Chapter 13 Cole
COLE
The photo was grainy. Taken from across the street through what looked like a car window.
Two men leaving a restaurant in Decatur, walking close but not touching.
One blond, one dark-haired. Both tall. Both recognizable if you knew what you were looking for, and the person who posted it to a gossip blog called AtlantaBuzz apparently knew exactly what they were looking for.
The headline read: Reapers' Dynamic Duo: Teammates or Something More?
"How bad is it?" I said.
"It's a blog. Not ESPN. The photo is blurry. You can't really tell it's you unless you already know. But it's making rounds on hockey Twitter."
I looked at the photo. It was from Saturday night.
We'd gone to dinner at a small Ethiopian restaurant in Decatur that Mik had read about somewhere, because Mik's approach to food in Atlanta was to systematically work through every cuisine the city offered, and he was currently in the East African phase.
It had been a good night. We'd sat across from each other and argued about whether injera counted as bread (I said yes, Mik said it was a category unto itself, which was such a Mik answer that I'd laughed until my eyes watered).
We'd walked to the car. We hadn't touched.
We hadn't even stood that close. But the angle of the photo made it look intimate, the way two people leaning toward each other in conversation will always look intimate to someone who's looking for it.
"Have you told anyone?" I asked Jonah.
"Told anyone what?"
"Don't do that. You know."
Jonah was quiet for a moment. "I know there's something going on with you and Volkov. I've known for a while. I haven't told anyone because it's none of my business and also because I'm not a monster."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Just tell me what you need."
"I need to find Mik before he sees this."
I was too late. By the time I got to the locker room, Mik was already at his stall, dressed and ready for morning skate, and the temperature around him had dropped approximately forty degrees.
He was not reading. He was not studying film.
He was sitting with his hands on his knees, staring at the wall with an expression that I recognized from the Miami flight.
The shutdown. The full Russian retreat behind walls so high you couldn't see the top.
I couldn't talk to him there. Rule one. Nothing at the facility. So I went to my stall and got dressed and laced my skates and went to practice and played hockey next to a man who felt a thousand miles away.
Practice was terrible. We were off. The connection that had been so fluid, so instinctive, was stuttering like a signal with interference. Coach noticed. He didn't say anything this time, which was worse than if he had, because it meant he was watching and waiting to see if we'd fix it ourselves.
After practice, I caught Mik in the parking lot. He was walking fast, keys already in his hand, headed for his car with the determined stride of a man trying to outrun a conversation.
"Mik. Stop."
He stopped. He did not turn around.
"Have you seen it?" I said.
"Yes."
"It's nothing. A blurry photo on a blog nobody reads. My agent already called. He's not worried."
"Your agent is not the one in the photo."
"You're both in the photo. So am I."
He turned around. His face was composed in a way that I had learned to read as panic.
When Mik was truly calm, his face had movement in it.
Micro-expressions. The almost-smile. The flicker of dry humor behind his eyes.
When his face went perfectly still, it meant everything underneath was in chaos and he was using every ounce of control to keep the surface flat.
"This is what happens," he said. "This is how it starts. A photo. Then questions. Then someone with a longer lens and better timing, and then it is not a blurry picture from across the street. It is clear. It is undeniable. And everything I have built falls apart."
"Mik, it's a gossip blog. They post rumors about every athlete in the city. Last week they said the Braves' shortstop was dating a reality TV star because they were at the same restaurant on the same night. It means nothing."
"It means someone is watching."
"People are always watching. That's what happens when you're a professional athlete."
"That is easy for you to say." His voice was even but his hands were not.
They were at his sides, fingers opening and closing in a rhythm that was not voluntary.
"You came out and the world applauded. Your teammates threw you a party.
You did an interview and people called you brave.
You have no idea what it costs the rest of us. "
The words landed like a body check. Clean, technically. But they knocked the wind out of me.
"You think it didn't cost me anything?" I said. My voice was steady but my chest was not. "You think I lost nothing?"
"I think you lost less than I would."
"My father hasn't spoken to me in two years, Mik.
