Chapter 10 Mik
MIK
Iread his text forty-three times.
I know the exact number because I am the kind of person who counts things, and because each reading was a separate act of self-destruction that I committed voluntarily and with full knowledge that it was making everything worse.
I'm not going to pretend that didn't happen. But I'll wait until you're ready to stop pretending too.
Forty-three times. On the bus to practice. In the film room before the lights went down. In bed at 2 AM with Saint Nicholas watching from the nightstand like a silent, judgmental witness to my unraveling.
The pretending was not going well.
I had tried. For five days I had tried to reconstruct the architecture of my former life.
The routine. The discipline. The clean, efficient loneliness that had served me for eleven years.
Wake at 4:47. Coffee, black. Weights. Film.
Practice. Home. Single plate, single fork. Dostoevsky. Sleep. Repeat.
The routine was intact. The man performing it was not.
I kept reaching for my phone. Not to text him.
Just to look at the thread. To see his name on my screen.
To reread the word "perfect" and the phrase "perfect too" and feel the ghost of his mouth against mine, which had taken up permanent residence in my nervous system like a virus I could not cure and was not certain I wanted to.
On the ice, I was a disaster. Not by anyone else's standards, perhaps.
I was still playing my minutes, still killing penalties, still doing the job.
But by my standards, I was failing. My gap control was a half-step slow.
My breakout passes were landing flat. The instinctive connection with Cole that had made us extraordinary was gone, and its absence was a hole in the middle of every shift.
Coach had noticed. The team had noticed. Wes Chen had brought me a Gatorade after a bad period and said nothing, which was his version of concern, and I appreciated the Gatorade and the silence in equal measure.
On the fifth night, I called Katya.
It was morning in Moscow. I could hear traffic in the background and the particular sound of Katya walking quickly, which she always did, because my sister moved through the world like she was late for something more interesting than wherever she currently was.
"Misha." She sounded pleased. She always sounded pleased to hear from me, which was one of the great unearned gifts of my life. "How is America?"
"America is fine."
"You sound terrible."
"I sound normal."
"You sound like you sound when you are trying to sound normal, which is how I know something is wrong. What happened?"
I closed my eyes. The apartment was dark around me. I was sitting on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets, which was not a normal place to make a phone call, but the floor felt solid and I needed solid things.
"I kissed someone," I said.
Silence. Then, very quietly: "Oh, Misha."
"It was a mistake."
"Was it?"
"Yes."
"Then why are you sitting on the floor? You only sit on the floor when the world has shifted and you're trying to find your balance. You did it when Papa left. You did it when you got drafted. You're doing it now."
I did not ask how she knew I was on the floor. Katya knew things. She had always known things. She was the only person in my life who had ever looked at the fortress I built and seen it not as a strength but as a symptom.
"Tell me about him," she said.
So I did. Not everything. But enough. The pairing. The drills. The film room. Nashville. Carolina. The texts. Miami. The rooftop and the skyline and the way his hand felt on the back of my neck, warm and steady, like something I could rest against.
Katya listened without interrupting, which was unusual for her. When I finished, the silence stretched for a long time.
"You have spent your whole life surviving," she said. "When will you start living?"
"It is not that simple."
"It is exactly that simple. You are in a country where it is legal to be who you are.
You are on a team where a man came out and the world did not end.
You have met someone who makes you sit on floors and call your sister at what is, I will remind you, seven in the morning.
What more do you need? A written invitation from God? "
"I need to not be afraid."
"No, Misha. You need to be afraid and do it anyway. That is what courage is. The absence of fear is not bravery. It is stupidity. You are the least stupid person I know."
I laughed. It was a small, broken sound, but it was real, and Katya heard it and I could feel her smiling four thousand miles away.
"Go to him," she said. "Stop being a monument. Be a man."
"You are very bossy for a twenty-one-year-old."
"I learned from the best. I love you, Misha."
"I love you, Katya."
