Chapter 9 Cole
COLE
The flight home from Miami was the longest three hours of my life.
Volkov sat in his usual row, four seats behind me and across the aisle, and he did not look at me once.
I know because I checked. Not constantly.
Not obsessively. Just once when I got up to use the bathroom, and once when the flight attendant came through with snacks, and once when we hit turbulence and I instinctively turned to see if he was okay, which is a thing I apparently do now.
Three checks. Three times I found him staring at his book or his phone or the seat back in front of him with the focused intensity of a man pretending the rest of the airplane did not exist.
He was pretending I did not exist.
I understood this. I did. On an intellectual level, I understood that Mikhail Volkov had kissed me on a rooftop in Miami and then spent the remaining hours of the night constructing an entirely new wall to replace the one that had cracked, and that the new wall was taller and thicker than the original because he'd built it in a panic.
I understood that his brain was doing the thing brains do when you cross a line you've spent your entire life behind, which is to scream at you until you retreat back to the safe side and pretend the line was never crossed at all.
I understood it. Understanding it didn't make it hurt any less.
We landed in Atlanta and filed off the plane and collected our bags and went to our cars and at no point during any of this did Volkov acknowledge my presence.
Not a look. Not a nod. Not even the faint suggestion of eye contact that I'd been collecting like currency for the past three weeks. Nothing.
I sat in my truck in the airport parking garage and stared at the steering wheel.
His mouth had been warm. That was the detail I kept coming back to.
Warm and careful and then, for one stunned second, not careful at all.
The sound he'd made when I kissed him back, a small, involuntary thing from somewhere in the back of his throat.
The weight of his hand on my chest when he pulled away.
I drove home. The Atlanta highways were empty at midnight.
My apartment was exactly how I'd left it five days ago, which was moderately messy in a way that felt like personality rather than negligence.
I dropped my bag in the hallway and went straight to the fridge and ate leftover Thai food standing at the counter in the dark and thought about nothing productive.
My phone was quiet. No texts from Volkov. No texts about Volkov. The "perfect too" message sat in our thread like a grenade with no pin, and I didn't know whether to text again or wait or set my phone on fire.
I waited.
Day one. Nothing.
Day two. Nothing.
Day three. Nothing.
By the third day I'd gone through all five stages of grief and was firmly settled in a sixth stage that I call "aggressively productive anger," which manifested as cleaning my entire apartment, reorganizing my equipment closet, calling my mom, calling my brother, cooking a meal that involved actual vegetables, and running six miles on the Beltline in weather that was too warm for running.
On the ice, it was worse. Whatever magic we'd found in Carolina and Tampa was gone.
Not diminished. Gone. Like someone had flipped a switch and disconnected whatever frequency we'd been operating on.
Our passes were off. Our timing was wrong.
I'd anticipate Mik going left and he'd go right, or I'd look for him in a spot he should have been and find empty ice instead.
We were two players again instead of one unit, and the whole team felt it.
Coach Callahan pulled us aside after a particularly bad practice where Mik and I had botched three breakouts and nearly collided in our own zone.
"What happened?" Coach said. He was not asking rhetorically.
"Nothing, Coach. Just an off day."
"You've had three off days in a row. Whatever's going on between you two, fix it. I don't care how. Fix it."
Mik said nothing. He hadn't said a word to me in three days, and his silence, which I used to find mysterious and then found endearing and then found fascinating, now just felt like a door slammed in my face.
I tried once. After practice on day two, I'd caught him in the parking lot.
"Mik."
He stopped walking but didn't turn around. His shoulders were rigid under his jacket.
"Can we talk about what happened?"
"There is nothing to talk about."
"There's pretty clearly something to talk about."
"It was a mistake. It will not happen again."
He got in his car and drove away, and I stood in the parking lot with my hands in my pockets and felt something inside me go very still.
Not angry. Not hurt, exactly. Just still.
The way you get when you realize that the thing you want most is also the thing most likely to destroy you, and you have to decide how much destruction you can afford.
Jonah noticed. Of course Jonah noticed. Jonah Park had the emotional radar of a golden retriever crossed with a therapist, and he cornered me in the weight room on day three with the casual determination of a man who had decided this conversation was happening whether I wanted it or not.
"Talk to me."
"About what?"
"About whatever happened on the road trip that turned you into this." He gestured at me. All of me. I wasn't sure what he meant but I was sure I didn't like it.
"Nothing happened on the road trip."
"Cole."
"Nothing happened."
