Chapter 7 Cole
COLE
Something changed in Carolina.
On the ice, we were reading each other. Not the way you read a teammate after running drills together for a few weeks.
Deeper than that. Instinctive. I knew where he was going to be before he got there.
I could feel the direction of his skating the way you feel a current shifting in water, and when I adjusted my positioning to account for his, everything opened up.
Lanes appeared. Passes connected. The other team couldn't figure out where the puck was going because we barely knew ourselves.
We were playing on feel, and the feel was electric.
We didn't talk about it. We didn't talk about the hotel room either.
We got on the bus to Tampa and sat in our respective seats and did our respective things, and the only acknowledgment that anything had happened was the fact that when Mik got on the bus, he glanced at me for half a second before finding his row.
Half a second. That was it. But it was half a second more than I'd gotten before Carolina, and I collected it like a coin.
Tampa was hot. Not warm. Hot. The kind of aggressive, swampy heat that hits you like a wall when you step off the bus and makes you question every life decision that led you to a state built on a swamp.
I'm from Minnesota. I understand cold the way other people understand breathing.
Heat is a foreign country where I don't speak the language.
The game was a matinee. Three o'clock start. The arena was packed with snowbirds and retirees in Reapers jerseys, which was surreal and kind of wonderful. We were drawing fans in other cities now. That meant something.
I won't give you a shift-by-shift breakdown because that's what game film is for, but I'll tell you about the moment that mattered.
Third period. We were up 2-1 and Tampa was pressing hard, cycling the puck in our zone, keeping us hemmed in.
I was on the ice with Volkov and our legs were burning.
We'd been out for over a minute, which doesn't sound like much, but a minute in a defensive zone with an opponent pushing is an eternity.
Tampa's defenseman wound up for a shot from the point.
Volkov stepped into the lane and blocked it with his shin.
The puck ricocheted to me in the corner.
I looked up. Two options. I could chip it off the glass and out of the zone, which was the safe play.
Or I could thread a pass through three Tampa players to Volkov, who had somehow already turned and was accelerating through the neutral zone with a lane that would be open for exactly one more second before it closed.
I made the pass. Cross-ice, tape to tape, through traffic.
The kind of pass you don't think about. The kind that comes from somewhere below conscious thought, from the part of your brain that has been processing another person's movement patterns for weeks and has built a model so complete that prediction feels like memory.
Volkov caught it in stride. He was alone. Breakaway. The Tampa goalie came out to challenge and Volkov went backhand shelf, top corner, bar down. The sound of the puck hitting the iron was the prettiest thing I'd ever heard.
The bench erupted. Guys were banging their sticks on the boards. The horn blew. 3-1. Game essentially over.
Volkov skated back to the bench and I was there waiting.
I don't remember deciding to be there. I just was.
He pulled up in front of me and I reached out and slapped his shoulder, the standard hockey celebration, helmet tap or shoulder slap or whatever combination of physical contact is acceptable between men in this sport that has very specific rules about which kinds of touching are allowed and which aren't.
His hand came up and gripped my wrist.
Not hard. Not aggressive. Just held it. His glove wrapped around my forearm and he held on for a beat that was exactly long enough to be something other than a celebration and short enough that nobody watching would have noticed.
Two seconds. Maybe three. His eyes on mine. Grey with those flecks that I now knew were closer to green than silver, which was information I'd gathered at very close range in a Carolina hotel room at 4:47 in the morning while he was asleep.
He let go. I let go. We sat down on the bench and the game continued and nobody said anything because nobody had seen anything, because there was nothing to see. Two teammates celebrating a goal. Happens a thousand times a night across the league.
My wrist burned for the rest of the game. Not from the grip. From the absence of it.
We won 3-1. The locker room was happy. Road trips where you string wins together have a specific energy, a sense of momentum building, and we were riding it.
Guys were laughing and spraying water and someone had put on country music, which prompted an immediate and violent debate about whether country music should be allowed in a hockey locker room.
The answer is always yes, because hockey and country music have a bond that transcends logic.
I showered and changed and checked my phone. A few texts from friends back home, a message from my brother asking about the game, and nothing from my dad, which was the absence I'd gotten used to but still noticed every time.