Two years. I call him on his birthday and he lets it go to voicemail.
I send Christmas presents to my parents' house and my mom sends a thank-you text and my dad sends nothing.
I sat in the same room as him at Thanksgiving and he talked to everyone except me.
Like I was furniture. Like I was less than furniture, because at least furniture you acknowledge when you bump into it. "
Mik's expression didn't change but something behind his eyes shifted. A recognition. One kind of loss seeing another.
"So don't tell me I don't know what it costs," I said. "I know exactly what it costs. The difference is that I decided the cost of hiding was higher."
"Your father did not put his hands on you."
The sentence stopped me cold. Because he was right. My father's weapon was silence. Mik's father's weapon was violence. These were not equivalent currencies of pain, and I knew that, and the knowing made me feel small and ashamed for the comparison.
"You're right," I said. "I'm sorry. That's not the same."
"No. It isn't."
We stood in the parking lot, three feet apart, in the space between two arguments that were both valid and both true.
The afternoon sun was absurdly bright for a conversation this heavy.
Atlanta didn't care about our problems. Atlanta was seventy-two degrees and sunny and completely indifferent to two men standing in a parking lot trying to figure out how to love each other across a gap that neither of them had created.
"What do you want to do?" I asked.
"I want this to go away."
"The photo or us?"
He flinched. It was small, barely visible, but I saw it because I had spent weeks memorizing his face and I knew every expression it was capable of and every expression it was trying to hide.
"The photo," he said. "Not us. Never us."
Something in my chest unclenched. Not all the way. But enough.
"Then we're careful," I said. "We're more careful. No restaurants. No public places. We keep it inside the walls until you're ready."
"And if I'm never ready?"
The question hung in the air. I heard it the way you hear a fire alarm in the distance. Not close enough to run from but close enough to know something is burning.
"Then we deal with that when it comes," I said.
"But I need you to hear something, Mik. I agreed to the rules.
I respect the rules. I understand why the rules exist. But I can't do this forever.
Not because I don't want to. Because hiding is poison and I've already survived it once and I don't know if I can survive it again. "
His face did not change. "Is that an ultimatum?"
"No. It's the truth. There's a difference."
"In my experience, there isn't."
He got in his car. He did not slam the door.
He closed it with the same controlled precision that he did everything, and the quietness of the closing was worse than if he'd peeled out of the lot with his tires screaming.
He drove away at exactly the speed limit, and I stood there watching his car disappear around the corner and felt the specific, terrible helplessness of loving someone who was fighting a war you couldn't fight for them.
I sat in my truck for a long time. The parking lot emptied around me. Guys heading home to their wives and girlfriends and dogs and lives that didn't involve hiding in parked cars after arguments about photographs.
My phone buzzed. My agent.
Photo's been taken down. Blog got a cease and desist from the team's legal. It's dead. Don't worry about it.
I stared at the message. The photo was gone. The evidence erased. Problem solved. Everything back to normal.
Except nothing was normal. The photo was gone but the fear that produced the reaction was still there, alive and enormous, and no cease and desist letter in the world could take that down.
I drove home. I cooked dinner for one. I sat on the couch where Mik's feet usually rested in my lap and watched the empty space and thought about what he'd said.
If I'm never ready.
Four words that contained an entire possible future. One where I loved a man who loved me back but could never say it in a room with the lights on. Where we grew old in the shadows, always careful, always calibrated, always one blurry photograph away from catastrophe.
I couldn't live in that future. I knew this with the same certainty that I knew my skating stride and my shot release and the sound of a puck hitting twine. Some things you know in your body before your brain catches up.
But I also couldn't leave. Because the alternative to that shadowed future was a future without Mik in it, and that was worse. That was the option that felt like dying.
So I sat on the couch and I didn't text him and I didn't drive to his apartment and I didn't do anything except exist in the impossible space between loving someone fully and being loved in half-light.
It was, without question, the loneliest I had felt since the day my father stopped talking to me.
The blue toothbrush was still in the cup by the sink.
I checked.