I hung up. I stayed on the floor for another ten minutes. Then I stood, put on my shoes, picked up my keys, and drove to Cole Briggs's apartment at eleven o'clock at night without texting first, because if I texted I would lose my nerve, and I could not afford to lose my nerve again.
His building was in Virginia-Highland, a neighborhood full of old trees and restaurants and the kind of easy charm that suited him perfectly. I found his door. I stood in front of it for a full minute, breathing, and then I knocked.
Footsteps. A pause. The lock turning.
He opened the door in sweatpants and a T-shirt with his hair pushed back and his eyes slightly confused in the way of a person who was not expecting a visitor.
His apartment behind him was warm and lit and messy, and I could see a laptop open on the couch and a half-eaten bowl of something on the coffee table, and the whole scene was so domestic and so alive that it made my sterile apartment with its single plates feel like a museum.
"Mik?"
"I cannot stop thinking about you."
The words came out without permission. No preamble. No construction. Just the raw, unedited truth delivered on a doorstep in Virginia-Highland while a man in sweatpants looked at me with an expression that shifted from confusion to something much more dangerous.
"I have tried," I continued. "For five days I have tried.
I have read Dostoevsky and studied film and followed every routine I have built to keep myself from wanting things that will ruin me.
None of it works. You are in my head every minute.
On the ice. Off the ice. In the dark when I am trying to sleep.
I hear your laugh and I lose my place in the book.
I see your name on my phone and my hands do something I cannot control.
I am not built for this. I do not know how to want someone and survive it.
But I cannot stop, and I am tired of trying, and I am here because my sister told me to stop being a monument and be a man. "
Cole stared at me. His mouth was slightly open. His hand was still on the door frame.
"Your sister sounds amazing," he said.
"She is. Can I come in?"
He stepped aside. I walked into his apartment and the door closed behind me and we stood in his living room with approximately four feet of charged air between us.
"You didn't respond to my text," he said.
"I know."
"Five days, Mik."
"I know."
"I thought you were done. I thought the rooftop was a one-time thing and you were going to pretend it never happened and I was going to have to play hockey next to you for the rest of the season knowing what your mouth tastes like and never getting to taste it again."
"I am sorry."
"Don't be sorry. Just tell me what you want."
"I want you."
Three words. The simplest sentence in the English language and the hardest one I had ever spoken. I want you. Subject, verb, object. The grammatical structure of surrender.
He crossed the four feet in two steps. His hands came up to my face, both of them, palms against my jaw, fingers in my hair.
He held me there and looked at me with those blue eyes and I could see every emotion he'd been carrying for five days written across his face like a headline.
Relief and want and something tender underneath it all that made my throat close.
"I don't know what I'm doing," I said. "I have never done this. Not like this. Not with someone who knows my name."
"I know."
"I might be terrible at it."
"You won't be."
"How do you know?"
"Because you just drove across the city at eleven at night and stood on my doorstep and said the bravest thing anyone has ever said to me. A man who can do that is not going to be terrible at anything."
He kissed me. Or I kissed him. It was not clear who moved first because we moved together, which was how we played hockey now and apparently how we did everything else.
His mouth was warm and tasted like whatever he'd been eating, something with garlic, and I should not have found that attractive but I found everything about this man attractive in a way that had broken my ability to be rational.
The kiss deepened. His tongue touched mine and I made a sound that I would be embarrassed about later but could not control in the moment.
His hands were in my hair and my hands were on his waist and we were pressed together from chest to hip and I could feel every line of him through the thin cotton of his shirt.
He pulled back just enough to speak against my mouth. "Tell me what you want. Specifically. We go at your pace."
"I want to not think. For one hour I want to not think about any of it. I want to be here with you and not be afraid."
"I can do that."
He took my hand and led me down the hallway to his bedroom, which was small and warm and unmade in a way that should have offended me but instead felt like being invited into something private. The lamp on the nightstand was on, casting everything in amber light.