Chapter 12 Mik
MIK
Wes Chen found me in the film room on a Tuesday afternoon.
This was unusual. Wes did not seek people out.
He existed in the spaces between conversations, large and silent and radiating the particular energy of a man who would prefer to communicate exclusively through acts of controlled violence.
We had an understanding, Wes and I. We occupied the same frequency of solitude.
We nodded at each other. We did not talk.
So when he appeared in the doorway and stood there for a full ten seconds before speaking, I knew something was wrong.
"Can I ask you something?" he said.
"Yes."
He came in and sat down two seats away, which was close for Wes. He stared at the blank projector screen for a moment, his jaw working like he was chewing on the words before letting them out.
"How do you deal with it? Being the outsider."
I considered the question. "You are going to have to be more specific."
"The team. The guys. They're good guys. I'm not saying they're not.
But I look around the room and nobody looks like me.
Nobody has my last name. Nobody's mom packed the same lunch I grew up eating.
" He flexed his hands on his knees. The knuckles were swollen and bruised.
They were always swollen and bruised. "I'm the fighter.
That's my role. The Asian kid who hits. Like that's all I am. "
I understood this more than he knew. The reduction of a person to a single function. The way a team could value you for what you did and remain entirely uninterested in who you were.
"You are more than that," I said.
"Easy to say."
"It is not easy to say. It is simply true." I paused. "When I came to this league, I was the Russian. The stoic one. The one who does not smile. They did not see me, and I did not help them see me, because invisibility felt safer than exposure."
Wes looked at me. Actually looked. "Did that change?"
"It is changing."
"How?"
I thought about Cole. About the way he had knocked on my door, literal and metaphorical, until I opened it. About the terrifying, liberating act of letting one person see the real thing.
"I found someone who looked past the function and saw the person," I said. "It is possible that you will find this too. But you may have to let them look."
Wes was quiet for a long time. Then he nodded once, stood up, and walked out without another word. At the door he stopped.
"Thanks, Volkov."
"You are welcome, Chen."
He left. I sat in the empty film room and thought about the conversation and about the strange, recursive nature of advice.
I had told Wes to let people see him. To stop hiding behind the role.
And the hypocrisy of this was not lost on me, because I was hiding behind a role of my own, a bigger and more fortified role, and the only person I had let see past it was currently at his apartment in Virginia-Highland probably eating cereal for dinner because Cole Briggs believed that Frosted Flakes constituted a meal.
That evening I went to Cole's apartment after practice. This was a Thursday, which had become one of our nights, though we did not call them that because naming the routine felt like admitting it was a relationship, and the word "relationship" was one I had not yet spoken aloud.
He opened the door and he was, as predicted, holding a bowl of cereal.
"Don't," he said, seeing my face.
"I said nothing."
"Your eyebrow said it. Your eyebrow is very judgmental."
"My eyebrow is concerned about your nutrition."
"Frosted Flakes have vitamins. It says so on the box."
"The box is lying to you."
He grinned and stepped aside and I walked into the apartment that had become, without either of us formally acknowledging it, a second home.
My jacket went on the hook by the door. The hook had not existed a month ago.
Cole had installed it after the third time I draped my jacket over a chair, because he understood that I needed a place for things and had made one without being asked.
We ate dinner. Real dinner. I cooked. Chicken and rice and roasted vegetables, because someone had to feed this man actual food or he would perish of scurvy by January.
Cole sat at the counter and talked while I cooked, which had become our rhythm.
He talked. I cooked. The words and the food filled the apartment with warmth, and it struck me, not for the first time, that this was the opposite of my own apartment with its single plates and its permanent silence.
After dinner we moved to the couch. A game was on.
Carolina at Boston. We watched with half-attention, the way people watch sports when the sport is secondary to the company.
Cole's arm was along the back of the couch behind my shoulders, not quite touching, existing in the space between intention and contact.
"Mik."
"Yes."
"Can I ask you something?"
"You are the second person today who has started a conversation with that question."
"Is that a yes?"
"It is an observation. But yes."
He shifted so he was facing me. His eyes were serious in a way that Cole's eyes rarely were, because Cole used humor and motion to keep seriousness at a distance, and when he let it arrive, it meant something.
"The scar," he said. "On your eyebrow. You told me it was from a fight. But I've seen a lot of hockey scars and that one doesn't look like a stick or a puck."
My hand went to the scar involuntarily. A reflex. The same reflex that made me flinch when someone moved too quickly in my peripheral vision, which was a response I had mostly trained out of myself but which surfaced sometimes in unguarded moments.
"It is not from hockey," I said.
Cole waited. He did not push. He simply waited with the patience of a man who had learned that my truths arrived on their own schedule and could not be rushed.
"My father," I said.
Two words. A complete sentence in the grammar of damage. Cole's face did not change. Not visibly. But something behind his eyes went very still, the way the air goes still before a storm.
"I was sixteen. He found a letter I had written to a teammate.
