Chapter 6 Mik
MIK
The woman at the front desk in Charlotte was apologetic in the particular American way that involves a lot of smiling and very little actual resolution.
"I'm so sorry, sir. There's a medical conference in town and we're completely sold out. The booking error shows two queens, but the only room we have available is a king suite. I can offer a complimentary upgrade to the minibar?"
I looked at the key packet in her hand. One room. One bed. And Cole Briggs standing next to me with his duffel bag over his shoulder and an expression I could not read.
Our team travel coordinator, a woman named Sandra who managed the logistics of thirty men moving across the country with the precision of a military operation, was already on her phone trying to find solutions.
She looked up and shook her head. "Every hotel in a three-mile radius is full.
Volkov, Briggs, I'm sorry. You're bunking together tonight. I'll have it sorted by Tampa."
"No problem," Cole said.
I said nothing, which Sandra correctly interpreted as agreement.
We rode the elevator in silence. The hallway was long and identical to every hotel hallway in every city I had ever played in. Patterned carpet. Brass sconces. The faint smell of industrial cleaner masked by something floral. Cole walked ahead, found the room, and swiped the keycard.
The room was nice. Large, even. A sitting area by the window, a desk, a bathroom with marble counters. And in the center of it all, one king-sized bed with a white duvet and approximately forty decorative pillows, because Americans believed that comfort was achieved through pillow multiplication.
Cole dropped his bag and surveyed the situation. "I'll take the floor."
"Don't be stupid."
"It's fine. I've slept on worse."
"You have a game tomorrow. You are not sleeping on the floor and then playing on a back that spent eight hours on carpet."
"Then what's the plan, Volkov?"
"The plan is that we are professional athletes and adults, and this is a bed large enough for four people, and we will sleep on our respective sides and it will not be an issue."
The words came out steady and reasonable.
They were the words of a man who had the situation under control.
I was not that man. I was a man who had spent two weeks cataloging the freckles on Cole Briggs's nose and deleting the evidence, and now I was going to lie next to him in the dark and somehow maintain the structural integrity of a persona I had spent eleven years building.
"Cool," Cole said. "I call left side."
"Fine."
"And I should warn you, I'm told I'm a restless sleeper."
"I am not surprised."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You are restless in all things. Why would sleep be different?"
He looked at me for a beat longer than was necessary, and I saw him decide not to pursue whatever thought had crossed his mind. "Fair point. Bathroom's mine first. I take long showers."
"Also not surprised."
"You're very judgmental for a man who gets up at four-thirty in the morning voluntarily."
He disappeared into the bathroom and I heard the shower turn on. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall and had a conversation with myself that went approximately like this:
This is nothing. You have shared rooms before.
In the KHL, we shared rooms on every road trip.
Dmitri Kosolov snored like a freight train and Sasha Petrov talked in his sleep about his mother's borscht.
This is no different. This is a bed. He is a teammate.
You will sleep. Nothing will happen because nothing can happen because you are Mikhail Volkov and you do not let things happen.
The shower stopped. The bathroom door opened. Cole walked out in athletic shorts and no shirt, toweling his hair, and every word of the speech I had just given myself caught fire and burned to ash.
He was. I don't know how to say this in a way that captures it accurately.
He was built the way hockey players are built, broad through the shoulders, thick through the core, with the kind of functional muscle that comes from years of skating and hitting and pushing your body past what it thinks it can do.
There was a bruise on his left side from the Tampa game, already yellowing at the edges, and a small scar on his collarbone that I had never noticed before.
I looked away. Opened my book. The Brothers Karamazov. I had been reading the same page for three days.
"You ever get tired of that book?" he said, pulling back the covers on his side.
"No."
"What's it about?"
"Brothers. Faith. The question of whether a moral society can exist without God."
"Light reading."
"I find it comforting."
"You find a book about existential crisis comforting?"
"It is honest about suffering. I prefer honesty to comfort."
He climbed into bed and arranged his pillows, which involved removing most of the decorative ones and building a small wall between us. I did not know if the wall was for my benefit or his, and I did not ask.
"That's the most you've ever told me about yourself," he said.
"I told you about my sister."
"That was about your sister. The Dostoevsky thing is about you."
