. The music, the food, the energy.
It was a city that understood the concept of a good time, and normally I'd be first in line for a team dinner on Broadway.
But that night, after we beat the Predators 3-1 in a game where Volkov and I combined for a plus-three, something else happened.
The team went out. I went out with them.
We hit a bar on Broadway with live music and overpriced beer, and it was loud and fun and exactly what a road win should feel like.
Jonah was doing karaoke with two of the rookies, which was a war crime against music but great for team bonding.
Wes Chen was sitting in a corner booth looking like he wanted to be anywhere else, which was his default setting.
Everyone was accounted for except one person.
Volkov hadn't come.
This was not surprising. Volkov never came to team outings. He was probably in his room reading or studying film or doing whatever deeply solitary thing he did to fill the hours that normal people filled with human connection. It shouldn't have bothered me. It wasn't my business.
I stayed at the bar for an hour. Had two beers. Sang backup on Jonah's deeply criminal rendition of "Friends in Low Places." And then, for reasons I didn't fully interrogate, I said goodnight and walked back to the hotel.
The hallway on our floor was quiet. That particular hotel quiet where you can hear the ice machine humming from thirty yards away. I was heading to my room, keycard in hand, when I saw him.
Volkov was standing at the ice machine in a white T-shirt and grey sweatpants, filling a bucket.
His hair was damp, like he'd just showered, and it fell across his forehead in a way that made him look younger.
Less guarded. The scar through his eyebrow was more visible without the game-day intensity framing his face, and for a second he just looked like a guy.
A regular guy getting ice in a hotel hallway, and not the six-foot-three fortress of Russian stoicism that I'd been building him into in my head.
He saw me and straightened up. The guard came back. Not all the way, but enough.
"Briggs."
"Volkov. Big Friday night plans, I see. Ice bucket. Very exciting."
"I am icing my shoulder."
"You could've come out with the team, you know. Nashville's fun."
"I have been to Nashville."
"When?"
"We played the Predators tonight."
"That doesn't count. You saw the inside of an arena and a hotel. That's like saying you've been to Paris because your flight had a layover at Charles de Gaulle."
Something shifted in his expression. Not a smile. But the territory adjacent to a smile, the landscape where smiles live before they commit to the journey.
"I do not enjoy crowds," he said.
"It wasn't a crowd. It was your teammates."
"Teammates are a crowd with matching luggage."
I laughed. I couldn't help it. Every time he said something like that, delivered in that flat, dry tone with his face completely neutral, it caught me off guard. Humor from Mikhail Volkov was rare enough to be valuable, like finding a twenty-dollar bill in a coat pocket.
"Fair point," I said. "So what do you do on road trips? Just sit in your room?"
"I read. I watch film. I call my mother."
"That's..." I almost said sad, but stopped myself. It wasn't sad. It was just solitary, and solitary and sad are not the same thing, even if they look similar from the outside. "Quiet."
"I like quiet."
"I know you do." I leaned against the wall.
I should have gone to my room. I was standing in a hotel hallway in jeans and a going-out shirt talking to a man in sweatpants about his Friday night plans, and there was absolutely no reason for this conversation to continue except that I didn't want it to stop.
"My sister wants to study in London," he said.
This was unexpected. Volkov didn't volunteer personal information. He parceled it out like a man rationing water in a desert, and the fact that he was offering this without being asked felt significant.
"Yeah? Good school?"
"She wants to study literature. She reads constantly. She is smarter than me, which is not a high bar in my family, but she does not know that."
"I bet the bar is higher than you think."
He looked at me. Direct, unblinking. "Why are you not with your teammates, Briggs?"
"I was. I came back."
"Why?"
Good question. I ran through the possible answers in my head. Because I was tired. Because two beers was enough. Because Jonah's karaoke was literally painful. All true. None of them the real answer.
The real answer was that I had spent the entire bar thinking about the empty chair where Volkov should have been, and at some point the bar stopped being fun because the person I most wanted to talk to wasn't there, and that realization was so startling and so inconvenient that I had to leave before it showed on my face.
"I don't know," I said. "I just felt like coming back."
He held my gaze for a long moment. In the fluorescent hallway light, his eyes looked lighter than usual. Almost silver.
"You should ice your shoulder," I said.
"I should."
"Goodnight, Volkov."
"Goodnight, Briggs."
Neither of us moved. Two men in a hotel hallway with ice melting between them and something else building that I didn't have a name for yet. Three seconds. Five. The ice machine hummed.
I pushed off the wall and walked to my room. Swiped my keycard. Stepped inside. Let the door close behind me.
I stood in the dark hotel room and pressed my forehead against the cool wood of the door and thought about Mikhail Volkov in his white T-shirt telling me about his sister.
The way his voice changed when he talked about her.
Softer. Warmer. Like there was a version of him underneath all the granite that was actually gentle, and he only let it out for people he loved.
I wanted to be someone he let it out for.
The thought arrived fully formed and undeniable, and I stood there in the dark letting it settle into my bones.
Then I brushed my teeth and went to bed, because wanting things is fine, but acting on them at eleven-thirty at night in a Nashville hotel is how careers end and friendships implode.
My phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Jonah: You disappeared. Everything good?
Me: Yeah. Just tired.
Jonah: Mhmm.
That single "mhmm" contained more observation than I was comfortable with. I put the phone face down and closed my eyes.
Sleep came slowly. And when it did, I dreamed about ice machines and silver eyes and a man in a hallway who told me about his sister like it was a gift he wasn't sure I deserved.