A boy named Alexei. The letter was... it was clear in its intentions.
" I paused. The words were difficult not because they were painful but because I had never assembled them in this order for another person.
"My father was a hard man. Not cruel in general.
But this was different. This was shame, and shame made him violent. "
"The scar."
"His ring. He wore a wedding band with a raised edge. The first hit split the skin. My mother stopped him before the second."
Cole's jaw was tight. I could see the muscles working.
His hand, which had been resting on the back of the couch, moved to my face.
Slowly. Giving me time to pull away if I needed to.
His thumb traced the line of the scar with a gentleness that was almost unbearable, because gentleness applied to a wound that was made in violence creates a kind of contrast that the body does not know how to process.
"What happened to Alexei?" Cole asked.
"He married a woman. He has three children. We do not speak."
"And your father?"
"He left my mother two years later. He lives in Volgograd. I do not speak to him either."
"Good."
The simplicity of the word carried more weight than a speech.
Good. Not "I'm sorry" or "that must have been terrible" or any of the phrases people use when they encounter someone else's pain and don't know what to do with it.
Just good. An endorsement of the distance I had put between myself and the man who made me bleed.
He kissed the scar once, then twice, then moved his mouth to my forehead and then to my temple and then to the corner of my eye, and I realized he was retracing the path of the wound with tenderness, overwriting the violence with something else.
I made a sound. Not a word. Something involuntary from somewhere below language. My hands found his shirt and pulled him closer, and then we were kissing, and the kiss was different from Miami and different from that first night. It was slower. Deeper. It tasted like trust instead of desperation.
We moved to the bedroom. Not urgently. With intention.
He undressed me the way you unwrap something fragile.
Shirt first, his fingers finding the hem and lifting it over my head with a gentleness that made my throat tight.
He kissed the scar on my forearm. He found a bruise on my hip from a blocked shot and kissed that too, his lips soft against the discolored skin, and I felt something crack inside me that I did not know was still intact.
"Every mark," he murmured against my stomach. "I want every mark."
He traced them all. The scars, the bruises, the places where hockey and life had left their signatures on my body.
His mouth moved across me like he was reading a story written in skin, and under his attention my body became something I had never experienced it as before.
Not a tool. Not a machine for absorbing punishment.
Something worth studying. Something that deserved care.
I pulled him up and undressed him with less patience and more need.
I wanted to see him. I wanted my hands on the parts of him I had been memorizing from a distance.
The breadth of his shoulders under my palms. The trail of hair below his navel that I followed with my fingertips.
The sound he made when I wrapped my hand around him, a sharp intake of breath followed by a low groan that sent heat spreading through my entire body.
"Mik." My name in his mouth while my hand was on him. Nothing in any language had ever sounded like that.
I stroked him slowly. Learning the weight of him, the heat, the way his hips shifted into my grip when I tightened my hand.
He was responsive in a way that undid me.
Every touch registered on his face. Every movement earned a reaction.
After years of anonymous encounters where the other person's pleasure was incidental, being with someone who showed me everything, who hid nothing, was almost too much.
He reached for me and we held each other at the same time, foreheads pressed together, breathing the same air, our hands moving in a rhythm that found itself naturally.
It was not fast. It was not frantic. It was two men learning what it felt like to give and receive pleasure simultaneously, and the intimacy of the symmetry, of feeling his hand on me while mine was on him, was staggering.
"Together," he whispered.
"Yes."
We built it together. Slowly. His thumb swept over my tip and I gasped and tightened my grip on him and he gasped and the feedback loop between us became its own engine, each reaction fueling the next, until the pleasure was a wave I could not outrun and did not want to.
I came first, into his hand, with my face pressed against his neck and his name between my teeth.
He followed moments later, his body shuddering against mine, his hand gripping my shoulder hard enough that I would find the bruise tomorrow and press my thumb against it in private, wanting to feel the echo of this.
Afterward. The amber light. The cracked ceiling. His hand on my chest, tracing idle patterns.
"Thank you for telling me," Cole said. "About your father."
"Thank you for not treating me like I am broken."
"You're not broken. You're the strongest person I know."
I reached across the space between us and placed my hand on his chest. His heartbeat under my palm.
"Ty moyo vsyo," I whispered against his shoulder.
Cole shifted. "What does that mean?"
"I'll tell you someday."
"That's not fair."
"I know."
He pulled me closer and I let him, and the words sat between us like a seed planted in dark soil.
Not ready to bloom. But alive. Growing in a direction I could not yet see but could feel, the way you feel spring approaching in the last weeks of winter when the cold is still present but the light has already changed.
I fell asleep without counting the seconds. This was becoming a pattern.
Patterns, in my experience, are either evidence of a system or evidence of a habit, and the distinction matters because systems can be dismantled but habits become part of who you are.
Sleeping next to Cole Briggs was becoming part of who I was.
I was not yet certain whether this terrified me or saved me.
I suspected it was both.