"You're a terrible liar. You've always been a terrible liar. In fourth grade you told Mrs. Henderson that your dog ate your book report and you didn't even have a dog."
"We had a goldfish."
"Not the point." He sat down on the bench next to me and leaned his elbows on his knees.
Jonah in serious mode was a different animal than Jonah in chirping mode.
Quieter. More direct. The kind of friend who would sit in silence until you talked because he knew that silence from someone who loves you is harder to resist than questions.
I held out for about forty-five seconds.
"If I tell you something, you can't ask follow-up questions."
"That's not how conversation works."
"It's how this conversation works."
He considered this. "Okay. No follow-ups. Go."
I took a breath. The weight room was empty. The door was closed. It was just us and the dumbbells, which felt appropriate because this whole situation was dumb.
"Something happened with Volkov."
Jonah's face did not change. Not even a flicker. He just waited.
"I don't know how to describe it. We've been... I don't know. Getting to know each other. During the paired drills and the film sessions and on the road trip. And it was good. It was really good. And then something happened in Miami and now he won't look at me and I don't know what to do."
Jonah was quiet for a long time. Then he said, very carefully, "When you say something happened."
"You said no follow-ups."
"That's not a follow-up. That's a clarification."
"It's a follow-up with a different name."
He held up his hands. "Okay. No follow-ups." He was quiet again. Then: "Do you want my opinion?"
"Not really."
"I'm giving it anyway. Whatever happened, you can't force someone to be ready for something they're not ready for. You can show up. You can be patient. You can make it clear that you're not going anywhere. But you can't build someone else's courage for them. That's a solo project."
This was annoyingly wise. I hated when Jonah was wise. It disrupted the narrative that he was just a hockey player who did crossword puzzles and ate Oreos.
"When did you get smart?" I said.
"I've always been smart. You just don't notice because you're too busy being loud."
I almost laughed. Almost. What came out instead was something closer to an exhale that had too much feeling in it to be a regular breath. Jonah put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed once, and the simple warmth of the gesture nearly undid me.
"He'll come around," Jonah said. "If whatever happened was real, he'll come around. People always do."
"And if he doesn't?"
"Then he's an idiot, and I say that with full respect to his defensive positioning."
I went home that night and did what I always did when my brain was eating itself. I laced up my running shoes and I ran.
The Beltline at dusk was beautiful in a way that Atlanta rarely gets credit for.
The old railroad corridor turned into this winding path through the city, past murals and restaurants and apartment buildings, with the skyline rising up in the distance like a promise.
I ran south from Piedmont Park, past Ponce City Market where people were having dinner on the patio like everything was normal, past Krog Street where the tunnel was painted with colors so bright they looked like they were shouting.
I ran until my lungs burned and my legs ached and my brain finally, mercifully, went quiet.
And in the quiet, I found the truth.
I wasn't angry at Mik. I wasn't even frustrated.
I was scared. Scared because what I felt for Mikhail Volkov was not a crush or an attraction or a passing interest. It was the real thing.
The kind of feeling that rearranges your priorities and rewrites your future and makes everything before it look like a rough draft.
I wanted his laugh. His rare, almost invisible laugh that sounded like a secret being shared.
I wanted his brain, the way it processed the world in patterns and precise observations that revealed more than he intended.
I wanted his hands, which were scarred and precise and capable of holding a hockey stick and holding my wrist with the same deliberate care.
I wanted his voice in the dark, telling me about his sister, offering me something he didn't give to anyone else.
I wanted all of him. The granite and the gentleness. The fortress and what was hiding inside it.
And the terrifying part was that wanting all of someone means accepting that they might never let you have it.
I stopped running at the Eastside Trail overlook. The city was spread out below me, lights coming on as the dusk deepened. I was sweaty and winded and standing still for the first time in three days. My phone was in my pocket. I pulled it out and opened the thread with Mik.
I typed one message. Deleted it. Typed another. Deleted that too.
Finally I wrote something that was not clever or strategic or calculated. Something that was just true.
I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen. But I'll wait until you're ready to stop pretending too.
I sent it and put my phone away and walked home in the dark.
He didn't respond that night.
He didn't respond the next morning.
But when I walked into the locker room before practice, Mik was in his stall reading Dostoevsky, and as I passed, he looked up. Just for a second. The briefest glance. And the expression on his face was not cold or closed or indifferent.
It was afraid.
And fear, I thought, was the beginning of something. Because you can only be afraid of losing a thing that you have already, secretly, decided you want.