Chapter 8 Mik
MIK
Not entirely. Hockey is a team sport and losses belong to everyone.
But the third goal came off a turnover in my own zone, a lazy pass up the boards that I knew was wrong the instant it left my stick, and their winger intercepted it and buried it before our goalie could set his feet.
Coach didn't say anything to me on the bench.
He didn't have to. I could feel the disappointment radiating off him like heat from an engine.
The locker room after was subdued. Three wins and a loss on the road trip.
A good result by any measure. But losses stick to you in a way that wins don't, and this one stuck to me like tar because I knew better.
I was better. The mistake was not a lack of skill.
It was a lack of focus, and I knew exactly where my focus had gone, and it was sitting four stalls away unlacing his skates.
I had been distracted. For two days, since Carolina, since the bed, since the word "perfect" that I had typed after deleting six other words that were all less true, I had been playing hockey with half a brain. The other half was occupied by Cole Briggs, and tonight it had cost us a goal.
This could not continue.
The team went out. Miami nightlife. Clubs and bars on Ocean Drive, the kind of loud, bright places where hockey players could disappear into the crowd and be young and rich and free for a few hours.
I had no interest in any of it. I went back to the hotel, showered, and changed into jeans and a shirt that I had packed for no reason and certainly not because some unconscious part of me had anticipated an evening that required something other than sweatpants.
I went to the hotel's rooftop bar because I wanted air.
That was the reason. Fresh air. The rooftop had a pool that was closed for the night and a bar that was still open and a view of the Miami skyline that looked like a postcard.
I ordered a vodka, which the bartender poured from a bottle that cost four times what it should, and I sat on a lounge chair near the railing and looked at the ocean.
The Atlantic was black and enormous and completely indifferent to whatever was happening inside my chest. I found this comforting.
The ocean did not care about hockey or turnover rates or the specific way a man's hair fell across his forehead when he was sleeping.
The ocean just existed, vast and unconcerned, and I wanted to borrow some of that indifference for myself.
I was on my second vodka when I heard footsteps behind me.
I knew it was him before I turned around. I don't know how. Some shift in the air, some frequency that my nervous system had learned to detect without my permission. The way a compass needle swings north. Automatic. Involuntary.
"You left early," Cole said.
I did not turn around. "I was not aware I needed to file an itinerary."
"You don't." He came around the lounge chair and sat in the one next to mine.
He was wearing a blue button-down with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and he had clearly been out with the team because his cheeks were flushed and his hair was slightly disarranged and he smelled like beer and that cedar cologne. "I just noticed you weren't there."
"And you came to check on me."
"I came for the view."
"The view is downstairs in the lobby. The rooftop is closed."
"The bar's still open."
"The bar has one customer."
"Two now." He flagged the bartender and ordered a whiskey. We sat in silence while it was poured and delivered, and then we sat in more silence while the Miami skyline did its job of being beautiful and indifferent.
"The third goal wasn't your fault," Cole said.
"It was."
"It was a team breakdown. The forecheck was soft and the weak side wasn't covered."
"The pass was mine. The mistake was mine."
"Okay." He took a sip of his whiskey. "So it was your fault. You going to sit up here and punish yourself about it, or are you going to be human for five minutes?"
I looked at him. "I don't know what that means."
"It means you made a mistake. One mistake. In the same game where you blocked a shot with your shin and made a breakout pass that led to a goal and played twenty-four minutes of hockey that was, by any objective measure, elite. One mistake doesn't erase all that."
"In Russia, one mistake is all anyone remembers."
"You're not in Russia."
The simplicity of it hit me somewhere unexpected. Four words. You're not in Russia. A fact so obvious it shouldn't have needed saying, and yet hearing it from Cole Briggs on a rooftop in Miami at eleven o'clock at night felt like someone opening a window in a room I'd forgotten had windows.
"No," I said. "I'm not."
We drank. The silence between us had changed over the past two weeks.
It used to be hostile, then it was awkward, then it was cautious.
Now it was something else. Comfortable is not the right word, because comfortable implies that the tension was gone, and it was not gone.
It was very much present, humming between us like a live wire.
But we had learned to exist alongside it.
To sit in the same space and let the tension be there without demanding that it resolve.
"Tell me something," Cole said. "Something real. Not hockey."
"Why?"
"Because we've been on a road trip for five days and I know your plus-minus and your ice time and your penalty kill deployment but I don't know anything about you. The real you. Not the hockey robot."
"I am not a robot."
"You are a little bit a robot."
"This is offensive."
"It's a compliment. Robots are efficient and reliable. You're like a very well-designed hockey robot with occasional flashes of personality that you immediately suppress."
I should have been insulted. Instead I felt the corner of my mouth pull in a direction I was not authorizing. "What do you want to know?"
"Anything. Everything. Pick something."
I considered this. The safe options were obvious.
I could talk about Chelyabinsk, the city itself, the winters, the factories.
I could talk about hockey in Russia, the systems and the politics and the old coaches who believed that suffering was a prerequisite for excellence.
I could talk about food or weather or any of the surface topics that constituted normal human conversation.
Instead I said something I had never said to another person in the English language.
"I miss my sister."
Cole turned to look at me. Not with pity. With attention. Full, undivided, Cole Briggs attention, which was like standing in a spotlight.
"Katya?"
"You remembered her name."
"You only mentioned her once. But yeah. I remembered."
Of course he did. Cole Briggs remembered things.
He collected details about people the way I collected data about opponents, with precision and care and a filing system that organized information by importance.
The fact that my sister's name was filed somewhere in his memory felt like a kind of proof.
