Chapter 19
COLE
I was exhausted. My legs were burning. I had a cut above my left eye from a high stick in the second period that the trainers had glued shut between periods, and the glue was pulling at my skin every time I blinked.
My shoulder ached from a hit I'd taken along the boards in the first. None of it mattered.
Pain is just information, and the information I was receiving was that my body was approaching its limit, which meant I had to be smarter with what was left.
In the locker room between periods, Coach Callahan stood in the center of the room and said nothing for a full thirty seconds. The silence was more effective than any speech. We all sat there, breathing, sweating, bleeding in some cases, and felt the weight of the moment settle on us like snow.
"You know what to do," Coach said.
That was it. Five words. We filed back to the tunnel.
In the corridor, walking toward the ice, Mik fell into step beside me. We didn't touch. We didn't need to. His presence at my shoulder was its own kind of contact. A frequency. A current.
"How's the eye?" he said.
"Glued shut. Very glamorous."
"You look like a pirate."
"A sexy pirate?"
"A pirate who needs to keep his head up in the neutral zone."
"That's less romantic."
"I am not trying to be romantic. I am trying to keep you alive for overtime."
"Same thing, coming from you."
We stepped onto the ice and the noise hit us like a physical force.
Eighteen thousand people, on their feet, making a sound that was not quite a cheer and not quite a roar but something primal and desperate and full of the kind of hope that only sports can produce.
The arena lights were blinding. The ice was fresh and clean and gleaming, and the sixty minutes of war that had been played on it were erased, and everything started new.
Overtime in the playoffs is sudden death. Next goal wins. There are no timeouts, no coach's challenges, no margin for error. You play until someone scores and then you either celebrate or you don't. The simplicity of it is terrifying.
The first five minutes were a stalemate.
Both teams playing cautious, probing, neither willing to make the mistake that would end it.
The pace was slower than regulation, which was deceptive because the intensity was higher.
Every pass was calculated. Every shot was contested.
Every whistle was a chance to breathe and a reminder that the breathing would stop when the puck dropped again.
I was on the ice for the seventh minute of overtime when it happened.
Columbus turned the puck over in the neutral zone.
A bad pass, the kind of mistake that happens when legs are tired and brains are fried and the pressure of Game 7 overtime compresses your decision-making into a space too small for good choices.
The puck squirted free. Jonah got to it first, because Jonah always got to loose pucks first, and he pushed it up the left wing with two quick strides.
I was ahead of him. I could feel the lane opening before I saw it, the way I always could with this team, with these players, with the specific neural network that we had built over a season of shared ice and shared purpose.
I accelerated. Jonah saw me. The pass was perfect.
I caught it at the top of the circle and the Columbus defense collapsed toward me because they had been watching me score goals all series and they were not going to let me beat them in overtime.
Which was exactly what we wanted.
Because while three defenders converged on me, the right side of the ice opened up like a door swinging wide, and Mikhail Volkov was skating into that space with the quiet certainty of a man who had been reading this play since before it started.
I didn't look at him. I didn't need to. I felt him the way I felt my own heartbeat.
I slid the puck across the ice, through the legs of the collapsing defenseman, a pass that had no business working and worked anyway because the connection between us operated on a level that had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with trust.
Mik received the puck in stride. One touch to settle it. One look at the goalie. One shot.
Top corner. Bar down. The sound of the puck hitting the crossbar and snapping the twine was the loudest silence I have ever heard.
A fraction of a second where the entire arena held its breath, the puck in the net, the red light not yet on, the world suspended between what had happened and what was about to happen.
Then the light went on. And the world exploded.
I have never heard a sound like that arena.
It was not applause or cheering or any of the normal sounds that sporting events produce.
It was a detonation. Eighteen thousand people releasing everything they had been holding for three hours, the fear and the hope and the desperate wanting, all of it erupting in a single, unified roar that I felt in my teeth.
The bench emptied. Players pouring over the boards, sticks and gloves flying, a chaos of bodies converging on the ice.
Mik was standing at the top of the circle where he'd taken the shot, his stick raised, his face split open with something I had never seen on him before.
Not an almost-smile. Not the ghost of an expression.
A full, complete, radiant display of joy so intense that it transformed him into someone I barely recognized and had been waiting my whole life to meet.
I reached him first. Of course I reached him first. I had been skating toward Mikhail Volkov since September, through drills and film rooms and hotel hallways and rooftops and bedrooms and parking lot fights and rainy doorsteps, and this was just the final stretch of a journey that had started the moment he'd hit me in preseason and I'd looked at him and felt something I didn't have a name for yet.
I grabbed his jersey. He grabbed mine. We were face to face, inches apart, the arena screaming around us, and I saw the moment the decision happened.
Not in his eyes but in his whole body. A releasing.
A letting go. The last wall coming down not in pieces but all at once, like a controlled demolition, like something he had planned even though he hadn't, like his body was once again making a decision his brain would never have authorized.
He kissed me.
On the ice. On camera. In front of eighteen thousand people and however many millions were watching at home.
Mikhail Volkov, who had spent eleven years building a fortress around the truth of himself, who had learned at sixteen that wanting was the thing that destroyed you, who had crossed an ocean and buried his heart and played hockey like a man with nothing to lose because he'd already lost everything he was afraid of losing, kissed me on the ice after scoring the overtime goal in Game 7 of the first round of the NHL playoffs.
His mouth was cold from the ice and warm underneath.
His gloves were on my jersey and my gloves were on his and the kiss was not graceful or cinematic or any of the things that kisses are supposed to be in the stories people tell about them later.
It was clumsy and brief and tasted like sweat and mouthguard and adrenaline. It lasted maybe three seconds.
It was the best kiss of my life.
The arena went silent for one heartbeat. One single, stunned, collective heartbeat where eighteen thousand brains processed what they had just seen.
Then the sound came back. And it was louder than before.
Not angry. Not confused. Louder. The roar doubled, tripled, became something that shook the glass and vibrated through the ice and rose into the rafters where the championship banners hung.
Eighteen thousand people screaming not despite the kiss but because of it, or at least alongside it, the goal and the kiss fused into a single moment that would be replayed on every sports broadcast in the country by morning.
Mik pulled back. His eyes were wide. I could see the panic starting to form at the edges, the old reflexes activating, the voice in his head beginning to catalog the consequences.
"Hey," I said. My hands on his jersey. My forehead against his. "Stay with me. Right here. Right now."
"I just kissed you on national television."
"Yeah, you did."
"In front of everyone."
"In front of everyone."
"I did not plan that."
"I know."
"My mother is going to call."
"Probably."
"Katya is going to be insufferable."
"Definitely."
The panic in his eyes was dissolving. Not because the consequences weren't real.
They were, and we both knew it. But in this moment, on this ice, with my forehead against his and the arena still shaking around us, the consequences were future tense and the kiss was present tense, and Mik had spent his whole life living in the future at the expense of the present.
"I don't regret it," he said.
"Good."
"I should probably regret it."
"Probably. But you don't."
"No." And then, impossibly, he smiled. The real one. The full one. The smile that I had first seen in my kitchen on a recovery day and had been collecting ever since. "No, I don't."
The team reached us. The pile-on was immediate and total.
Bodies crashing together, helmets flying, sticks clattering on the ice.
Jonah was screaming something incoherent.
Wes was grinning, actually grinning, which might have been the most shocking thing that happened all night.
Someone poured water on both of us. Someone else was crying.
The celebration was chaos and it was beautiful and Mik and I were at the center of it, soaking wet and surrounded by the men who had become our family over the course of a season that had changed everything.