He was right, and the precision of the observation unsettled me. Most people did not listen closely enough to make that distinction. Cole Briggs listened like it mattered.
I closed the book and placed it on the nightstand. Turned off the lamp on my side. The room went half dark, lit only by the glow of Cole's phone as he scrolled through something.
"Goodnight, Volkov."
"Goodnight."
He turned off his phone. Full dark now. The only light was the thin line of city glow bleeding through the curtains and the green dot of the smoke detector on the ceiling. I lay on my back with my hands at my sides and stared at that green dot and listened to Cole settle in.
The bed was large but not large enough. I could feel the warmth of him radiating across the mattress like a slow tide. The sheets rustled as he shifted onto his side, facing away from me. His breathing began to slow. Ten breaths. Twenty. The rhythm of a man falling asleep.
He fell asleep fast. This was consistent with everything I knew about Cole Briggs. He moved through the world with a confidence that extended even to unconsciousness. No tossing. No negotiating with the dark. Just a decision to sleep, and then sleep.
I envied him. Not just for the sleeping. For the ease of it. The way he occupied his own life without apology or calculation.
I lay there and listened to him breathe.
This is what I thought about, in the dark, in Charlotte, North Carolina, in a king-sized bed with a man I was not supposed to want:
I thought about Alexei.
Alexei Petrov, not Sasha's brother but a different Petrov, because in Russia every third person is a Petrov.
Alexei who played left wing on my junior team in Chelyabinsk.
Alexei who had dark eyes and a crooked smile and who kissed me in the equipment room after practice when I was sixteen and the world was still a place where I believed things could be simple.
I wrote him a letter. A stupid, earnest, sixteen-year-old letter about feelings I did not have words for yet. I hid it in my bag. My father found it.
The details of what followed are not important.
What is important is the lesson. The lesson was that wanting was the thing that destroyed you.
Not the wanting itself but the evidence of it.
The letter. The look. The moment of carelessness that proved you were something other than what you were supposed to be.
I had not been careless since.
But lying in this bed, listening to Cole breathe, I understood something that frightened me.
Carelessness was not the only danger. The other danger was care.
Care was what happened when you stopped thinking of someone as a risk and started thinking of them as a person.
Care was knowing someone had seven freckles.
Care was leaving a bar in Nashville because the hallway was better.
Care was the slow, patient accumulation of details that built a picture you could not unsee.
Cole shifted in his sleep. His hand moved across the no-man's-land of the mattress and came to rest six inches from my forearm. His fingers were loose and open. Even asleep, he reached.
I did not touch him. I did not move. I lay perfectly still and felt the warmth of his hand across the gap and thought about Dostoevsky and suffering and the question of whether it is braver to build a wall or to let one fall.
At some point, I slept. This surprised me. I had expected to lie awake all night, vigilant, maintaining the perimeter. But the sound of his breathing was steady and the bed was warm and my body made a decision that my mind would never have authorized.
I slept deeply. Dreamlessly. The best sleep I had gotten in months.
When I woke at 4:47, the room was still dark.
Cole was on his stomach now, face turned toward me, one arm stretched across the pillow wall he'd built.
In sleep, his face was different. Softer.
Younger. The competitive energy and the constant performance stripped away, leaving something unguarded underneath.
I let myself look. Just for a moment. A stolen inventory taken in the predawn dark of a hotel room in North Carolina, where no one would ever know and no evidence would remain.
The line of his jaw. The way his hair fell across his forehead. The bruise on his ribs rising and falling with each breath. The open hand still reaching across the space between us.
I looked for exactly ten seconds. I counted them.
Then I got up, dressed in silence, and went to find a gym.
In the elevator, I pressed the button for the lobby and watched the numbers descend. My reflection stared back at me from the polished doors, and the man in the reflection looked the same as always. Controlled. Composed. Unremarkable.
But something had happened in that room. Something I could not file away or lock behind a door. Something as simple and as catastrophic as sleeping well because another person was breathing next to me.
I had not slept that well since I was fifteen years old, in the house in Chelyabinsk, before my father found the letter and everything that was soft in my life turned to stone.
The elevator reached the lobby. The doors opened. Gerald was at the security desk.
"Morning, Big Man. Cold enough for you?"
"Perfect," I said.
And for the first time, I was not sure I was talking about the weather.