I went back to the hotel. Separate rooms this time. Sandra had made sure of it, and I'd said "great, thanks" in a voice that I hope sounded like I meant it.
I ordered room service. Ate a chicken sandwich on a bed that felt too big and too quiet. Watched half a movie I wasn't paying attention to. And then, at 10:14 PM, I did something I'd been thinking about for three hours.
I texted Volkov.
Nice goal.
The three dots appeared almost immediately, which meant he was on his phone, which meant he was awake, which meant he was in his hotel room in Tampa doing his own version of sitting alone and being quiet. The dots bounced for a while. Longer than two words required.
Nice pass.
Two words. Perfectly mirrored. I smiled at my phone like an idiot.
Did we just become friends?
A longer pause this time. Thirty seconds.
A minute. I watched those three dots appear and disappear and appear again, and I could picture him on the other side of the wall or the floor or wherever his room was, choosing his words with the same care he used to choose his positioning on the ice. Every word deliberate. Nothing wasted.
Don't push your luck.
I laughed out loud in my empty hotel room. Then I typed back:
Too late. I'm a luck pusher. It's basically my whole personality.
Another pause. Shorter this time.
Yes. I have noticed this about you.
Was that an insult or an observation?
In Russian, these are often the same thing.
I was grinning. Lying on a hotel bed in Tampa, Florida, grinning at my phone because a man who communicated primarily through silences and hockey was texting me back with something that approximated warmth, and it felt like the best conversation I'd had in months.
I should've stopped there. Said goodnight. Put the phone down. But I didn't, because I am exactly the kind of person who pushes his luck.
Seriously though. That goal was beautiful.
The dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. I held my breath, which was ridiculous, because it was a text message, not a bomb.
Thank you for the pass. It was... perfect.
I stared at the word "perfect" for a very long time.
There was something about seeing it in Mik's voice, in the careful syntax of a man who chose every word like he was spending currency he couldn't afford to waste.
He didn't say "great" or "nice" or any of the throwaway compliments that athletes exchange like loose change.
He said perfect. And the ellipsis before it suggested he'd considered other words and rejected them in favor of this one.
Perfect.
I typed six different responses and deleted all of them. Too casual. Too serious. Too much. Not enough. I finally settled on:
See you tomorrow, Volkov.
Goodnight, Briggs.
I put the phone on the nightstand and turned off the lights and lay there in the dark.
The ceiling in Tampa looked exactly like the ceiling in Charlotte, which looked exactly like the ceiling in Nashville, which was the ceiling I'd stared at after the hallway conversation about his sister.
Hotel ceilings are all the same. Flat, white, blank.
Good for projecting thoughts onto when your brain won't shut off.
Here is what my brain was doing:
It was replaying the wrist grab. The two or three seconds of contact. The way his grip felt through the glove, firm but not forceful, like he was anchoring himself to something. Like I was the fixed point and he was the one in danger of drifting.
It was replaying the text. The ellipsis. The word "perfect."
It was doing math. The kind of math I'd been refusing to do for weeks, where you add up all the small moments and see what they total. The almost-smiles. The hallway in Nashville. The sister. The shared bed. The wrist. The text. Each one individually meant nothing. Together, they meant everything.
I knew what this was. I'd been here before, with other people, in other cities. The gravitational pull toward someone specific. The way one person starts to take up more space in your thoughts than they should, until thinking about them isn't a choice anymore but a condition.
The difference was that those other times, the person on the receiving end was available. Open. Possible.
Mikhail Volkov was none of those things. He was closeted and terrified and Russian and my teammate, and any one of those things alone would have been reason enough to stop. All four together should have been a concrete wall.
But my wrist was still warm where he'd held it, and the word "perfect" was glowing on my phone three feet away, and concrete walls, it turns out, are not as solid as advertised.
I fell asleep thinking about his hand on my arm. About the way he'd held on for one beat longer than necessary, which in the language of Mikhail Volkov was the equivalent of a love letter.
A grip. An ellipsis. A word.
It wasn't much. But coming from him, it was everything.