Proof that the conversations in the hallways and the film room and the weight room had registered. That I was not invisible to him.
"She is twenty-one," I said. "She is studying literature. She reads everything. Tolstoy, Chekhov, but also American novels. She loves Fitzgerald. She says The Great Gatsby is about the impossibility of becoming who you want to be in a country that promises you can be anyone."
"That's a hell of a reading."
"She is very smart. Smarter than me."
"You keep saying that. I don't think it's true."
"It is true. My intelligence is narrow. I understand hockey and defensive positioning and how to read a breakout. Katya understands people. She understands why they do the things they do even when the things they do are irrational."
Cole was quiet for a moment. "Does she understand you?"
The question landed like a stone in still water. Ripples moving outward.
"Yes," I said. "She is the only person who does."
Another silence. The ocean was doing its job, being vast and dark and full of things that lived beneath the surface. I finished my vodka. Cole finished his whiskey. The bartender had gone inside, leaving us alone on the rooftop with the city below and the sky above and no one watching.
"My dad hasn't talked to me in two years," Cole said.
I looked at him. His face was in profile, lit by the glow of the skyline. He was not smiling. The absence of his smile was more notable than anyone else's absence of anything.
"The bisexuality thing," he continued. "I told my parents.
My mom was great. She cried and hugged me and said she loved me no matter what.
Textbook perfect. My dad just... left the room.
And he's been leaving the room ever since.
Not physically. He still shows up. Christmas, birthdays, whatever.
But the talking stopped. The real talking.
The hockey conversations, the calls after games, the stuff that made us us. Gone."
"I'm sorry," I said, and I meant it with a weight that the English phrase could not fully carry.
In Russian there are different words for different kinds of sorrow.
There is a sorrow that is sympathetic and a sorrow that is shared, and what I felt for Cole Briggs was the second kind.
A sorrow I recognized because I had lived inside it.
"It's fine," he said, in the way that people say "it's fine" when it is the exact opposite of fine. "I just think about it sometimes. How you can do the right thing and still lose something. Like, I don't regret coming out. Not even a little. But I miss my dad. I miss who we were before he knew."
"You did not change. He did."
"I know. That doesn't make it easier."
"No. It doesn't."
He turned to me. His eyes were wet but he was not crying. He was just present. Fully, terrifyingly present, with no performance and no defense and no smile to hide behind. This was Cole Briggs without the armor, and he was devastating.
"You don't have to be alone, you know," he said. "On the road trips. In the hallways. In general. You don't have to do everything by yourself."
"I am used to it."
"Being used to something isn't the same as wanting it."
"No," I said. "It isn't."
The distance between us was approximately two feet.
Two lounge chairs on a rooftop in Miami with the Atlantic behind us and the skyline in front of us and no one else in the world except us.
Two feet. It had been shrinking for weeks, through drills and film sessions and hallway conversations and a hotel bed and a wrist grip and a text message that said "perfect," and now it was two feet and I was out of retreat.
I did not plan what happened next. I want that to be clear. I did not think about it. I did not weigh the consequences or calculate the risk or run it through the analytical framework that governed every other decision in my life. For the first time in eleven years, I acted without thinking.
I leaned forward and I kissed him.
His mouth was warm. He tasted like whiskey and surprise, and for one suspended second he didn't move at all, and I thought I had made the worst mistake of my life. Then his hand came up and cupped the back of my neck and he kissed me back, and the world went very quiet.
It lasted maybe five seconds. Maybe ten.
I lost the ability to measure time, which for me is like losing the ability to breathe.
His lips were soft and his hand on my neck was steady and warm and he kissed the way he played hockey, with instinct and generosity and a total commitment that left nothing in reserve.
I pulled back first. The distance returned. Two feet. My heart was slamming against my ribs with a force that should have been audible.
"I should not have done that."
"Don't." His voice was rough. His hand was still on the back of my neck. "Don't you dare apologize for that."
"I wasn't going to apologize. I was going to say I should not have done it here. Where someone could see."
"There's no one here, Mik."
My name. Not Volkov. Mik. The shortened version that only Katya used, the intimate version, and hearing it in his voice with his hand still on my skin was too much. The locked room in my chest was shaking. The door was rattling on its hinges.
I stood up. He stood up. We were close. Closer than two feet now. I could feel his breath.
"I need to go," I said.
"Mik."
"Please."
He dropped his hand. I saw the cost of it on his face. The effort it took to let go when every line of his body was leaning toward me. He stepped back and gave me the space I was asking for, even though we both knew the space was the wrong thing to ask for.
"Goodnight, Volkov," he said quietly.
I walked to the elevator. I pressed the button. I waited. The doors opened and I stepped inside and turned around, and he was still standing at the edge of the rooftop, silhouetted against the Miami skyline, watching me go.
The doors closed.
I pressed my back against the elevator wall and covered my face with both hands and breathed.
In through the nose. Out through the mouth.
The way they teach you to manage panic, because this was panic, but it was also something else.
Something underneath the panic that felt like standing on the edge of a very high place and realizing you were not afraid of the height.
You were afraid of the part of you that wanted to jump.
I had kissed Cole Briggs.
I had kissed him on a rooftop in Miami and his mouth was warm and his hand was steady and he called me Mik and I was going to have to live with the knowledge that I now knew what that felt like, which meant I also knew what it felt like to not have it, and the distance between those two things was going to kill me.
My phone buzzed.
Cole: For the record. That was perfect too.
I read the message seven times. Then I put my phone face down on the nightstand next to Saint Nicholas and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to convince myself that what had happened on the rooftop was a mistake.
The ceiling did not believe me.
Neither did I.